Colonial Forgettings: A project blog

Forgetting, n. “The mental act by which something is forgotten”

“Jelliffe […] asks again and again […] how it was possible for an illness which had been described unmistakably innumerable times to be ‘forgotten’ anew by each generation. Such forgettings are as dangerous as they are mysterious, for they give us an unwarranted sense of security” – Oliver Sacks, Awakenings.

“By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed”. – John Le Carré, Absolute Friends.

This is, will be, project on how how Britain’s colonial history has been constructed in talk and text in history textbooks over time.

The launch point is the idea – granted not revolutionary is sociological circles – that (white) British society has forgotten its history in order to create a sanitised, absolved, collective identity. It’s past has been willfully and conciously forgotten and erased in public discourse over time and this forgetting continues to this day.

I am an ‘uncomfortable’ linguist; whilst I ground my work in the critical analysis of discourses from a functional linguistic perspective, I am always cognizant of how these discourses are situated in time and place.

To bring this into my work, I aim to draw on theories and analytical frames from other (granted, narrowly defined) fields, including: critical race studies, post/de-colonial studies, sociology of education, collective memory studies, and the discourse-historical approach to linguistic analysis.

The project is just starting. As I move into it, I’ll be writing about the process of research – my reflections, my findings and my analyses.

If you want to, please get in touch at sbennett@wa.amu.edu.pl or via Twitter @samtbennett