RCHA 2022-2023 Project: Repairing the Past
Reckonings with history are at the center of contemporary public debates in the US and the world. On multiple levels - communal, national, and transnational - political action overtly invokes the revision, defense, or recreation, of entrenched historical records, for the sake of alternatively empowering disenfranchised constituencies, or silencing them from exclusionary dominant narratives. Many of these debates have been argued over centuries and around the globe. As it takes up with case studies, this seminar will consider comparative histories of repair work and redress from interdisciplinary perspectives. The questions with which the seminar intends to wrestle are existential in nature: Which possibilities does the practice of historical inquiry afford within the dynamics of the current moment? What forms of action should calls to “repair” the past entail? What role should scholars of history and memory play in “applying” past to present for purposes of redress? In sum, this seminar will explore the ways in which history is “at work in the world.”
