Unofficial Histories (review)

The first Unofficial Histories conference took place at the Bishopsgate Institute, London, on 19 May 2012. It had several objectives: to advance critical interest and enquiry into those everyday activities and forms of history-making which often escape the attention of full-time professional historians; to encourage the generous exchange of ideas and views across disciplinary and professional boundaries in this endeavour, particularly between the academic world and those working in community, cultural and political settings; and, perhaps more ambitiously, to begin a process of exploring the current state of our public historical imaginary. As organizers we wanted to capture something of the ‘do-it-yourself’ spirit, channelling our personal energies into fostering an informal and convivial environment for discussion and debate. This aim remains elusive, but we think we managed to escape some of the stiffness and formalities that often accompany academic gatherings.

Raphael Samuel’s contention that ‘history is ... a social form of knowledge; the work in any given instance of a thousand different hands’ (Theatres of Memory, 1994, p. 8) was our starting point. We wanted to explore the various ways in which historians, curators, writers, journalists, artists, film-makers, enthusiasts, activists and others, have made use of the past in multiple settings, from the academic to the everyday. The idea of ‘unofficial’ histories offered a broad and capacious way to signal an interest in the practices and activities of history, particularly those which exist outside established and authorized versions of the past, or which contest them from within. Moreover, it suggested how to think about how history functions in contemporary society in ways that would disrupt or subvert common distinctions between academic and popular, professional and amateur, and orthodox and radical. In this respect, Unofficial Histories gestured towards politics – to the work of power in producing historical representations, as well as the struggle over these representations and their means of production.

Special attention was paid to making the conference as accessible as possible: by making it free and by holding it on a Saturday and in a central location. We were also keen to pitch it to appeal beyond academic spheres, so we distributed the call for papers to regional and community history networks and non-history websites (personal blogs, social media etc.), as well as drawing on contacts in community heritage, archives, museums and so on to distribute news of the conference further afield.

It was heartening that speakers and participants came from a variety of areas and angles of interest, and included established academics, postgraduate students, artists, museum curators, archivists, writers, and performance artists. We received more than double the number of proposals we could accommodate and, in a difficult selection process, we tried for an overall balance between papers to include the daring or unusual, and those which complemented and cohered with one another, and to ensure a diversity of representation. After several hours of consideration, we finally had a programme organized under the following themes: ‘Practising History Beyond the Academy’; ‘Recovering Forgotten Pasts’; ‘Performing the Past’; ‘Poetics of History’; ‘Producing Heritages’; and ‘History in the Popular Imagination’.

The Unofficial Histories conference day started with a performance lecture given by Amelia Beavis Harrison and Alan Armstrong, entitled ‘19th May’. Both artists have performed extensively in the UK and abroad. Even as organizers, we did not know quite what to expect from them and the sight of balloons being tapped back and forth across the hall certainly raised a few eyebrows. But their performance created an interesting juxtaposition of oral and visual elements, inviting the audience to contemplate its meanings across the registers of past and present, spoken word and performance. Besides this, not only did it signal our intent, but it helped to set the tone for the rest of the day and to foster a sense of informality and sociability.

The first session, ‘Practising History Beyond the Academy’, was opened by Hilda Kean with a paper on ‘Critical Public Histories: the role of public historians in the social construction of knowledge’, which discussed the importance of plural and everyday sources of historical knowledge...