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Clone of [Black Europe]
Workstream Rationale
[Black Europe] emerges from a critical recognition of the enduring epistemological frameworks that privilege whiteness as an unmarked category within European studies. While UCL boasts significant interdisciplinary scholarship on race, racialisation, and postcolonial critique - alongside distinguished research on Europe’s history, politics, and cultural production - this workstream confronts the structural omissions and methodological biases that persist in analyses of Europe itself. By interrogating the tacit hierarchies underpinning institutional and intellectual practices, we seek to dismantle the Eurocentric paradigms that obscure racialised power dynamics and their material legacies.
Highlights
Festival in June 2024
This festival celebrated Black cultural production and critical inquiry and sought to explore the structures that make Blackness seem natural, self-evident, and variously foreign across Europe.
Videos and podcasts
Hearing Ghosts: The Life & Times of Josephine Morcashani
Video short by Graham Riach introducing the international music hall star of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, relating her to the conditions for Black British performance artists today.
African-American entertainers in pre-jazz Europe
In this Talking Europe podcast, the historian Jeff Bowersox takes us to Central Europe around 1900, where the response to the arrival of Black American entertainers both confirmed and disrupted ideas of race and culture.
Resources
Black Central Europe
This rich website and international network of historians - of which Jeff Bowersox is managing editor and chief contributor - 'argue[s], quite simply, that Black people have always been a part of Central European history'.
Black Studies resources in the SSEES Library collections
The contribution of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies' Library’s to the Black Studies LibGuide aims to highlight the increasing interest in researching race, racism and the black diaspora in the context of Slavic and East European Studies.
Reading Group
Dr. Beatrix Gassmann de Sousa: Affective Debt in Film, 26 February 2025
- "Talking Straight to Us": Affective Debt in Film, Karina Griffith, unk.
- Bankruptcy of Affect: Blackface in DIE UMZÜGE, Karina Griffith, 2020
Dr. Toyin Agbetu: Decolonisation and DEI Are Dead: Long Live Deracialisation, 5 March 2025
- Hall, Stuart. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities.” In Theories of Race & Racism, edited by Les Back and John Solomos, 144–153. Taylor & Francis Ltd / Books, 1999.
- Mbembe, Achille. “The Becoming Black of the World.” In Critique of Black Reason, translated by Laurent Dubois, 1–9. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Prof. Phiroze Vasunia: Andromeda and Representations of Myth, 26 March 2025
- Elizabeth McGrath, “The Black Andromeda,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992): 1–18.
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Was Andromeda Black?,” The Root.
- “How Andromeda, the Daughter of Ethiopian Royalty, Ended Up White,” The Root.
- Optional: Joaneath Spicer, “Heliodorus’s An Aethiopian Story in Seventeenth-Century European Art,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 3: From the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the Age of Abolition, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 307–35.
Dr. Chloe Ireton: Black Lives and Thought in Early Modern Europe, 7 May 2025
- “Coda: Felipa de la Cruz’s World and Letters,” in Ireton Chloe L., Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic. Cambridge University Press; 2025: 252-264.
- "Introduction" in The Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive, Social Text, Volume 33, Number 4 (125).
- Optional: Karen Graubart, Pesa más la libertad: Slavery, Legal Claims, and the History of Afro-Latin American Ideas, William and Mary Quarterly 78:3 (July 2021): 427-58
Coffee/tea will be provided. We will circulate relevant readings and rooms at least one week in advance.
For more information, please contact Olivia Clarkson at olivia.clarkson.23@ucl.ac.uk
Seminar series
Keon West: The Science of Racism, 21 January 2025
Diamond Ashiagbor: EU integration and European colonialism, 10 December 2024
Aissatou Mbodj-Pouye: An Address in Paris, 16 May 2024
James Mark: Wilson's white world: the foundation of Central-Eastern European nation-states after World War I, 12 March 2024
Mame-Fatou Niang: French but not (Q)White: Defining Frenchness for the 21st Century: Prof. Mame-Fatou Niang, 27 February 2024
Rachel Jean-Baptiste: Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood and Citizenship, 5 December 2023
Hans Kundnani: Eurowhiteness, 20 November 2023
Damani Partridge: Blackness as a Universal Claim, 16 October 2023
Black Europe Workshop
Opening workshop featuring Bea Gassman: The 'ideas' of Africa: Four stories & Jeff Bowersox: Performing Blackness for Germans, 13 March 2023
