Dr. Christer Petley and Dr. Priti Mishra, A conversation about teaching Empire In History Seminar
- Time:
- 13:00
- Date:
- 6 December 2017
- Venue:
- 65/1173, Avenue Campus, University of Southampton, SO17 1BF
For more information regarding this seminar, please email Mary Andrew at m.j.andrew@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
Part of the CIPCS Seminar Series
In his critique of imperial histories, Franz Fanon argued that “The settler makes history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey”. Imperial histories of the non-west are histories of the colonizer rather than the colonized. Our task in teaching empire in the classroom is to decolonize the discipline of history itself. Often, in our efforts at orchestrating such decolonization we are faced with difficult conversations with students about the aptness of imperial descriptions of the colonial and post-colonial actors and places. For instance, how do we respond to students who argue that the current political crisis in Zimbabwe corroborates that the colonial arguments about African ‘savagery’ and inability to sustain democratic rule? In this conversation about difficult questions, Christer and Priti hope to explore how to counter such claims while taking the student’s question seriously.
Speaker information
Dr Christer Petley , Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Southampton.. I am a historian with interests in Atlantic history, British imperial history, and Caribbean studies. My work has focused on the histories and legacies of slavery in the Americas, mainly on slave societies in the British Caribbean. My particular area of expertise is the history of colonial settlers and slaveholders, and I have published work on the social and cultural history of the Jamaican planter class.