Gianna Pomata’s epistemic genre

what it is and how to use it, with a case study on historians’ theoretical manifestos

Abstract

This article begins with a conceptual and historiographical introduction to the notion of “epistemic genre” in the work of Gianna Pomata. It has gained considerable attention and interest over recent years, not only in relation to history of science and medicine but also among historians in the field of historiography and theory of history. Broadly speaking, the notion of epistemic genre is a tool for the cultural history of knowledge. For Pomata, the disappearance, emergence and transformation of an epistemic genre reveal profound changes in collective modes of thought. Specific attention in the paper is paid to the manifesto, now a socially recognized genre in contemporary debates in theory of history, and to what it reveals about historian’s moral economy. I argue that the transformation of the manifesto
– which history we can trace back to modern revolutionary struggles and contemporary artistic avant-gardes – into an epistemic genre can be read as a sign of the introduction of its political-temporal dynamics into the production of
historical knowledge.