' [The 'multi' in multicultural] represents one of the most important cultural developments of our time: the stakes which 'the margins' have in modernity, the local-in-the-global, the pioneering of a new cosmopolitan, vernacular, post-national, global sensibility......continuing to misrepresent Britain as a close, embattled, self-sufficient, defensive, 'tight little island' would be fatal' - Stuart Hall, Whose Heritage, Un-Settling 'the Heritage' Re-Imagining the Post-Nation, (Third Text, 1999).
Symposium, The Assembly Rooms, Newcastle. Friday 24th May, 2019. For tickets, click the above image.
In light of the divisive climate Brexit has unleashed on this country and the toxic increase in hate crimes, it feels timely to revisit exactly what we mean by British heritage today.
The first keynote will be delivered by broadcaster David Olusoga and the second by the Chief Executive of Eclipse Theatre, Dawn Walton. If you're not excited, you absolutely should be! There are a broad range of panels, performances and papers throughout the day to consider and share multiple practices and critical approaches in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. To bring the peripheral into focus.
Funded by the AHRC, the symposium is organised by Susan Ashley, PhD of Northumbria University and is delivered in close partnership with BAME cultural organisations based in North East England. 'BAME' is an acronym [often contested] which stands for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic.
Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) people are part of the latter heterogeneous ethnic grouping. As a British Gypsy who has completed a PhD that illuminates an obscured GRT presence in literature, visual art and the archive, I'm delighted to have been asked to read at this symposium. I'll share my creative-practice led research and gather with friends, celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Stuart Hall's landmark address. In solidarity.