{"id":40599,"date":"2022-02-24T20:45:10","date_gmt":"2022-02-24T20:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?post_type=cu_story&p=40599"},"modified":"2025-02-03T11:30:16","modified_gmt":"2025-02-03T16:30:16","slug":"reclaiming-the-caribbeans-historical-truth","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/story\/reclaiming-the-caribbeans-historical-truth\/","title":{"rendered":"Reclaiming the Caribbean\u2019s Historical Truth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Reclaiming the Caribbean\u2019s Historical Truth\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n\n\n

History Professor confronts distorted colonial narratives in textbooks and the classroom<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

By Nick Ward<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHistory may be about the past, but it is contested in the present, in a fight for a particular vision of the future,\u201d says Audra Dipt\u00e9e<\/a>, Associate Professor in the Department of History<\/a> at Carleton University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dr. Audra Dipt\u00e9e, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

To reclaim the historical truth of the Caribbean, Dipt\u00e9e\u2019s latest research project drags into public light a systematic scheme by white colonists to erase the violent records of British rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The programme, titled \u2018Operation Legacy\u2019, was executed by the British Colonial Office from the 1950s until the 1970s in an effort to save the British Government from embarrassment and incrimination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through Operation Legacy, government employees were instructed to destroy and hide official documents to ensure \u201cthat any histories that were written would serve them as they moved from a colonial power dynamic to a neocolonial power dynamic,\u201d explains Dipt\u00e9e.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The result of this destructive action is a completely distorted historical narrative penned by the colonists \u2013 a fable wrought with colonial biases and self-interests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOperation Legacy is one of those cases when you cannot help but say \u2018truth is stranger than fiction,\u2019\u201d says Dipt\u00e9e.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Dipt\u00e9e has access to letters which give explicit instructions to burn records or to drop them in weighted containers into the Caribbean Sea, the challenge she and other like-minded historians face is that \u2013 as per the colonist Government\u2019s intention \u2013 there is no way to comprehensively know which documents were destroyed and what information was enclosed within them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately, not all documents were shredded and scattered to the winds. In 2011, the British government revealed that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office quietly held in its possession 8,800 remaining files from 37 former colonies. Four years later, it reported that another 170,000 \u2018legacy\u2019 files were \u2018found.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe fact that the British government denied the existence of these documents and only admitted to it after they were required to by the courts is revealing,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The National Archives (Kew Gardens, UK)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This presented Dipt\u00e9e with a rare opportunity to see the past through an unobscured lens. She quickly began a detailed review of the colonial documents, which detail unremitting violence, American-assisted coups of democratically elected progressive governments, and racist education curriculums intended to destroy local culture and impose counterfeit colonial memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to examining these once-clandestine British documents, Dipt\u00e9e is also studying what some historians are calling \u2018the counter archives\u2019 \u2013 records of the past that were produced by the people of the Caribbean, including music, poetry, literature, non-official correspondence, and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These resources are crucial in Dipt\u00e9e\u2019s curation of historical truth. Moreover, they serve as a reminder that the Caribbean people have long been fighting for their historical consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnti-colonial thought has been around for a very long time, and while the examples I will be examining are taken specifically from the Caribbean, you can find anti-colonial intellectuals all over the Global South,\u201d Dipt\u00e9e explains.<\/p>\n\n\n

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“In the 19th century, the Haitian anthropologist At\u00e9nor Fermin challenged the racist assumptions of anthropology in 1885. Of course, there is the work of John Jacob Thomas, who challenged the Oxford-trained slavery apologist Anthony Froude in 1889. From the 20th century, we have Franz Fanon, Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, Suzanne C\u00e9saire, Walter Rodney, George Padmore, CLR James, Eric Williams, Fernando Ortiz. I could go on\u2026.”<\/p>Dr. Audra Dipt\u00e9e<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Given the unending examples of colonized peoples challenging white rule, racism and state-fabricated nationalism, Dipt\u00e9e says she often finds it frustrating to hear talk in contemporary academia about decolonizing knowledge as if it\u2019s something new.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She stresses that the university still has a long way to go in this respect and\u2014drawing inspiration from her Operation Legacy findings\u2014has challenged herself to reflect on her own pedagogical approach in the classroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dr. Audra Dipt\u00e9e<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLately, I\u2019m a lot less concerned with teaching historical narrative,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy focus is on showing how history is used. I try to introduce students to methods that allow for the critical application of historical thought, so that they can analyze and critique the uses of history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if it is not a popular idea amongst other historians, Dipt\u00e9e argues that history students need to be equipped with an evolved toolkit and understanding to help them combat the ubiquitous phenomenon of the colonial rewriting of history textbooks. She\u2019s using her Operation Legacy project as a case study to explore this larger issue.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cIn a nutshell, my overarching research question is \u2018how do we effectively mobilize historical knowledge?\u201d<\/p>Dr. Audra Dipt\u00e9e<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cI cannot recall where I read this, but someone once said that if you ever doubt the importance of history, then you should ask yourself why the first thing a dictator does is rewrite the history textbooks,\u201d says Dipt\u00e9e.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With that in mind, Dipt\u00e9e maintains that the fight for the past is also the fight for the present and the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History Professor confronts distorted colonial narratives in textbooks and the classroom By Nick Ward \u201cHistory may be about the past, but it is contested in the present, in a fight for a particular vision of the future,\u201d says Audra Dipt\u00e9e, Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University. To reclaim the historical truth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_story_type":[816],"cu_story_tag":[],"class_list":["post-40599","cu_story","type-cu_story","status-publish","hentry","cu_story_type-general"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/40599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/40599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40622,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/40599\/revisions\/40622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_story_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_type?post=40599"},{"taxonomy":"cu_story_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_tag?post=40599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}