In the third of the #ReconstructionWork series, ‘Legacies of British Slave Ownership’, Catherine Hall and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse explored the importance of new histories, reparations, working to decolonise education and shifting collective memories in the effort to imagine new futures.
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The most recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests has rejuvenated popular debate over the removal of statues of British slave owners from public spaces. The fall of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol and calls to remove statues of Winston Churchill, Lord Nelson and Cecil Rhodes has forced the British public to reconsider questions of history and colonial legacies.
The term ‘reconstruction’ is often used to characterise a moment in time where a series of events force a period of political, social and economic reorganisation. This past year, the Covid-19 pandemic and the sustained Black Lives Matter protests have prompted a collective reassessment of the past in order to make sense of present-day inequalities. Stuart discussed ‘reconstruction’ as an opportunity to “reinscribe the past, reactivate it, relocate it and resignify it” in order to work through the present, reinterpret the future and to imagine something else. Our #reconstructionwork series implements Stuart’s thinking through a series of online public conversations where we invite writers, artists and activists to critically consider how we can build a better society in response to the Covid-19 crisis and the Black Lives Matter protests worldwide.
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THE SPEAKERS
Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of History and Chair of the Centre of the Study of British Slave-ownership at UCL. She has written extensively on the history of Britain and its empire including Civilising Subjects (2002) Macaulay and Son (2012) and, with others, Legacies of British Slave-ownership (2014). From 2009-2016 she was principal investigator on the LBS project www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs. She is currently writing a book on Edward Long, Jamaica and racial capitalism. She is a trustee of the Stuart Hall Foundation.
Ruth Ramsden-Karelse is founder and co-convener of the Oxford Queer Studies Network and a DPhil candidate in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. The inaugural Stuart Hall Doctoral Studentship, in association with Merton College, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and the Stuart Hall Foundation, supports her research on the world-making capacity of collaborative works by self-described gays and girls from communities formerly classified “Coloured” in Cape Town, South Africa, from 1950 to the present, with a specific focus on the Kewpie Photographic Collection. Ruth’s writing has appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
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