Chapman, A. and Facey, J. (2004) Placing History: territory, story, identity – and historical consciousness. Teaching History, 116, pp.36-41. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Black and British? History, Identity and Citizenship
This paper will explore some of the tensions and contradictions in being labelled 'black' and 'British' within the United Kingdom, set against the discourses about the historic development of British and other identities as well as strands of post-modern thinking. It will relate these tensions and contradictions to emerging practice in citizenship and history curricula in England at Key Stage 3 level.
Faith in history: memory, multiculturalism and the legacies of Empire in postwar England
History of Education, 2011
This article employs a broad concept of memory in order to examine the reconstruction of the past in various migrant religious and educational settings in the period after 1970. In educational projects designed to promote good community relations, and in attempts to develop non-dogmatic forms of religious belief, British history became the subject of extensive discussion and debate. A small space opened up in which the legacies of British imperial history, so often a matter of visceral feeling, could be publicised, explored and taken seriously. Using case studies from London and Birmingham the article argues that religious groups played a small but important role in enabling new, more inclusive and more critical historical narratives to enter metropolitan British society.
International Sociological Association, Durban, South …, 2006
This paper examines the shifting dominant discursive representation of an area that was the hub of the British Empire, from an empty land and 'clean slate' ripe for property development in 1990, to a peninsular with a long-established white 'Islander' population in 2000. The significance of the incorporation into the dominant discourse about the 'Island' and east London of a homogeneous 'Muslim' minority after 9/11, and especially 7/7 is explored in the context of renewed national debates about 'multiculturalism'.
Shadows of Empire: How (not) to remember Britain's tricky past
2023
This was an hour-long invited public lecture -- a collaboration between the Stadt Bamberg, the University of Bamberg and the voluntary organisations 'Europa in Bamberg' and the 'Deutsch-Englischer Club Bamberg' -- which was delivered at the Volkshochschule Bamberg on 23 June 2023. You can find the video here: https://europa-in-bamberg.de/shadows-of-empire-how-not-to-remember-britains-tricky-past/ . In the past few years, and particularly since the ‚Black Lives Matter‘ protests of 2020, there have been ever louder calls for Britain to face up to the legacy of its imperial and colonial past. An Oxford statue of Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) – both a brutal imperialist and a willing philanthropist – became a particularly controversial focal point in this debate. Should it stand? Should it fall? Should it be curated in a museum? Destroyed? Pushed into a dark corner and forgotten about? And what do our answers say about both our relationship with the past, and our values in the present and future? In this talk, Dr Robert Craig wants to think about these questions through his own experience as both a literary and cultural theorist and a native Brit. He will ask what the British can learn from Germany’s difficult (and ongoing) process of „Vergangenheitsbeschäftigung“ – and how Europe in general can come to terms with national histories that have often been far from glorious. Dr. Robert Craig is a Lecturer in English, American, and German Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Bamberg. He’s edited a book on the interplay of literature and science around 1900 and written a monograph, which was published in 2021, about the groundbreaking German modernist author, Alfred Döblin. He’s also published articles on various aspects of modern literature, philosophy, and cultural theory. He sits on the board of ‚Europa in Bamberg‘; and he has appeared on German Radio and TV as a commentator on British cultural affairs — specifically in relation to the monarchy and its changing significance in contemporary Britain.
Patterns of Prejudice, 2020
The Department of Education and Science (DES) produced Circular 7/65 on 14 June 1965, launched by the Labour Party but devised by the previous Minister of Education for the Conservative Party, Sir Edward Boyle, in 1963. It recommended that schools with more than 33 per cent immigrant children on the roll should disperse them (5). The ensuing practice of dispersal continued until it staggered to a halt between 1976 and 1986 (129), continuously obfuscating its purpose until its final demise. The vagaries of this particular dispersal policy are the focus of Olivier Esteves's The 'Desegregation' of English Schools. This is the first book-length study of the dispersal policy, bringing together archival sources, interviews and secondary materials to examine English bussing during a period of increased immigration to postwar Britain. Esteves provides a fascinating account of this period by 'reading against the grain' (5) and using a 'paucity of sources' to surmise intentions and expose what is a dramatic narrative. In his narrative, Esteves situates bussing at a particular moment in time: when white people were escaping areas of ethnic minority clustering, and politicians were advocating an official policy of integration for non-Anglophone Asians. This confluence, occurring after the implementation of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962), intended to curtail immigration but led rather to a sudden and large influx of women and children, and alarming media stories about the consequential formation of ghettos (203). Esteves compares bussing in Britain to the same concurrent practices in the United States that gave rise to the phenomena of so-called 'white flight' and 'white backlash'. These comparisons to the United States act as counterpoints throughout the book, serving both to globalize the history and to provide an ideological mirror in which to reflect it. For instance, British legislators invoked the American model as justification: 'The natural ethnic clustering of Asians in Southall was, to Boyle, Southeys etc. tantamount to Jim Crow Mississippi or South African Apartheid' (41). This was an example of the resulting distortion, as in a carnivalesque hall of mirrors, since the Asians in Britain 'were not trapped or forced into segregated schooling as they would have been in the south-side of Chicago' (41).