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2021 Neale Lecture: Kennetta Hammond Perry - 'Sensory Encounters With the Archive of David Oluwale'
12 May 2021, 5:30 pm–7:00 pm
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Helena Vowles-Shorrock – History07594897181
On 4 May 1969 authorities pulled the body of a Nigerian-born homeless man named David Oluwale from the River Aire in Leeds. Much of what the historical record reveals about David Oluwale’s life in Britain is a product of his encounters with the state. Traces of his life in Britain are largely contained within an archive of dispossession that primarily provides an accounting of his alleged violations of the law and his seemingly undeserved dependency on public resources. This lecture seeks to explore what reading David Oluwale’s archive through the sensory registers of sight and sound can tell us about how the power of the state is engineered, mobilized and sustained in such a manner that systematically suborns, sanctions and silences anti-Black violence, civil injury, distress, harm, and death. Moreover, it seeks to critically assess the extent to which an archive steeped in Black dispossession and death might offer possibilities for imagining Black emotive lives and constructing histories of Black sentience even as they are produced in the context of racialised violence and duress.
Image: https://www.thejusticegap.com/remembering-oluwale-indelible-black-mark-leeds-police/
About the Speaker
Kennetta Hammond Perry
Kennetta Hammond Perry serves as Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University where she is also a Reader in History at Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University
Kennetta Hammond Perry serves as Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre at De Montfort University where she is also a Reader in History. Prior to her appointment at De Montfort, she was an Associate Professor of History and Co-Director of the African & African American Studies Program at East Carolina University in the USA. Dr Perry holds a PhD in Comparative Black History and her research interests include Black British history, transnational race politics, Black women’s history, archives of Black Europe, and histories of state crafted violence. She has published widely, including a book-length study on Caribbean migration to Britain following World War II titled London Is The Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford Press, 2016) and is currently working on new book, David Oluwale’s Britain which uses imperilled Black life as a lens to rethink the contours of contemporary British history.
More about Kennetta Hammond Perry