There is a lot say about this topic but mostly there is a lot to ask. For some #BLM is a time to fight and for others, it is time to reflect and review.
This reflection can been seen in the removing of statues and renaming of streets or in the case of my dad the renaming of inappropriate climbing routes. If I look at this from the point of view of someone who is interested in archives and the preservation of history, I feel this moment in history proves how history is not static. And it shows that how we tell history needs to be constantly updated. This includes archives. I remembering hearing somewhere that people struggle to find black history in archives after the mid 20th century because the words used to catatorgise the documents are not words we use today.
What I am hopefully am going to explore during this PhD is to how do we set up archives that allow this reviewing of history to happen easily and inclusively. Rather than making history a battle ground of identity it becomes the educational resource that it should be.
On the 16th June I joined the oral history reading group. We had been given two papers to read that were written in the 1980s and only one was written by a black person.
The first paper was by Kim Lacy Rogers called ‘Memory, Struggle, and Power: On Interviewing Political Activists” published 1987. In the paper Rogers reviews her work on interviewing activists, both black and white, who were involved in civil rights in New Orleans in the 1960s.
The second paper was by Donald Hinds called “The ‘Island’ of Brixton”. It was a portrait of Brixton in the 1960s.
The discussion was mainly about how you interview activists when they are people who are aware of their position in history. What seemed odd to me was that people were not interviewing the people who were affected by the activism. If we are looking a text about activism in the 1960s written in the 1980s, yet the world it talks about could easily be the current one, then why aren’t we asking why things haven’t changed? What is their legacy? Do we need more revisiting of movements and more reviewing?
The other main topic was co-analysis, co-creation and other co-activities that should occur in order to create a more equal representation of the situation when it comes to race. The biggest issue being that there are not many people of colour in oral history yet there are plenty oral history recordings on the topics. Which as always are stuck in the archives.
I found it tragic that we were a group of white people who could only dig up two papers on the black oral history from the 1980s. This situation proves that a review of how we take oral histories and how we set up the archives is desperately needed.