Author Archives: A Youngson

Radical Heritage, Art & Culture: The Work of a Thousand Different Hands

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This post was contributed by Dr Claire Hayward, lecturer in History at Farnborough College of Technology, Researcher for Pride of Place and a team member of the Raphael Samuel History Centre

On 30 June – 3 July 2016, the Centre will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of the socialist historian Raphael Samuel, along with the fortieth anniversary of the journal he helped to found (History Workshop Journal), with the Radical Histories Conference.

RSHC-logo-long

While the main question of Raphael Samuel History Centre Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism will be ‘what is radical history?’, the history conference and festival will also ask how heritage, art and culture can be radical. We hope that discussions will raise questions about how radical histories are shared with people from all walks of life, and how they can be made more accessible and both involve and reach radical communities.

Radical Public Histories

The RSHC is ‘devoted to encouraging the widest possible participation in historical research and debate’. The Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism conference and festival intends to carry on this idea. The conference papers, presentations and performances given over the three-and-a-half-day event will bring histories of radicalism to a broad audience of performers, artists, students, teachers, local community members and historians.

We’ll hear from heritage practitioners, curators and artists on how to access and preserve radical histories. On Friday morning, a panel on commemorating suffrage activism in Parliament will explore radical history in Parliament, and question how we can make radical histories more visible in the present. On Saturday afternoon we’ll hear about radical archiving and archiving radical histories. On Sunday we’ll hear about radical publishing and alternative visionaries like the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift.

Participatory Events

Radical Histories conference

Radical Histories conference

Co-production and participation is at the heart of some of the scheduled events. You can join in a musical workshop and sing late nineteenth century socialist hymns for Jewish immigrant workers during Sunday’s long lunch break. You can also join in walking tours that will take you through radical histories of the East End and Hackney. Performance and art are central themes of the long weekend, and the programme promises to be both enlightening and entertaining.

Stalls, exhibitions, films and other events will take place at lunch during the long weekend. Pride of Place will be there to collect LGBTQ histories. The project is run by Historic England (previously English Heritage) and Leeds Beckett University. It is radical in multiple senses. The project collects and shares histories of radical LGBTQ lives, of radical sites such as queer squats and alternative housing. It is also a crowdsourced project that aims to collaborate with, be informed by and reach as wide an audience as possible. Radical heritage takes on many methods, and crowdsourcing is just one of them. During the lunch time sessions, you can also hear poetry readings, watch screenings and join workshops that bring to life radical voices, histories and ideas.

Revealing Radical Histories

As Raphael Samuel said, ‘history is the work of a thousand different hands’. The Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism conference and festival aims to show how radical histories are the work of many hands, from many backgrounds, for many purposes. The organisers, speakers, contributors and audience are from a range of different backgrounds, and have a wealth of different experiences and skills. We hope this will reveal radical histories and bring to light radical ideas of how to share them through heritage, art and culture.

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Five years after the Arab Spring: The Implosion of Social Movements?

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This post was contributed by Dr Barbara Zollner, lecturer in Middle East Politics, Department of Politics. Here Dr Zollner offers an insight into issues to be discussed at a public colloquium at Birkbeck (“Five years after the Arab Spring: The Implosion of Social Movements?”) on Friday 10 June. The colloquium is run by Birkbeck Institute for Social Research

‘There is no freedom when you are in fear’; so goes the title strip of the song Akher Okhneya (Last Song) by the Egyptian music-group Cairokee. The rap, which is shot on a deserted railway-line in Cairo, echoes the feelings of many young Egyptians. The mass-movement against authoritarianism in Middle Eastern countries, commonly known as the Arab Spring, gave hope to their call for political and personal freedom.

Thousands joined the protest, but subsequently many saw themselves excluded from democracy-building. Fewer continue to dream of revolution today. The view of these shabab (literally, young people, but usually refers to the Tahrir movement) is that Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood ‘hijacked’ the prospect of political change. This led them to side with the Tamarrod movement against President Mursi, which in turn opened the door for al-Sisi’s military coup.

Now, five years after their Arab Spring, Egypt faces another authoritarian military regime under President al-Sisi that uses nationalist overtones to crush any social movement, any contentious politics, any dissent.

‘The beneficiary is the one who controls you, the one who’s making you passive, who’s dictating you where to go, the one who’s predominating you. They imprisoned you inside your mind, the bars are your fear. You are afraid to think free, because you are afraid they might catch you.’ Cairokee, Akher Oghniya

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZu2euuj2GE

The future of democracy looks bleak

Egypt, although an obvious case, is not the only example that the hopes associated with the Arab Spring are crushed by new authoritarianism, civil war, ethnic and sectarian strife. All over the Middle East, whether in Gulf oil-monarchies, eastern-Mediterranean and north-African republics (with perhaps Tunisia as a remarkable exception) and even in constitutional monarchies, the future of democracy looks rather bleak.

Within this turmoil, social movements (SM) are severely restrained in their activities, yet they continue to shout HURIYYA – FREEDOM. It is these movements, that continue a struggle for political reform across the Middle East, that are the focal point for a one day colloquium at Birkbeck.

Despite considerable interest in the current regional crisis, there is surprisingly little systematic research on the responsibility of SMs in successful or indeed failed democratic transitions. The short period of the Arab Spring provides rich material to explore this theme. It allows us to analyse, compare and theorise on specific empirical cases, including Islamist and secular movements that depart from the mainstream focus.

Questions arise such as whether and, if so, to what extent, SMs are responsible for the failure of democratic transition in the Middle East. Moreover, what happened to SMs and SMOs five years after the Arab Spring? Did they simply implode or did they reconfigure their political activism, potentially even turning towards violence?

The one-day colloquium intends to explore these issues. It seeks to bring together Middle East experts with an interest in contentious politics to study how these relate to processes of fundamental political change such as democratic transition, civil war, the rise of extremist movements and counter-revolutions.

“5 years after the Arab Spring: The Implosion of Social Movements?” – a one day Colloquium, run by Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, will be held at Birkbeck on Friday 10 June.

Book on to the colloquium and view the full programme here

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Arts Week 2016: Rediscovered!

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This post has been contributed by Louise Horton of the School of Arts’ Department of English and Humanities after she attended the Arts Week 2016 event on Wednesday 18 May titled, “Rediscovered! The Story of Birkbeck’s Manuscript and Rare Medieval Book Collection”

Birkbeck Hours; Pentecost

How does half a millennium of possession and loss write itself into the history of a book? How can time eat itself into the very pages of a mislaid book? And what happens to a book when no one remembers it?

Rediscovered! at Birkbeck Arts Week invited us to consider these questions through the story of four medieval books found late last year in Birkbeck Library. Uncatalogued and locked away for safe keeping, these books had slipped from memory sometime in the last century – almost certainly not for the first time in their history.

A tale of finding something that once was lost

Telling the story of the books’ rediscovery were Birkbeck’s Anthony Bale and Isabel Davis, but their fascinating talk was more than a tale of finding something that once was lost. It was a talk that swept through 600 years of European history; following the books’ journey between libraries and collections, surviving the Reformation, Napoleonic and world wars, until finally reaching Malet Street sometime in the twentieth century.

Here and there it was possible to catch glimpses of the forgotten books, swapping owners and countries, but mostly their past is silence; as is history on the fate and identities of those who once read and left their marks within these pages. Yet these are organic books, and traces of the lives that made, owned and touched them do survive.

The pages are palimpsests, layered with centuries of the European book trade. From these medieval manuscripts and incunabula the hands of scribes, illuminators, vellum makers, printers, and book binders emerge; leaving behind the fingerprints of culture and commerce, and belief and behaviour. In the beautiful book of hours, from early fifteenth century Paris or Rouen, the face of an enigmatic bear-bird-man watches the reader contemplate the crucifixion.

And so in this strange figure we find just the tiniest glimpse of a domestic lay culture where fantastical creatures could adorn a scene from the passion – reminding us with a jolt that these books are more than objects. These books were made, read and used with purpose. The books belonged to people who wrote in them, drew in them and with them marked the passing of time, until all that survived was the book.

The road to Birkbeck

Fast forward several centuries and we find a Victorian bibliomaniac on the continent, perhaps adding to his 146,000 book collection from the detritus of libraries broken up during the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars. Forward another century and a Birkbeck mathematician, whose studies were broken by the Great War, adds his personal mark of ownership – an image of a fox in a library. Somewhere along the way woodworm creeps in, a book is re-bound, another is bought at auction, one is catalogued and then lost from the system that makes sense of its numbering. Somehow through trade, acquisition and donation the books reach Malet Street, London and then despite being perfectly safe are lost again. Until 2015.

So, what next? Have these books stopped travelling? Well, yes and no. The books will remain at Birkbeck, but a new journey is beginning for them too. These fragile books will be catalogued anew, and securely stored. Yet, through digitisation and plans for online access the books will take new form. From manuscript to early printed book to online edition a new chapter in the rediscovered Birkbeck medieval collection is about to begin.

Read Professor Anthony Bales recent blog: Four forgotten medieval books at Birkbeck College

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Can History be Radical?

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This post was contributed by Dr Onni Gust, lecturer in colonial and postcolonial history at the University of Nottingham, and member of the Raphael Samuel History Centre – a research and educational centre, of which Birkbeck is a partner, devoted to encouraging the widest possible participation in historical research and debate.

On 30 June – 3 July 2016, the Centre will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of the socialist historian Raphael Samuel, along with the fortieth anniversary of the journal he helped to found (History Workshop Journal), with the Radical Histories Conference.

DCF 1.0

Here, Dr Gust gives an insight into some of the central themes to be grappled with at the London-based the conference.

In 1961, towards the end of the war of Algerian Independence against France, Franz Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth.  In this indictment of the psychological impact of European colonial power, Fanon called on his African brothers not to follow the path set by Europe but to start “a new history of Man.”  In this history, Europe’s crimes would be accounted for, but the overall aim would be to “create the whole man” as opposed to the “pathological tearing apart of his functions and crumbling of his unity” that European imperialism had engendered. Fanon’s vision for humanity lay in the creation of new concepts that would enable unity rather than division and inequality. History lay at the core of that radical reinvention of humanity.

Fanon’s was a polemic designed to provide inspiration and to galvanize those in the midst of a brutal and bloody war against French imperialism. His death in 1961, the same year that Wretched of the Earth was published, freed him from grappling with the realities of governing a newly-formed post-colonial nation and from the difficulties of researching and writing a redemptive and inclusive history.

Those who survived and have inherited the legacies of anti-colonial resistance, have born the burden of enacting the agenda that Fanon so powerfully laid out. That agenda was inseparably tied to the desires and disillusionments of mid twentieth-century socialism. Together, and in mutual constitution, socialism and post-colonialism looked to history as one mode through which a more equal and humane future could be enacted.

The radical potential of history

As a project of decolonizing and democratizing historical knowledge, History Workshop was a key forum in which that vision of a more humane and inclusive ‘people’s history’ was enacted. Yet the heyday of History Workshop, which ran concurrently with the emergence of ‘Subaltern Studies’ in India and post-colonial history more generally, also marks the growing disillusionment with post-colonial and socialist alternatives and the rise of an apparently inescapable neo-liberalism.

How far has the hope that was placed in the promise of history been lost, too? Has the faith in the power to right the wrongs of the past and build a more equitable future through the rewriting of history dissipated? Since the early ‘90s, post-colonial critique has cast significant doubt on the radical potential of history as we understand it (whoever ‘we’ are) to effect liberation.

The promise and potential of histories of subalterns – be they peasants, the proletariat, the enslaved, the racialized, gender and sexual minorities or the disabled – to open up agency now appears, at least in the academy, to be somewhat naïve. Gayatri Spivak’s critique of the Subaltern Studies project of recovering ‘subaltern’ voices in the archive ultimately determined that subaltern subjectivities were always mediated and compromised by the structures of state power that conditioned the historians’ access to the documents themselves.

In 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincialising Europe argued the power of history to effect agency was compromised from the very outset by its form. The narratives to which any subaltern history must fit inevitably referred back to a framework that emerged simultaneous to European-imperial structures of power. Anjali Arondekhar’s fabulous critique of the search for dissident sexualities in the colonial archives built on these positions to show how the archives simply reflected the fantasies, ‘perversions’ and paranoias  of its own elite. Taken together, these histories and critiques seem a far cry from the hope offered by Fanon’s revolutionary vision.

Questions

Yet at the same time as the academy (much of it emanating from the US institutions) appears disillusioned with the possibilities of historical knowledge as integral to liberation, history proliferates beyond its bounds. Local community archives, oral history projects, maybe even the trend for genealogy, rejuvenates a field outside of the parameters of academic knowledge.

Are these micro-projects, often based on the assertion and recovery of forgotten, or lost identities in the past, part of Fanon’s vision? Or do they merely fragment and therefore undermine the ‘whole man’ that Fanon believed was integral to the post-colonial world? What is their relationship to the history that those of us in the academy are trying to create, under the pressure of REF deadlines, funding parameters and a demand by administrators to teach subjects and approaches that are perceived to be marketable to students?

Do any of our histories really reconfigure hegemonic narratives or are we complicit in creating side-shows that act as charades of democratic knowledge? Where and how do such hegemonies conglomerate? The nation? The tenuous remains of Europe? The networks of global capital?

In many ways, the very title of ‘Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism’ encapsulates this unsure and indecisive moment. The forward slash implicitly invites the questions of ‘where’ and ‘why’ and ‘how’ radical history can take place in neo-liberal times. The series of papers, exhibitions, films and performances, I have convened with colleagues under the broadly-conceived title ‘Radical Movements’ appear, as a group, to invite speculation rather than certainty.

What visions and templates of change did actors in the past – from Kashmiri Communists, to Transatlantic Anarchists, to ANC activists in London – hold for their own futures?  How do we navigate the increasingly precarious work conditions of academics in higher education and the housing crisis that, structurally, are parts of the same problem? What is the history, and the future of radical booksellers and what does it mean to historicize the miners’ strike?

In broaching these questions, the contributors to ‘Radical Movements’ hover between the historicisation of radicalism and the construction of radical history.

About the Radical Histories Conference (30 June – 3 July)

The conference will feature a weekend of discussion, celebration and debate bringing together activists, community historians, students, teachers, writers, artists, practitioners of history, from inside and outside universities. The programme will include film screenings, theatre, song, dance, walks and talks, stands, exhibitions, caucuses and debates.

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