ABSTRACT
In this chapter, a third approach – and set of conceptual tools – for including and theorising historians’ experience is explored: those concerning resistance to erasure in orthodox historiography. From the 1960s onwards in Anglophone history, varied historians pursuing historical subjects related to feminism, racism, sexuality and madness articulated and theorised their identities along with their histories. The marginalisation – often amounting to erasure – of all these groups from conservative histories prompted attempts to ‘rescue’ or recentre certain kinds of historical actor. This brought with it an intense and complicated politics of identity for the historians concerned. Participation in projects to reclaim marginalised actors and identities remains a powerful way that one's identity as a historian is brought to relevance in relation to one's historical output. This chapter explores some of the consequences of, and some of the resistance to, such a politics – especially the need for largely unmarginalised scholars (white, heterosexual men like the present author) to avoid the trap of ‘self-fashioned marginality’ when approaching personal experiences.
