Radical records vs Contested pasts

Radical records

Bob Cant, Susan Hemmings

1988

The period between the publication in 1957 of the liberalising Wolfenden Report and the introduction in 1987 of the homophobic Section 28 was characterised by unprecedented optimism and political activism among lesbians and gay men in Britain. But the law and its shortcomings never determined their whole political and cultural agenda and Radical Records explores the diverse and sometimes conflicting attempts of lesbian and gay people to build a new world for themselves and those they loved. The contributors recount their own personal narratives of how they struggled to re-define their identities, to explore non-traditional expressions of intimacy, to reclaim public spaces, to engage with the HIV epidemic, to build alliances and, generally, to make radical transformations of their lives. The re-issue of this important work, first published in 1988, gives its readers an opportunity to re-visit that turbulent time through the voices of its participants.

Contested pasts

Katharine Hodgkin, Susannah Radstone

2003

The chapters in Memory, History, Nation, written by international scholars, offer a complex awareness of the workings of memory, and the ways in which different or changing histories may be explained. They explore the relation between individual and social memory, between real and imaginary, event and fantasy, history and myth. Contradictory accounts, or memories in direct contradiction to the historical record are not always the sign of a repressive authority attempting to cover something up. The tension between memory as a safeguard against attempts to silence dissenting voices, and memorys own implication in that silencing, runs throughout the book.