This month, a special issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies themed on ‘Deep Historicities’ has been published featuring the work of multiple members of the Centre. The publication emerges from a symposium held at Harvard University in April 2019, co-convened by Laura Rademaker, Ben Silverstein (both Postdoctoral Fellows on the Laureate Program) and Daniel Lord Smail of the Harvard History Department.
The collection represents different ways of imagining and understanding deep pasts across culture and discipline, attending to the specificities of both Indigenous knowledges as well as knowledges produced by deep historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists. In the title article, Laura Rademaker and Ben Silverstein seek to understand the deep past, the knowledges of First Nations peoples and of the various academic disciplines that can seem incommensurable.
In addition to contributions from Ben Silverstein and Laura Rademaker who also edited the issue are papers by Julia Rodriguez, Ann McGrath, and Gustavo Verdesio, and a response from Daniel Lord Smail. In People of the Footprints: Rediscovery, Indigenous Historicities and the Science of Deep Time, Centre Director Ann McGrath uses a case study from one of Australia’s most significant deep history sites to show how reconciliatory efforts to share the western scientific kudos attached to discovery narratives have proved an uncomfortable fit with Indigenous cultural values.
Read: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies Volume 24, 2022 – Issue 2: ‘Deep Historicities’.
The Centre for Deep History would like to thank our symposium partners: The Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard, Harvard University Department of History, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, ARC Laureate Program on Rediscovering the Deep Human Past, ANU Global Partnership Scheme, Harvard University Center for African Studies and the Harvard Committee for Australian Studies.
