Location
IHR Senate House, London (and Online)
Shaping Histories: Representation and Perception through Time
This conference aims to explore how identities—whether gendered, national, religious, or cultural—have been shaped, expressed, and transformed across different historical periods and regions.
Key questions include: How have historical events influenced the way individuals and groups are represented and perceived? In what ways have power structures such as empire, religion, and war shaped these representations in both tangible and intangible forms—through official records, cultural artefacts, literary traditions, and collective memory?
Themes include:
- Visual and Textual Representations: How have identities been constructed or contested through art, textual formats, literature, political discourse, and other mediums of expression during periods of significant change, such as wars, revolutions, or colonial rule?
- Religion and Identity: Exploring the representation and evolution of religious identities in historical contexts, particularly their interactions with political and social power structures.
- Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories: Investigating how colonial legacies have shaped national and cultural identities, and how the representation of colonised peoples has evolved over time.
- Gender and Historical Representation: How have gendered identities been portrayed and transformed through historical events and social movements?
- Crisis and Identity Shifts: Examining how crises like pandemics, wars, or political upheavals.
Keynote Speaker: Neil Forbes (Professor, International History, Coventry University)
War and conflict in Europe since 1900: the shaping and representation of identity
The years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the transition of power from communist regimes to democratic governments across Europe, seemed to herald a new era of peaceful coexistence between countries. We are now all too aware that the chauvinistic rivalries and extremist ideology that propelled nation to take up arms against nation, and divided citizens within nations, are phenomena that did not just shape twentieth century history, but rather continue to shape the everyday lives of many Europeans today. The experience and memory of war, questions of identity and the practices of remembrance are closely connected; they involve issues which continue to generate controversy and passion in public discourse around the conceptualisation of the nation. In this context, the pervasive influence of globalisation has been perceived as a force that acts to dilute national identity and thereby weaken the state. Nation states are not without distinctive identities, made up of a mixture of historical events, customs and traditions, socio-legal norms and values, among other features. However, from the perspective of the historian, if trade between geographically distant parts of the world is one of its cornerstone, globalisation is anything but a recent phenomenon, and any close examination of identity based on race, religion or culture shows the extent of cross-fertilisation throughout history. Consequently, when conceptualisations of identity incorporate claims that purity, uniqueness or exceptionalism are the hallmark of a nation’s culture, and that its citizens are anointed with a set of special characteristics, national narratives become indistinguishable from myth-making. This talk seeks to reflect on questions of identity by selecting a few examples, drawn predominantly from the recent history of Europe, where war, conflict and the legacies of past conflict bring the significance of identity into sharp focus.
Speaker Bio
Neil Forbes is Professor of International History at Coventry University where he has held several senior posts including, latterly, as the Director of the Research Institute for Creative Cultures. His research focuses on the relationship between Europe’s rich cultural heritage and its peoples, particularly how the tangible and intangible legacies of conflict and war underpin the multiple identities of Europe and its nation states. He also studies and has published widely on the interaction of foreign policy with the practices of business, especially those of multinational enterprise, in the context of the interwar, international crisis and the coming of the Second World War. As Principal Investigator or Co-ordinator, he has led several, international research projects funded by national and European agencies. He sits on the advisory and review boards of several professional associations and projects, and acts in this capacity for UK Research and Innovation and the pan-European Joint Programming Initiative.
HistoryLab Otele Olivette Otele Prize Winner Lecture: Olivia Wyatt (Final-Year PhD candidate, Queen Mary University of London)
“Black is beautiful”: The politics of pigmentation within the British Black Women’s Movement, 1970-1990
The “Black is beautiful” slogan emerged under the cultural and political movements of the 1960s. As Black women were pressured to aspire to the White aesthetic of straight hair and lighter skin, the slogan referred to an identity premised on racial pride and emotional wellbeing while reflecting the need to celebrate natural appearances. The process of delineating the natural, beautiful features of Black people required a set of criteria to measure blackness: typically, afro hair textures and dark pigmentation. Blackness in Britain, however, held multiple meanings within political spaces: the organising principle of “Black is the colour of our politics, not the colour of our skins” confronted the Africanisation of blackness promoted by some strands of Pan-Africanism. How did activists outline the beauty of blackness when their understandings of the concept differed? The paper grapples with the question through an analysis of the Black Women’s Movement: a political space for women of African and Asian descent which became fraught with disagreements on identity and belonging. By examining newspapers like Freedom News, poetry like FOWAAD’s Sisters’ Poems, and plays like SKIN, alongside oral history testimonies from leading activists like Stella Dadzie and Farrukh Dhondy, the paper reconfigures our understanding of the tensions within the Movement – and of the politics of race more broadly – through the overlooked lens of pigment. Despite the promotion of a “Black is beautiful” aesthetic premised on dark skin and afro hair, the treatment of dark-skinned women within the Black Power Movement demonstrates the limits of transforming political rhetoric into a tangible reality. My analysis of colourism within Black politics challenges prevailing scholarship which contends that “shade-blind” racism in Britain helped migrants “shed […] the deluding idiocies of pigmentocracy”. The paper then traces the shift to autonomous Black female spaces to investigate the impact of the “Black is beautiful” aesthetic on solidarity and identity within the Black Women’s Movement, with a focus on the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent and the subsequent We Are Here collective. An analysis of the politics of pigmentation requires reckoning with the anti-blackness against darker-skinned women, the positioning of South-Asian women as ‘light-skinned’, and the contested identity of mixed-race activists. Rather than a cliché or an ineffectual rallying cry, “Black is beautiful” brought about a series of challenges which informed the construction of blackness, and the role of complexion in marking the boundaries of race and belonging in Britain.
Speaker Bio
Olivia Wyatt is a final-year PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London and an incoming Visiting Fellow of the University of the West Indies (St. Augustine). She is currently completing her thesis – “If You’re Brown, You Can Stick Around”: Complexions in Black Britain, c.1920-85 – as the Justin Champion doctoral fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. Alongside Deanna Lyncook she organised The Issue of Truth: Representing Black British History: a multi-funded, international conference which brought emerging and established academic historians into conversation with artists and community practitioners.
There will be two panel sessions running concurrently at the conference. Kindly watch out for the programme schedule to be published before the conference.
All welcome- this seminar is free to attend but booking in advance is required.
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