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Radhika Natarajan, The Imperial Politics of Time in the British History Classroom, Modern British History, Volume 35, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 55–58, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwae025
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Extract
During the week in which I finished drafting this essay, the state of Israel dropped more bombs in Gaza than the US-led coalition deployed in the most brutal month of their air campaign in Afghanistan.1 That same week, my students and I read Dan Hicks’ account of the British punitive Expeditionary Force’s destruction of Benin City and the looting that followed. The events we witnessed in Gaza shaped how I read Hicks’ argument that the museum is a weapon that intervenes in time and extends, repeats, and intensifies the event of violent dispossession that brought each object into display.2 I wondered, is the university an institution like the museum? How do the frameworks of our classes, and the choices we make regarding texts and assignments, extend the temporality of empire? What relationships are we brokering between the present of our classroom and the violence of the past (and present)? Can our classrooms intervene in the politics of time to function as sites of repair?