Join us in the Stuart Hall Library for our monthly Saturday Reading Group facilitated by Senior Library Assistant Lexi Frost.
Readings are selected from requests and suggestions made in advance by attendees, and draw upon the rich, wide-ranging collections of the Stuart Hall Library, which holds a unique collection of diasporic material and postcolonial writings from all over the globe.
We will be exploring texts from books on non-western critical theory with a political and international focus, as well as articles, short essays and zines on contemporary art and visual culture.
This is an informal event where reading takes place together, so you don’t need to read anything in advance.
We usually meet on the third Saturday of the month, between 15:00 and 17:00 in the library. Please see the individual event pages for booking details. The reading group is free and open to all.
The reading group list is below, including past and future reading material. We welcome new suggestions. Email library@iniva.org if you would like to make a recommendation for reading.
- James Baldwin, ‘Autobiographical notes’ from Notes of a Native Son and Octavia Butler, ‘Positive obsession’, from Blood Child (Saturday 17th February reading group)
- Angela Davis, ‘Women, Race & Class’ from The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: a working class perspective and Zadie Smith, ‘Joy’ from Feel Free (Saturday 24th March reading group)
- Mark Dery, excerpt from ‘Black to the future’ including an interview with Afrofuturist science fiction writer Samuel Delaney, in Flame Wars : the discourse of cyberculture
- Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff, ‘Virtual reality is no match for the empathetic generation’ in The Guardian newspaper and excerpt from Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Parable of the Sower, about ‘hyperempathy’
- Barnor Hesse and Juliet Hooker, ‘On black political thought inside global black protest’, from the After #Ferguson, After #Baltimore issue of South Atlantic Quarterly journal
- Afua Hirsch, Brit(ish)
- Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light
- Amrit Wilson, ‘Finding a voice: Asian women in Britain’ from Black British feminism: a reader, edited by Heidi Safia Mirza
- Amina Mama, ‘Black women, the economic crisis and the British state’, from Black British feminism: a reader
- Beverly Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scarfe, ‘The heart of race: black women’s lives in Britain’, from Black British feminism: a reader‘
- Abondance Matanda, ‘Road femme’ and ‘Blk British girlhood’ poems from her zine, Fuckeries
- Pratibha Parmar, ‘Gender, race and class’, from The Empire Strikes Back: race and racism in 70s Britain by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies