In commissioning this feature, editorial fellow Rachel Moss asked contributors: how can we radically re-imagine the writing of history? Over the next few weeks, our contributors reply with creative new methods, sources and forms that they are using to reshape what history writing can look like. In this instalment, Sarah Knott writes hastily, ahead of waking’s interruption, about being a historian who is always with child in one way or another.
How should historians respond to acts of violence in the official archive? Catherine Phipps considers the life of Samia, an Algerian-French teenager, arguing that the epistemic attacks she faced highlight the urgency of historical work which takes account of police violence against sex workers.
The gatekeepers of history have tended to take few risks. Julia Laite argues for a less certain, more quantum kind of history in the latest in our #WritingRadically series.
How can racialised and Islamophobic terms in common currency in Sri Lanka today be traced back to British colonial rule in the late nineteenth century? Shamara Wettimuny explores the formation of racialised colonial identities and legacies of exclusion.
How has the recent passing of the historian Bernard Bailyn become a new weapon for conservatives attacking critically engaged approaches to history? Asheesh Siddique explores.
On the 7th May 2020, at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, news broke that this year’s Notting Hill Carnival would be cancelled. Set to take place this August Bank Holiday weekend, the cancellation was a first in the Carnival’s more than fifty-year history. A few weeks […]
What models of love and support get lost if we cling to a linear model of family life? Leighan Renaud calls for a model of genealogical enquiry rooted in a decolonised, expansive and ‘matrifocal’ understanding of the Caribbean family.
