READING ROUNDTABLE
Everyday Utopianism
APRIL 26. Alumni Room, School of English, 5:00-6:00pm.
For this roundtable discussion we hope to open again the question of cultural expression and its relationship to power. Do the old capacities of diasporic culture remain powerful and available to audiences in 2017? Can these forms still assert presence, aid survival, or imagine a world beyond race? How do our own areas of cultural interest, from calypso to literature, in themselves handle such questions? Here we aim to pool together the widest possible range of expertise and to draw upon the richest possible variety of cultural material. But to begin to conceptualise our approach, we will also here step outside our familiar disciplinary contexts (African American studies, postcolonialism, Caribbean studies, e.g.) to consider an essay that stands at a tangent to our concerns but which could illuminate them in interesting ways. While discussing and comparing our immediate areas of interests, our reading group will thus also consider Nathaniel Coleman's recent defence of utopianism in our age of "capitalist realism," with particular regard to Henri Lefebvre's recuperation of the everyday (see below). Do these utopian possibilities become apparent in the specific cultural practices that preoccupy our research?
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 in the pdf (left). All, especially postgraduate and early career researchers, are welcome to join us; lunch will be provided afterwards.