“Entangled History” and/or the “Decolonization” of Historical Research?

Abstract

The article is an introduction to this issue’s section “Entangled His‑ tory: Muslims and the Others in Russia and Abroad”. It articulates the foundations of the historiographical approach named “Entangled History”, as seen by the author (who is also the compiler of the section) and the authors’ team, and examines the new meaning this approach has acquired in the context of recent calls for the “decolonization” of historical research, especially in the field of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (REEES). “Entangled History” is seen here as an extension of, but also as an alternative to, the straight‑ forwardly understood “decolonization”. It carries a decolonizing pathos in the sense that it uncovers the functions and relativity of dominant narratives and deconstructs them. At the same time, the agents of domination are considered here not within dichotomous constructions, as “decolonization” is often seen, but in the space of the diversity of cultural forms and practices, and such agents themselves appear to be different in different situations. Intercultural entanglements, which acquire a crosscutting role in history, appear much more complex than binary “interactions”, and the historical context is constructed as flexible, fluid, and multilayered. Thus, the proposed approach makes it possible to more vividly reveal the historical dynamics of the communities under study, its multidimensionality and multilinearity, and demonstrates the artificiality of the search for “autochthonous”, “pure” historical conditions. Simultaneously, this complex vision of history retains an ethical dimension.