History, agency and the representation of ‘race’ – an introduction

This is an edited version of a keynote speech to the annual conference of the Archives and Records Association 2016 in which a leading black British cultural curator, using the concept of ‘reparative histories’, charts his own involvement in and knowledge of recent milestones in black cultural heritage intervention in the UK. Referencing the London Mayor’s Commission on African and Asian Heritage, the museum world’s marking of the ‘2007 bi-centenary of the Act abolishing the Atlantic slave trade’ and the significant ‘No Colour Bar’ archive and art exhibition of 2015, he challenges archivists to understand the issue not as the need to simply ‘include’ Black experience, but to allow Black agency in the making of the record.

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Archives, race, class and rage

Prescod

2017

“…In a special issue of Race & Class on Reparative histories in January 2016, we argued that 'the politics of the present moment demand a rigorous investigation of how certain stories of the past are mobilised, and how certain histories are shaped in the light of contemporary concerns'. 51 the story of Sam Fahie and his co-conspirators in tortola is oblique in the annals of anti-slavery rebellion, but it provides a way for thinking about the intertwined history of black resistance and abolitionism in light of current debates about black agency and the mobilisation of forms of humanism against racialised exclusionary practices. the idea of the 'reparative' sets up a certain temporality -one marked by the interval between what Avery Gordon has recently called the 'no-longer' and the 'not yet'.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The latter indicated a set of connections that were being made to present circumstances – however complicated that connection might be – as the scale of the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean was emerging in the British press. 8 For a reparative history that seeks to revisit the past in relation to contemporary resistances, the statue wars that have sought to destabilise the literal monumentalising of racialised histories, are indicative of the ways in which silencing narratives of ‘closure’ on violent pasts are being contested.…”

Section: Memorial Battles For the Racialised Pastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reparative histories: tracing narratives of black resistance and white entitlement

Bergin¹,

Rupprecht²

2018

Self Cite

the reinvigoration of forms of white supremacy in the uS and Europe has sharply delineated the connections between occluded racialised pasts and contemporary race politics in ways which make reparative history an urgent concern. this article argues that contemporary struggles over the politics of memorialisation telegraph more than a debate over contested histories. they are also signs of how the liberal narrative of 'trauma' and healing no longer suffices as a way of marginalising the history of radical black agency. Building on the research by the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project, the article focuses on the incendiary year of 1831 and on a moment of collision-between black resistance and white entitlement. It situates a hitherto overlooked aborted slave uprising in tortola, British Virgin Islands, within its multiple radical Caribbean, Atlantic and British contexts as a way of disrupting the distance between Cathy Bergin is a senior lecturer on the humanities programme at the university of Brighton. her research focuses on transnational black radical politics, particularly in respect of literary and cultural production.

“…Reparatory history must be about more than identifying wrongdoers and seeking redress: it begins with the descendants, with trauma and loss, but the hope is that the work of mourning can be linked to hopes for reconciliation, the repair of relations damaged by historical injustice. 30 The attachment to the idea of abolition as a mark of Britain's love of liberty and freedom was linked to a deep, yet disavowed, attachment in English culture to Britain's imperial power. In the wake of decolonisation and the loss of Empire, Paul Gilroy diagnosed 'postimperial melancholia', marked by an inability even to face, never mind actually mourn, the profound change in circumstances and moods that followed the end of the Empire … Once the history of the Empire became a source of discomfort, shame, and perplexity, its complexities and ambiguities were readily set aside.…”

Section: Reparationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing reparatory history: bringing ‘race’ and slavery home

Hall¹

2018

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.