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VIRTUAL EVENT: Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State Book Launch

18 February 2021, 7:00 pm–8:30 pm

Empire's Endgame book launch

Gargi Bhattacharyya, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Sita Balani, Kerem Nişancıoğlu, Kojo Koram, Dalia Gebrial, Nadine El-Enany and Luke de Noronha

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

Kaissa Karhu – Sarah Parker Remond Centre

This event will be hosted as a Zoom webinar by UCL.

Please note that the session (as well as the chat function) may be recorded and retained as per UCL’s retention schedule. 

In Empire's Endgame, eight anti-racist scholars make a powerful intervention in debates around racial capitalism and political crisis in Britain. While the 'hostile environment' policy and Brexit referendum have thrown the centrality of race into sharp relief, discussions of racism have too often focused on individual behaviours and discrimination. Foregrounding instead the wider political and economic context, the authors trace the ways in which the legacies of empire have been reshaped by global capitalism, the digital environment and the instability of the nation-state. Empire's Endgame offers both an original perspective on race, the state, media and criminalisation, and a political vision that includes rather than expels in the face of crisis.

Join us for this book launch, where the eight authors will each reflect on some of the key arguments presented in Empire’s Endgame, returning to the text six months after the manuscript was finalised. This book is not an edited collection, with sole-authored chapters, but a book written by one compound author (or family). It is the product of an anarchic mix of collective thinking, noisy and very funny discussion, silent writing and remote editing. In this book launch, the authors return to this mode: thinking aloud together and trying to make sense of what is going on and what is at stake in accounting for and struggling against racism.


Sarah Parker Remond Centre

This event is being hosted by the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation at UCL, which provides a focal point for scholarship, teaching and public engagement activities that are addressed to various problems of racial inequality and hierarchy. The Centre is committed to the production of new, historically-informed, critical knowledge addressed to some of the most urgent social and political questions of our time. The event will be introduced by the Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre, Professor Paul Gilroy. 


The book

Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, published 20 Feb 2021)
Half price for Black History Month https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745342047/empires-endgame/

Authors

Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at University of East London. She is the author of Rethinking Racial Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Dangerous Brown Men (Zed, 2008) and Traffick (Pluto, 2005).

Adam Elliott-Cooper is a Researcher in Social Sciences at Greenwich University. He is the author of Black Resistance to British Policing (MUP, 2021).

Sita Balani is a lecturer in contemporary literature and culture at King's College London. She is the author of Deadly and Slick: How Sex makes Race in Postcolonial Britain (Verso, 2021).

Kerem Nişancıoğlu is a Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS, University of London. He is the co-author of How the West Came to Rule (Pluto, 2015), and co-editor of Decolonising the University (Pluto, 2018). He also blogs at The Disorder of Things.

Kojo Koram is a lecturer at the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Color Line (Pluto, 2019).

Dalia Gebrial is the editor of a special issue of the Historical Materialism journal on identity politics and co-editor of Decolonising the University (Pluto, 2017).

Nadine El-Enany is Reader in Law at Birkbeck School of Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Race and Law, and the author of Bordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (MUP, 2020).

Luke de Noronha is lecturer at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre (UCL) and author of Deporting Black Britons: Portraits of Deportation to Jamaica (MUP, 2020)

Pluto Press

This event will take place as a Zoom webinar. Please sign up via Eventbrite and you'll receive an email with the Zoom link before the event.

All welcome.  Please do not hesitate to contact us if you need assistance on the day, and follow this FAQ link for more information and to read our virtual events code of conduct. All of our events are free, but you can support the IAS here.