In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • What is Radical History Now?
  • Onni Gust (bio)

To accept one's past – one's history – is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

James Baldwin, 19631

James Baldwin, the African-American novelist, critic and civil-rights activist, wrote his epistolary essay, The Fire Next Time, in order to explain to his nephew what it meant to be a black man growing up in white-dominated America. Except in so far as Baldwin narrated his own relationship with blackness and his experiences of racism across his lifetime, The Fire Next Time was not a history; it was a political critique of white supremacy in the United States. Yet he was emphatic in his claim that history was a key tool in the struggle against racism and for Black liberation. Against the myths that white Americans, alongside Europeans, had created to assure themselves of their superiority, Baldwin posited the 'spectacle of human history and American Negro history in particular'. It was in this undefined 'spectacle of human history' that he placed his hope for the future, as a testament to 'nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible'.2 Baldwin's understanding of history as a tool for building a better society was shared by his fellow Pan-Africanists, including the Algerian freedom fighter, Frantz Fanon, and by the Black feminist and prison abolitionist, Angela Davis. History as a means of self-empowerment and realization was also central to the Women's Liberation Movement and formed the raison d'être of the History Workshop movement in the 1960s and seventies. Yet how far does this belief in history as a tool with which to identify and struggle against oppression still persist today? What is 'radical history' and where is it to be found? What kind of 'radical history' is possible in the context of universities that are increasingly driven by neo-liberal agendas and marketization?

The Raphael Samuel History Centre's three-day conference, 'Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism', held at Queen Mary University of London in July 2016, undertook to address these and many other questions. [End Page 230] The conference marked twenty years since the death of Raphael Samuel, who founded the History Workshop movement, and forty years since the establishment of History Workshop Journal. Organized by the directors of the Raphael Samuel History Centre, Matt Cook (Birkbeck), Kate Hodgkin (University of East London) and Barbara Taylor (Queen Mary University of London), with the support of Katy Pettit and a team of twenty-four historians, the conference was roughly divided into five strands that ran simultaneously: radical movements; diversity and difference; local and global histories; culture, art and environment; and, history, policy and the idea of politics. The call for papers yielded about 230 submissions, ranging from papers to performances, roundtable discussions to installation pieces, a response which attests to the enthusiasm for the idea of 'radical' history and the diversity of its conceptualization. From these submissions, the organizing team selected those that fitted best in relationship to each other and the overarching themes. Overall, the conference had fifty-five panel sessions and twelve exhibitions and performances. This report cannot possibly cover them all. Instead, I gather some of the key themes, questions and concerns that appeared and reappeared across the different panels and plenaries that I attended. What was 'radical history' and what does it mean today? Who gets to define the parameters of 'radical history' and whose voices get heard? My focus, however, will be primarily on the relationship between radical history and the production of history from within the academy. What does it mean to research and teach 'radical history' at universities in Britain when student fees and increasingly precarious employment conditions are steadily eroding any semblance of democratic access to higher education? What possibilities and problems does the Research Excellence Framework's 'impact agenda' (which ranks universities according to their ability to disseminate ideas and inform practice beyond the academy) pose for the relationship between academics and communities?

'RADICAL' HISTORY: THEN AND...

pdf

Share