Launching Words for The Barber Who Read History
by Sharon Crozier-De Rosa
On 15 December 2021, Associate Professor Sharon Crozier-De Rosa (University of Wollongong) launched The Barber Who Read History: Essays in Radical History (Bull Ant Press, St Peters, 2021) by Rowan Cahill and Terry Irving. This is an edited version of her words on this occasion.
*********
Let me start near the end of the book. In a chapter in Part 4, Rowan shared why he admired E. P. Thompson’s ‘eccentric’ study of the lifelong radical poet William Blake, a study entitled Witness Against the Beast. This was a book dedicated to investigating how radical faith was passed on across generations and centuries. In some ways, Rowan writes, this book is ‘a portrait of a historian at work’. ‘Biographically’, he continues, Witness Against the Beast ‘can be seen as the final personal summative statement by a major radical intellectual, about being a radical intellectual’.
In many ways, it can be said that The Barber Who
Read History is an assemblage of portraits of two radical historians at
work. It can likewise be said that, whether or not this is the ultimate,
penultimate or pre-penultimate book that Terry and Rowan write together, it too
can be seen as a personal summative statement by major radical intellectuals,
about being radical intellectuals.
To understand the significance of this book, we first need to understand what Terry and Rowan mean by radical history. Let me take you to much earlier in the book, to their elucidation of ‘radical historians’:
Radical historians write
about the struggles of disempowered people to stand up to their oppressors and
exploiters, and to take control of their lives by attacking coercive authority
and by socializing power. They tell stories of resistance and agency, not of
ruling and maintaining order, which are the signs of ruling class history.
Radical historians, secondly, are partisan. They write with a social purpose,
and in doing so they draw on radical philosophies and methods. They write
history as a political act. Thirdly, although writing about the past, they want
to encourage people in the present to resist and rebel. Because the radical
past was always being made anew their work is pregnant with possibilities,
alerting their readers to the possibilities for action in their own situations.
This has consequences for how they write. Readers must be given space to
reflect on the present as well as the past. It is not enough to tell stories;
the stories have to be shaped by theory, sharpened by the historian’s passion,
and riddled with unresolved political questions. Moreover, whether writing for
other radical intellectuals, engaging with scholarship and theory, or seeking a
wider audience, radical historians place a high value on clarity of expression,
avoiding like the plague the over-theoretical language of academic in-groups,
and their self-aggrandizing citation of trendy thinkers.
Referring to Umberto Eco’s term ‘dumb’ books – books
that are inaccessible and therefore cannot speak to readers and so do not
incite action – our authors show a determination to be read…and to incite
action. Whereas Eco’s ruthless librarians restrict access to knowledge, the
modern academy places research behind paywalls. Not so these essays. And we are
all the better for their determined refusing to be dumb or dumbed!
A former teacher of mine, an American Studies Professor, introduced me to the study of social criticism. He drew my attention to the limitations of some of even the greatest social critics. Unless they offer blueprints for reform, their often-ingenious critiques of society’s ills remain impotent. Again, this is not the case here. For not only do these essays offer superbly robust and analytical critiques of our present and proffer visions of alternative radical futures, but they do so pragmatically. Under sub-headings like ‘What can be done?’, they suggest means by which we might create those futures. This book then is a meeting place – a place where intellectual critique, personal politics, political and ethical visions, and an earthly sense of pragmatism and agency all meet, mingle, merge to produce an agenda for change.
Put simply, that agenda is to radicalise, to refuse to
be cowered into submission by institutional and industry dictates, to form
radical collectives of academics, artists, archivists, activists and become a
force for change – to set the knowledge agenda rather than to follow one
which is already prescribed by those in power.
As lofty as these aims and ideals are, they do not
deliver their insights in a pontificating manner. Far from it. They cultivate a
spirit of generosity and sagacity by using complex layers of personal and
professional experience to critique, analyse, suggest, guide.
As many of you know, The Barber Who Read History follows the publication of their co-written book, Radical Sydney, published in 2010. These chapters were written during or after the writing of that book.
This 2021 collection is organised into 5 parts:
Shaping Times; Labour History and Radical History; Thinking, Writing, and
Engagement; Some Radical Historians; and, finally, Shaping Histories.
It is impossible to give you a cohesive overview of a
book that roams over such varied, complex and diverse terrain – all held
together by a commitment to furthering social justice through the
democratisation of research and knowledge – so what I will attempt instead is
to offer glimpses into what struck me as I read through.
Well, firstly, in countering any claim to an authoritative or non-partisan voice, Terry and Rowan generously allow us to see behind their historical writing through providing us with biographical chapters. There is none of Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’ here. Here the author matters – their politics, position on social justice, experiences, privileges and limitations, they all matter. They are all declared.
In Terry’s case, growing up in a
progressive-revolutionary household, he was encouraged to be a broad-thinker. Growing
up with a ‘red’ mother and as a ‘commo kid’ with thinkers and talkers parading
through, he ‘naturally equated politics with ideas, with intellectual
activity’. It was a rude shock, he said, when he went to university and
realised that not everyone did. More deflatingly, student politics showed him
that even those who aspired to run the country, they did not honour the
synergies here. [I have to say, that this observation resonated deeply and painfully
with me. As a recent migrant in the 1990s from the Troubles in the North of
Ireland, where politics was life or death, my brush with student politics in
Australia revealed that strategy trumped honest politics, careerism triumphed
over authenticity.]
Rowan shares with us that his household was conservative.
He grew up in paradoxical times – when arcadia as exemplified by nature,
friends, roaming, was juxtaposed to apocalyptical imaginings represented by nuclear
threats. He plots the ‘accidental evolution’ of his political leanings away
from those of his parents. He was, he said, ‘a middle-class rebel-in-waiting’
when he entered university. An anti-war student activist, conscientious
objector, a trade union historian, he explains that a ‘wedge’ between himself,
the academy and academic writing was forged when he started writing these
public histories – the history of the Seaman’s Union for example.
Secondly, here’s just a few snippets from the essays.
Terry recounts how he and Rowan came to write Radical
Sydney. Their discoveries about 1840s and ‘50s Australia, he said,
countered mainstream histories. Rowan’s and Terry’s history talked of violence
and riots – of ‘ordinary’ people’s agency – stories, they said, were central to
their approach to activism-scholarship as revealed through the Radical
Sydney process. Stories offered a way to engage readers to adopt a radical
perspective.
Here, I am reminded of a very recent exchange in the
British press. Historian of black Britain, David Olusoga wrote that historians
had become ‘unwilling conscripts in toxic culture wars, the focus of online
hate and tabloid misinformation’. Their work had been perceived ‘not as an
expansion of our national history but as a politicised assault upon it’. He was
referring to the uncovering of slave histories and exposing the British
empire’s complicity in those histories. He said, the media and the government
attacked historians by rebranding them as ‘activists’, and claiming that ‘their
scholarly detachment has been surrendered to ‘woke’ ideology’. Olusoga replied:
Historians
should repeatedly point out that the ‘rewriting of history’ is not some act of
professional misconduct but literally the job of professional historians. The
phoney arguments at the heart of this phoney war have too often been allowed to
define the debate. Historians, so skilled at reframing discussions and “problematising”
debates, need to bring those skills to bear on those who would reduce public
history to what Donald Trump’s infamous 1776 Commission termed ‘patriotic
education’ – something as far away from history as an academic discipline as
can be imagined.
This push back – this ‘rewriting of history’ – indeed,
this being an ‘activist’ – is, Rowan and Terry say, our responsibility –
uncomfortable as it is, well, for some.
Another remit of The Barber Who Read History
This brings me back to William Blake who I talked
about at the outset of my talk. In my third year undergraduate history essay on
Blake’s Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, I wrote about how his
focus on childhood was 50 years before the middle class even brought the
category of ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ before a sentimental audience. His lament
for the suffering of poor children, working children, fell on deaf ears until
long after his death when, with historic audacity, his insights – way before
his time – were lauded. Being a step out of time does not bode well –
resurrecting and bringing to new light those social justice thinkers who were a
step ahead of time – more colloquially ‘way ahead of their time’ – the Eric
Frys and more – bringing them into the light is a laudable remit.
Ok, now to draw to something of a close…
The barber, after whom this book is named, reads
‘history’ and sees the future ‘cynically, alone, and without hope’.
Thankfully, this is not the feeling we are left with
after closing the cover of this book.
‘Radical history’, our authors tell us, ‘has an
emancipatory dimension, the power to move people to act’:
By studying the past, and
movements and people over time, it can show that change is possible, that
apparently powerless or humble organisations and people can overcome apparently
insurmountable odds; it can heighten perceptions and understandings, enhancing
the desire for change; it can show not what is inevitable, but what could and
might be.
Those of us fortunate enough to be trained, to have
access to time and outlets for disseminating knowledge, we should all aspire
not simply to be ‘idea makers’, but also ‘idea users’. We should keep a copy of
The Barber Who Read History close by to remind us of this potential – to
inspire us to courage.
I offer my profound thanks to our activist-scholars – to Anthony, to Rowan, to Terry – for sharing their experience, wisdom, training, their ethical inclinations – for fighting this good fight.
Sharon Crozier-De Rosa
15 December 2021.
