"In recent years, there has been a return to the story telling function in history, a celebration of the imaginative elements in historical reconstruction, a greater awareness of history writing as a literary practice." (Paula Hamilton, 1994, p.25)

History, as we know, is made not given. The shift from disciplinary history, with its emphasis on 'facts' and 'figures' to a history that embraces oral history, narration, testimony and amateur genealogy is transforming the making of history by including other voices, other practices, previously relegated to the margins.

As Derrida suggests in the concluding paragraph of Specters of Marx,

"[i]f he loves justice …, the "scholar" of the future should not just enlist the ghost to provide lessons about justice but also should learn from attempts to engage the ghost, not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself." (Derrida, 1994, p.176)

We, in a sense, become mediums, allowing the ghosts of the past to tell their stories, our stories, through us.