Radical Bookselling discussion event

Applied History Network View this email in your browser

Sites of Resistance: Radical Bookselling A discussion event Tuesday 9th February 2016, 6.30-8pm, London EC1R 0DU

UPDATE [9 Feb. 2016]: Change of venue Due to unforeseen circumstances we have had to change the venue of our upcoming event to UCL's Institute of Archaeology, Room 6.12. The address for the Institute is: 31-34 Gordon Square London WC1H 0PY. For further directions and a map, please see their website. We only have a few tickets left, so if you haven't booked yours yet you can still do so through our Eventbrite page. If you have already booked your tickets please come early to make sure you get a good seat. The other details remain the same: [See below] We will be looking at the importance of radical bookshops as "sites of resistance."  The 1970s saw a peak in the numbers of bookshops dedicated to providing access to alternative publications covering the growing anti-racist, LGBT+ and feminist movements, amongst others. Many of these bookshops also acted as meeting places and support centres for new and established groups, and offered a template for encouraging further grassroots and community activism and campaigning. More recently, the numbers of these vital “sites of resistance” have closed due to increasing rents, funding cuts, the growth of online bookstores and competition from larger bookshops. Although bookshops have been a core element of campaigns, as a subject this seems to have been neglected by researchers and historians of social history. Key questions that we will cover are: has the internet already filled the space left by these important centres? What is the future of activism and campaigning? And the future of radical bookshops?

Speakers: Sarah Garrod: Archivist, George Padmore Institute Nik Gorecki: Co-ordinator, Alliance of Radical Booksellers and co-manager of Housmans Ken Worpole: Author Rosa Vilbr: Oral Historian and founder of On the Record Event Info: Date: Tuesday 9th February 2016 Time: 6.30pm-8pm Venue: Marx Memorial Library, 37a Clerkenwell Green, London, EC1R 0DU Eventbrite: Register here Website: Applied History Network

The Applied History Network is a group of PhD students and early career researchers committed to politically engaged history. We put on regular evening events in London which aim to apply an historical perspective to contemporary events and debates. The event grew out of conversations started at the ‘what is radical history?’ conference at Birkbeck in March 2015. In an effort to carry on these important debates, we put on free events every two months in central London.

Next Independent Working Class Education Seminar (London) and Public History event

IWCE : planning education for change

Saturday 21st March 10.30 - 3.00

London Brunswick Community Centre, Foundling Court.

See the note on the door for Room 10.

Across from Russell Square tube station.

Provisional Agenda

Meirian Jump, Archivist & Library Development Officer, 'Archives & Education at the Marx Memorial Library’

Arthur McIvor (Stratthclyde Uni.) on Working Lives, Work in Britain since 1945 

Rosa Vilbr, An oral history on Centreprise bookshop/cafe in Hackney 

Doug Wright The history of busworkers in London and the present dispute

and "We are fortunate to have Osamu Umezaki from the Osaka Labour Archive in Japan joining us on Saturday. His interests include Oral history."

Each presentation is short and a lively discussion is welcome. 

We'll also look at the IWCE Manifesto and plan future events in Leicester, Edinburgh and London.

Cost £5.00 (includes lunch). Pay on the day.

To book email Keith Venables iwceducation@yahoo.co.uk

Also on 21st March (could look in on both):

***

Public History Discussion Group

Saturday 21^st March 2015

Room 209

Institute of Archaeology, 31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY

Room on the 2^nd floor- lift and stairs to all floors

Talk starts promptly at 11.30am

“Making public forgotten black histories 1750-2014: From ghostly hands to children’s memorials on slave graves” 

The talk discusses not only traditional memorials, walking trails and artworks, but also ghostly legacies of the trade, including human body parts. Taking the small slave port of Lancaster, England, as a key case study, the talk draws on recent theoretical work on corporeality, spectrality, Holocaust studies, trauma, dark tourism, the Black Atlantic and memory studies to interrogate the meanings of these legacies. It develops the idea of “guerrilla memorialisation” used historically and in recent responses to the trade.

Professor Alan Rice, University of Central Lancashire

Alan Rice is Professor in English and American Studies at the University of Central Lancashire and co-director of the recently formed Institute for Black Atlantic Research (IBAR) there. He  has degrees from the University of Edinburgh, Bowling Green State University, Ohio and Keele. He has worked on the interdisciplinary study of the Black Atlantic for the past two decades including publishing Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (Continuum, 2003). Alan was academic advisor to the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project in Lancaster, was editor in chief of Manchester’s Revealing Histories Website and a co-curator of the Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester’s 2007-8 exhibition Trade and Empire: Remembering Slavery. His latest monograph is Creating Memorials, Building Identities: The Politics of Memory in the Black Atlantic (Liverpool UP, 2010) and his latest edited collection is a special issue of Atlantic Studies on the “Slave Trade’s Dissonant Heritage” edited with Johanna Kardux (2012). He is also continuing the work on black abolitionists in Britain started in his co-edited Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Georgia, 1999) with a new collection in Slavery and Abolition (2012) with Fionnghuala Sweeney. He is an advisor to museums in Liverpool, Lancaster and Manchester and his latest museum publication is a catalogue essay for Manchester’s 2012 We Face Forward West African Art exhibition. His articles have appeared in a wide range of journals including, Slavery and Abolition, Atlantic Studies, Patterns of Prejudice, Journal of American Studies and Research in African Literatures. He has organised landmark events on issues in Black history in Britain including a 2013 event commemorating the mutiny of African American GIs in Bamber Bridge. He has given keynote presentations in Britain, Germany, the United State and France and in January 2012 he gave the Martin Luther King Memorial Lecture in Hamburg. He has contributed to documentaries for the BBC, Border Television and public broadcasting in America as well as appearing on BBC’s The One Show in February 2013.  More information can be found at:

http://ibaruclan.com/

http://www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/explore/publications/newsletters/newsissue14/king1.htm

http://www.uclan.ac.uk/staff_profiles/alan_rice.php

http://www.uclan.ac.uk/about_us/case_studies/sollis_marks_70th_anniversary_of_battle_of_bamber_bridge_report.php

***

http://publichistorygroup.wordpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/publichistoryuk