Unsettling History

In recent decades, scholars working in postcolonial history have successfully challenged the primacy of Western historiography and its Eurocentric worldview. WithUnsettling History, a group of historians extend that challenge to two central components of work in history: archiving and narrating. Archival resources, they argue, despite their air of impartiality, are the product of established interests and subject to various practices of selection, cataloguing, and preservation. Narrating, too, is more complicated than it might at first seem, especially as the range of genres available to the historians for presenting their findings has expanded in recent years.

Sebastian Jobs is a postdoctoral research fellow at the graduate school in Rockstock. Alf Lüdtke is an honorary professor of the history of everyday life at the University of Erfurt.