Throughout 2017 we are running a range of events open to all. Roundtables, public discussions, and seminar presentations will focus on different examples of these everyday modes of expression.....
2017
READING ROUNDTABLE: Everyday Utopianism
APRIL 26. Alumni Room, School of English, 4:30-6:00pm.
The purpose of this reading roundtable is to reconsider the relationship between cultural expression, diaspora and power. We will do so both by drawing on our own experience as cultural practitioners or researchers, and by relating this to the possibility, or impossibility of everyday utopianism as discussed in the recent work of Nathaniel Coleman. Coleman's article and further information is available here.
SEMINAR: Food, Diaspora and the US South.
MAY 11. Alumni Room, School of English, 4:30-6:00pm.
On May 11 and 12 the Diasporic Everyday network focuses on food and cooking in the diaspora, with a particular focus on US culture. In our opening event, two influential food studies scholars--Professor Psyche Williams-Forson (American Studies, Maryland) and Professor Elizabeth Engelhardt (American Studies, UNC)--will discuss their food research and its relationship to questions of class, gender and race in the cultures of the American South. They will be joined by the younger scholar J. Michelle Coghlan (Manchester), whose new project Culinary Designs explores points of comparison between US cookbooks and US naratives of the nineteenth century.
READING ROUNDTABLE: Kyla Wazana Tompkins on Louisa May Alcott.
MAY 12. Alumni Room, School of English, 12:00-1:30pm.
For our second food studies event, in the company of Elizabeth Engelhardt, we will consider the new scholarship of Kyla Wazana Tompkins. Tompkins is an important new researcher of everyday diasporic cooking in its 19th century textual representations, and her monograph Racial Indigestion (New York, 2014) won the American Studies Association book prize for its exploration of the variant ways in which black cooks become instruments and figures of desire in US print culture. For this reading group, we consider a more recent article in which Tompkins extends these ideas through a reading of Louisa May Alcott's The Candy Country. The full text of this article is here. All, especially postgraduate and early career researchers, are welcome to join us; lunch will be provided afterwards.
AUTHOR TALK: Caryl Phillips: Writing Every Day, Rewriting the Everyday
OCTOBER 12. Venue TBC. 6:00-7:30pm
In October 2017 Caryl Phillips will join our network's conversations on art and everyday life. Turning in particular to questions of writing in everyday life, we will invite him to revisit his critical statements on the political importance of the novel in a number of historical moments. This conversation will be shaped both by Phillips's own responses and interests and by the group's concerns as they emerge over the course of the year.
ROUNDTABLE: Langston Hughes and Everyday Education
OCTOBER 20. Venue TBC. 5:00--7:00pm
Confirmed participants include Rachel Farebrother (English, Swansea) and Kasia Boddy (English, Cambridge). Having read selections from Not Without Laughter and one or two other prose pieces, the group will discussion the use of simplicity, and the theme of access and education in the work of Langston Hughes.
ROUNDTABLE: Learning from Carnival
NOVEMBER. Date & Venue TBC. 5:00--7:00pm
Here Emily Marshal (Leeds Beckett) will lead a discussion In which key actors and participants in Leeds Beckett's forthcoming conference on carnival (May 2017) will reflect on the central themes and lessons to have emerged from this major international event.
ROUNDTABLE: Hip Hop event
NOVEMBER. Date & Venue TBC. 5:00--7:00pm