Migrant City: A New History of London | Panilos Panayi

Panilos Panayi Imagem Times Higher Education
Panilos Panayi | Imagem: Times Higher Education

According to a survey carried out by the National Federation of Fish Fryers in the 1960s, the first fish and chip shop was opened by Joseph Malins in 1860 on Old Ford Road in the East End of London (p. 234). The combination of the fried fish that had been sold and eaten in the Jewish East End since the early nineteenth century with chips created what became a quintessentially British meal. This is one of many examples included in Panikos Panayi’s Migrant City: A New History of London of how migrants have contributed to the culture and economy of London and in turn the United Kingdom.

Panayi makes clear the crucial role that migrants have played in the development of London as a global centre of trade, finance, culture, and politics. He ties this to London’s status as both the centre of a global empire and the largest city in the world for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More than half of migrants arriving in the United Kingdom from abroad moved to London, whose history of migration stretches back to its Roman founding. London, therefore, had long been cosmopolitan and by the late twentieth century had become ‘super-diverse’, with residents born in more than 179 countries, many beyond Europe or the former British Empire. Leia Mais

Four Nations Approaches to Modern ‘British’ History: A (Dis)united Kingdom | Naomi Lloyd-Jones e Margaret M. Scull

Naomi Lloyd Jones
Naomi Lloyd-Jones | Imagem: Royal Historical Society

Four Nations Approaches, as the editors acknowledge from the start, follows in the footsteps of a very solid tradition of edited collections, brought about by the rise of ‘New British History’ in the 1990s and early 2000s. Unlike the majority of that scholarship, however, this volume focuses on the modern rather than the early modern period: the stated aim of this chronology is that it allows the historian to transcend the discussion of ‘state formation’ (p. 5, and see also p. 62). Hugh Kearney’s ‘four nations’ label is adopted here to highlight the fact that ‘the extent to which’ England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales ‘shared a “British” history is interrogated, rather than assumed’ (p. 6), and the approach remains ‘pluralistic’ rather than ‘wholeistic’ (p. 5). ‘Interactions’, instead of ‘integration’, form the focus of analysis (p. 5).

On the whole, there are two dangers that the volume sets out to avoid: the Anglocentrism which is residual in J. G. A. Pocock’s work, and, almost inevitably, in many political and state-centred histories; and a backstaging of the differences and peculiarities of each nation in an effort to look at how they fit into a British ‘whole’. This backstaging usually leaves behind especially Wales, tacitly subsumed into England, and—as Krishan Kumar has most eloquently noted—England itself, whose supposed essence is often reduced to positional dominance in the Union and in the Empire.(1)  In this historical moment, however, an explicitly dis-homogenising historiographical approach is made most relevant by the post-2016 trajectories not of Wales and England, but of Scotland and Northern Ireland (pp. 15-18). Lloyd-Jones and Scull are very aware of the risks of hindsight-thinking. That of coming to see the United Kingdom as less of a historical reality merely because of its present disgregation was an issue with which historians had to grapple already in the 1990s. (2) Yet in firmly choosing the Four Nations framework, and determinedly bypassing not only Anglocentric paradigms, but the very idea of ‘Britishness’, this book may well be riding an early wave of what will become the politically mainstream understanding of ‘British’ history. Leia Mais

Bram Stoker e a Questão Racial. Literatura de horror e degenerescência no final do século XIX | Evander Ruthieri da Silva

Proponho analisar o livro Bram Stoker e a Questão Racial. Literatura de horror e degenerescência no final do século XIX (2017), livro de estreia do jovem historiador Evander Ruthieri da Silva, e que teve como base sua dissertação de mestrado defendida na Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR). Nele Ruthieri faz um trabalho primoroso de história social dos intelectuais, nos mostrando as redes de sociabilidade em que Bram Stoker circulava, a articulação entre seu projeto literário e o seu projeto intelectual.

Queremos com essa análise colocar em evidência essas categorias (redes de sociabilidade, circulação e projeto literário), apontando como hipótese o uso intuitivo delas, em outras palavras, evidencia que seu intento será ir além das simples verbalizações que dará novas possibilidades de ver o mundo literário. Gostaríamos de apontar nesse texto os caminhos escolhido pelo autor como uma possibilidade de pensar a história dos intelectuais a partir da relação autor-obra-leitor. Isto me permitirá, com mais liberdade, imaginar e compreender as formações discursivas que circulam nesse período, bem como aferir o movimento das categorias mencionadas acima. Leia Mais