Our guest speaker Dr Chris Vardy (University of Manchester) presents: ‘Contemporary Prehistories’
Wednesday 26 April 2-4pm at the University of Salford Irwell Valley campus
Please write to S.Thurston@salford.ac.uk if you would like to join us!
Abstract
This paper analyses the representation of human ‘prehistory’ in contemporary writing. Politicised and racialised fantasies about the ‘prehistoric’ human (a concept that emerges in the late nineteenth century) are prominent throughout modern cultural production, from Freud and Marx to Picasso, Hepworth, H.G. Wells and William Golding. What happens to prehistory in the early twenty-first century, when archaeological and scientific advances provide increasingly detailed and precise historical information about early humans, and when the colonialist and gender essentialist underpinnings of modern accounts of prehistory are subject to unprecedented critical scrutiny? How do we think with prehistory now, when competing longue durée accounts of anthropogenic climate crisis and ecological collapse are so culturally prominent, and when these increasingly existential threats direct attention to the remains of previous extinction events and long-collapsed cultures?
Chris Vardy is a Lecturer in 20th Century Literature at the University of Manchester. He is writing a book analysing contemporary British representations of the 1980s and Thatcherism called Remembering the End of History, and has published a number of articles on twenty-first-century historical writing.