As a scholar who has thought and written extensively on my own ‘outsiderness’ in relation to my research and often felt isolated in championing such open positionality and reflexivity, Stéphane Gerson's edited collection Scholars and Their Kin is a refreshing, and indeed greatly needed, addition to historical scholarship in the broadest sense. Based on papers from a public symposium held in New York in 2020, the volume brings together ten scholars from a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds to reflect upon their own family histories within their academic study more broadly. Bookended with an introduction by Gerson and an afterword by the renowned memory scholars Marrianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, the chapters in Scholars and Their Kin cover numerous times and spaces, and all speak to the volume's purpose of academics uncovering knowledge through dialogue with their familial pasts and presents. Conceived as a book project in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Leslie M. Harris's chapter focuses on discussions on race and class in New Orleans, specifically the complicated place of Creole identity within her own family and wider society. Aiming at challenging the somewhat moralized narrative of an upward trajectory through property, education and intergenerational wealth transfer for people of colour in the city, Harris's contribution blurs wider societal contextual shifts with microhistorical considerations of character and values. Perhaps the most affecting chapter in my opinion, Chapter 2, focuses on Christine Détrez's attempt to ‘re-vive’ her mother's story (in the language of Vinciane Despret p. 46), decades after her death in a car crash when Détrez was a young child. Musing that ‘some of the dead are more silent than others’, Détrez traces her mother, an ‘unknown woman’ (p. 31) through various institutional archives as ‘bureaucracies keep traces’ (p. 33). Alongside discovering more of her mother's life, Détrez found a number of stories of similar women who navigated the same social-worlds and class-based struggles. In contrast to Détrez's wide institutional search for information on her mother, Martha Hodes’ chapter on the 1970 Dawson's Field hijackings uses her own diary – ‘the most illuminating document of all’ (p. 64) – from the week-long ordeal, alongside her father's documents from the period to understand her own responses to trauma and the hijacking as a whole. Considering the erasure of certain memories over others and viewing these in situ with her father's papers, Hodes uses her own history and her own emotions as a gateway to the history. Gerson's own chapter in the volume covers a similar gendered silence to the young women in Détrez's chapter and the erasure of memories from Hodes's. The chapter focuses on Gerson's late grandmother Zosia's seemingly uneasy relationship with ‘Annie’ who, alongside her husband Charles, helped to rescue her and hid her child Francine from the Nazis during the Second World War. Gerson traverses multiple familial silences within a broader history and attempts to recover the lost figure of Annie, who was conspicuously absent from Zosia's recollections. Gerson notes that the ‘political afterlives’ (p. 87) of these pasts created silences within her own family and eloquently returns Annie to this history. As Détrez relied on institutional archives in her chapter retracing her mothers’ life, Martha Jones’ chapter begins by noting the perceived dichotomy apparent in private family archives – those notes ‘scrawled on all sides of fading stationery’ in comparison to the ‘ink and paper sureness of public records, certificates, and schedules’ (p. 91). Jones’ chapter details the complexity over her own birth certificate; placing her parents’ relationship within the broader context of race-relations in the United States and her own biracial identity, Jones delves into the officiating Black doctor at her birth, labelling her as ‘white’. The next three chapters step away slightly from the narrative structures of the previous authors, interested more perhaps with the theoretical, emblematic and wider social historical value. Tao Leigh Goffe's chapter returns multiple times to the (semi-rhetorical) question ‘Who gave you permission to write about your family history?’ examining her own dual Black and Asian heritage and the complex impact this has on her writing and practice today for both her and the respective wider communities. Amy Moran-Thomas's places her own family, accompanied by a host of images, in wider kinship networks across time within the context of the Pennsylvania oil industry. Clare Hemmings's chapter uses the childhood stories of her grandmother's past as a means of stepping off into ‘empirical fictions’ where she ‘makes things up as a way of characterizing how the past enters the present in narrative form’ (p. 152) through her own unpublished short story ‘Grandma was a Dancer’. In Chapter 9, reflecting on his own initial unwillingness to tackle his Dutch grandfather's collaborationist past, Marnix Beyen questions whether he can ‘divorce the historian from the grandson’ (p. 174). Using Rothberg's ‘implicated subject’ as a vehicle into this, Beyen suggests that his relation to his grandfather, and the complicated nature of his wartime experience (‘in spite of his obvious collaboration, he was well respected by the Resistance’ p. 173), leads Beyen to ‘participate in his humanity’ (p. 174) as well as his history. This participation in the human experience is seen in the final chapter by Christine Bard, where the author reflects on the writing of her semi-non-fictitious novel Jack based on the life of her late father. Using one of Jack Bard's poems In the Fog (p. 187), Christine Bard deploys the fog metaphor throughout, as a way of questioning how to tackle her father's secret queer life in view of her writing, her wider family and her late father's unknown wishes – a fitting final chapter to an edited volume that at many points tussles with the implications of what the authors write. It is easy to get lost in Scholars and Their Kin, a volume of refreshingly honest and insightful commentary on the widest variety of human experiences. The volume is not perfect, with some chapters perhaps slightly overwritten and some slightly unclear of their purpose at points, but what it does is remind us of the value in the personal, the subjective, the microhistorical and the beauty of the contingent and the irrational in scholarly inquiry. As historical research seems to (rightly) be returning to one less concerned with a somewhat Rankean objectivity and the eschewing of personal connection, volumes such as Gerson's provide the most humane look at the past. I cannot heavily recommend Scholars and Their Kin enough – a book of unique focus, and a genuine page turner in places, the volume reminds every scholar of the profound humanity we might all seek to find in our own academic endeavours.
Charlie Knight (Thu,) studied this question.