QUILTING POINTS:

Thursday 10th December  |  5:30-7:00pm  | Microsoft Teams  For our fourth session – and last of 2020 – we are welcoming Dr. Douglas Field! Dr. Field is a Senior Lecturer in 20 th Century American Literature at the University of Manchester. He is also a co-founding editor of the James Baldwin Review . He will be chairing the session and has chosen to discuss Baldwin’s essay ‘Stranger in the Village’ (1953) and Teju Cole’s 2014 rereading of Baldwin, titled ‘Black Body’ .   Baldwin’s essay describes his experiences in a remote village in Switzerland, a place he believes he may be the first black man ever to visit. Recounting the reception he receives from the inhabitants, he compares the village to the “West” and turns his attention back to the US. He argues that while he may be considered a stranger in the Swiss village, no American has the ‘luxury’ of being able to look on their black countrymen as strangers.   Cole’s response describes his own experience ...

  Wednesday 18th November    |  5:30-7:00pm  | Microsoft Teams  In our third session, we will discuss Raoul Peck’s brilliant documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2016). The film is an adaptation of an unfinished James Baldwin manuscript, Remember This House. The documentary includes a number of Baldwin’s letters and notes from the 1970s. It is structured around the lives of three men:  Malcolm X,  Martin Luther King Jr.,  and Medgar Evers . All three were Civil Rights leaders who were assassinated. They were also close friends with Baldwin.   The film is currently available to watch, for free, on BBC iPlayer .      The meeting will be hosted on Microsoft Teams and is open to anyone with an email address affiliated with Office 365. To join us on Wednesday 18th November for the meeting, please email Joseph on  en17jog@leeds.ac.uk .