Example Lecture Summary

“Mi Soon Dead!”: The Haunting of the Empire Windrush

This session shows how psychogeography, hauntology, and horror media were vital to my PhD investigation about postwar Caribbean Northants, looking for sources that do not exist, as many early residents are dead. In the white imaginary, Black people never left the hold of the slave ship – many dying early from what Christina Sharpe (2016) refers to as the “…continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (p14).

Saidiya Hartman (2009) uses “critical fabulation” to describe how art can give a fuller picture to experiences of enslaved people in the absence of records that centre them – erased by official recorders. “The intention here isn’t anything as miraculous as recovering the lives of the enslaved … but rather laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible” (Hartman, 2009: 11). Like Saidiya Hartman, my work is not about ‘filling’ silence but using creativity to offer a historically informed mode of storytelling that resists the mechanisms of racism in the archives. 

Concurrently, as provincial Northants does not have the community structures that many major cities do (Ventour-Griffiths, 2024) including The Black Cultural Archives in London and the Anthony Walker Foundation in Liverpool, my PhD was also like a cold case inquiry. My thesis uses creative writing combined with eyewitness testimonies to give that fuller picture due to how local archives largely centre whiteness. Doing this research, there were obstacles, like how can I do Black history with an absence of Black archives? Further, the deaths of early residents.  

Avery Gordon (1997) discusses hauntings as a method for “abusive systems of power to make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with” (xvi). Hauntology, easier described as Ghost Studies, refers to how elements of social or cultural past reanimate in the present as ghosts. With psychogeography also about how place and space effect emotions (DeBord, 1954), my thesis offers both mixed with eyewitness accounts of Northamptonshire’s Black past.

This session illustrates the ways horror texts, namely non/fiction and films, helped me tell community histories while simultaneously seeing how many of my interviews were also ghost stories raising characters from the grave.

 

Initally, this was a 15-minute conference paper but can be extended into longer lectures, workshops on what’s possible elsewhere, and a session that includes questions and discussion. 90 Minutes – Half-Day / Full Day Session.

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Activity Day/Half-Day: ‘My Hair Don’t Care’

In this session, we use hair racism to discuss whiteness and racial microaggression. This is dependent on user participation and the learning comes from not only what I say, but also what audience discuss with one another.

Using a variety of texts including children’s books, historical texts, video, poetry and more, this session takes audiences through an education on microaggressions through hair racism.

The term ‘microaggression’ was first coined by a Black American psychiatrist named Chester Pierce in 1970 and has since gone on to be used in a wide array of disciplines. This session is essentially an introduction to microaggressions, applicable to many age groups including children (11+), university groups, and maturer audiences in private/public sector institutions.

Black hair is not just hair, and the history of African hairstyling shows how important hair can be to many Black people across the world. Before the introduction of colonialism, our hair was not stigmatised and this is session aims to affirm Black people of this identity as does to show the role of whiteness in the stigmatisation of African hairstyling.

Intersectionality was conceptualised to define how different forms of inequality, disadvantage, or violence can compound themselves creating barriers that are not understood through traditional ways of ‘seeing’.

Using the 1970 ‘subnormal’ British school scandal as a catalyst, I use this period of British history to discuss ‘neurodivergence while Black.’ While neurodivergent [ND] white people have long escaped being seen as ‘raced’, Black NDs are relatively absent in popular culture, including mainstream literature, films and TV shows.

Through a Black Lives Matter framing, I use discussions about colonialism, eugenics, and the 1970s ESN Scandal to make sense of contemporary debates of Blackness, neurodivergence, and the British education system. As for white people (ND/disabled or not), their whiteness is often invisible to them, but for those racialised outside of whiteness – as Sara Ahmed writes, “it’s hard not to see whiteness; it even seems everywhere.”

45-60 Minutes + Q&A

See my longer essay on this topic published with NeuroClastic.

 

We Should All Be Poets (Half/Full-Day)

Using poems of race, culture and identity, I get participants to reevaluate what they have been told about poetry and approach the artform with new eyes.

In this workshop, I use the work of spoken word artists and more traditional page poets to get participants to see how poetry can be used to understand social and political issues.

For many, poetry begins and ends with the English literary canon and “high culture” defined by the arts and political establishment. However, when we remove ourselves from institutions onto “the street” we see a very different poetry that can inform how we relate to the world.

Via the “poetry of the streets” we see how this is juxtaposed to traditional work that dominates the reading lists of exam boards. In this session, we learn to forget everything we think we know and to start over.

 

“Spoken Word” … refers to poetry that is read aloud […] But to say that “it isn’t poetry” (as many do, with gusto) is close-minded and, frankly, ahistorical” – Guante