QUILTING POINTS:

  8th October  |  5:30-7:00pm  | Microsoft Teams  For our first meeting of the year, we are going to look at James Baldwin’s 1963 essay collection The Fire Next Time . We’ll aim to read the first short essay (‘My Dungeon Shook’), and the first half of the second essay (‘Down at The Cross’), which can be found on pages 3-47 in the attached reading. The first of these takes the form of a letter Baldwin wrote to his nephew for the centenary of the emancipation proclamation, and the second broadly considers the role of the church in Baldwin’s early life, examining how that contributed to his understanding of, and engagement with, the civil rights movement.  We will also discuss Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s article, ‘The Fire Last Time’ , which was published in 1992, shortly after the LA riots. In it, Gates re-examines the relevance of Baldwin’s work at that time, a question we will re-visit ourselves over the course of the year.  This year's meetings will be...

 Quilting Points 2020-21: Reading James Baldwin Photograph by Carl Van Vechten/Beinecke Library © Van Vechten Trust We are pleased to announce the return of the interdisciplinary critical and cultural theory reading group Quilting Points for its ninth consecutive year.  Ran by postgraduate researchers in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures at the University of Leeds, this year's directors are Joseph Genchi, Izzy Jenkinson, and Craig McDonald.   This year we will be reading and discussing the work of African-American critic, essayist, novelist, and activist James Baldwin. As we explore Baldwin's extensive oeuvre , we will encounter themes of racial politics, sexuality, identity, and literary and cinematic representation.  As well as reflecting on Baldwin's writing within the context of its own creation, we will be placing Baldwin alongside current events, especially the political and social movement Black Lives Matter. This year's meetings will take plac...