Chasing James Baldwin in Switzerland

Matthew Wilson, a Bajan now living In Switzerland retraces some of James Baldwin’s steps 70 years after him. Leukerbad is the place that inspired ‘Stranger in the Village’ and where Baldwin completed ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain’. Also drawing from Teju Cole’s 2014 essay, Black Body: Rereading James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” and… Read More

Black British histories didn’t start in 1948

Anti-Black racism and the hostile environment have a long history. For Tré Ventour Griffiths, the interwar years of 1919-1938 deserve more recognition in how we understand British history. Following heightened discussions about anti-racism in the summer of 2020, I found it challenging that popular media stayed rooted in Windrush as the starting point of anti-Black… Read More

Poetic Resistance to the language of “Civilised” Citizenship

Language has long been used to destroy, control and denigrate the ways of knowing and being of those subject to colonialism and racism. In this piece, poet and activist lisa luxx traces these colonial roots, as well as the inventive linguistic creolisations of imposed languages that poets have used to resist domestication, “to rewild their grammatology” and “To… Read More

The War in Ukraine and the Ugly Face of Racism

Header image: AJPlus What Ukrainian Racism is saying about Western Democracy By Dr Ornette D Clennon Lots of people will be thinking, “do you have to bring race into this, at this time of ALL times?” My response to them is, “I wish that I didn’t have to”. Why? Because at a time when a… Read More

Inside the strikes: When ‘being realistic’ is social value reduced to pure economics

Photo credit: Vincent Møystad As Goldsmiths UCU strikes to prevent 52 workers being made redundant in a ‘restructure’ desired by university management, Goldsmiths lecturer Kiran Grewal speaks on the rationale behind the action As a lecturer at Goldsmiths participating in yet another round of strike action, I have been asked quite a lot recently what the… Read More

Does Black music need to “get its house in order?”

A new event aims to get to the heart of music scholarship and how ever-evolving genres of Black music are researched, engaged with, and social significance discussed We find ourselves in a bizarre cultural moment, again. Black music, and specifically this digitally-mediated, largely homegrown and magnetic form which draws influence from across the diaspora, has… Read More

Decolonial Fantasy Lands

A lifetime of being othered due to skin colour, race, religion, takes a toll on the psyche; instilling shame, inferiority, and self-loathing. This can lead people of colour, including film-makers, writers, and other artists to seek purer, more beautiful alternative worlds. However as Kavita Bhanot and Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi discuss ‘Everyone wants to imagine themselves… Read More

How to decolonise the university

The Rhodes Must Fall campaign at the university of Cape Town ignited a worldwide discussion about decolonising universities and other further education institutions. Now, a new book Decolonising the University brings together resources to help academics and students to resist. Talia Dundoo talks to the book’s editors In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town… Read More

Black women as agents of change: reclaiming our narratives, voices and memory

For so long, Black women’s stories and memory have often been ignored, erased, and neglected in and out of academia. However as Jaimee A. Swift writes, 2018 showed itself to be a year of reclamation of Black women’s narratives, agency and memory. From our MD Academic Space  “No Black woman writer in this culture can… Read More