Language & Anti-racism: A Journey & Working Tools
This workshop is for anyone, of any background, who is actively seeking to push back against the rise of racism today, and wants to learn how to improve their communication skills around racial topics and identities.
It might be that you’ve done some specific anti-racist work, examining your own prejudices and biases, and being open to the change that is possible for you.
Maybe you haven’t done much of this work yet, and you are looking for an alternative to the kinds of approaches you have seen before.
Where does this work come from?
My work focuses on how literary texts are able to resist racism, and can make a claim for an empowering sense of humanity in the face of racial violence.
In the past three years, I have been working on a study which analyses forms of language which create exclusion and division based upon ideas of race. I have been looking at forms of poetry, fiction and memoir which create forms of communication across dynamics of racism, in the most beautiful and sensitive of ways. This is work which humanises us all in these dehumanising times of racial violence.
In the workshop, I present the main findings of my study, and I offer tools which you can take into your learning and your life. Writers, poets, and artists energise us for the fight against racism - I want to show you exactly how they do that.
The Workshop
Thursday 16th October, 7.30-9.30pm, UK time, online. £55 Early Bird until 9th October, £65 thereafter
In this workshop you will learn:
How to recognise precisely the qualities of speech and language which are racially harmful
How to recognise the qualities of language which reaches for processes of racial repair or healing
How we can actively benefit from the best of human creativity in order to fight the worst of human abuses
This is different from wondering how things got so bad
This is a change from pointing at those who are ‘more racist’ than we are, observing them to be the problem
This is an anti-racist practice, which works through:
- self-awareness
- cultural education
- mutual respect
- the use of critical tools and appreciation of the arts to inspire the best in our humanity
This is also an acknowledgement that the arts – always under threat under ultra-conservative political regimes – are the technology which will free us, on an individual and collective level, and which will reconnect us with one another.
About Your Teacher
I am a scholar, an author, and a healing practitioner. I am of mixed ethnicity and mixed cultural experience. I have over 20 years’ experience as a scholar and lecturer of literature and race, and I am also a yoga teacher and a doula. I believe in and experience anti-racism as a vibrant combination of cultural education, self-enquiry, and healing.
My academic work focuses on African American and Black British literature, diaspora, cultural memory and aesthetics. My book, The Cultural Memory of Africa in African American and Black British Fiction, 1970-2000, was published by Palgrave in 2016, and my articles have appeared in a range of scholarly journals. My work has been called “boldly progressive” and “exhilarating”, and my students find me “enlightened”, “welcoming”, and “inspirational”.
