Revisiting Labour history

Abstract

Discarding the triumphalistic populist-nationalistic discourse that has plagued substantial portions of the corpus of Malta's political history, this publication presents cutting-edge research marked by different theoretical perspectives and methods, re-examining, contesting and not infrequently revising conventional historical narratives and ideas on the Labour Movement - as the title of the volume makes explicit. This spirit permeates the papers in this volume, which are derived form an academic conference held in the first two days of October 2010 to mark the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the Malta Labour Party (today Partit Laburista). The volume sheds light on the critical rethinking of the history-including the very recent past-of the Labour movement which is currently underway in Maltese academic circles with the aid of multiple methods of analysis available in history and the allied social sciences. The authors of the papers in this volume hail from different disciplines within the arts and social sciences-history, various sub-fields of sociology, public administration, socio-linguistics, critical pedagogy and political theory, thus offering a multidisciplinary treatment of the subject