On Culture: Psychosocial Studies Seminar
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
No booking required
The melancholic cartography of a national white British society and her ‘ethnic minority communities’ each of which follows a distinct and defining historical path and cultural trajectory continues to shape our ‘common sense’ understandings of culture despite the proliferation of multidisciplinary work on hybridity and creolisation.
This mythology is indispensable to the pathologisation and criminalisation of minoritised communities illuminated by Britain’s histories of postcolonial warfare, deportation, police violence and the infiltration of radical political cultures by police undercover operations over the past fifty years. This discourse on separate cultures bordered by ‘specific values’ nurtures the normalisation of nationalist modes of thought in British universities and the resurgence of ultranationalisms.
I try and present an alternative theorisation of intertwined, hybridised ancient, medieval and modern colonial and postcolonial cultures without centres or borders. I discuss how ancient and medieval histories of hybridisation can add to a reformulation of creolisation which does not essentialise the different cultural elements and which reconnects histories of empire, the formation of modern Britain and colonial nationalisms which erase and reinvent pre-colonial and colonial histories.
I hope that this retheorisation of culture can contribute to interdisciplinary discussions on creolisation and hybridity, retheorising postcolonial cultures and communities, nationalisms and anti-nationalisms, histories of anti-racist political struggle and reparatory academic work.
Please book through the Eventbrite page: https://bit.ly/2EvLm12
Contact name:
Paula Fortune
- Birkbeck Centre for British Political Life
- School of Historical Studies
- Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
- School of Social Sciences
- Centre for Law and the Humanities
- Centre for Media, Culture and Creative Practice
- Centre for Multilingual and Multicultural Research
- Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies
- Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture (BIRMaC)
- Race Forum
- SSHP: Philosophy
- SSHP: Politics
- SSHP: Psychosocial Studies
- Research students
- Birkbeck Institute for Social Research
- Corporate website
- ARTS: School
- ARTS: Cultures and Languages
- Library
- School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
- Centre for Contemporary Literature
- SSHP: Applied Linguistics and Communication
- SSHP: History, Classics and Archaeology
- SSHP: Geography
- Centre for Research in Aesthetics of Kinship and Community
- Birkbeck Institute for Gender and Sexuality Studies
- Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
- Public lecture or event
- SSHP: School
- Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics (MaMSIE)