Aslı Iğsız Theorizing Palimpsests Unfolding Pasts into the Present abstract How do we connect the past with the present to address structural problems? While the pursuit of a cause-and-effect past flowing into the present contributes to the under- standing of an event or object, how that past is recalled, represented, related, disconnected, suppressed, and/or obfuscated in any given present matters. This article proposes palimpsests as a critical tool for analyzing the many histories of the present. To illustrate this theoretical practice, the article offers a palimpsestic reading of a museumized object, the Nubian Temple of Dendur, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The structural nature of a history of the present comes into view only when one is able to discern multiple histories, presents, categories, and objects layered together within the palimpsest of history. keywords palimpsests, transtextuality, Gérard Genette, Nubian Temple of Dendur No slogan insulates the present from its connected past(s) better than the statement “Never again!” Usually associated with a reply to the Nazi exter- mination of Jews—the Holocaust—it has become a familiar call to condemn political violence and demand justice. “Never again” delivers a future prom- ise, suggesting that a lesson about history will have been definitively learned. Yet from Black Lives Matter in the United States to the Solidarity Academies established by dissident academics in Turkey, calls for social justice reveal that consigning earlier instances of state-sponsored violence to the past is an impossible task (Odman). This has been the case with slavery in the United States (Carico; Scott), colonial racism in France (Stoler), and the 1955 anti-Greek pogroms in Turkey (Güven). These violent histories have not been put to rest for all time, but neither have they remained the same: social structures do not change through a dialectic of rupture and continu- ity, rather they are enfolded in new ways into the present. How do we connect the past to the present to reveal this process of enfold- ing? As the contemporary world context makes abundantly clear, this is not HISTORY ofthePRESENT ■ A Journal of Critical Histor y ■ 11:2 ■ October 2021 doi: 10.1215/21599785-9015288 © 2021 Duke University Press 193 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/history-of-the-present/article-pdf/11/2/193/1258796/193igsiz.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 21 October 2021