University of Leeds
13-14 December 2018
Organisers: Joshua Doble, Liam Liburd and Emma Parker
Last week I had the opportunity to attend and present at the After Empire? conference in the University of Leeds.
Due to the fairly inefficient and infrequent train service from Lancashire to Yorkshire I was unfortunately unable to attend the first morning of panels. However, the day and a half I was able to take part in featured a fantastic quality of work, across multiple parallel panels. The conversations that emerged during panels, keynotes, and the breaks in-between were intellectually stimulating and they have wormed their way deep into my thinking. This post attempts to briefly capture some of the important and necessary discussion that developed across the two days.
The first paper I attended was presented by Peter Mitchell and began to investigate the culture of fragility within the systemically white, patriarchal British university when confronted with calls to “decolonise.” In the conversation that followed, the university was presented as a reactionary space: a site that has the potential to develop dialogue across subjects of nationality, race, class, and gender. On the one hand, the university is place of “established” knowledge, but on the other, it is a generative space to grow new ideas (or to revisit forgotten histories).
This notion of “forgetting” cropped up multiple times in papers presented by Matthew Whittle, James Raey Williams, and Chloe Germaine Buckley as part of the panel on “Imperial Melancholia.” Revisited time and again across the two days was the romanticised vision of imperialism: nostalgic and classical, even lavish. But this nostalgia comes with what Whittle termed “active forgetting” or what Germaine Buckley called “judicious forgetting.” Selective forgetting facilitates the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia. A case was made in all three papers for writers and scholars of the postcolonial to keep one foot in the past, to address its material inequities.
Gary Younge from the Guardian then joined us for a conversation with John McLeod, their discussion moving between the legacies of colonialism and the current politics and language of Brexit. Younge talked about how the aforementioned “forgetting” that perpetrates imperial nostalgia occurs partly because Britain remains “physically untouched” by colonialism: it was something that happened somewhere else.
The conversation then moved to Brexit, to the ways in which immigration was at the forefront of the Brexit debate, and how neither the Conservative nor the Labour party have defended or protected immigration as part of their political policy in the past 15 or so years. In relation to this, Younge described instances that demonstrated our potential to facilitate change if we choose to seize the moment: the shift towards a more positive language about immigration in the immediate aftermath of the death of Aylan Kurdi in 2015 and the Windrush Scandal this year. In both these instances, the shift has been fleeting, not least because of the crisis of our short-term media and short attention spans, but both cases signify the potential to act and reform the typically negative language directed toward immigrants.
The conversations of the previous evening proved a useful basis for the next morning’s panels. I presented my paper on Refugee Tales I and II, alongside papers given by Cathie Jayakumar-Hazra and Tasnim Qutait. Deliberating on the theme of writing across borders, all three papers discussed the potential for literature and writing to rehabilitate and excavate the narratives of migrants and ethnic minorities; to defy expectations and stereotypes.
This notion of excavation was later explored by Churnjeet Mahn who discussed her involvement on the project “Creative Interruptions” investigating the experiences of Post-Partition Punjab communities in Scotland. She addressed the ways in which objective methodologies used as part of qualitative research often leave interviewees feeling exploited, where their experiences are “collected,” but the individual is essentially left behind. Mahn discussed how giving interviewees an opportunity to edit the writing-up of their narrativized experiences works to restore some agency to the process, although the act of extracting information remained somewhat problematic. There is a responsibility to represent otherwise marginalised, elided viewpoints—to rehabilitate, excavate, and restore—but there needs to be a stronger engagement with how to do so ethically.
This discussion over the ethics and responsibility of representation was central to Elleke Boehmer’s keynote on “Postcolonial Poetics.” In response to a current investment in the politics of representation, Boehmer’s keynote asked: “representation to what end?”. Her keynote recalled Barbara Harlow’s pivotal work on resistance literature, and Boehmer argued that it was not just the writer that must be resistant, but also the reader. The reader as activist. Reading, an act which searches for meanings, is generative: “a cascade of inferences.” Crucially, teaching literature activates and educates the reader in forming these inferences.
Still, there remains the problem of who reads this literature. Who chooses, for example, to read—to learn from—Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race (2017)? In the concluding paper of the final panel, Dom Davis highlighted the experiential fatigue felt by Eddo-Lodge in having to talk about race, to constantly explain and position herself within a nation that is structurally rigged in favour of white men. A conversation on the topic of “labour” emerged from this paper, alongside many other discussions held across the two days: the labour that people of colour perform in negotiating a Britain that is in equal parts forgetful and nostalgic for its imperial and structurally inequitable historical foundations; and the labour that allies (academics, writers, and readers) can do in joining in the conversation, and taking on a burden of responsibility.
This was discussed further following Bill Schwarz’s concluding keynote on the politics of Brexit and populism: we need to take responsibility for ourselves and those immediately around us. This means not just at the family dinner table, but also everyone who shares our space, on the bus, the tube, in a café, a seminar room. In this way we can be better allies, building collective constituencies of support and resistance, through shared sensibilities, instincts, and commitments.
By Rachel Gregory Fox
menawapoco.wordpress.com 