Behind Chronicle/Counter-Chronicle

Two major goals laid the foundation of Chronicle/Counter-Chronicle: the need to closely study texts, contexts, and subtexts on/of conflict and migration today, and the importance of amplifying Humanities research and its endless potential.

Why migration? If we try to understand the phenomenon of migration – not just the mere act of crossing borders, but the social, cultural, economic, and emotional transitions that accompany this movement – it becomes impossible to disagree with George Steiner’s postulation that the history of the modern world is the history of migration. And the reasons for migration: wars, conflict, urbanisation, or even the hope for a more prosperous future. 

Conversations on migration are marked not just by promises of socioeconomic opportunity, familial reunification, or education, but also by distressing experiences, ones often relegated to the margins of public histories. Political tension and conflict have consistently blurred the line between a disaster-displaced person and a refugee – a line whose boundaries remain a pressing concern for humanitarian efforts, while trying to navigate International Laws today. To write/right the history of modern times, it is important to foreground histories of migration – through the experiences of refugees, by questioning state-sponsored and nationalist historical records, or even interrogating the reliability of manufactured public memory. 

The genealogy of attempts to theorise migration lacks no depth, ranging from Hannah Arendt’s efforts to redefine what it means to be a “refugee” to Zygmunt Bauman’s provocative equivocation of refugees to human waste. However, even today, we hear less of first-hand experiences. This leaves us with a pertinent question – how do we centre what is in the margins of margins?

Amidst the narratives that claim to be History, it becomes impossible to unearth counter-history – memories, stories, and even silences that remain hidden in attempts to remember and document the past. To puncture mainstream thought and public memory, it is imperative to shed light on micro-histories that were constantly overlooked. While these gaps represent not just missteps in how most spaces of Humanities research contributed to an incomplete global History that worked in the favour of the status quo, they also present an opportunity for scholars today: an opportunity to question, critique, write, correct, and rewrite Grand narratives built on the silences of people inhabiting the margins. 

This is what led to Chronicle/Counter-Chronicle – an ardent desire to provide a space for historical research where students question whose story is being told and who tells the story – to understand that discourse on conflict and migration is much more nuanced than it may have initially seemed.