Language & Unravelling Racism: Workshop
This workshop is for anyone who is seeking to push back against the rise of racism today, and wants to learn how to improve and refine their communication skills around racial topics.
Racism is a relatively new system, which has been in place in the way we know it for less than 500 years, and has upheld colonialist land-grabs and worldviews. Much older is a system of communication, storytelling, and listening, which holds much of the resolution to racism today.
This is a deep-dive on the role of language and active listening in establishing allyship in times of racial crisis. A special and focused teaching space which draws directly from my latest research as an academic who studies racism and anti-racist resistance in literary texts.
The research
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
Tuesday 13th January, 7.30-9.30pm, UK time, online. £55. Join live or receive the recording.
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 a 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 an academic, an author, and a teacher. 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”.
