ABSTRACT
The practice of oral history operates alongside the Caribbean's own oral traditions that enact what Edward Baugh calls the “quarrel with history.” This quarrel is framed by the tensions between lesser-known discourses and dominant historical narratives that claim to be objective. Dominant narratives that circulate and that are predicated on skewed or incomplete information – stereotypes – influence discriminatory social beliefs and practices. This chapter uses oral history to document a West Indian, woman-centred account of migration to Britain during the Windrush era to intervene upon xenophobic and sexist ideas about women during that time. In addition, it forwards oral history as a method that, because it is non-representative, can be applied alongside empirical studies to enable fuller representations of people's lives. Oral history highlights the ways that what is taken as truth may be a matter of community consensus and tacit agreements than it is about objective knowledge. Engaging with this singular account of immigrant arrival, in which the narrator shares the particularity of her experiences, troubles our conception of what might constitute historical importance. This chapter shows that documenting and collecting oral histories enables the creation of new archives of experiences that we can continually return to, examine, and build upon to cultivate new knowledge about interactions in our social world.
