WHAT IS HISTORY IN A SETTLER COLONIAL SOCIETY?

MAPPING THE LIMITS AND POSSIBILITIES OF ETHICAL HISTORIOGRAPHY USING AN AUSTRALIAN CASE STUDY

Anna Clark

History and Theory 63, no. 4 (2024)
Theme Issue: “History and Ethics,” edited by Andre de Lemos Freixo and João Ohara

In recent decades, the role of the history discipline as part of the architecture of colonization has become more visible and better understood. Such acknowledgement reflects foundational shifts in historical practice and theory prompted by transdisciplinary and transnational scholarship in fields such as postcolonial and settler-colonial studies, First Nations knowledges, and historical perspectives and practices contextualized by transatlantic slavery. Their intervention in turn prompted a vital question: How do we map settler-colonial historiography if the discipline has been complicit in the settler-colonial project? Using Australian historiography as a case study, this article explores how History has been part of the architecture of colonization, policing whose stories can be told and by whom. Drawing on the work of Indigenous history-makers and knowledge-holders, it also points to ways that researchers might reach outside the traditional scope of historiography to map and contemplate the range of history-making that comprises history in the settler colony.

Photo by Catarina Sousa.