For our previous events please visit the 'Past Events' page in the side menu.

Forthcoming events, all welcome:

Black Ghost of Empire: Comparative Emancipations in a Global Perspective
Speaker: Professor Kris Manjapra
Wednesday 27 April 2022, 4.30 pm

On Zoom: https://newcastleuniversity.zoom.us/j/87124900291

To understand why the shadow of slavery still haunts us today - and the truer meaning of reparations - we must look closely at the way slavery ended. Between the 1770s and 1880s, emancipation processes took off across the Atlantic world. But far from ushering in a new age of human rights and universal freedoms, these emancipations further codified the racial caste systems they claimed to disrupt.

In this talk, Kris Manjapra identifies six types of emancipations across the globe - gradual emancipations in the American North, compensated and retroactive emancipation in the Caribbean, emancipation by war in the American South, emancipation as pretext for massive colonialism in Africa, and emancipation at sea - and reveals how the perceived failures of all of them were not failures at all, but the predictable outcomes of policies designed first and foremost to preserve the status quo of racial oppression.

Black Ghost of Empire rewires our understanding of the world in which we live. Abolition was not a line, once established, that marked the end of slavery and the beginning of a new world order. And yet, the formerly enslaved resisted and fled oppression: they rebelled, made art, and loved.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Colonial Traces, Exile, and the 2021 Nobel Prize

Guest-speakers: Dr Lucinda Newns (Anglia Ruskin University)
and Dr Florian Stadtler (Bristol University)
Tuesday, 10th of May 2022 2.30 PM – 5 PM

In person event @Hallgarth House Seminar Room, Durham, UK.
Tea and coffee provided.

Programme:
2.30 PM: The event will start with a pre-recorded conversation with Prof Abdulrazak Gurnah, the 2021 Nobel Laureate for Literature. 

3 PM: Position papers and Q&A

Dr Lucinda Newns: Abdulrazak Gurnah in the Context of Migrant and Refugee Writing 

Dr Florian Stadtler: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Afterlives (2020): Memorialising the Traumas of German Colonialism in East Africa. 

4 PM: Reading group discussion on Gurnah’s latest novel, Afterlives.