ABSTRACT
Unlike Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd, the History Workshop movement in Britain, or the generations of feminist historians who helped to shape a new disciplinary field, Hayden White stopped short of articulating a political position as such in his polemical and provocative writings about history. But the History Workshop movement from 1967 onwards really sought to use historical research as a form of oppositional political practice. However, by historicising the present as a 'post-racial era', anti-reparationists present the arguments for reparations as anachronistic; reparations advocates are criticised for living in the past, for engaging in retrospective politics, for having a 'pathological nostalgia for suffering'. In Keith Jenkins's view, history lacks any potential utility as a theoretical and/or practical base for emancipatory political projects because it is incompatible with the post-foundational premises of contemporary intellectual life in general.
