Image by George Tames courtesy of The New York Times/Redux. Cover design by Erin Kirk.

Panya Banjoko

Eve Makis

Dr Leila Kamali

1 Oct - 31 Oct 2020

Formation: History

Critical responses to Black History Month

To launch our year-long Formations programme, delivered in partnership with Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre, we are pleased to announce our October events, under the thematic banner – Formation: History, Critical Responses to Black History Month.

Thursday 15 October 2020, 7 pm – 8.30 pm
SNCC’s Stories: Book launch and interview with Sharon Monteith

Join us for an interview with Sharon Monteith, Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Cultural History at NTU, as she tells us more about SNCC’s Stories: The African American Freedom Movement in the Civil Rights South (University of Georgia Press, October 2020).

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee would have commemorated 60 years since its founding in 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. This book coincides with that anniversary and uncovers the organisation’s narrative culture and activist literary history. Join Sharon Monteith in conversation about SNCC and her book with Panya Banjoko, poet, director of Nottingham Black Archive and NTU doctoral researcher.

Watch here.

Tuesday 20 October 2020, 6.30 pm – 8pm
Resilience Writing: Creative Writing Workshop with NTU’s Postcolonial Studies Centre writer-in-residence Eve Makis

Join a writing session with Eve Makis exploring identity and the meaning of resilience, taking inspiration from seminal works by Maya Angelou. All levels welcome.

Eve Makis is the author of four novels, a life-writing guide, and an award-winning screenplay. She teaches fiction on the MA Creative Writing course at Nottingham Trent University, where she is writer in residence for the Postcolonial Studies Centre.

All participants will get the chance of having their work edited and included in a planned NTU anthology.

Find out more and book your place here.

Wednesday 28 October 2020, 7 pm
Dr Leila Kamali talk: John Edgar Wideman: African American History-Making and Uses of Visual Art

Dr Leila Kamali invites audiences to learn about her major film and education project relating to the work of the great African American writer John Edgar Wideman. In this event, Leila discusses Wideman’s work in relation to decolonisation, exploring the ways that the visual images in his writing signal his construction of a decolonising gaze.

Dr Leila Kamali is a literary scholar with specialisms in African American literature, Black British literature, diaspora, transnationalism and cultural memory. Her research investigates the relationship between memory, trauma, language, and tradition, in order to discover ways in which literature resists contemporary forms of racism and builds new forms of citizenship.

Watch here.