Archiving from Below Discussion Series: All Knees and Elbows of Susceptibility and Refusal: Reading History From Below
February 26 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm GMT
In All Knees and Elbows, published in 2012 Tom Roberts and Anthony Iles attempted to recover and politically and critically survey the work of historians contributing to practices of reading and writing ‘history from below’.
If we articulate the ‘below’ as populated by creatures marked by material processes of differentiation through race, class and gender, then ‘from’ and ‘reading’ designate methods of recovering and centring their lives and experience. To show these are material matters, one way we characterised historical disjecta was as ‘lobster traps’, that is E.P. Thompson’s phrase for the peculiar devices of capture where the historian might find and hear the voices of the unheard articulate themselves.
During this session of Archiving from Below, Anthony will present some arguments and examples from the book – focusing on class, historical evidence and methods – in order to animate a discussion about where we might begin to look and listen for the ‘below’, then, today and tomorrow?
Suggested Reading:
Anthony Iles is an researcher, editor, archivist, writer and teacher living in East London. A former editor of Mute, founding member of Full Unemployment Cinema and current contributor to leftove.rs and library.memoryoftheworld.org.
Artwork by Rachel Baker.