Introduction : Labour history, historiography and beyond

Abstract

Taking the opportunity presented by the ninetieth anniversary of the Maltese Labour Party (today Partit Laburista), a conference was organised in the first two days of October 2010, with such a critical intention in mind. As Andrew Thorpe put it in his contribution to this book, such anniversaries matter to the extent that we use them to provide a serious assessment of the Labour movement's 'record, achievements, and shortcomings' - and this is essentially what these papers are all about. This event indeed proved to be a serious academic exercise in the critical rethinking of the history - including the very recent past - of the Labour movement, done with the aid of multiple methods of analysis available in history and the allied social sciences. To be sure, · the authors of the papers in this volume come from different disciplines within the arts and social sciences besides history - from the various sub-fields of sociology, public administration, socio-linguistics, critical pedagogy and political theory. Consequently their contributions offer a multidisciplinary treatment of this subject. Resolutely discarding any triumphalism and populist-nationalistic discourse, which has plagued a substantial portion of the corpus of Malta's political history, including the Labour Party's own institutional or official histories, these papers provide some cutting-edge research, marked by different theoretical perspectives and methods, which re-examines, contests and not infrequently revises conventional historical narratives and ideas on Labour's past - as the title of the volume makes explicit.