Doing reparatory history: bringing ‘race’ and slavery home

Abstract

This article asks whether history writing can be reparatory. Opening with a discussion of the bi-centenary of the abolition of the slave trade in 2007 and the national conversation that was created at that time, it goes on to reflect on contestations over memory and the significance of the emergence of reparations as a key term with which to think about the wrongs of the past and the possibilities of repair. It uses a discussion of the author's individual and collaborative historical work to argue for the importance of a different understanding of Britain's involvement in the slavery business and our responsibilities, as beneficiaries, of the gross inequalities associated with slavery and colonialism.

Toward a Comparative History of Racial Thought in Africa: Historicism, Barbarism, Autochthony

“…Baba provided a "confessional ethnography" of such collective distinctions which later jurists found invaluable. 46 So even for Baba, there was slippage between the categories of civilized belief and descent. But most pertinent was the middle ground accepted by all participants in these debates.…”

Maada’oonidiwag gete-dibaajimowen (“sharing old stories”): reflections on a place-based reparatory research partnership in Nbisiing Anishinaabeg Territory

“…Our use of the term reparatory praxis builds on Catherine Hall’s ( 2018 ) work on “doing reparative history” within the context of slavery and its legacies, specifically in the UK and in her own discipline (history). Reparation, as a people-focused process of repair (which Hall and others distinguish from institutional reparation s ), identifies the people and systems responsible for inequitable, broken relationships (including but not limited to relationships with people and with land) and then mobilizes forms of repair from within.…”

“…Indigenous methodologies and ways of knowing have informed (and, we think, resonates with) the values of community geography values, including relationship, ceremony, reciprocity, storytelling, and place-based research (see de Leeuw et al, 2012 ; Smith, 1999 ; Sutherland, 2020 ; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015 ; Wilson, 2008 ). In what follows, we present three examples of “reparatory praxis”—using repair (Hall, 2018 ) and reparation as the connective tissue joining theory and practice—beginning with acknowledging the partnership itself as evolving praxis, then sharing two examples of preliminary practice focused on repatriation and collaborative counter-mapping. We end by responding to questions posed by editors of this special issue about institutional support and challenges, while gesturing toward future community geographies of repair.…”

Reparative histories: tracing narratives of black resistance and white entitlement

“…This article builds upon Catherine Hall’s call to open up the ‘entangled histories’ of racialised capitalism and to trouble the ‘binary between black and white’ which we can see at work in the reactions to the statue wars. 9 It does so via the investigation of a quite different historical moment, and one to which no memorial exists. It is a moment, however, that reaches out from the history of the enslaved to illuminate what Colin Prescod has termed the ‘radical histories of resistance to White supremacy, locally and globally’.…”