What is Radical History Now

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?

American history · Art · Literature · Mythology · Nothing · Political science · Politics · Racism · Sociology · Spectacle · White (mutation) · White supremacy · Anthropology · Educator Training and Historical Pedagogy · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society

• Beyond Caricature and Hubris

  Emma Gattey

  Incluir item

• What is radical planning history

  Open Access•Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago•Planning Perspectives•2025

  Incluir item

• The Wretched of the Earth

  Open Access•Frantz Fanon•Posthumanism•2000

  Incluir item

• The Peculiarities of Oral History

  Alessandro Portelli•History Workshop Journal•1981

  Incluir item