The Fire Next Time and 'The Fire Last Time'

 

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 delivered online through Microsoft Teams and can be accessed via a link. Any email address affiliated with Office 365 is able to use Teams. To join us on Thursday 8th October for our first Quilting Points meeting of the 2020/21 session, please email Joseph on en17jog@leeds.ac.uk.  

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