In anticipation of this year’s summer conference we wanted to share the absolutely fantastic plenary from last year’s virtual event by the brilliant Jason Todd: “Silences, Traces and Voices: Conversations and Journeys Through Race”.
In the film Jason makes the case, drawing on the work of the Jamaican-born intellectual Stuart Hall and Haitian academic Michel Rolph Trouillot, for the History curriculum to address silences around race.
Initially through conversations with Professor Catherine Hall from UCL and Bill Schwarz from Queen Mary University, he explores how these silences and traces work. Then drawing on the Saidiya Hartman’s idea of ‘critical fabulations’ he talks with Booker Prize-winning Bernardine Evaristo and the Ted Hughes Prize-winning Jay Bernard, to consider ways to give voice to silenced voices.
The film is interspersed with the contemporary voices of young people from Britain, South Africa and New Zealand.
There is so much here to provoke thought, questions and action.
Enjoy!
