ABSTRACT
History is everywhere, and by that token it is both on display and an integral part of daily life. But what is ‘history’? It is usual to distinguish between two meanings: the past and the study of the past. To these I would add a third – a non-academic, often barely articulated sense of other times, a ‘history’ shaped by emotions, fashion, style, personal experience and popular memories. Whether you interpret history as all that has gone before, as a field of academic study or as a diffused consciousnessofpreviouseras,itistotally boundup with communicating ‘otherness’-quo;. I shall explore the relationships between history, display and ‘otherness’ from the vantage point of a practising historian. The discipline of history is awkwardly placed at the moment, but it exists in professional and institutional forms, and these constitute the main arena in which issues surrounding the nature of history in all its senses are debated. Debates about history can be usefully conducted using ideas, such as ‘display’ and ‘otherness’, that have previously been associated with literary and art-historical studies.
