Keynote Speakers: Professor Catherine Hall, Professor Hakim Adi and Professor Martin Thomas

The manner in which empire is remembered, forgotten or imaginatively reconstructed plays a key role in forging national identity in many countries in the twenty-first century; it also, arguably, shapes how they imagine their future role on the global stage. The issue of how Britain engages with its imperial past, for example, has recently come to the fore through debates about how imperial and BAME history should be taught at schools, whether contentious imperial actors should be publicly commemorated, and through questions about the provenance of many museum collections. At the same time, citizens of its former empire in postcolonial nations have pressed the need for Britain to come to terms with its colonial legacies.

Within postcolonial states, moreover, the issue of who is forgotten or remembered as participating in anti-imperial struggles is itself contentious, with some commentators arguing that nationalist political elites have shaped the story of anti-colonial struggles to aggrandize their own roles at the expense of other subaltern actors.

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