Repairing the past, transforming the future: why history matters for social change
The history I was taught at school mostly consisted of the Tudors, some broader details about kings and queens of Britain, a lot on World War Two, and some timelines of British Prime Ministers of the 19th Century. We may even have covered something on Italian and German Unification.
It was an eclectic mix. And sparked a love of the subject from a young age. I was fascinated with Queen Elizabeth I as a child. Something about a woman in charge, who was unmarried, and lived a life in grand buildings.
But this history barely touched on the lives of people who were not royalty or the ruling class. It definitely didn’t include colonialism. And other than one class where we watched a short excerpt of a film about the trans atlantic slave trade, there was very little to explain how England became wealthy, how unevenly that wealth was distributed and exploitation, violence and struggle that made Britain what this nation-state became.
It was only in social movement groups in my twenties and early thirties that I started to understand histories of colonialism, of extraction, of capitalism. And how important it was to understand these histories if I wanted to be involved in social change.
It was important partly because knowing how we got to the inequality and injustice of the present shapes what change is called for, partly because the people I was in struggle with needed me to know the centuries long processes that have determined who is impacted by climate change, the housing crisis, access to land and the ability to grow food, migration and poverty.
Every step along the way people have risen up to fight injustice, to build worlds anew, and to find collective joy. It is also important to know these stories and to understand the struggles against empire and capital and patriarchy and oppression that have been an also constant thread.
There is also a possibility that doing history differently by looking at stories that are often not told, stories that are challenging, stories that subvert what we are taught, can be a form of repair.
In her article, “Doing reparatory history: bringing ‘race’ and slavery home”, Catherine Hall asks “Could re-thinking the past, taking responsibilities for its residues and legacies, be one way of challenging right-wing politics and imagining a different future?” (Hall, 2018: 8).
Hall develops five stages of work in reparative history:
First, understand the dominant narratives.
Second, ask a series of questions about these narratives to unsettle them.
Third, surface other histories perhaps from other perspectives that might have been hidden/marginalised.
Fourth, ask what these other histories might mean for repair in the present.
Fifth, ask what wider change is needed beyond repair.
Engaging with these histories also might enable the possibility of reparative futures to emerge. In a UNESCO paper, ‘Learning with the Past: Racism, Education and Reparative Futures’, Arathi Sriprakash and colleagues develop this idea of reparative futures.
‘The idea of reparative futures signals a commitment to identify and recognise the injustices visited on, and experienced by, individuals and communities in the past. It understands that these past injustices, even when they appear to be distant in time or ‘over’, will continue to endure in people’s lives in material and affective ways unless, and until, they are consciously and carefully addressed.’ (SRIPRAKASH ET AL. 2020: 2)
By doing the work of reparative histories and reparative futures, it becomes possible to understand how we reached these presents we find ourselves in. By uncovering and acknowledging how we got here, the gesture towards repair starts.
Choosing to tell stories that don’t get told, looking towards histories that may be deeply uncomfortable and challenging to the status quo, weaving together events and processes that have happened over a long period of time - this is political.
History is a political act. The stories that so often get told uphold the dominant culture. Instead let’s turn to the stories that seek to unravel and understand in other ways. What futures become possible if we listen to other stories, if we tell other stories? With a desire to repair and transform the future?
