'Ain't nobody's business if I do': reform vs. self-sufficiency? - a linear community at a crossroads

Millette, Holly-Gale (2013) 'Ain't nobody's business if I do': reform vs. self-sufficiency? - a linear community at a crossroads. Unofficial Histories Conference, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom. 15 - 16 Jun 2013.

Abstract

There are more boats and ‘live-aboard’ boaters on the inland waterways of Great Britain than there were in the late nineteenth century. The history of these peoples began in commerce at the height of the industrial revolution and became a way of life for many by the turn of the century. The everyday history of boaters, and their representative history in the public realm, experienced seismic shifts throughout the twentieth century, but most recently competitive and corresponding desires, primarily concerned with funding imperatives, and external to their own lived history have manipulated their past and contested their future.

This paper considers the community history of a marginal people who have, for over 150 years, suffered a falsity of perception and paucity of representation within both the public sphere and the consciousness of history. Outside of their own micro-communities and in the public and regulatory realm, boaters are marginalised and contained by taxonomy groupings (vagrant, traveller, gypsy, pirate, etc.) that are not their truths, rather the truths of false and lazy perspective. They are a people who pride themselves on belonging to a 3,000-mile linear village and theirs is a various and vacillating unofficial history that forms the very rhetoric through which they communicate and celebrate their communal identity.

Using independent film, visual narrative, song, and academic discussion I would like reflect on a people whose community is at a crossroads of history making and knowledge. My argument is their past histories are democratic and emancipatory but their future histories are being imposed as dissident and resistant, and that it is the imposition – not the histories themselves – that is the provocateur in this argument.

“who are moving to and fro continually under our eyes, beneath the thousand sacred precincts”

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Contributors

Author: Holly-Gale Millette

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