QUILTING POINTS:

Tuesday 22 nd November | 5:30 – 7:00pm | The Alumni Room (School of English)   We will begin our exploration of Sylvia Wynter’s oeuvre with her ground-breaking text ‘“No Humans Involved”: An Open Letter to my Colleagues’ (1992) in which Wynter responds to the brutal beating and arrest of Rodney King at the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). During the trial and subsequent acquittal of the police officers responsible, it emerged that the acronym NHI (No Humans Involved) was routinely ascribed by LAPD officers to young, unemployed black men. In this extraordinary intervention, Wynter interrogates the dominant knowledge systems that exclude some people from being counted as ‘human’, and the role of the university in perpetuating these dangerous and exclusionary classificatory logics. Although the meeting will focus on ‘“No Humans Involved”’, we are suggesting as potential further reading a short introduction to Wynter’s work by Katherine McKittrick 'Yours in th...

We are very pleased to announce the return of interdisciplinary critical and cultural theory reading group Quilting Points for its eleventh consecutive year!  This year we will be reading and discussing the work of Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter. Wynter's extensive oeuvre includes fiction, drama, theory and criticism which, through a deeply anti-colonial lens, disrupts and reimagines Western conceptions of what it means to be human.   Run by postgraduate researchers in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Cultures, your directors this year are Freddie Coombes, Marika Ceschia, and Ellie Wakeford.  This year's meetings will take place in-person, with our first meeting of the year taking place on 22nd November. More details coming soon. We can't wait to see you all there!   Image: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. 

Wednesday 29th of June | 5.30-7.30pm | Maurice Keyworth Building room 1.04 & Zoom  We look forward to welcoming you to our next and final Quilting Points session of the year with a screening event. To bring this year’s activities to a close we will be meeting on Wednesday the 29 th of June at 5.30pm for a screening of the film The Riots 2011: One Week in August directed by James Jones followed by a short period of reflection and general discussion. If you are based in the UK the film is available to watch on the BBC iPlayer for the next month. As usual our meeting will take place both in person ( Maurice Keyworth building room 1.04 ) and online over Zoom. For those joining us online please do watch the film in your own time, and join us for the discussion after the screening which should start at approximately 7.00pm. Although the meeting will focus on One Week in August , we are suggesting as potential further reading an article by Paul Gilroy on the ‘riots’ titled ‘ 1981 ...

We are very excited to announce our next session of Quilting Points which will take place on Thursday 12th of May, 5.30-7.00pm. The session will take place both in-person and on zoom (details of room to follow). For this special guest speaker session we extend a particularly warm welcome to Professor John McLeod whose recent book Lifelines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury, 2015) is the first critical study to explore narratives of transcultural adoption from contemporary Britain, Ireland, and America. Professor McLeod will introduce Paul Gilroy's foreword to the edited collection  In The Best Interests of the Child: Culture, Identity, and Transracial Adoption  (ed. by Ivor Gaber & Jane Aldridge, Free Association Books, 1994) , situating it within the field of adoption studies and speaking to its significance. This will be followed by a lively discussion as usual that all are welcome to contribute to.  Everyone is very welcome to join us for what promises to...

Thursday 17th March 2022 | 5.30-7.00pm | Maurice Keyworth Building room 1.09 & Zoom (email Ghada on en14gh@leeds.ac.uk to receive the link) Quilting Points is extremely excited to announce our next session: a special guest speaker event where we will be joined by Dr. Dhanveer Singh Brar from the University of Leeds to discuss Paul Gilroy's passion for music, its relationship to freedom movements, and the history of Black British music.  Please join us for what promises to be a fascinating conversation, interspersed with music from a playlist Gilroy himself composed for  Wire... For this session we will be reading a sample of Gilroy's music journalism in the article ' Bohemians, Stamp Collectors, Revolutionaries and Critics ' alongside the essay '"Rhythm in the Force of Forces": Music and Political Time' . For this session we have also put together a list of suggested further listening consisting of the Wire Playlist: Windrush Vibrations  , Tony Her...

Quilting Points is back for its first meeting of the calendar year and new semester! We will be reading a section of Chapter 4: Modernity, Terror and Movement from Gilroy's seminal The Black Atlantic; pages 117-124 . We are pairing this with an interview between Paul Gilroy and Sindre Bangstad from April 2018 that was part of a series marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of the book for which Gilroy is arguably best known. The interview illuminates some of the ways in which Gilroy offers a diagnosis of the contemporary political climate, as well as reflecting on the importance of his own work throughout the years and in the current moment.  We will deliver this meeting in a hybrid format over Zoom and on campus in the Maurice Keyworth building, room 1.09.  To join us online for this meeting and to receive a reminder about the session  please email Ghada at en14gh@leeds.ac.uk to be added to the mailing list, through which you will receive the Zoo...