Textual Histories of Race & Colonialism 2023

UCL's Sarah Parker Remond Centre is pleased to announce a new seminar series, Textual Histories of Race & Colonialism 2023, organised by Dr Pavan Manogaran, Research Fellow at the SPRC.

This series comprises three events that each centre around a conversation with writers on their books, their work, and the stories they tell about the inherited histories of race, ethnicity, and colonialism in the UK and beyond. Each will last 90 minutes and take a loose format of a conversation between the invited guests on their work followed by 20-25 minutes for questions from the audience at the end. The discussions will be wide-ranging and are likely to cover topics ranging such as the governance of race and its present-day continuations, the historical contingencies of race and the afterlives of colonialism, as well as broader notions such as the aesthetics of writing about race and colonialism. Whilst they will begin by meditating on the text(s) in question, the conversations will also aim to be expansive – engaging with the world around us and its entanglements with the afterlives of race & colonialism.

Connecting abolition, anti-racism & anti-capitalism: Preti Taneja in conversation with Tariq Jazeel

23 March 2023, 4.30 - 6pm 

About the event

How is the project of abolition connected to anti-racist and anti-capitalist politics? Preti Taneja’s latest book, Aftermath (And Other Stories, 2022) reckons with this question amongst others. Written in the aftermath of the London Bridge terror attack, the book works through the interconnectedness of different forms of oppression – Islamophobia, incarceration, colonialism, and more – to present an argument for the elimination of all oppressive forms. In this event, Taneja is in conversation with Tariq Jazeel, Professor of Human Geography and Co-Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. 

About the speaker

Preti Taneja is a writer and activist. Her first novel We That Are Young (Galley Beggar Press, 2017) is a translation of Shakespeare's King Lear set in contemporary India that won the Desmond Elliott Prize for the UK’s finest literary debut of the year and was listed for international awards including the Folio Prize and the Prix Jan Michalski. It has been translated into several languages. Her second book Aftermath (And Other Stories, 2022) an abolitionist’s lament against terror, trauma, and the school-to-prison pipeline following the Fishmonger’s Hall terror attack in 2019, was a New Statesman and a New Yorker Book of the Year. It is the winner of the Gordon Burn Prize for literature that is 'forward thinking and fearless in its ambition and execution, often playing with style, pushing boundaries, crossing genres or challenging readers' expectations.' Taneja is Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University. She is the winner of the 2022 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Languages and Literatures.

In conversation with Sita Balani on ‘Deadly and Slick: Sexual Modernity and the Making of Race’

16 May 2023 4.30-6pm

Synopsis of Deadly and Slick

If race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded in everyday life through the domain we take to be most intimate and essential: sexuality. Modernity inaugurates a new political subject made legible as an individual through the nuclear family, sexual adventure and the pursuit of romantic love. By examining the regulation of sexual life at Britain's borders, in colonial India, and through the functioning of the welfare state, marriage laws, education, and counterterrorism, Balani reveals that sexuality has become fatally intertwined with the making of race.

About the event

In this event, Sita Balani is in conversation with Pavan Manogaran, Research Fellow in Racism, Racialisation and Gender at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. The launch will consist of a discussion of Deadly and Slick and its connections to the larger cultural politics of race and sexuality, followed by questions from the audience. There will be an informal drinks reception after the event. It is free and open to all, please register here.

About the author

Dr. Sita Balani is a lecturer in English at Queen Mary University of London. She is the co-author of Empire's Endgame. She has published in Vice, Tribune, the White Review, Novara, Salvage, Ceasefire, Five Dials, Wasafiri, and Open Democracy. She has appeared on BBC3 and Novara Media, and is a regular speaker at events on anti-racism, feminism, education, sexuality, and colonial history.