Download the programme as a PDF here.
Day One
Thursday 6 June
12:00 – 13:00
Registration and Lunch
13:00 – 13:10
Welcome & Housekeeping
13:10 – 14:40
Panel 1: Networks, Collectives, Movements | Chair: Brendon Nicholls (University of Leeds)
Brynn Hatton, Colgate University
Jordanian-Soviet Film Friendship and Post-National Collectivity
Nicholas Bloom, Harvard University
Stand Still and See the Salvation: The Pragmatic Internationalism of Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America
James Procter, Newcastle University
Bim, and the letters of an Unlikely Collective
14:40 – 14:55
Break
14:55 – 16:25
Panel 2: Magazines | Chair: James Procter (Newcastle University)
Oliver Layman, Cornell University
Writing Africa in Race Today: Anti-Colonialism in Print
Malak Abdelkhalek, King’s College London
Avant-garde as Resistance: Third-Worldist Trilingual Magazine Lotus and Experimental Magazine Gallery 68
Jude Nwaboukei, Teeside University
Nurturing Narratives: Unveiling the Impact of Brittlepaper and Africa in Words on Collective Form and National Liberation in African Literary Writings
16:25 – 16:30
Comfort Break
16:30 – 17:45
Keynote Presentation, chaired by Hayley G. Toth (Newcastle University)
Christian Høgsbjerg, University of Brighton
‘The individual achievements of a few black men do not and cannot solve the problems of the blacks’: C.L.R. James, Black Jacobinism and Black Bolshevism
18:30 till late
Conference Dinner at 21 Restaurant, One Trinity Gardens, Pandon, Newcastle, NE1 2HH. Limited availability. Pre-booking required.
Day Two
Friday 7 June
8:30 – 9:00
Coffee and breakfast
09:00 – 10:30
Panel 3: Collaboration and Multi-Authorship | Chair: Kate Spowage (University of Leeds)
Helen King, Newcastle University
‘The necessary collaborative framework’: tracing the genesis of an anti-apartheid children’s book
Megan E. Fourqurean, University of Leeds
Collective Literary Production, Racial Justice and Afrofuturism in Multi-Authored Fiction
Rehnuma Sazzad, Institute of English Studies and Institute of Commonwealth Studies
Cultural Collaboration in Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and Its Diasporas (2023): A Postcolonial Reading of Art that ‘Sings’ through Nationalist Debates
10:30 – 10:45
Break
10:45 – 12:00
Keynote Presentation, chaired by Hayley G. Toth (Newcastle University)
Asha Rogers, University of Birmingham
Exams and Warehouses, or ‘Collective Form and National Liberation’
12:00 – 13:00
Lunch
13:00 – 14:30
Panel 4: Infrastructures and Spaces | Chair: Chloe Ashbridge (Newcastle University)
Daniel O’Gorman, University of Leeds
Literary sumud: Rebuilding ‘home’ in Atef Abu Saif’s The Drone Eats with Me
Dom Davies, City, University of London
Reading the Roadblock: Vehicles of National Liberation?
Jack Rondeau, University of Leeds
Atmospheric Interventions and the Politics of Breathing in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
14:30 – 14:35
Comfort Break
14:35 – 16:05
Panel 5: Collective Form in Fiction and Non-Fiction | Chair: Rehnuma Sazzad (Institute of English Studies and Institute of Commonwealth Studies)
Emma Parker, University of Bristol
Confinement, Activist Networks, and Collective Struggles in Women’s Memoirs of Apartheid
Mike Niblett and Myka-Tucker Abramson, University of Warwick
The Collective Forms of Black Belt Proletarian Literature
Chloe Ashbridge, Newcastle University
Northern Noir and the Search for Black England
16:05 – 16:20
Break
16:20 – 17:50
Panel 6: African Collective Forms | Chair: Asha Rogers (University of Birmingham)
Brendon Nicholls, University of Leeds
Revisiting Struggle Cultures through Collaborative Journalism
Kate Spowage, University of Leeds
Language and Socialism
Guy Austin, Newcastle University
The Kabyle imaginary: Collective Discontent, National Liberation and the Postcolonial Regime in Algeria
17:50 – 18:00
Closing Remarks: Hayley G. Toth (Newcastle University)
18:00 till late
Post-conference social at Head of Steam, 2 Neville St, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 5EN
Abstracts (in alphabetical order)
Malak Abdelkhalek, Avant-garde as Resistance: Third-Worldist Trilingual Magazine Lotus and Experimental Magazine Gallery 68
The writers of Gallery 68, an experimental, avant-garde, and nominally apolitical literary magazine saw avant-garde experimentation and literary engagement as incompatible. This same view has also been expressed by wider literary scholarship on Arabic literature (Kittani 380; Halim 81-84). On the other hand, Lotus, a multilingual journal produced in English, Arabic and French, had an explicit focus on iltizam (commitment or littérature engagée) and Third-World solidarity, and for this reason was often seen as non-experimental. It was a magazine of the magazine of the Afro-Asian Writers Association and aimed to advance national liberation for all of its contributors. Both magazines started in Egypt at the same time (1968) and shared some editorial board members, yet their stated focus was very different. Their status as magazines, meaning that they have many contributors means that they are “collective forms”, and the overlap in their writers cements that “collective form” status because it can be understood as two-fold. Despite their antithetical self-presentations, I propose that the committed magazine Lotus may itself be considered a vehicle for the avant-garde, while much of the material in Gallery 68 may arguably be understood as expressing political engagement, reflecting the entanglement between both magazines in their contents, their histories, and their contributors. The primary texts that will be analyzed will be taken from Lotus and Gallery 68. They will be read in comparison to each other, with a focus on convergences in literary style, aesthetics, and structure, as well as to visual elements of the magazines. The frequency of political motifs will also be taken into consideration, especially looking at the local/ international politics of the time and the political leanings of the contributors. This will be cross-referenced with the dates of the issues and their own historical and political contexts.
Malak Abdelkhalek is a Comparative Literature PhD student in the department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at King’s College London (KCL). Her research looks at literary and artistic periodicals of the late twentieth century in Egypt to understand the relationship between avant-garde literary production and political engagement. Before her PhD, Malak taught and designed courses around her research interests. She completed her MA at KCL, which focused on transnationalism and gender in the Egyptian surrealist movement. She also holds a BA in English and Comparative Literature from the American University in Cairo.
Chloe Ashbridge, Northern Noir and the Search for Black England
It is nothing new to say that expressions of Black life in Britain have been dominated by London. Labour demands in the capital significantly drove post-war migration, while London settings and audiences continue to dominate publishing decisions, especially in terms of writing branded as ‘multicultural’ (Fowler, 2008). London’s status as the epitome of a thriving, pluralistic Britain has required an implied, defining inverse, usually provided by the North of England. The latter’s literary history is characterised by white working-class consciousness, with a geographical specificity that has proven incompatible with the ‘deterritorialised’ (Procter, 2003) or ‘expansive’ (Jackson, 2020) logic of Black Britain. But while the need to ‘devolve’ Black British writing is well-documented (Procter, 2003 & 2012; Fowler, 2008; Jackson, 2020; Ashbridge, 2023), less attention has been paid to the ambivalent – and often invisible – position of England in these debates. These two tendencies are, in fact, connected, with England’s absence in the field owing, at least partially, to a disciplinary discourse which has long aligned Northern England with ‘closed’ or ‘bounded’ modes of identification. This paper explores creative engagements with England’s ‘invisibility’ in Black British writing as a collective form. Northern England’s Black novelists, poets, and playwrights have often coded England’s disciplinary absence at the level of genre, deploying various spatial configurations of haunting. The first part of this paper identifies the emergence of Northern Noir as a devolved literary mode, indexing this to historical periods when the region was central to contestations over English nationhood. The second section maps a regional geography of haunted moorlands, coastlines, and cities. In all of these cases, Northern England’s haunted landscapes hint at a post-imperial revision of England and, in turn, trouble Black Britain as a collective paradigm for reading the nation.
Dr Chloe Ashbridge is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University, where research addresses the interdependence between British literature and political change since 1945. Chloe has published widely in the areas of race, class, nationhood, and the literary identity of Northern England, and her work appears in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Open Library of Humanities, Alluvium, and the Cambridge Journal of Education. Chloe is currently working on her second monograph, which offers the first study of Northern England’s postcolonial literary cultures, 1960 – present (EUP, 2027).
Guy Austin, The Kabyle imaginary: Collective Discontent, National Liberation and the Postcolonial Regime in Algeria
Fanon wrote that after national liberation from colonial occupation has been achieved, “the leader pacifies the people” that he [sic] had previously awoken to the struggle, and tries to make them sleep (2001, 135-6). In Algeria, from the moment of independence in 1962 onwards, such a “sleep” has been far from peaceful. The regime established by the FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) has repeatedly marginalised, disenfranchised and brutalised the country’s Berber minority, especially the most vociferous Berber community, the Kabyles. This paper will explore the Kabyle imaginary* as a “collective form” which persists to this day, that is, as a shared set of norms, values and stories which define Kabyles as the “true” revolutionaries who have always resisted not just the French colonial presence but also the discriminatory (anti-Kabyle) Algerian state. Key features of this imaginary include references to Kabyle history (struggles against pre- and post- 1962 authority), to Kabyle geography (sites of victimhood and martyrdom, local landscapes), and the assertion that “it’s in our genes to rebel”. The argument will be illustrated and supported by examples from fieldwork carried out in 2019 as part of the AHRC-funded research project Screening Violence, focusing in particular on two participants: a Kabyle student, and an activist for Kabyle autonomy. It will be noted that the imaginary expressed by these participants mobilises affective landmarks from the defeat of Berber forces (the FFS) by the FLN in 1962-3 to the Black Spring unrest of 2001. Conclusions will be drawn regarding how shared stories help to define the “collective form” of the Kabyle imaginary, and regarding the wider conceptual importance of the imaginary as a “collective form” which expresses, performs, and informs the formation of group identity.
*The imaginary will be defined with reference to Charles Taylor, Simin Davoudi, and to Sara Ahmed’s concept of “emotional capital” accrued over time.
Guy Austin is Professor of French Studies in SML. He researched for several years on French cinema but now specializes in Algerian cinema and politics. He is PI of the AHRC-funded project Screening Violence, which explores imaginaries of conflict in countries recently suffering civil war–Algeria, Argentina, Colombia, Indonesia and Northern Ireland–and also of the “digital follow-on” Refracted Violence (a public-facing website curating stories of conflict from those five countries). He is the author of books on Algerian cinema, French cinema, Claude Chabrol, and French film stars and the editor of a collection on Pierre Bourdieu and media studies.
Nicholas Bloom, Stand Still and See the Salvation: The Pragmatic Internationalism of Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America
Between 1859 and 1862, the Black American intellectual and activist Martin Delany serially published one of the most confounding texts in the history of Black Atlantic fiction: Blake; or, the Huts of America. The novel tells the story of an archetypal “great man” of history, Henry Blake, as he travels around the nineteenth century Atlantic world trying to foment a Black revolution, from the US South to West Africa to Cuba. Yet, the revolution never comes—the “great man” leaves seemingly thousands of people across the world waiting for his sign to begin, which never arrives. The most obvious reason that scholars have given for Blake’s frustrating conclusion is that Delany simply never finished it—the US Civil War started, Delany became an officer in the Union Army, and his focus never returned to the novel after the war. Yet, as I argue in this paper, there may have also been political and ethical reasons for Delany’s “failure” to complete the “great man” narrative arc of Henry’s revolt: his contemporaneous involvement in planning the famous 1859 raid on the US Army arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, led by John Brown. In this paper, I examine Blake alongside various primary accounts of the planning meetings that took place between Delany, Brown, and other abolitionists in Canada during the late-1850s to suggest that even as these abolitionist leaders seemed to invest themselves in the idea of the “great man” theory of revolution, their material experiences with collaborating across lines of difference and attempting to lead communities in revolutionary action contravened the “great man” theory in ways they could not ignore. I ultimately argue that Delany’s experience planning the raid led him to articulate a radically democratic and collectivist vision of revolution in Blake, whether this was his intention or not.
Nicholas Bloom is Lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University, and he received his PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022. His first book project, Black Revolt in the American Nation: A Cultural & Intellectual History, 1770 – 1860, analyzes the role that Black militancy played in shaping various strains of American political thought in the first century of the United States. His work has been published in a variety of venues, including American Quarterly, Tocqueville 21, IEHS Online, and the Austin Chronicle.
Megan E. Fourqurean, Collective Literary Production, Racial Justice and Afrofuturism in Multi-Authored Fiction
This paper examines two multi-authored literary texts inspired by Afrofuturist music. I suggest that both texts explore the creative possibilities of a collective approach to literary production by working in cooperation with other authors and musicians past and present. The creators of these literary works deliberately foreground not only their artistic cross-genre lineages but also imagine Black queer futures of racial justice predicated on collective cultural production. Moreover, both texts not only enact collaboration in their mode of production, but their stories consider questions of community and collective memory in the face of violence, oppression and dehumanisation. Collective authorship engages with these questions by devolving creative authority, voicing multiple perspectives and creating shared space for communally imagined futures. In 2019, Rivers Solomon published The Deep, a novella inspired by and produced alongside techno music group ‘clipping.’ Three years later, Janelle Monáe published The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer, a collection of short stories based on her Afrofuturist concept album Dirty Computer (2018). Like The Deep, The Memory Librarian is a collaborative literary work produced by Monáe together with five Black and Caribbean writers.Both texts challenge the individualistic nature of literary production by transforming it into a shared practice through collaboration. The Deep’s creators describe the novella as a form of ‘artistic telephone’ (Solomon et al. 157), together building upon but also deviating from its original source material. In contrast, Monáe collaborated with their co-authors individually, forging a collection of stories which together share the world of Dirty Computer as their foundation. Nonetheless, both texts foreground collaboration as the basis upon which their stories are told. Whether speculating on the afterlives of enslavement or considering potential dystopian futures, The Deep and The Memory Librarian utilise their collective forms to imagine Black queer futurity through coalition and community.
Megan E. Fourqurean (she/her) is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds. Her doctoral thesis analyses representations of gender nonconformity in contemporary Nigerian literature through the figure of Mami Wata. Her research interests include postcolonial and decolonial studies, religious studies, ecocriticism and environmental humanities, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism. Megan’s published work has appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and The Journal of the African Literature Association.
Dom Davies, Reading the Roadblock: Vehicles of National Liberation?
This paper reads the phenomenon of the roadblock as a collective form of liberation in Britain. Gathering to obstruct passage along mobility infrastructures has been a method of protest for many decades, with the activists gluing themselves to the M25 or scaling the Dartford Crossing only the most recent examples in a long tradition of resistance. While the tactic is most frequently deployed by environmental groups, roadblocks have also been central to acts of internationalist and anti- colonial solidarity, from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp’s blockade of nuclear weapons facilities in the 1980s to the more recent union-led barricading of arms factories selling munitions to Israel. More than just a historical account of the roadblock, this paper digs into its cultural politics to show how in Britain it is conjoined with imaginaries of empire and nationalism. In particular, it focuses on the tense confrontation between what Raymond Williams called the “mobile privatisation” of driving, on the one hand, and the static and collective form of the public protest camp, on the other. In so doing, it troubles ideas of both “the national” and of “liberation” to raise questions about what we mean we speak of “national liberation” in postcolonial Britain. The powerful feelings of individual mobility made possible by driving were deliberately coopted by figures from H.V. Morton to Margaret Thatcher to cement a narrative that described free market neoliberalism as a vehicle – both literal and metaphorical – for Britain’s own national liberation from the burden of its Empire. In this postcolonial context, the roadblock has become cast as an act not of national liberation, but of national betrayal. How does the roadblock trouble the conjunction of “nationalism” and “liberation” in the context of the post-imperial metropole? As a spatial tactic that not only misaligns with but actively disrupts nationalist imaginaries, what pressures does it place on ideas of collective form? And how have recent groups such as Insulate Britain sought to reconnect the roadblock with the nationalist currents that are dominating contemporary British politics?
Dom Davies is a Senior Lecturer at City, University of London. His research focuses on infrastructure, how it is lived and imagined, and its representation and remaking in literature, culture, and visual art. His most recent book, The Broken Promise of Infrastructure (Lawrence Wishart 2023), explores the cultural politics of infrastructure as they take shape through contexts of empire, nationalism, and racial capitalism. More information about his work is available at drdomdavies.com.
Brynn Hatton, Jordanian-Soviet Film Friendship and Post-National Collectivity
A trove of rusting film canisters from the former Soviet Union sits in a storage room in Amman, Jordan. It is the former property of the Jordanian-Soviet Friendship Society, one of nearly sixty such organizations established during the Cold War to promote internationalism and anti-imperialism, and to foster diplomatic “friendship” through cross-cultural artistic exchange. Since their rediscovery in 2014, the films have captured the interest of institutions and individual researchers who have come and gone to Jordan in stints as funding remains elusive and resources sparse. After nearly a decade, the work to bring these films to light has persevered through the efforts of a small group of multi-national academics, activists, and artists who have become the default stewards for this orphaned collection. We are an organic, leaderless, asynchronous collective rooted in the belief that sharing resources is the best way to achieve our goals, however different they may be. As we collaborate across national and disciplinary boundaries toward diverse individual ends, we take cues from Pan-Socialist solidarity networks of transnational friendship and ideological cohesion that brought the film collection itself, our mutual object of fascination, into the world. The proposed symposium paper will present the known history of the Jordanian-Soviet Friendship Society’s film collection and its connection to international socialist diplomacy efforts during the Cold War. It will also introduce the body of work produced by the collective that has formed since its rediscovery in 2014, inclusive of academic publications, contemporary art works, and functional design concepts that operate beyond national and disciplinary frames. The potential of an affordable, open-source film scanner that can be used by researchers onsite and in real time will also be explored, as a means by which to access and preserve precarious media facing disappearance or erasure due to extra- or post-national status.
Brynn Hatton (Assistant Professor, Art History, Colgate University) researches and writes about contemporary art and visual forms of protest. Her forthcoming book, The Vietnam Idea: The Art of Made and Unmade Connections, explores how Vietnam functions as a central artistic and political concept around which disparate struggles and identities are linked across time and space, from the mid-1960s to present day. She has been published recently in ARTMargins, the journal of visual culture, Al-Raida and Artforum, and her work with the Jordanian-Soviet Friendship Society collective was featured at the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin in summer, 2023.
Christian Høgsbjerg, ‘The individual achievements of a few black men do not and cannot solve the problems of the blacks’: C.L.R. James, Black Jacobinism and Black Bolshevism
This presentation will examine the themes of collective form and national liberation through the methodological and historical lens of thinking about C.L.R. James’s idea of ‘Black Jacobinism’ as a form of political and ideological organisational leadership which emerged during the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. It will argue this stress on collective form when writing about the Haitian Revolution emerged from his own political and theoretical identification as a Trotskyist with the contested collective form of ‘Black Bolshevism’ while writing The Black Jacobins (1938), but also from his own theoretical and practical involvement with anti-colonialism and militant Pan-Africanism. In colonial Trinidad, James had been part of the Beacon Group of writers and a supporter of the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association (TWA), while in Britain in the 1930s he had been involved with the League of Coloured Peoples (LCP), and then played a leading role in forming the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE) and the International African Service Bureau (IASB). After exploring briefly the nature of these different anti-colonial collectives, the presentation will make the case for a turn – or perhaps a return of sorts – to ‘organisational histories’ of the anti-colonial movement, in order to better track not only transnational networks and counter-cultures of resistance but also neglected grassroots activists and organisers within the anti-colonial struggle itself.
Christian Høgsbjerg is Senior Lecturer in Critical History and Politics in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton. He is author of C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain (Duke University Press, 2014), co-author of Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions (Pluto, 2017) and co-editor of The Black Jacobins Reader (Duke University Press, 2017), The Red and the Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic (Manchester University Press, 2021) and Revolutionary Lives of the Red and Black Atlantic since 1917 (Manchester University Press, 2022). He is currently working on Atlantic History in 15 Slave Revolts: Resistance, Rebellion and Abolition From Below (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming).
Helen King, ‘The necessary collaborative framework’: tracing the genesis of an anti-apartheid children’s book
This paper will explore Beverley Naidoo’s Journey to Jo’burg (1985), drawing on archival sources to trace the novel’s genesis in the collaborative work of UK-based anti-apartheid activists. Naidoo is a white South African children’s author living and working in the UK. Journey to Jo’burg was Naidoo’s first children’s book, narrating the story of two Black South African children who travel alone from their village to find their mother in Johannesburg. This physical journey maps onto a journey towards politicisation for both characters and implied reader, who is invited to learn about the impact of apartheid on Black children. Targeted squarely towards British readers, the book was created ‘to open a window for children in Britain, onto an area of South African life that they rarely, if ever, see’ (‘Journey to Jo’burg: A statement on its origins’). Involved with the AAM since arriving in the UK in 1965, in 1981 Naidoo joined the education sub-committee of the British Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa. The peritext and archive associated with Journey to Jo’burg reveal that the novel was born out of Naidoo’s work with the BDAF, and shaped by BDAF members and a broader network of UK-based anti-apartheid activists. This paper will demonstrate the impact of this ‘necessary collaborative framework’ (Naidoo, Letter to Harry Rée) on the published text and on Naidoo’s subsequent writing career, whilst exploring the limitations of the novel, written as it was for British children and developed largely by a network of white activists. I argue that whilst being real and necessary, Naidoo’s collaboration with the BDAF was also used to bolster the authenticity of Journey to Jo’burg, and to lend the book its status as a classic example of political writing for children.
Dr Helen King is a Research Associate at Newcastle University for the Nuffield Foundation ‘Understanding Communities’ project. Her research uses school archives to explore children’s perspectives on migration and community integration. Her PhD research, completed at Newcastle University in 2023, explored the political potential of childhood reading in the work and archive of Beverley Naidoo. She is also currently an Inclusion, Participation and Engagement Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, carrying out research exploring the uses of refugee-authored children’s books in the primary classroom. Her interests include radical and anti-racist children’s books, child agency, and child-adult collaboration.
Oliver Layman, Writing Africa in Race Today: Anti-Colonialism in Print
The Brixton-based journal Race Today was a hub for cultural and intellectual production in the 1970s and 1980s. Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ) had a brief stint as an editor and regularly reviewed books and music. C.L.R. James lived above the building that housed the journal, provided erudite political analysis, and regularly wrote on cricket. Much has been written about Linton Kwesi Johnson and CLR James but the political and intellectual impact of Race Today has not been adequately explored. Under the leadership of Darcus Howe, the journal provided a platform for issues affecting black, working-class, and Asian communities in the United Kingdom. It also had a considerable focus on political issues in the Caribbean. Further, Race Today introduced its readership to anti-colonial African Nationalism by reproducing key ideological texts of movements like the PAIGC and leaders like Kwame Nkrumah. It recognized and acknowledged the importance of culture as resistance and published literary works by Africans that reflected an anti-colonial stance. In its focus on Africa, Race Today acted as a literary nucleus for ideas about anti-colonialism and cultural nationalism and functioned as a means to educate its readership about colonial domination in Africa. In doing so, it forged solidarity between struggles that were happening in the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and Africa. This paper presents a reading of how Race Today positioned itself in relation to Africa and forged political solidarities that transcended the nation-state. It does this by examining articles that were published on anti-colonial movements in Lusophone Africa and several poems written by South African authors under Apartheid. Throughout this paper, I attempt to clarify the nature of the ideological work done by Race Today. Finally, this paper posits that engaging the intellectual production of Race Today might offer important lessons for the fight against racial capitalism.
Oliver Layman is a first-year Ph.D. student in Africana Studies at Cornell University. He is broadly interested in three distinct but overlapping areas: cultural and social analysis, intellectual histories, and theory. His current project proposes to focus on the ways in which twentieth-century Black cultural workers sought to interpret, challenge, and offer alternatives to ‘the modern’/modernity. In doing so, he seeks to explore how ideas pertaining to freedom and liberation were constructed as well as their material implications. Oliver holds a Masters degree in Political Studies from the University of Cape Town.
Mike Niblett and Myka-Tucker Abramson, The Collective Forms of Black Belt Proletarian Literature
This paper builds on recent scholarly work calling for a reconsideration of the Russian Revolution as itself an anti-colonial revolution and one that, in turn, played an important role in shaping subsequent national liberation struggles and the literatures and cultures of the postcolonial period (Djagalov 2020). Such a pre-history of the post-World War II national liberation era includes the passing of the “Theses on the National and Colonial Question” at the Second Comintern Congress, the 1920 Congress of the People’s of the East, which marked the Comintern’s shift to supporting revolutionary nationalist movements across the East, as well asthe passing of the so-called “Black Belt” thesis at the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928, which recognized African American peoples in the South as constituting an oppressed peoples and called on Communist Parties to support their struggle for self-determination. Focusing on this Black Belt period, we examine two paradigmatic Black Belt proletarian literary texts, written by well-known visitors to the Soviet Union – the Jamaican American Claude McKay’s Banjo (1929) about the labour radicalism of the Marseilles docks and the US southerner Myra Page’s Gathering Storm (1932)about the Gastonia Mill Strikes. Re-reading their formal diversity as constituting part of what Katerina Clark identifies as Soviet Realism’s broader project of offering “object lessons” for the working-out of the “spontaneity /consciousness,” and thus “individual and society” dialectic (1981: 16), we argue, first, that both novels constitute important experiments in the forging of new collective literary forms. And second, that such forms be read in relation to debates about the meaning and possible forms that a politics of black national liberation can take. We conclude by considering the ways that the experiments of collective form in the internationalist black belt texts might be understood as part of this longer trajectory of postcolonial studies.
Michael Niblett is Reader in Modern World Literature at the University of Warwick, UK. His books include The Caribbean Novel since 1945 (2012) and World Literature and Ecology (2020).
Myka Tucker-Abramson is an Associate Professor in American Literature at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism (2018) and has recently finished a manuscript entitled, Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and the American Century.
Brendon Nicholls, Revisiting Struggle Cultures through Collaborative Journalism
My paper considers Bessie Head’s journalistic collaborations with the Drum generation of male writers as an example of collective form. Head is usually received in terms of psychic exception, in part due to her complex relationship to Pan-African politics and her exile in Botswana. However, her early journalism for the Golden City Post (fictionalised in The Cardinals) reveals a fascination with the writing and editing processes, and a subtle immersion in collective form. To make this argument, my paper extends lines of thought from Bheki Peterson’s 2016 chapter, “Youth and Student Culture: Riding Resistance and Imagining the Future,” in Students Must Rise (co-edited by Anne Heffernan and Noor Nieftagodien). Peterson’s central argument is that culture is both “a way of life” and “the arts.” I suggest that Peterson’s subtly ambivalent definition positions struggle politics as a mode in which collective public performance and individual experience are in mutually-informing tension. Peterson offers an elegant perspective on 1960s writing and on critiques of 1970s Black Consciousness aesthetics. Further, he offers a tentative, but related, framework for thinking about post-Apartheid youth movements more generally. In each historical moment, I argue, the culture that seems extraneous to struggle (aesthetics) is in fact crucial to communal self-positing (in newly found or achieved “ways of life”). My paper moves through a series of textual examples, from SASO’s 1973 Statement on Poetry and Black Literature, through Mafika Gwala’s critique of Black Consciousness, and through the late 1950s and early 1960s moment of Bessie Head’s Golden City Post journalism. In my view, Peterson’s intervention allows the critical field to update and repurpose familiar texts and debates by linking collective struggle and the ways of life it offers. But crucially, Peterson uses post-1994 movements to intuit the centrifugal tendencies of racial, gendered or class-based identitarianism, and argues instead for “culture” as a mobile site of progressive gathering. The implied tension between centrifugal identity and progressive gathering, I argue, offers a key critical method for appraising intersectional tensions in Head’s Golden City Post journalism.
Brendon Nicholls is Director of the Leeds University Centre for African Studies (LUCAS) and Associate Professor of Postcolonial African Studies in the School of English, University of Leeds. Nicholls is author of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading (Ashgate) and Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (Routledge). He has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Research in African Literatures, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Cultural Critique, and New Formations and has work forthcoming in the Annals of Theoretical Psychology.
Jude Nwaboukei, Nurturing Narratives: Unveiling the Impact of Brittlepaper and Africa in Words on Collective Form and National Liberation in African Literary Writings
This study examines the substantial contributions of African literary websites, specifically Brittlepaper and Africa in Words, to the discourse on collective form and national liberation, elucidating their impact through concrete instances. Drawing parallels with historical collectives, notably the esteemed African Writers Conference, these contemporary platforms carve a distinctive trajectory within the spheres of collective form and national liberation, mirroring the influential role played by their historical counterparts in shaping the stylistic inclinations of African authors. Like the African Writers Conference, Brittlepaper and Africa in Words transcend geopolitical boundaries, utilizing the digital realm to navigate the collective literary and cultural ethos of African and Afro-diasporic literature. These platforms, serving as dynamic spaces where diverse voices converge, showcase the richness of African literary expression through interviews, essays, and reviews. For instance, Brittlepaper’s comprehensive coverage of the Caine Prize for African Writing and interviews with prominent authors provides a platform for collective celebration and exploration of African literary achievements. Similarly, Africa in Words contributes actively to the discourse on culture, politics, and art through critical reviews and analyses of African literature. Furthermore, these platforms actively propagate a pan-African perspective by transcending national borders. Africa in Words fosters discussions on works exploring identity, belonging, and resistance, fostering a sense of shared struggle across the continent. Brittlepaper’s commitment to Pan-Africanism is evident in its focus on diasporic literature and engagement with literary events across different African countries. In conclusion, Brittlepaper and Africa in Words extend their contributions beyond territorial confines, embracing a transnational purview that underscores the interconnectedness of literary expressions and cultural narratives. This perpetuates a dynamic and inclusive dialogue on the shared socio-political aspirations of the African literary landscape.
Jude Nwabuokei is a PhD student in the English Studies section of the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Law at Teesside University, Middlesbrough. His research interests revolve around African Literature, Afro-diasporic literature, digital literary studies, digital humanities, Media studies, and Postcolonial Studies.
Daniel O’Gorman, Literary sumud: Rebuilding ‘home’ in Atef Abu Saif’s The Drone Eats with Me
In recent years, an increasing number of literary texts by writers from Gaza and its diaspora have appeared in English (sometimes, but not always, in translation), and these texts have borne witness to the encroachment of Israeli settler-colonial architectures not only on Gaza’s physical space, but also on its social space. Authors such as Atef Abu Saif, Ahmed Masoud, Selma Dabbagh, Nayrouz Qarmout and Ibrahim Nasrallah are among a range of contemporary Palestinian literary voices whose work has zoomed in on the everyday spaces of Gazan homes. In a new century that has seen a rapid intensification of Israeli oppression, to the point that it has become clear that Gaza now faces an immediate existential threat, they foreground the textures of its everyday social life: the senses, movements, rhythms and rituals of daily existence in the Gaza Strip. Drawing on innovative home designs by Palestinian architect, Salem Al Qudwa (co-researcher on the project upon which this paper is based), I analyse Atef Abu Saif’s 2014 memoir, The Drone Eats with Me, as a case study for how Gazan literature – like homes rebuilt from rubble – weaves the fragments of Gazan urban life into the textures of its narrative. Saif’s text highlights the impact of Israeli state violence not only upon Gaza’s built environment, but also on its social space. In doing so, The Drone Eats with Me contributes in a small and indirect but, nonetheless, significant way to the reinforcement of Gaza’s social space: a form of literary sumud, or ‘steadfastness’, in the face of relentless violence. With entire neighbourhoods destroyed and everyday life for Gazans shattered, literary texts like Saif’s testify to this life, offering a blueprint for rebuilding that can’t be erased by an airstrike.
Daniel O’Gorman is a lecturer in the School of English at the University of Leeds. His work focuses on discourses of ‘terror’ in contemporary and postcolonial literature. This paper is part of a collaborative British Academy project called ‘Beyond Concrete: Everyday Space in Gaza’, with RIBA-nominated architect, Salem Al-Qudwa. Daniel is the author of Fictions of the War on Terror: Difference and the Transnational 9/11 Novel (Palgrave, 2015), and co-editor, with Robert Eaglestone, of The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction (Routledge, 2019).
Emma Parker, Confinement, Activist Networks, and Collective Struggles in Women’s Memoirs of Apartheid
In the aftermath of apartheid, life narratives such as Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom (1994), Antje Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998) and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela’s A Human Being Died that Night (2003) became global texts, offering personal and collective accounts of formal reconciliation. There has subsequently, and rightly, been a growing critical focus on what Sarah Nuttall and Liz McGregor call ‘the surge of narrative energy’ (2007, 10) in post-apartheid life writing. Recent studies (McGregor and Nuttall 2007; Twidle 2020) have moved to discuss the plethora of autobiographical texts published in and about contemporary South Africa, suggesting that the end of apartheid is an ongoing process, rather than exemplary event (Ndebele 2007, 93). Against this encouraging critical backdrop, this paper suggests that women’s autobiographical accounts of apartheid rule remain overlooked as crucial predecessors to more experimental forms of South African non-fiction. By turning to autobiographical accounts of life ‘under the great iron hand’ of a police state, which compelled women to exist both domestically and politically ‘in the twilight world of being and not being’ (Bernstein 2009, 76) I examine the particular impact of detention and surveillance on women in the anti-apartheid movement. I suggest that a cohort of life writers — including Hilda Bernstein, Noni Jabavu, and Ruth First — issued their own, distinct challenges to the limits of the memoir, navigating a productive tension between individual eye-witness testimony, and the need to record collective, intersecting forms of female struggle. By focussing on autobiographical accounts of detention cells, enclosed exercise yards, and eventually life in exile, this paper positions these individual narratives within a female-led network, following the attempts of writers and activists to establish lasting ‘places of reunion and our archive’ (First 2010, 43).
Emma Parker is lecturer in Literature and Gender at the University of Bristol. Her research is interested in many forms of life writing, postcolonial literatures, and modern women’s writing. She is the author of Life Writing at the End of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2024), and the co-editor of British Culture After Empire (MUP, 2023). Emma is currently working on a project to celebrate the Aotearoa New Zealand writer Janet Frame’s centenary.
James Procter, Bim, and the letters of an Unlikely Collective
Bim (1942-2023) was in key respects anathema to ideas of anticolonial struggle, racial justice, and cultural nationalism. Frank Collymore, the literary periodical’s founding editor, once described it as a ‘strictly non-political’ and ‘non-racial’ publication. Yet it was also critical to the establishment of a collective Caribbean consciousness. Its networks were regional and transnational. Its historical endurance remains remarkable. Piecing together correspondence held at the Barbados Nationalarchive, this paper asks questions about the epistolary politics of this putatively non-political formation.
James Procter teaches in the School of English at Newcastle University. His most recent book is the outcome of a Leverhulme-funded project, Scripting Empire: Broadcasting, the BBC and the Black Atlantic (OUP, 2024). His earlier monographs include Dwelling Places: Postwar Black British Writing (MUP, 2003) and Stuart Hall (Routledge, 2004). He is co-editor of the Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe, 2012) poetry anthology, and co-author of Reading Across Worlds (Palgrave, 2015).
Asha Rogers, Exams and Warehouses, or ‘Collective Form and National Liberation’
In this paper, I respond to the symposium’s two overarching goals articulated in the CfP: how have ‘collective forms’ mediated processes of national liberation and decolonisation, and what happens when we approach such histories with collaboration and co-operation in mind? If the first question is principally historical, inviting us to ‘learn from the history and the future of the collective form’, the other is turns on methodology, asking how ‘the perspective of collective form’ might ‘change the questions we ask and the conclusions we draw in postcolonial studies’ for the better. My response focuses on the historical and methodological lessons arising from two exemplary ‘collective forms’ of the seventies and eighties: the first surfacing from postcolonial Kenya’s dynamic literary-educational situation (exams), the second from the uneven global information and communication order as seen from Birmingham in England (warehouses). Deliberately registering the breadth of the CfP’s guiding note to embrace ‘collective form’ generously, these case histories are not only geographically distinct, but differ at the level of structure and form. We move from the syllabus as a documentary artefact of the movement to decolonise national education produced through networks, organising and the negotiation of bureaucratic state procedures on the one hand, to the shape adopted by publishing mutuals as non-for-profit limited companies under Britain’s 1965 Industrial and Provident Societies Act. For all their distinguishing characteristics, both point to two instructive things: first, there is much to see beyond the individual actor, or its counterpart: the monolithic power structure. (Consider Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s decision to dedicate Decolonising the Mind to ‘all the teachers and the staff of literature departments’ who ‘continued the debate on African literature in schools’ in his absence). Second, whether imaginatively or materially, national interventions often exceed national thinking, drawing from and effecting change transnationally and globally.
Asha Rogers is Associate Professor of Contemporary Postcolonial Literature at the University of Birmingham and the author of State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945 (2020), which explored how the modern British state involved itself in the literary field for literature’s sake and how Britain’s changing publics shaped the meanings of state action. Her next project centres on postcolonial language politics from the perspectives of institutional and book history.
Jack Rondeau, Atmospheric Interventions and the Politics of Breathing in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
When considering how collective forms seek liberation from marginalization and oppression, we ought to consider how law is spatialized. In this paper I propose to look at the spatialization of law through the concept of atmosphere. I bring together a literary understanding of atmosphere (Jesse Oak Taylor, 2016) with a legal understanding of atmosphere and lawscapes (Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2014) to consider the role of air in contemporary discourses around racial justice. Air, given its supposed ubiquity, tends to be under-theorized in postcolonial discourses around liberation from multitude forms of violent oppression – ranging from instances of police brutality to levels of air pollution, and living conditions. However, I contend that one can trace the central function of air in collective forms of resistance from Frantz Fanon’s notion of combat breathing (Fanon, 1970), through to recent iterations of the Black Lives Matter Movement, with its central slogan “I Can’t Breathe”. This paper considers the role of air in the context of racial justice by reading Salman Rushdie’s notorious 1989 novel The Satanic Verses through a legal-literary model of atmosphere. Rushdie’s novel provides a critical example of how atmospheres can be engineered to fatal ends. I look at the role of state-funded organizations (Camden Committee for Community Relations) and legislation (British Nationality Act 1981), in informing Rushdie’s depiction of the arson attack on the Shaandaar Cafe, which kills Sufyan and Hind (Asha Rogers 2020). Rushdie’s depiction of the Shaandaar fire establishes a politics of breathing in which minority and marginalized groups are subject to live in collective spaces where access to air is limited. This paper concludes by thinking about how we might spatialize air as a material force which forms a contract between atmosphere and law, and which might, in turn, provoke new ways of disrupting invisiblized social structures that enable racial discrimination.
Jack Rondeau is a PhD student in the School of English at the University of Leeds. My research focuses primarily on literary depictions of aerial violence, warfare, and terrorism in contemporary South Asian literature. My broader research interests include issues surrounding the environmental risks of nuclear power; planetarity, globalization and cosmopolitanism; the relationship between theory and practice, and the application of psychoanalytic approaches to postcolonial fictions.
Rehnuma Sazzad, Cultural Collaboration in Out of Sri Lanka: Tamil, Sinhala and English Poetry from Sri Lanka and Its Diasporas (2023): A Postcolonial Reading of Art that ‘Sings’ through Nationalist Debates
My paper proposes to readOut of Sri Lanka as a cultural and artistic collaboration that highlights various facets of nationalist struggle in the problematically decolonized country. Anthologizing over a hundred poems either written in English or translated from Tamil and Sinhala, editors Seni Seneviratne, Shash Trevett, and Vidyan Ravinthiran create a celebratory instance of utilizing Sri Lankan nationalisms(s) for the Anglophone audience. I will highlight the part of the anthology that elucidate the civil war between the government and the Tamil Tigers, who have been fighting for ending the domination of the south of the island over the north in terms of a nationalism that is not coterminous with Sinhalese vision. From this perspective, the collaboration of British-Sinhalese Seneviratne, Tamil Trevett as well as Ravinthiran is a significantly intertwining phenomenon. I will focus on the collaborative goal to affirm the urgency to remember the competing nationalism(s) for illustrating how this animates struggles for decolonization in the troubled land. My aim is to highlight the collaboration as a symbol of the agency asserted by the agents of anticolonial, liberation and racial justice movements, since the editors address the Tigers’ violence as well. In order to demonstrate how the nationalist perspective(s) created by the collaboration change the questions we ask and the conclusions we draw in postcolonial studies, I will compare this collective form with another ground-breaking co-creation, Parallels & Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2004) by Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim. The cultural critic and the classical pianist discuss National Socialism and music for displaying the emancipatory power of creative minds. Since they aimed to project how ‘music, culture, and politics today form a unique whole,’ I contend that the collaboration among the anthology editors will ‘sing’ extraordinary songs through their genre-defying efforts that create unison out of dissension.
Dr Rehnuma Sazzad is a Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, and an Associate Tutor at the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia. She is an Associate Editor and a Reviews Editor of Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and an Editorial Advisory Board Member for English. Her first monograph, Edward Said’s Concept of Exile (2017), adds new depths to discourses of resistance, home and identity. She is currently completing her second monograph reflecting on nationalism in South Asia.
Kate Spowage, Language and Socialism
Language has a complex relationship to ‘collectivity’. Linguistic practices are relational, and ‘our’ language – whatever it is – is a social product. Major linguists, though, have overestimated the extent to which a language represents a community. Bourdieu, in his excellent quasi-Marxist critique, took Saussure and Chomsky to task for indulging in an ‘illusion of linguistic communism’, precisely by ignoring real speakers and thus the social conflicts that characterise their relations under capitalism. Language divides as much as it unites, excludes as much as it includes, and as such it remains a vital problem for those interested in collectivist political forms, including socialism. In this paper, I explore possibilities for a socialist theory of language. In this, I mean a theory of language that foregrounds the concerns of socialist thinking, and a theory of language that can form part of socialist praxis. Using the work of Marxist decolonial thinker Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, among others, I will ask what it means to think about language as both a collective form and an element in the making of collective politics.
Kate Spowage is Lecturer in English Language and the University of Leeds. Her research centres on the politics of language and the history of linguistic thought, especially in relation to colonialism and decolonisation. Her first monograph, Language as Statecraft: ‘Global English’ and the Politics of Language in Rwanda (Routledge, 2024), argues for a cultural-materialist approach to language policy and the study of global English.
