Eagle Eye Magazine Issue 1 2023

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EAGLE EYE | ISSUE 1 | <strong>2023</strong> DR MELEISA ONO-GEORGE, BRITTENDEN FELLOW IN HISTORY What first ignited your passion for history? I’m not sure there was one thing – it was probably a series of moments. One of these moments was when I was in Guyana, in the Caribbean, with my parents at the age of about nine. It was my first trip there and I was confronted with a level of poverty I had never encountered before in Canada, where I am from. A little boy about my age approached me outside a bank begging. I remember how ragged he looked: he didn’t have any shoes on, and his shirt was torn and dirty. I offered him the loose change jangling in my pocket. But then the bank security guard approached us and shooed him away by threatening him, not just for being near the bank entrance but also for begging change from me. My parents quickly moved me away, but the poverty and the way in which this child was treated really shocked and upset me. I also identified with him in some ways. My mum is from Guyana and grew up poor. What I saw in that boy was a poverty that I felt could have been my own. After that, I had a conversation with my parents about the experience and listened to the way they discussed the wider condition of the country, at least as much as I could understand, basically the history and politics. I suppose that was my first lesson in the way the past and present are intrinsically connected. What draws me to history is that it can provide an explanation for why things are the way they are. I learned from an early age that history is not just about dates and names, the kind of things kids are often taught to memorise in school. I learned to look beyond school. The only thing I learned about people of African ancestry in school was that our ancestors were enslaved—the teacher showed us the TV show, Roots. This was the eighties. That was about it. I learned the vibrant and radical history of the Caribbean and Black folks not from my teachers, but from my parents and my community. You have talked about history as a tool of change. Can you explain what that means and how it motivates you as an historian? History has always been mobilised for a purpose. History is not just a retelling of the past, it’s a constructed narrative based on interpretations of pieces of archival records or testimony. I always say that history is more of an art or craft then it is any science. And the stories we craft, the history we produce, can be used in all kinds of ways. How do we tell stories about who we are and where we have come from? How do we tell stories about what matters to us? It is also very political and can be an incredibly powerful and divisive tool, as well as a way of bringing folks together. For me, I use history to challenge what people generally assume to be normal and what we take for granted as the way things have ‘always been’. Part of the history that I do is focused on ideas “I love teaching something I’m working on: you get quite different responses and views, and it feels like a real exchange, like I’m also learning from them. of “race” as a social construction, the cumulation of ideas and practices that emerged in European colonial expansion, slavery, and the Enlightenment. One of the things I’m looking at in my current project is the ways in which ideas of both whiteness and blackness were being refined and the boundaries of racial difference hardened in the late 18 th century. The ways we think of racial difference today, what it means to be a white person or a black person, and even who we label as such, were not the same way folks in the 18 th century thought about such categories and themselves. So, the way we think about racial difference is something that is constructed; part of my work is trying to unpick some of this to show how the beliefs we have about racial difference in Britain have been formulated and embedded over time. Your current research focuses on the life of an Afro-Jamaican woman in the late 18 th century. What interests you about her? I am writing a book on Amelia Newsham, a woman born enslaved and with albinism in Jamaica who was then brought to England as a child so that she could be exhibited as a curiosity and studied by anatomists, naturalists, and philosophers. More specifically, I’m tracing the archival fragments of her life to talk about the ways in which ideas of racial difference are being defined and refined during this period. For an enslaved woman in Georgian Britain, Amelia is very present in the archives. I’ve been able to find details about her everyday life that are often not recoverable in the archives of Black British life during this period. For instance, I know that she liked to sew, read, and sing. And that she had smallpox as a young girl in London. Part of the reason I’ve been able to trace her life is Photo: David Olds 14
ecause, unlike so many other people of African ancestry brought to England as a curiosity, Amelia survives. And she survives at least into her 50s. I know this may not seem like much, but you have to understand that I am so often confronted with Black lives cut short in the archives. What can we learn about wider social changes from examining the everyday lives of individuals? I am interested in the ways in which people are able to live within social structures that are very oppressive, that are meant to keep them in a subjugated position, that devalue their lives. I am thinking here specifically of Black lives, poor lives, the lives of the socially marginalised. I’m also interested in the legacies of these structures and systems we assume to have ended because there have been changes in the law but are still present. By looking at things on a macro level, you think you can see big changes but by looking at individuals you see what those changes mean, or don’t mean, and you start to see how little might have actually changed. As a socio-cultural historian, it can be frustrating to see this – you see how things are articulated differently but the intrinsic ideas are still there. What aspects of Caribbean research methodologies do you draw upon in your work? I’m particularly interested in a Caribbean research methodology that draws on storytelling as a key part of the process and sitting with multiple, sometimes contradictory, interpretations, different ways of seeing and understanding. It puts me in mind of the way my parents relayed history when I was young. It was told almost parable-style with one message cloaked in another. They were giving me and my siblings tools from the past to use in the present. One of my forthcoming projects is to bring people together from different generations to ‘lime’ (to chat) and share stories or rather, their own interpretations of the past and its legacies. It’s more than information-sharing, it’s also different ways of communicating the feelings of the past, of what it meant, and continues to mean. And in doing this, articulating what we hope and imagine for the future. What do you most enjoy about teaching history? The joy of seeing someone encountering something for the first time. It’s incredibly rewarding to see students develop intellectually over the course of one term, let alone their whole degree. As teachers, we make an investment in young people, both intellectually and emotionally. I value giving them a tool for understanding the world around them. The other thing I love is teaching something I’m working on: you get quite different responses and views, and it feels like a real exchange, like I’m also learning from them. What do you think of the new Netflix drama Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, which follows the imagined life of Queen Charlotte who was Queen Consort to George III and patron of Queen’s in the 18 th century. I’m a fan of the Bridgerton series. I think it is fiction done well because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. What a series like Queen Charlotte show us is a different way of using the past to talk about the present. Questions around Charlotte’s race are not new, but the series raises interesting questions for the public about what “race” was in the 18 th century and what could have been, which I think is a useful conversation to have. Can you give us a book recommendation? I have two for you: In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe, which is an important text for me in my research and in thinking about the continued legacies of slavery and the formulations of anti-blackness A sketch of Amelia Newsham during the Enlightenment. It’s also beautifully written and I have found myself moved to tears by her writing. My other pick is Babel: An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang, which is classed as young adult fiction, but is still great! It’s a cross between historical fiction and sci-fi, set in Oxford in the early Victorian period. I found myself really drawn into the world crafted by Kuang, a testament to good writing. It’s about empire and the power of language, but also how we use the power and privileges we have, even if they are limited, to do right. If you would like to support the teaching of History at Queen’s, you can do so by making a gift to the John Prestwich Fellowship in History. Thanks to the generosity of Old Members and Friends, the Fellowship is currently at £2.5M of its full endowment goal of £3M. Once complete, the Prestwich Fellowship will join with the Brittenden Fellowship (endowed in 2020 thanks to a legacy gift from Fred H. Brittenden (1946, Modern History)) to ensure that the teaching and study of History at Queen’s is safeguarded in perpetuity. To make a donation, please visit https://bit.ly/485ofUG or contact development@queens.ox.ac.uk 15
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Page 3 and 4: The Provost at the 2023 College Gar
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Page 11 and 12: TEACHING WITH THE FIRST FOLIO Caree
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Page 25 and 26: far exceed the short timespan I had
Page 27 and 28: What motivated you to co-found The
Page 29 and 30: targets for 2035, and that includes
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Eagle Eye Magazine Issue 1 2023

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