History 'is, at last, impossible'. 1 No single narrative, study, research, or reconstruction of events can capture the complexity of human existence. No single narrative can tell us the story of everything and everyone that has ever existed. Nor it can describe with a genuine level of honesty the emotional universe of individuals that once were. History is the discipline of approximation, a partial description, a bounded analysis of the past. 2 When individuals build histories, they tell us a lot about themselves, their values, and their aspirations. Creating a specific type of history is a political choice. Historiographies are political vehicles. As David Harlan put it 'a sense of the past is a way of being in the present. At its best it is a way of arguing with ourselves'. 3 If impossible, what is the goal of history? Or to be more precise, what is the role of public historians in creating new histories of Europe? Olivette Otelle told us in her powerful recent book, African Europeans, that learning the history of Afro-descendants in Europe has the transformative capacity of dismantling 'racial oppression in the present'. 4 History then is a transformative tool, a vehicle for thinking about the past to change the present. More recently, the historiography of the Global South has demonstrated a growing concern with the histories of those who have been silenced, ignored, or disregarded in terms of the grand narratives. 5 Creating the histories
Black History is European History. By placing Blackness at the centre of the historical narrative, historians are transforming the way in which we think of the history of Europe and successfully overcoming intellectual frameworks which have consistently failed to produce accurate, diverse and compelling analyses of European societies. This collection of essays engages with the methodological and intellectual challenges that we, as historians, face when doing so. We conclude that no matter the difficulties, these new approaches have proven genuinely liberating, and it has allowed historians to escape traditional narratives that consistently ignore the intellectual, political, social and cultural contribution of Black people to European History.In their contribution, 'Centring Blackness as Methodology and as Citational Practice', Nicholas Jones and Alani Hicks-Bartlett emphasize the importance of citation and the recognition of this practice as a political choice. In the first part, 'Centring Blackness as Methodology', Jones stresses the importance of taking seriously the work of Black women along with other scholars of colour to create a radically new, anti-racist, historiography, as part of a transformative methodological approach. In 'Centring Blackness as Citational Practice', Hicks-Bartlett opens her discussion of race, recognition, and acknowledgment with a brief analysis of spectacle, corporeal spectacularity, and the regime of the gaze in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Then, turning to methodological pathways and the issue of citational practice itself, Hicks-Bartlett considers key issues informing accepted citational ethea along with problematic lacunae and omissions by addressing citationality and critical silencing through an intentional citational exercise.Chloe Ireton, in her essay 'Black Thought in European History', argues that while the call to centre Blackness in European history is an admirable one, historians must go beyond tracing the presence of Black Africans and their descendants in European history and think more carefully about the methodological implications for accounting for the diverse intellectual legacies of the African Diaspora in Europe and its empires.
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