November 20th marks Trans Day of Remembrance, an annual day of mourning for trans lives stolen by violence in the past 12 months. While many remembrance ceremonies are now moving from community centres to online platforms, the central purpose remains the same: to acknowledge and reckon with high rates of trans murder worldwide that are otherwise obscured from public view.
In December 2019, as Paris was brought to a standstill by a massive public sector strike, I was happily foraging away in the backroom of the Centre for the Study and Research of International Revolutionary and Trotskyist Movements (CERMTRI). The volunteer archivist, who had ducked off from the picket line […]
Shahmima Akhtar explores a postcard from the Irish village of ‘Ballymaclinton’, a display at the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition in London created to promote an Irish soap brand and a politically white Irish unionism.
What does the gargantuan legacy of public statuary have to do with Britain’s history? Miles Taylor argues that the past is not like a statue.
Madge Dresser argues that statues of slave traders, such as Edward Colston, often served complex local and civic objectives, which were inextricable from historical processes which silenced the voices of enslaved Africans.
The last fortnight has seen many statues associated with racism and colonialism torn down. When were they originally put up, and what can that tell about the history of whiteness and empire? Peter Hill explores.
With debates over the public history of empire and colonialism intensifying across Europe, Afonso Dias Ramos explores the controversy in Portugal over the use of the term “Discoveries” to encompass the country’s complex colonial past.
