Bringing together academics from across Newcastle, Northumbria and Durham Universities who share a common interest in postcolonial research, the reading and writing group will organise two kinds of meetings throughout the year.

Postcolonial Theory Reading Group

This reading group is designed to provide an informal space for discussing key postcolonial texts. Participants will be asked to read, in advance, an article or book chapter related to a pre-identified area of postcolonial research.

In 2021/22, the first meeting will be held on 17 February at 5-6pm, in person (venue tbc). The text will be Priyamvada Gopal’s 2021 article 'On Decolonisation and the University'.

In 2020/2021, meetings were held on 18 February, 18 March, 15 April, 20 May and 17 June 2021, on Zoom.  

In 2019/2020, meetings were held on 21 November, 19 December, 16 January and 27 February, discussing Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Colonialism is a System', Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Gayatri Spivak's important text, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', and Tayeb Salih's novel Season of Migration to the North.

Future readings will be picked from the google drive below.

POSTCOLONIAL RESOURCES

To facilitate our discussion at both the Work in Progress Forum and the Theory Reading Group, this google folder here contains some useful resources and key readings in postcolonialism, including but not limited to:

Gloria Anzaldúa. 1987. Borderlands.

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, eds. 1998. Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts.

bell hooks. 2000. Where We Stand: Class Matters.

Frantz Fanon. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty. 1984. Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature.

Aníbal Quijano. 2007. 'Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality'

Edward Said. 1993. Culture and Imperialism.

Jean-Paul Sartre. 1956. 'Colonialism is a System.'

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 1983. 'Can the Subaltern Speak?'

Postcolonial Work in Progress Forum

This is open to postgraduate students, early career researchers and more established academics, and is a collective space to discuss each other's work and develop interdisciplinary conversations on postcolonial research across different disciplines and academies. At each meeting, a few volunteers share a piece of work in progress or a presentation with group participants, who then provide constructive peer-to-peer feedback.

In 2019/2020 we held three meetings on 30 October, 11 December, and 12 February. It will not run in 2020/2021.