I have very long intros and bios to the five speakers,
but they've asked me to keep it short and crisp and that all the information is on the website if you want it, if you want to find out more.
So here first up is Susheela Nasta, who is the the long time editor of What's the Theory?
That very important magazine of international and contemporary writing that she founded back in 1984,
a literary activist, writer and presenter, she is now emeritus professor of Modern Literature at the Open University.
She is editing the Cambridge history of Black and Asian British writing with Markstein beside her.
And Mark is chair of English Postcolonial and Media Studies at the W-W.
You can't waste the best finding of this Wilhelmina University.
Yes, in research and teaching, Mark takes an interest in Anglophone cultural productions from around the globe,
and he has a number of books to his name currently. Then he's working on the Cambridge History with Susheela.
Besides, Marc is Florence Stetler, who is a senior lecturer in Global Literatures at the University of Exeter.
He's published on South Asian and British Asian Cinema, most recently the monograph, fiction,
film and Indian Popular Cinema and is reviews editor for Was The Theory Beside Florian is Hang Him a serene coming Carney,
who is assistant professor in Literatures and Cultures of the Black Atlantic at St. Mary's University,
Canada, she has published on the work of Linton, Quincy Johnson and Bernardine Evaristo, who we of course met earlier in the series,
and she's written on black British poetry and fiction in the late 20th century.
And then beside her at the other end of the table is Gail Lowe, who teaches creative writing and book history at the University of Dundee.
She is the author of White Skins Black Masks that I know many of us know and has
coedited A Black British Canon with Marilyn Davis and The Voyage Out with Kirsty Gunn.
You all very well. And we're very, very excited to hear you. And I'm going to head over to Sheila to start us off.
Thank you. I've been told that the theme of the seminar this term has been reading an identity, how we identify through what we read,
obviously, as Alex has already pointed out, we're all literary critics of crickets of my daughter.
One for them probably talk too much.
And in a sense, this particular history has been quite long in coming and actually is quite late in coming.
I would say in terms of British writing, I'm going to start off by saying a few general things.
Probably you probably discussed all these kinds of things over the term about reading and writing and being a reader and a writer,
because obviously with a different hat on, I am editor was a period and I've in fact published most of the writers that you've had reading this term.
And those things, I think relate to this whole idea also of at home.
I wondered, I'm sure you didn't intend this to have a kind of double meaning the at home.
But of course, I thought of immediately at home in Britain,
the in the nation and the idea of a so-called national canon, but also be at home where you are a visitor coming in.
And of course, those kinds of streams, those visitors, those migrants are also part of at home in our book, if you like.
So those quotes are just really food for your imagination, the last to relate quite closely to the theoretical frameworks in our book.
The first two are just two that I like, and one of them, the extract from Anybots poem.
There's no such thing as any literature was the title of an article I wrote in
the 80s about why the British canon should perhaps try and expand its borders.
And I was just when I was thinking about that today, I thought it seems incredible that one's still actually having so many of those conversations.
So I'm just going to say a little bit and then hand over to Mark.
So basically, how do we look at it, whether through a personal lens, a community lens or from an international critical perspective,
it's clear that literature, whether for reader, writer, writers or listeners, increasingly changes things, takes us on a voyage.
So a child reading a bedtime story looks for worlds beyond those he's familiar with.
Prisoners in cells read to take them out of their confinement.
People at funerals perhaps gain release by listening to a poem read it takes them possibly out of their grief.
Activists use literature to fight oppression and so on. So it's through writing and through reading.
We can express ourselves, learn to shape identities, and as readers, we continually open ourselves to that and the perspectives of others.
This was particularly important to me personally as a mixed race child growing up in Suffolk in the late 1960s, early 1970s,
when I did not encounter texts that spoke to me directly and I didn't encounter take
fibre till I went to the University of Kent and began to read authors such as Jean Rezo,
V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selborne or Derek Walcott. And, you know, that famous line in Wide Sargasso Sea.
There's the other side always. And I remember that really spoke to me as a sort of 19 year old.
And I know many other critics, writers have made that point, like Carol Phillips talks about his childhood in Leeds when he says,
you know, he was in a situation where he was, in a sense, literally culturally starving.
And if we think about today with the re-emergence of the xenophobic phobic discourse of the 70s and 80s following Brexit,
it becomes increasingly important that literature isn't just the art for art's sake thing, but it's also a political tool.
And I'm not saying that should be a one sided, too, but it is an important political tool.
So it's with that kind of framework. If you think of a history of where maybe I'm coming into it as a critic and I think MC2 and I'm
sure he explains himself that we started to put together this history we were approached by.
It's obviously a formidable task because there is no one history.
There can be no one unified history of black and Asian, but.
Writing, there's no one geography, there's no one cultural influence,
there's no one way of thinking about black or Asian or indeed putting them together,
because, in fact, it was only in the sort of 80s that black and Asian began to be separated as terminology.
So we've got quite a problematic scenario in terms of actually trying to construct this history.
And we wanted to avoid falling into the trap of simply doing a narrative of reclamation or retrieval or as an opposition to complicity,
but to offer reading through different theoretical and historical lenses,
creating a history that runs both because people would want this as a Cambridge history chronologically, as a vertical history,
but also horizontally, so that where there are all these uneven shapes and gaps and silences,
because there is no straight chronology of black and Asian British writing,
you can make links across a continuum in terms of symbols, tropes, preoccupations,
as Leninists actually said in her book on this subject, I think it was in 2002.
So that's the kind of way we're coming into this.
And there are lots of problematics with the history and how we might put it together.
But I'm going to hand over to Mark now to explain a bit about that and the structure of the book.
What we did with that. All right. Well, thanks very much.
Can you hear me in the back? That was my voice is flagging to let me know.
Um, yeah. I'm also very pleased to be here and very pleased for us to be doing this project together.
I'm also intrigued that today, as Alec has shown, you know, we're interested in and reading in the act and the act of reading.
And I thought I'd give you a quote from a book that's very close to my heart.
It was published in the Year of the French Revolution in 1789 by Roulade Equiano.
And it's quite a well-known text. I realise that, but I thought I'd give you that quote.
He says, I had often seen my master employed in reading and I had a great curiosity to talk to the books as I thought they did.
And so to learn how all things had a beginning for that purpose,
I have often taken up the book and have talked to it and then put it to my ears when alone in hopes it would answer me.
And I've been very much concerned when to remain silent.
So this is a trove of the talking book. Equiano once a slave at that time, and he observed others reading wasn't allowed himself to read and write.
He did learn it later, but he was fascinated with reading.
And at the time he thought because he'd seen people moving their lips, you know, that it was the book actually talking back to the reader.
And of course, that is what books do. Do you have that quote from when you were 19 years old, Jean Rhys, write books do speak to us ideally.
But what I find fascinating about that is clearly it's about great writers that inspire us.
But you need great readers, right? You need to grow up and be a reader as well.
And all great writers are clearly great readers as well.
Adriana's book, The Interesting Narrative Belongs, falls into many genres autobiography, spiritual autobiography, slave narrative.
It's a political text, the petition presented to Parliament to further the cause of abolition.
But it's also a story of him not just learning to write and writing his books, have publishing his book,
but developing into a reader, formidable reader, and in that way entering British culture and, you know, leaving a legacy of will.
He was the first black person in England who required a will because he, you know, made money and bequeathed that to his daughter.
So, you know, the act of reading is is resonant, I think, for us in in many ways.
Now, he says he took up the book in order to learn how all things had a beginning.
And this is in a sense, you know, what we're constructing or constructing a history like the one we're confronted with.
And at the same time, you said it's a formidable task. Yes.
But it's also one we're conflicted about. A history carries authority and this field clearly needs that authority.
Very much so. And at the same time.
We don't want a book that's so authoritative as to not allow, you know, for this field to develop further and for for its openings to remain visible.
So we have to strike a balance here. And that's why he made the point about the horizontal collateral, the vertical connexions.
So it's not just a canonical chronological history that starts at the beginning and then takes you through to the end.
And we don't have chapters focussing on individual authors, but rather, you know,
we're always trying to encourage the contributors to interconnect different writers, but also between different chapters.
So in a sense, we should be saying this. It's going to be quite a messy history because it is a messy history that we're seeking to represent.
So in a sense, it's about undoing the authority at the same time as one is constructing it.
And that's why I think this quote up here is quite interesting.
I trim in half, bang in the middle, she says. Despite all the desperate internal attempts to separate, contain and mend, categories always leak.
And so that quote speaks to the requirement that we face as academics to establish categories.
Right? That's what we learn and that's what we teach.
We work within categories, but we also question them, we reform them and we need to move beyond them where meaning making animals.
We cannot but categorise crayon boxes even once we remain aware that they are of necessity, provisional at best.
So trim in half. Of course, our efforts not just eternal,
but also desperate because we rely on and indeed depend upon categorisation discrimination on distinguishing one from the other.
And as we differentiate between different texts and offers, different genres and formats,
different entry periods and so forth, we insert separations, we introduce rifts and we create spaces of containment.
And these are, you know, politically speaking, quite dangerous acts, which at the same time we think and feel need to happen.
And so it's good to actually see that Minnehaha reminds us catagories always leak.
We may wish to amend them, but there is leakage, there is seepage.
And so, you know, I'm personally quite taken by the notion of porosity here.
Right. I think we need to emphasise the leaks of those categories inasmuch as we need the categories.
Yes, but the porosity, the leakage is is crucial.
And that also refers to the core terms.
Black and Asian, black, British and British, Asian.
You've already indicated, you know, there was a point in history when the Caribbean artist movement was very strong,
that, politically speaking, black was used in an overarching sense.
And it was, you know, covering people and writing, you know, black and Asian provenance.
That moment we've moved beyond. But we don't now have to sort of pure and terms black and Asian that are transparent, quite to quite the contrary.
So these very terms are messy as well.
Now, you promised that I talk about how the book is structured and used up at least half my time, if not more.
And so I should quickly say that we have three sections in the book and they are you won't be surprised to hear chronological sections.
That's three sections. The first. Yeah. So the first part of the book, you know, it's just five chapters, but it covers the 18th and the 19th century.
It's called early formations. And then we quickly move over to the 20th century.
And we've got and we're very happy to have two contributors from that massive part part series called Uneven Histories,
Changing Landscapes in the 20th century. And the third part, basically, the 21st century is represented here, effluvium.
And I'll find a title, if I can remember it for some reason.
Here is writing contemporary Britain first, ethnic and transnational imaginary.
And it's interesting, I think we both agree that, you know,
this this third title here writing Contemporary Britain Post Ethnic and transnational imaginary.
Yes, it is how we see the present moment, but we see Connexions from that present moment way back to the eighteenth century.
So even our three sections, we emphasise, you know, the messiness, the interconnectedness which will be challenging for the readers.
And we'll have to make that introduction how this all this is intended.
That's the only way in which we thought we could conceive of a history like that.
There is no precedent for this work. So we want to open this up rather than foreclose.
And that's our way of of doing so, you need some sort of structure, obviously you have to organise this,
but we were emphasising the openings and the overlaps as much as the distinctions, the divisions in this work.
And I want to return to the theme of the of your seminar,
great writers inspire at home and the question of what reading and writing might do for Equiano.
It was formative. It was clearly formative that he learnt how to read and to write.
And he was able to obtain freedom and, you know, move beyond his existence as a slave.
I think more generally speaking, reading the after reading sets has the potential to set all of us free.
And the act of writing is, ideally speaking, a transformative act.
Right. Making wealth was up there on the screen when Ellacott introduced all of us.
I think writing I think books literally creates worlds.
It doesn't just allow us to see the world through the eyes of someone else.
It literally contribute contributes to the transformation of the world we live in.
So reading and writing, from my perspective are political acts and certainly fact Rihanna,
who wrote this book as a petition to achieve the abolition, you know, to end the slave trade.
You know, he saw his writing as a political act. And it was you know, he was successful, of course, at the end of the day.
Now, I haven't checked my time, but it may be a moment to pass.
And can I just say one thing report,
which is just simply because I saw the connexion to actually when I was sitting there watching that video you showed at the beginning, of course,
the last point Mark made about writing wills, of course,
that's what that I want to see that video in terms of the different imaginative worlds that you might enter through reading.
I will hand over, but I will say one more thing, and that is we're writing we're constructing this history of black,
British and British Asian writing, but all those texts are more than what we allow them to be.
So that's another point of connexion that we're that we're reading.
They are, in a sense, trans local text. They gesture elsewhere.
So what at home is specifically for the texts that are being covered in that book, you know, needs to be established for each and every text.
So they point to the subcontinent, they point to Africa, they point to the Caribbean,
and they cannot be read, ignoring that sort of didactic quality of pointing out, of reaching out.
And of course, they relate to Britain just as well. But this is another element of this messiness, I think, that we're confronted with.
But it's part of the excitement of those texts. I'm going to say that I'm a little bit like a cuckoo in a kind of nest.
You know, I got one great big fat kookery I'm going to miss, partially because I'm coming from it in a completely different way.
I did ask I did ask in my defence market, Susheela, should I really be here?
And they said, yeah, just come it. Because my research has really been about publishing.
History has been about how manuscripts are transformed into books, and I take nothing for granted.
So I'm quite interested in the edifices or the infrastructures that support the circulation of text as books, but not simply ideas,
but in actually producing a text for publication and producing as a book you siff if you like, that whole field.
So I'm really interested in circulation of Texas books. I'm interested in editors editing texts, not taking the text itself for granted.
So for example, the case of Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish editing of Raymond Carver, all of a sudden that was a real bombshell to my students.
How much intervention is made on a text that you take for granted as simply being a floral kind of signature?
So I'm interested in publishers, critics, the marketplace, the literary and educational,
and how they shape audiences, how these shaped books are, how body shape readers publishing.
First of all, I'd have to say is a commercial industry. It's a business and has commercial if it's run on long commercial lines.
So I'm thinking about books here as cultural and aesthetic and educational objects.
But I'm also thinking about books as commodities, if you like, within that kind of literary ecology of letters.
So generally, to put my cards up front, I'm interested in why certain books are published in certain books aren't published.
What are the many hands of gone to shaping a book rather than just the one single romantic hand that you presume is the author?
I'm interested in things like editing. I'm interested in designers that actually those pretextual elements that package a book that
shape the way you might react or whether or not you might pick the book up in the first place.
I'm most interested in how books are talked about, how discourses are used to open up books as readers and these might be through,
I suppose these discourses might be generated through the marketplace,
editing, reviewing, reviewing cultures there might be generated through educational institutions like here or like the universities we all represent,
or they might be generated by formal aesthetic concerns. But all these open up books and certain kinds of ways.
And I also want to think about the strengths of the limitations of each particular way of interacting with a book along those lines.
I'm also interested, I suppose, in what extra textual factors impact on the way the book is put together or the way it is read.
So I'm going to start my short presentation.
I hope this is going to be short with some of the four areas that I'm quite concerned with, I'm quite interested in.
And these four areas are, I suggest, distinct, but are also overlapping.
And then I'm going to provide, I suppose, some examples of the ways you might think about that.
So first of all, I think you need supportive networks and you need if you don't have supportive networks, you need patronage.
So, for example, in the 30 minute broadcast programme that I think you, Mark, refer to Carabine Voices between 1943 and 1958.
Now, that really helped encourage a little ecology and ecology for literature on the Anglophone
Caribbean islands by putting literature on a professional and institutional footing.
And I think that's quite important to me, the professional and institutional footing.
First of all, by acting as a paying publisher, writers are paid for the stuff that actually they sent to to London,
which was then broadcast and read up on the BBC,
when especially at a time when there were very few places that actually paid for writing on the islands itself.
So so one can think of Caribbean voices as growing that kind of cultural infrastructure for writing locally,
but also writing also those transnational exchanges between London and the islands.
So enabling a kind of literary connexion to to occur between London and the islands for both sides of the divide that was mutually beneficial.
And it's not only a one way traffic now the gravitation to London of that generation writers who are now part of a Caribbean canon,
but also in some ways part of a black British canon.
And one can think of Samuel Selvam, George Lamming at committal Hoser, Andrew Salkey, Jean Sperry, Wilson Harris, all of those.
The arrival of those writers was in part driven by a belief that you could work professionally as a writer.
And I think this is important that you can make a living. Professionally, as a writer and be part of an intellectual, an established network,
and so a Caribbean voice is in some ways became the magnet for four, if you like, that generation of writers.
Now, there were other organisations like the transcription centre who did that for Africa,
but there's a much more checkered and much more troubled history with transcriptions and who was in some ways funded by the CIA.
And everyone knew that. And it was open with Soyinka actually writing, you know, yeah, my list is going to be passed.
And I see your CIA friends, too. That's done.
And he said the London publishing at that time in the 1950s and in the early 60s seemed open to new writing,
publishing, and it prompts, I suppose, diners at very famous comment.
Everyone actually quotes that it was easier to for a little time, it was easier to be a black writer in London and get your pub,
get your book published and reviewed than it was for white writer. Whatever you think of that statement, and I don't think is entirely true.
It's quite interesting that that kind of sentence,
that there were new possibilities of all these small publishers that were publishing, if you like, writers.
So, for example, Alan Wingate, who was essentially Andrew Deutche publishing some Salvin 11 get wealth, not Ellenwood,
but under Andrew Deutche publish, of course, V.S. Naipaul, Michael Anthony and a whole generation of those kinds of writers.
And also one has to think about that, networks of support and patronage in the literary establishment in Britain at that time,
particularly in the London literary establishment.
So you think of the famous figures like Walter Allan of Frances Windom, who worked with Deutsch as a reader for a while.
Alan Ross for the London Magazine will improve, who read as a reader for Jonathan Cape and actually advocated the publication of Derek Walcott.
So there's a whole, if you like, network that one has to unearth and a shaping of connexions in that way.
Now, patronage is to a significant extent support on someone else's terms and the reasons for that support.
And I've written about it and people have kind of ranged from, I suppose, genuine curiosity, exoticism.
That's a huge factor in that literature also as part of an international and global network in the Republic of Letters.
And again, this is really important. There is a shared investment in the legacy of modernism.
So a lot of writers that came over and reading acceptance letters by John
Stoll's were the on someone like Kobu Braithwaite and locating him as part of,
if you like, a tradition of literary modernism. And also that's a feeling, I suppose,
that there is a real schools market out there that these writers could very well publish to and earn huge profits for these publishers, if you like.
So the educational reform, educational curriculum was to move in the direction of cultural independence and decolonisation.
Well, here was a killing to be made and hence the rise of the educational publishers.
Serious. Now, education is so here I come to my second second kind of block education.
Literature is read by the general public for leisure purposes, for pleasure and detainment.
But literature is also edifying. It's also educational, is instructive.
It opens up all kinds of ethical aesthetic agendas.
This, of course, all of these affect why books are published and why we go to read these particular books in the 1960s and 70s,
which my work mostly is located in the rise of serious that I can remember as a post graduate student,
as a student, the African Rights Series, The Caribbean Writer Series Three Crowns with Matheran and Oxford University Press with Longman,
Caribbean with the Caribbean Drumbeat Series.
Now, all of these were really also important in the UK as much as they were important elsewhere in the colonies,
because schools and universities teach literature. This is a way of reaching, if you like, a certain strata in and shaping your audience.
Much of the original motivation for the series had to do with the profits to be made from the
numbers the numbers game that a independent situation might reap profits for you of your publisher.
There was also a kind of demand for much more local material as the educational reform hit,
if you like, these kind of colonies at the point of decolonisation.
But I suppose what I'm saying here is that textbook publishing literature,
as textbooks sell in vast numbers, they outsell the kind of mainstream trade publication.
And you have to think about that. And this shapes, if you like, the way we have a sense of how we invest in the literary tradition.
In some ways, I think.
Educational publishing is like an iceberg, the general trade publishes only the top of it, and then there's a vast array of how books are adopted.
Her books are anthologies, how material is kind of harvested for schools and educational use.
OK, here I come to my other. But OK, backtrack a bit how the series, the educational series evolved or seised.
The documentation from the archives also show a much more considered,
a much more reflective and nuanced and also much more contradictory approach to publishing, even when they were motivated by, if you like, profits.
So these multinationals were also in some ways open to different kinds of writing, though it was a debate about aesthetic value,
about how you judge other cultures when you don't come from that particular place.
There was also a belief, if you like, in the intrinsic value of the work.
So they're not simply kind of harvesting objects to, if you like, repackage for markets abroad.
OK, I want now to think about my third strand, which is the context of literary ecological matters and multiculturalism, which speaks to,
I suppose, much more to the stuff that we were addressing here in in black British and Asian writing multiculturalism in the 1980s,
military and literary education publishing histories have really been intimately
linked with teaching and institutionalisation of colonial and black British writing.
Black, British and Asian writing decolonisation led to, if you like,
a mainstream commercial publishers seeking to take advantage of much more locally relevant literary educational material abroad.
But this meant that the series that service other parts of the world also became available in the UK for purchase in Britain,
particularly in the 80s in the push towards multicultural educational curricula agendas in the London,
particularly in the in the early 80s, then overseen by the London Education Authority.
And of course, the multicultural. The push to was much more inclusive.
Culturally diverse kind of syllabus came from the racial disturbances, the nineteen seventies,
late 70s and early 80s, all the way through about how much you had to do more.
And on the back of that, you could see this one report, a 1985 Education for All and Dorson idea of a much more inclusive educational curricula.
And of course, Susheela, you know, she's here as a historical person as well.
I mean, she was part of the Association of the Teaching of Caribbean,
African and Asian Literatures that was formed in 1978 to advance the education of British public in the works of African,
Caribbean and Asian origin, really in a very coordinated, organised manner to a true booklist.
They published lots of booklist.
They had staged conferences, they comply of schools, they submit it recommendations, exam boards, they organise meetings, workshops.
This is really quite interesting time.
And I kind of state I'm reading some of her little notes in the archives that I work with, and I think that's really funny as well.
What do I not know if you OK on the other side of the equation.
In the meantime, in the UK, there were small independent presses such as New Beacom Bogalay Overture, and these were the small,
locally, politically driven, but also aesthetically driven small presses which saw education as crucial.
We culture as a form of education, the need to know, the need to address those kinds of absences in mainstream culture as a new beacon.
And Bhogle Publishing also saw publishing the ownership of the means of production, i.e. that you're not publishing on someone else's terms,
but you publishing what you what your communities really want instead of actually always being mediated by mainstream publishers.
This was a way of building direct relationship with readers, plugging the gaps in a white uninflected cultural and historical curriculum.
So John Leros, Jessica Huntley and they started the radical book fairs in London, transformed bookshops into spaces for local communities.
And they could all be situated within, I suppose, an activist mode of publishing.
So publishing is a form of activism rather than publishing simply for commerce.
You always have to have commerce there.
But you can see the other kinds of forms of publishing as well that are that inflect commerce in different kinds of ways because,
of course, consciousness raising was so important in this particular period.
And you can also look at this as part of the feminist movements and the anti-racist movements in the eighties.
Independence is one key to the range of. Issues that arose in this particular period in the 80s, you think a mango cheeba kitchen table,
only a breath, all of these were formative in my particular time as a student, as a post graduate student.
So there's a shared agenda between feminism, multiculturalism and diversity of the time.
So now I'm going to come back to readers. I'm going to pose a question.
I'm not going to answer it because I don't actually know the most appropriate way of answering.
And this is a question about audience readers and aesthetics.
And my last section, I like to end quite soon, possibly in writing a multicultural writing is more mainstream than it used to be.
And I think this is a fact and this is a result of various campaigns interventions.
It doesn't simply happen. You know, Susheela organisation at Kelts was very instrumental in those days, various campaigns against marginality.
But the presence of post-colonial text in the much and also the presence of post-colonial text itself has an effect on
the Karenin by making it much more diverse educational and literary canon that we all teach and have an investment.
And well, what is the impact?
Well, some of the impact on audiences and niche markets and readers are actually very contradictory, I think, for readers.
These books provide access to other cultures,
and one has a kind of sense of why certain writers are taken out and feted and certain kinds of ways might
also be to do with the feeling of exoticism of those cultures that we have very little knowledge of.
And this might be a way of transporting you. Let's not say that's in itself a bad thing, but what you do with that thing is something else altogether,
because, of course, there's a lovely book that I only just picked up, but it was published some time ago.
Market Aesthetics by Elena cIass, I think I'm pronouncing it Wrongest is a Spanish name.
And she she says that part of the driver for some of this is a kind of a demand for a reading
relationship with these writers and these texts as one of knowledge and one of intimacy that you create,
if you like, a real sense of intimacy with the with the reader and the niche market that you are actually promoting your text to,
because the book's value is then measured and somewhat problematically, not all programmatically,
but somewhat problematically by questions of authenticity, its ability to speak culturally authoritatively about the cultures that it represents.
This might be one way of thinking back to that night in the 1980s,
debates about the burden of representation and the culture and being a culture spokesman for the particular books that you're
allowed to say you are supposed to represent in the fiction that is is on the table for educational institutions like us.
And I work in a university that these books,
these books become teachable is another interesting way of thinking about it in questions in relation to questions of access.
Are there literary?
They should be literary because we are within these particular cultural institutions and education to what are the modes of teaching these.
But they become teachable and certain kinds of ways, not only in terms of aesthetics, but other kinds of ways,
i.e. kind of political agendas or cultural agendas, and within a kind of post-colonial influence,
ethical agenda that they signify literary resistance.
This is in some ways a demand of readers going to those books, teachers teaching those books,
and then also writers finding that they have to address the question of literary resistance oppositional to,
if you like, kind of forms of political and sexual authority. Now, where does this leave us?
What I already know the answer to those kinds of it's a very complicated,
very contrary, contradictory and enormously kind of interesting to read to talk about.
So, you know, I believe leave this and invite your kind of comments on these areas.
So, like Dale, I also have this sense that my chapter in the S.O.P collection might seem to fit incongruously with the themes of this workshop series,
particularly in terms of that entanglement between readership, identity and writing.
And I say this because my analysis is not entirely bound by literature, books and textualism.
My chapter examines the genre of poetry, a form which functions between differing sensorial modes through sight, sound and feeling.
It's not just the text in the writing that constitutes the genre, but more importantly,
the sonic affectations of the words forged through Afro Caribbean sounds of reggae and post independent Jamaica.
The DUP poet composes verses based on the inherent beat of the words.
The rhythm of reggae would come to create a euphonious poetic practise that focussed on crafting words as politicised musical cadence,
whether on the page and performance. Whereas original music through the interrogation of three influential black British dead poets,
Lyndon Johnson steamed into Integris and Benjamin Zephaniah,
I traced the means by which these poets cultivate Sonic Solidarity's between black and Asian communities in the 1970s and 1980s.
The noisiness of the poetry, coupled with the text, creates the condition for auditory alliances.
In these sensorial spaces, Johnson incorporates the chants of the Asian youth movements.
Come what may, we are here to stay.
Zephaniah fuses classical Indian music with drum and bass, while Briese manages to find a way to make sound give birth.
Because of the importance of morality, the sense of hearing,
the notion of reading and even writing becomes a complicated terrain and this multimodal genre.
Who are the readers of poetry of Johnson, Zephaniah and Briese?
Can we even speak about readers?
If the form of the text necessarily moves beyond notation and text duality, it might be more appropriate to think of this readership as an audience,
since the poetries often and articulation of demonstration and protest it has
at times seemed to be a genre suited for a distinctive group or audience.
As Stewart-Brown has argued, the duty of the poet is to voice the concerns of the community.
He or she becomes the voice of popular discontent in ways that are exclusive to the experience
of that community due to civic qualities and play with forms of vernacular speech.
Poetry indeed appears to speak solely to those communities signified in the sonorous bassline of the poems,
while the imminence of the politics of poetry is crucial.
I want to suggest in contradistinction that its various modes of enunciation create an artistic form that is at its best, actually transcendent.
This is why, as a journalist William Tenny Fearne noted in an interview with Carol Phillips,
even French audiences know all the words to Lyndon Johnson's verses.
In other words, the so-called readership of poetry radically shifts and is rarely exclusive, in part because the poetry exists in multiple forms.
Take, for instance, Johnson's poem. It read In England.
The poem is dedicated to George Lindow, who was wrongfully arrested for robbing a Bradford betting office in August 1977.
His imprisonment would eventually lead to the lengthy free George Lindow campaign, in which Johnson played a crucial role.
In April of 1978, with over 300 protesters gathered at the police station,
Bradford Johnson, armed with a megaphone, amplified his verses to the crowd.
It, dressed in England, has many material lives. It is literally a protest first voiced on the steps of a police station soon after.
In the same year, it first appeared in print and the radical magazine raised today and subsequently released on LP Dread Blood.
It featured again in Johnson's third collection of poetry. England is a [INAUDIBLE].
In 1980, each version of the poem, whether at a demonstration in a political magazine on a music record or book of poetry,
represents the intersection of differing readerships and audiences.
Those who listen, read, watch and feel the words can be engaged politically, artistically, locally, nationally and globally.
Thinking through the specific performative aspects of poetry, the words themselves can even be irretrievable.
As Walter Ong has suggested, sound exists only when it is going out of existence.
Each readership then attests to the complex multivalent and ephemeral material histories of the verses.
These histories incorporate not only distinctive mechanisms of writing, but also the technologies and the.
Body experience of Sound It Dread in England was republished in 2002 and Johnson's Penguin Modern Classic collection with revolutionary friend,
making him the first black poet and second living poet to have a modern classics text.
Was this the moment that poetry became great writing for an anti-establishment genre that's
been described by various critics and collections as rage and belligerent overstatement,
tedious jabber and shrill denunciation? Its imprint as a classics seemed an odd move.
Even Johnson was surprised. I wondered. He tells us, if it was some kind of plot to undermine my street cred.
Johnson's induction into the classic series provoke conversations about what constitutes great or in this case, canonical writing.
Can a form of writing that does not even privilege the page count?
To my mind, the answer? Simple, of course it can. Great writing manages to somehow transcend categories and genres.
Great writers mock function at the limits of and often obliterate boundaries.
We see the most profoundly paradoxical version of this with Johnson's classics tax.
As a poet who's dedicated to specific local issues and who explicitly writes against hierarchies of taste,
culture and methods of making meaning in the literary realm, Johnson somehow connects beyond what we might think to be the boundaries of his work.
The multimodality of poetry has everything to do with this connexion.
Ironically, then, with this genre in mind, great writing can include texts that have significant extra textual lives.
Writers like Johnson are great precisely by working against this categorical moniker altogether.
It is through the various iterations of these verses that a constellation of utterances form which
entangled the lives of black writers used in the 1970s with young French Arab concertgoers in the 1990s.
French audiences know all the words to Johnson's verses because the localised sociopolitical context represented
on the page through the voice and in the music clairvoyant Liebeck unexpected forms of identification,
the greatness of Linton, Kwesi Johnson and the genre of poetry in general,
counterintuitively lies in the latent connexions embedded in the artistry that have yet to come.
This is a form of transcendence and futurity that cannot exist without the synaesthetic understanding of concretise context and material lives.
My task then here is really to think about this idea of claiming the centre the way in which British,
black and Asian cinema drama, television and new media have actually penetrated the mainstream.
And I think there are some very, very serious questions that need to be answered in that regard.
A lot of this is pushed onto the 2002 moment with the huge success of Bend It Like Beckham,
which has a direct lineage to more arthouse aesthetics of My Beautiful Laundrette that have been transformed and fed into a very,
very different kind of direction, colliding with each other.
So their attention has only recently been paid to the production of black and Asian British writing for stage film Radio-Television.
The first decade of the 21st century has seen an upsurge in these output's by writers from Asian, black,
British backgrounds and increased recognition in the mainstream and particularly thinking here about what it means
for these texts to be produced for mainstream audiences and to be consumed by mainstream audiences as well.
So, as I say, 2002, particularly for British Asian filmmaking, was a huge here.
Similarly, the staging of a triptych of plays in 2003 by Kwame played along the amylase kitchen fix up and Statement of Regret,
also marked a very, very important cultural moment.
And it's perhaps the first moment where the audiences at the National Theatre started to exponentially diversified.
This has led some commentators to claim that the increased success of these
works has significantly shifted the way in which Britain conceives of itself
as a nation and has led some to consider this breakthrough as a moment of arrival for black and Asian British productions and cultural mainstream.
That's very much the law of the land in in 2005,
which is the Blair moment as well with this wonderful multicultural nation here is expressing
outrage on our own screens on our stage that pat ourselves on the shoulder and carry well,
the law of the land now is very,
very different is an assertion that is increasingly being challenged, especially by actors from black and minority ethnic backgrounds,
Idris Elba and Henry in particular,
who are campaigning for more diversity and for an increase in roles for black British acting talent on British screens.
And there is still also obviously enormous problems with the lack of colour-blind casting in theatre, especially.
What then is interesting is that popular continuing dramas such as EastEnders and The Daily Casualty and Coronation Street feature
Asian black British characters much more organically than as we see them sometimes perhaps in cinema or in on on on the stage.
It is also true to say that the number of writers from Asian and black British backgrounds writing for these continuing dramas is proportionally low.
So what then is at stake for for black and Asian British stories to be told in the mainstream and how we might we might consume them?
As I say, drama, film are collaborative ventures and collaborative endeavours.
So we already again also face the challenge of classification when we're looking at these films.
Think about My Beautiful Laundrette, written by hand of Crazy, but directed by Stephen Frears.
Can we consider it an Asian British film? Do you consider it purely on subject matter, the writer?
But what then happens to the role of the director? Or what about the Windrush musical, The Big Life 2004,
a co-production between Central Stratford East and then lokendra brought into the West and which very successfully round at the Apollo Theatre.
But it was written by an English dramatist composer. It was directed by British Tarabin director Kundun.
So in other words, to be considered a black or Asian British cultural product.
Is Storen subject matter more important than the writer?
And what then about our engagement as spectators reader with this?
Do these productions challenge the primary position of the writer as the push into the mainstream
then is premiss increasingly on a cross pollination that combusts such binary distinctions?
Perhaps these works need to be considered through this. By the prism of collaboration, by focussing on creative process,
how black and Asian British stories are actually presented to mainstream audiences through a range of media.
So if we start to take account of these creative and organisational collaborations,
which are increasingly at the forefront of bringing black and Asian British stories to mainstream audiences,
perhaps a more nuanced picture can be drawn around the successes and failures of
these endeavours in their questioning of notions of British national identity.
This is very interesting to see the Bend It Like Beckham as a film was hugely successful in 2002
but was a massive flop when it was turned into a musical in 2015 run for less than 12 months.
There is one of the few flops that Sonia Friedman is a very, very successful first producer,
has had some of the first decade of the new millennium marks and increased visibility
of these productions in Britain's cultural mainstream that seek to engage a broader,
more diverse audience. The second decade of the 21st century offers perhaps a more sobering perspective,
with a distinct reduction of plays by black and Asian British playwrights on the major national stages and broadcasting
outlets of the U.K. and a representation of Asian and black British life that often panders to stereotypes.
And the one that is often cited in regard to this citizen come in an earlier, earlier phase.
Also, the Koumas number 42,
which was sort of a follow on for the from for Muslim from the same team that did the very radical goodness gracious me in the late 1990s.
Here, though, from accusations of Uncle Thomas and in particular with not the major falling out between themselves and each other as well.
In some ways,
then this whole questioning of a burden of representation lies at the heart of the discussions that I that I want to stage in my chapter,
which to me remain very,
very valid in relation to the cultural productions that we have and the way in which black and Asian British lives are presented to us on on screen.
And I'm wondering to some extent how far the collaborative process can actually help us to further nuance some of these representations.
And an interesting case study for that are actually some of the dramas we have seen on our screens, whether it was the period drama of Small Island,
it was turned into life is not ha ha hee hee, which is an adaptation of Marseille's novel or the most one of the most recent ones.
And W and I think N.W. is a very, very interesting case in point.
Again, a screenplay writer who is white British,
collaborating with a British writer to adapt the novel for television and hear
why this is a narrative that has black British lives very much at the centre.
It is also one that is very much a state of the nation story in that microcosm of of North London.
It is in some ways can be read as a prose post credit crunch, crunch, austerity.
Drunk at the same time, and this is very much the kind of aesthetic that it that it took in its in its representations to conclude
really that these are really a number of provocations and questions that I that I wanted to push out with how,
you know, the terminology and that some of the questions around definitions that we're that we're all that we're all happening.
While there have been, of course, these very high profile successes,
I think those successes also need to be need to be questioned and particularly
what impact some of these successes actually have on the writers as well.
And this is really a question that emanates from this increasing visibility.
So if there is a push for mainstream recognition and is enabled, perhaps on the one hand, monuments,
sometimes more stereotypical representation, and has it really done enough to pull the writer in from the margins?
Is it here perhaps where a dark underside can also be detected?
The black British writers only asked to write on black subjectivity.
Can we really consider a sense of arrival as a form of success,
of having claimed the mainstream while we actually perpetuating similar kinds of stereotypes?
The case study here that is very interesting is that of the writer Avel Rogers,
who was one of the writers of the successful 2008 miniseries Baby Father,
who noted in a 2014 interview with The Independent that the series made her fall into a deep,
dark pigeonhole that as a consequence meant her losing out on commissions before baby
father and the success she would write a long running continuing dramas like the bill.
After that, all of this dried up. Suddenly, she would only be offered material to adapt on black British subjects, nothing else.
But she wasn't interested in doing how this contemporary Britain engaged the African, African, Caribbean community living in Britain and vice versa.
How do cultural productions articulate the problem of the black British community in multicultural Britain?
And its in addressing these kinds of questions that perhaps a combination of a change
in perception within Britain and a more conscious sense of its multicultural,
multi-ethnic self has allowed for these players to reach broader audiences.
But perhaps it's not done enough to challenge persistent stereotypes.
That's what the TV show. We'd love to open it up to the floor for questions.
Yeah. They need to talk to us.
So that's what I thought the panel was very fascinating. Thank you very much and congratulations on this really important project.
And secondly, these are connected.
And if they're going to be a digital form of the history, because if so, with that help, with the kind of leakage, seepage,
the sense of not wanting to contain things and, you know,
because you can play it much more easily than you're likely to see page fifty four or whatever.
And and secondly, what do you do about the categories of black and Asian British when there might be dialogue with
nonblack and non Asian British writing possessed another whole sort of compartmentalisation.
It is. Who would like to respond to something?
Yeah, but I mean, I don't really have a cogent response to that.
I certainly am nostalgic for the time in which black included everything.
I like the sense that. But the idea of black is a much more complex Stickles.
It is much more complicated story that if you ask someone where they're from, you know, there's a huge narrative behind it.
It's not simple anymore. I also we also publish was published a series of essays on firm little magazine
I run during the University Review of the Arts and the essay today in China.
This was an essay on African-American representation.
And I can't quite remember the title now because it's kind of going up in my head,
but it's to also maybe foreground the sense of black as complicated, but also performative.
So there is no self evident category, if you like, that we take to be kind of a product of the way you look, etc.
And part of the debate in that essay was, well, Barack Obama, but huge Salon debate about that.
Well, you can't call him a black president because he is he is in some ways has white ancestry.
So there's a kind of interesting debate about black in that term.
And I think the complications matter and they should be that maybe on the other add to that.
Thanks very much. Two questions, which I think are wonderful.
You also asked the first point was about, you know, digital format and we have talked about it.
We're not sure it's going to happen. We see that it would be very, very valuable.
On the one hand, it has to do with, you know, does S.O.P want to do it?
In which form would it take? The other problem might well be one would have to maintain it.
One would have to keep adding to it. If it was, say, something like a website that complements the book.
I did, yes, we would have a caucus of text. But, you know, up to it, I think.
Would it be available digitally? Yes. Yes, it will be available.
I think we should an e-mail that will be the case that we also talked about doing it,
particularly with some of these material histories where, I mean,
do you have lists and lists of organisations or network, some that lasted one year on that list of 10,
you know, kind of disappeared, but were quite important for different reasons.
And one of the contributors is not here, that they had a wonderful list of all of these university brading who was.
Yes, Necla, who is virtually the at minister.
And we wanted to create some underserve that like a discography, some kind of resource.
But I think in the end, we decided it was one leg too far for us at the moment with 42 contributors.
And yeah, I don't have a 79. Right. Yeah, but we would like to do it in ideal terms and maybe and maybe it can still happen in the future.
And the other question, of course, you've answered it already, but I wanted to add it did come out of Julian's talk already.
You know, it's going to remain open, really how the Singapore is black and Asian are being used.
We're going to have to talk about it.
But it historicist those terms in the introduction that invite the individual contributors to, you know, contextualise it for the specific chapters.
But there won't be you know, you can consider Colin MacGinnis, although he's a white writer because of the stories he tells.
But we're certainly not going to say that the matics of the cultural product are the defining element and I think a mistake.
I made it quite clear that, you know, the generic specificity comes in and what we can do with it, I don't know.
You know, so it's a question and I think it has to remain a question for it to be productive.
So that performance for.
It's really helpful here and at the same time, because these are political terms, so you cannot just be playful and postmodern about them.
So, you know, that's that's the tension that we spell out and under which we operate.
The question won't go away, will remain a question. It's difficult in my chapter in particular, because in terms of the history of film production,
Asian cinema, Asian Birgersson develops on a very different trajectory to black British cinema.
There's a real split between that, whereas in in drama it does emerge out of that 1970s moment and consideration of an idea
of blackness actually that is shared across communities that are political moment.
So, yes, even within a chapter, you see those debates. I think it was quite interesting in the symposium that the that we had in Winston last year,
that all of us who were writing chapters were not exactly wrestling with the same question of how
to frame black and Asian together and whether this was was was even still a tenable proposition.
Actually, yes. Which is a huge argument that I just to point to that on the controversy of this Idris Elba as gorilla, the series,
the TV series where people are quite upset that there was a South Asian woman activist and and the director was defending it.
And through this this notion of political blackness where the black woman so this question of what black constitutes is very,
very important and really controversial still. And as everyone's been saying, everyone grapples with it in different ways, which is why I think it's.
Yeah, it was done. Yeah, thanks for a great panel, that's really interesting.
I'm looking forward to reading the book as a whole. I had a question well, really maybe as a comment, but I'd really like to respond to something.
And then also kind of I was already thinking it. And then it came up in the video, which I missed before,
was the kind of all of these chapters that we've heard from kind of give expose the fallacy of reading as a as a kind of solitary act,
whether it's in, you know, the kind of kind of networks and the kind of and kind of social activism stuff.
These are real places with people mingling together and girls comfortable, whether, you know,
whether it's the dancehall and the protest march or whether it's the of the theatre.
And I mean, maybe this isn't literature, but it is writing and writing has to be read.
Right. So there's something about reading as a as I, I don't know.
I feel like I grew up with inherited an idea of reading as a solitary activity from somewhere.
And I don't know as clearly that's not true. So I wondered if you wanted to respond to that was at least you call it an activity,
which is a good thing, because often some people consider reading to be something that's almost passive.
You're doing nothing. You just sitting there or you're just you're just reading a book. And it's seen also as part of part of leisure time.
But actually that is precisely that kind of intellectual engagement,
that kind of idea of opening up a world of inhabiting perhaps also sometimes a different skin colour comes into that.
And taking yourself out of that out of that comfort zone becomes very, very important, I think.
I mean, perhaps I overstated it a little bit too much in terms of the idea of a shared spectatorship,
because ultimately it is still solitary insofar as it's your you and your own engagement with whatever happens on stage or on the screen.
But yet it it becomes something different by having other people sitting next to you.
Maybe it's replicated in the form of book clubs where, where,
where books are concerned or or in classrooms or in classrooms or or even in
through audio books and podcasts in which increasingly used in people's homes,
for example. So yeah, I think thing is a really important point actually making that.
Yeah, that's a fantastic question. I think in terms of poetry, though, it's always been communal.
And so that's not an odd concept at all with the genre.
I guess my work has tried to. I quoted Stuart Brown, who's very dark.
Poetry is about one specific community, and he's right in many ways it's localised verses and they don't tend to,
you would think, don't tend to move beyond a certain group, not an individual.
But my work I'm trying to kind of move beyond that. It's not just one group, but multiple groups in ways that may not be noted.
So a lot of dark poems will specifically note groups, institutions, ethnicities, whatever.
But there's there's a kind of latent identification that, as I mentioned with the French concert that Arabs use,
are drawing from, for instance, that isn't noted in the text itself.
So I think as a genre, it is inherently communal. And and I guess it's up to the readers, critics, audience members,
who you never know which direction identification will go to expand those boundaries.
I mean, I don't really have much to use that at all in some ways, but I would say writing is is also collaborative.
The book is also collaborative, is not simply the author.
Whatever we take the authors to be, let us say, and we just can't talk about that.
We cover many, many authors in this history whom I imagine have readers who are solitary and read in the more traditional way.
I mean, obviously, Paul. But it seems to me that your question is also interesting because of broadcast programmes,
if you hear radio and that's also a shared experience, you know, kind of your voice is being the kind of prime example of that.
That's a shared response to a right of a performance of a reading on radio that people talked about and kind of actively commented on.
And you can see some of that. And this is also a platform for both carried voices.
And this serves as a platform for me modernity's and yes, indeed,
to formulate a new way of writing because they could not publish so easily in mainstream Christian.
So I want to thank you all for that really rich panel.
I have a question I'm trying to formulate that will, I think, ask a question of the last three presenters, but linked to the fray,
the ways that you all framed it in terms of trans local transglobal and the messiness of trying to categorise or even pull this collection together.
So I wondered what would happen if we think about global market like you of inviting us to do and a global audience.
And so one example for that.
In the last presenter, I was thinking about NYU and the other film, the writer for the other four baby father, who said that after that, you know,
I've been pigeonholed and I was thinking about the fact that N.W. could be adapted in the U.K. and
yet it has a global audience and yet the global audience will never get the local context right.
Like I couldn't see, for example, N.W. having a home in the U.S., meaning on screen.
And so I wondered I wondered if you could any of you speak to that question about how this global audience plays into the way that
you're thinking through this sort of British frame that is both at home and yet really trans global in its reach within certain genres.
And then related to that, I think this question is for I mean, probably this question is for you.
And I was thinking about so I found it refreshing to hear the way that Dad was travelling.
And I often hear that on the other side of the pond around hip hop.
And so I wondered, why is it that Dub had the particular resonance that it did with this French and Arab audience,
with the Arab youth that hip hop did or didn't or the ways in which it complements or challenges?
You know, just thinking about the audience in that way. So we've got two two questions that he wants to go on the global one, first of all.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it would find that I mean, someone like HBO actually.
And a lot of I mean, it's quite interesting is that a lot of strong programmes,
particularly because the BBC so strapped for Cash Now productions anyway.
So they already made with, well, transglobal audiences, I guess in mind and not just local audiences,
but I think is also similarly goes for the writers as well.
I mean, Zadie Smith now lives in New York and yet has got and continues to maintain that
real sense of of the local of in the world of Kilbane and its surrounding area.
And she said on the last. This was probably going to be the last novel that she's going to see very much set in that environment.
She's moving to to to do something else now.
But I think just you know, so I think there are different linkages here in terms of your own positioning, your own re-experiencing as a local.
But certainly you don't get a sense that there's a reconfiguration of that space from a detached New York lens, so so that interrelationship remains.
But I think there is also a a connexion of of experience that goes beyond the locals.
To James Proctor, Newcastle was running a very interesting project on on reading groups.
And they were they were based across the globe. But one specifically in Glasgow,
living on an estate that was faced with demolition and the dissolution of community responded extraordinarily well to achieve as things fall apart.
And that that was so that there was a complete and.
The bleep that was happening there, but it felt to them what is happening in that novel was exactly what was happening to them.
So I don't want to overplay here this notion of the universal versus the particular.
But I think there are something that goes beyond that rootedness in the local that allows us to connect with these cultural productions.
And I think also that the global, although again, it may have been described slightly differently, was very much in the 18th century.
In the 19th century, in the early 20th century.
It's really actually post the Second World War in Britain that this idea of the global got narrowed down in most of these writers.
So many of the writers were covering in the book were global travellers imaginatively speaking in terms of who they were.
They were bicultural, bilingual. They looked in several directions at once and these things.
So I guess they kind of got narrowed down after the war.
But I mean, it's so in the sense that global question does I suppose in fact, it's an interesting question across the whole book.
In a way, Equiano travel is a prime example.
I'm just a response, I guess, directly to the question.
The big difference here is that poetry is not interested in the market like other like hip hop would be this notion of selling out.
This really this notion of selling out is a big, big deal. I'm Stuart Brown.
In that article I mentioned, just to be in a book is to sell out as a poet.
Right. So that in itself, Zephaniah has got claims of selling out.
I mean, the conversation expands, I suppose so to Linton refused Island Records.
He has his own company, record label company. So it is fascinating that appeal without those market mechanisms that dub certain dub poets do have.
And I think it just goes back to a foreigner saying that Connexions you wouldn't think would be Connexions are poetry.
In Canada, for instance, is a booming field and a lot fantastic female poets at the moment.
And they're really popular through through through the Internet, through pamphlets, right through word of mouth and through books.
They're fascinating, but they may not have the market support that larger writers or musicians may have.
So it is a little bit of a different ballgame, so to speak.
But it is a fantastic question. And the comparisons are really there was a second question, which I can't remember, but I got I got it.
All right. I thought you were. Yeah, I was just a small addendum to that, I suppose.
Think of the questions. How do you be how do you speak to local readers and local spaces and local places and local readers and yet also be global?
And of course, that's a quite a tricky kind of kettle of fish,
because I think sometimes the valorisation of things that travel easily at the expense of things that are very local is something,
again, that we need to think about quite carefully. So it's not always the case that things that travel well, things that are broadcast well,
things that are picked up by mainstream publishers that are then promoted globally are necessarily the only kind of thing that we ought to look at,
the only kind of literature that actually excels at what it does. And some things don't travel well.
But that's, I think, also a good thing. But in terms of publishing, it's it's really quite interesting now, I think.
I mean, if you look at something like a small press and to my mind it's a small press,
smallish press like people tree in Leeds and they publish out of Leeds,
they publish essentially for an American market and they publish for a Caribbean market.
And Jeremy Archie up from sister and of course, they have American editors or equipment.
All this is in the U.S. So it's quite a strange thing.
What is local and what it's global now. I think it's really much complicated and much more interesting.
I have a very complicated question, which I'm trying to formulate, but before I do that,
many of us in the room know Louise Lane, who right now is trying to finish her thesis on Kwesi Johnson.
And one of the headaches of proofing this thesis has been Clinton's non-standard spelling.
So she had to take the spell check off because dread beat and blood is different for every single kind of incarnation.
It's, you know, so that just to illustrate the non-commercial that you were that you were just touching on and to bring Louise's name into the ring.
So my my question is, I suppose in a nutshell here you have your Cambridge history,
and I'm wondering about the political role that you see, your editors in particular,
I suppose you see it as playing and whether through having that Cambridge imprint and through, if you like,
combining the words Cambridge black and Asian and British, you will be able to speak to sort of canons and processes of canonisation.
Gail touched on this and also syllabuses and processes of syllabus reform.
I mean, it's still the case. And this is one of the drivers behind this series.
It's still the case that in the Oxford English degree,
you can move from week one of the first year to the final week of the final year and not work on or read a single writer of colour,
you know, of any period or any time you really have to go out.
You have to go to, you know, the option papers if you if you kind of want to broaden the curriculum.
So what we wanted one of the questions behind the series was what what happens when, if you like,
an absolutely mainstream reader who perhaps has an Oxford or Cambridge or,
I don't know, UCL degree in literature, in English when they encounter this material?
What what what happens at that point are their process of estrangement,
of alienation, of feeling part of a community or of feeling shut out of a community.
And how can we in some way harness those processes of either feeling part of or feeling alienated and wanting to do something about that to,
you know, work with to widen the curriculum. So.
And surely it will give you a really powerful instrument in putting those, you know, those words Cambridge history, like Asian British to you.
Well, that is a complicated question. I mean I mean, I don't know.
I mean, I, I mean, basically, I'd say, yes, this is the root issues.
I'm a bit I cut out in my presentation was actually about some.
Yes.
Some major universities still actually only having these kinds of writers on the surface as options for regional studies or whatever they call them.
Yes. I mean, I think that quote from any borders, which goes back to the article I wrote in the 1980s, there's no such thing as a lecture.
Yes. That is a whole political issue to do with it. And I think the point really is that we we do actually want to keep it open.
But we do also want to put, if you like, those post-colonial canonical writers in there.
And we've got many of them, of course, alongside perhaps a lot of writers that people have never heard of,
but who are written about properly and critically and in the sense that Galileo was talking about it,
you know, in terms of institutionalising something there on a platform together.
And hopefully that will permeate through.
But that's you know, it is an ongoing that's, you know, constantly ongoing battle, isn't it?
I mean, even even between, you know, the editor. Right.
And so we were having to negotiate some of these chapters, weren't we?
So my take on that wonderful question would be very much in tune with what you've said.
Of course, you know, there are lectures that program's called something like From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf.
Yeah, OK. And that's fair enough. But you need to supplement that from Equiano to Evaristo.
And, you know, you need to supplement Beowulf, you know?
I mean, you have to then, you know, point out the intersection between those mature.
As well, right? So it has to be intertwined, so it's not so much about producing an alienating effect,
which, you know, was contained in your question, but to open up this field,
but to open it up, as you've said, properly and with the appropriate respect and also with the appropriate sort of methodological protocols,
you cannot just, you know, pick up those texts and read them and ignore, you know, their histories, what they stand for, the generic,
you know, specificity with specificity that came up in your two papers today and the material history of how those texts have come about.
So I think, you know, that is what we have or one element of what we hope to achieve.
So, you know, I think it's significant that this book is coming out now and it will highlight writers who've, you know, appeared and disappeared.
So it resurrects voices. I think that's quite important.
What we were at a conference together in to begin probably 20 years ago,
and I gave a paper or kind of correction and the panel was called Indian Literature, and I took offence to that.
Right. But at that time, it's hard to imagine it now. But there was no black is writing at the level of conferences.
So it's quite not good literature. But that time in the academy is of quite a recent provenance.
So it just shows one needs to engage.
I think as a critic with this field, as he was saying, teaching, but also with how, you know, how research is conducted.
And I think, you know, certainly since, you know, names like Salman Rushdie or Zadie Smith,
you know, a lot of mainstream attention has been directed at this field.
It is very selective. It's only a handful of writers that have gotten that sort of attention.
And that needs to be complemented by much more in-depth coverage, which, you know, this history is trying to to provide.
What we're also aware of is, however, that I teach in Germany, as you said in introduction earlier, a lot of the effects of this emphasis on black,
British and French Asian writing has been that writing from Africa, writing from the Caribbean,
writing from Asia more generally, etc., has has sort of retreated into the background.
So that's the other thing. And think got to be treated. Ghosheh so black British writing, which is is quite popular these days.
And in terms of, you know, from a post-colonial perspective, there has to be a balance.
Now, we can't do that within our book. But from a personal aesthetics perspective, that's something we also have to to see.
So the very location you mentioned leads, you know, publishing from the U.K.,
you know, gives those writers a lot of cachet about the rise of, say, in Africa.
Don't, don't. So that's at the back of my mind that it is possible to connect to that.
Go ahead. Is that tricky? I was actually to touch on your your presentation there.
Florida is a tricky negotiation of the centre and the periphery.
I mean, I was when I was reading for the English panel, one of my mediaeval colleagues said to me,
how about how could you possibly read this material, this mediaeval material? Because I couldn't possibly read your post-colonial material.
But you can access it, you know? So it says there's those questions of.
I know. I mean, I know it's it's it's it's you know, it's the same question.
But what it's what it points to is that for some readers,
there are barriers in certain texts or around certain authors names that are lower or higher depending on their cultural familiarity.
But then that I mean, I want to take up two points. But the one the one thing that is important, firstly, that bookshop,
stop segregating the they actually get let's get rid of the specialist sections and suddenly
have an abderrazak going on next to a Graham Greene or a Zadie Smith next to an Alice Smith or,
you know, a sham Salvadorian next to some seven. And actually think about this in a much more global kind of way.
Literature is literature, and I know they sometimes do that. It makes it easier to find.
But actually, I recently went through appropriate for a slightly crazy process and people organised my entire library at home alphabetically.
And it's actually it's quite interesting to see once you get rid of the regions, that different connexions become actually a possibility.
And I'm wondering whether we as educators in the universities, I've had a similar thing since 2013.
I've been pushing at Exeter to try and help diversify the curriculum.
And I've got some good supporters and some good people around me that are willing and open to doing that and perhaps more open.
So in in in the 20th century, modernists and americanus who are willing to do that.
But it's it was initially a very, very hard sell.
But the conversations have become very different as part of that process.
And students in. And actually, the kind of dissertations that they're writing to have become much more globally
engaged rather than what you would have seen when I first arrived back in in 2013.
So it can be done. But I think, as you say,
I think it needs to be a respectful dialogue with with with which you are engaging and meet each other on a level playing field.
And when you suddenly then see the kind of possible connexions between these liturgies,
that's when you start shifting rather than thinking about Daljit Nebraska,
the wonderful poem of coming to Dover, where there's this father on the GCSE anthology,
things like why are these these Indian writers presented as other than I'm other, I'm British.
So my poetry should be seen as British as well as think.
And I think it's that kind of conversation that we need to have more, I think, amongst ourselves.
But also I think with our students. I could just add really quick comment to that super quick.
I also think it's about looking at aesthetics as well. So my intro to English lit course.
I start poetry with Johnson. I started with poetry because obviously Davis neglected.
Yes, but because I genuinely think it's the best way to start a conversation about Cadence, a beat that will help students with Shakespeare.
So it's about aesthetics for me, and that's really helpful.
And and so students bring in that conversation with Blake and what have you.
So turning to aesthetics, I think is really, really crucial and super important question, I guess.
Yeah, I teach alongside Pollock, for example.
You know that that would be a way of enriching both sides and making the other relevant.
The question of what we go to lunch for is such a difficult question.
You know, what kinds of demands do is literature to fulfil?
You know, and I feel quite ambivalent, divided.
I don't quite know the truth because on the one hand, I've lived to all of the 80s demand for a kind of oppositional agenda,
which is very politicised through the 80s to the late 70s, 80s, and then on the other hand, which then sometimes aesthetics go out of the question.
And then I'm thinking, well, literature doesn't do what I wanted to do.
It's not opposition the way it doesn't translate into politics in quite a straightforward way.
So it's, I think, quite a tricky kind of.
But anyway, ultimately, a book like this hopefully will create space, more spaces and more educated readers so that you don't have,
as I had on one occasion of an editor of paper asking me who Derek Walker was, which was like twenty,
you know, ten years ago, do you think it was easier for those with the world to actually look at you?
You voiced it, but I have been thinking this all the way through because sadly,
I missed the other papers, but I did come here just in time to hear Floriane.
I'm going to catch up. I will look at them on the website.
And the question about the mainstream and the margins on the peripheries really does bug me.
And I just think in terms of cinematic production,
you've got that already wrapped up onto the idea of a production because some elements will be mainstream,
some will be marginal, and every production wants to capture the maximum attention.
So they will try their hardest one way or another to get a well-known author, a well-known star or a well-known producer.
That's my hunch. I don't know if you've got any comment on that,
but I think it's also to do with the aesthetics and sensibility actually that is generated within live within the whole production process.
And actually in the final product that you get in the end, it's in the editing, it is in its in sound, it's in the whole business.
And that you get with that, I don't think you could it would be very hard to describe it as a mainstream film in many ways,
even though it might have become that. But it's quite interesting because I teach it and my my students react quite viscerally is the wrong word,
but it's sort of there is something alienating about it.
There's something that they're put off by, whether it's some of the more surrealist elements that that that are in that it's a very vilayet narrative.
Whereas the reaction I get to when I screen something like that back and there's a completely different
one because it riffs on these very familiar themes from romantic comedy to a coming of age story.
That that you get and is produced particularly to entice you to recognise a genre that you're very familiar
with and then pull you in into the other story that is perhaps less mainstream than it tries to do,
whereas My Beautiful Laundrette in the immediate opening with the washing machine,
the bubbly sound that you get already put into a completely different direction.
And I think I mean, if you look at the work of John Unconference particular you, he retains this kind of more troubling aesthetic,
very, very deliberately, not wanting to push his filmmaking into into into the mainstream.
And I think this idea of the mainstream very much comes together, I think, in terms of recognisable, recognisable tropes,
recognisable character types that you've seen and recognisable genre that come together that are immediately recognisable.
That might be. Just set in a in a different kind of media,
whereas the art house very much tries to to rupture the ordinary and tries to unthink
and trouble those kinds of aesthetics with some of these mainstream things tend to.
So I do I do agree that there are cultural productions that blur or try to blur these kinds of boundaries.
And I think you're right. We need to think about the fissures and the kind of messiness,
a little bit more on the clear cut distinctions saying is this the more you will come, I think it is the leaders that were absent.
Well, OK. Yeah, I do take that point. I think it is easier to achieve that in drama than it is in film or television.
Actually, I think Alec is very keen to close this and rightly so.
Right. We from the panel want to thank you for coming here in such a lovely day.
I know you've been waiting in the river. You would have had alternatives.
The gentleman with the t shirt here now they have a department of literature is in English,
so it's not the English Department of Literature is in English.
And I like that the plurality implied there.
And I do also want to get back to Florian saying he really alphabetised his his book collection.
You know, I think the books that we cover in that history, they belong on many, many shelves.
They belong in many locations. So they have more than one place.
But more importantly, they belong to all our bookshelves, no matter you know, which community we feel we belong to.
So we want to also promote that those books physically,
materially travel into libraries and interpersonal collections within the alphabetised or you sort them by the colour of their spine is not up to me.
But get those books and thanks. And if you do want to protest against categories,
I notice to my horror that Blackwells I last spoke to the modern fiction about, I don't know, two, three weeks ago.
And they are the mainstream is in one section.
And then there's writing from Asia and then there's writing from the time.
So it's all it's all becomes segregation.
It is very fine if indeed. Indeed.
And I think this actually goes against the spirit of negotiation and kind of working between centres and clusters of centres you're talking about.
So what you could do is go to places such as.