QUILTING POINTS:

Tuesday 24th October | 5:30 – 7:00pm | The Alumni Room (School of English) We will begin exploring Cedric Robinson's work by reading both Chapter 1 of his most famous book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition published 40 years ago this year, and a 2013 interview with Cedric and his partner Elizabeth Robinson from the edited collection Futures of Black Radicalism .  In this first chapter Robinson gives a novel historical reading of the development of capitalism to emphasise what he terms 'racial capitalism'.  In his own words: "Racism [...] was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the "internal" relations of European peoples. As part of the inventory of Western civilization it would reverberate within and without, transferring its toll from the past to the present." We want to use this chapter to think about the ways in which Robinson uses history as a vessel f...

We are very pleased to announce the return of the interdisciplinary critical and cultural theory reading group Quilting Points for its twelfth consecutive year!  This year we will be thinking with the work of Black Radical theorist Cedric Robinson.  Photograph of Cedric Robinson in a black jacket with his finger on his chin. Widely reproduced image but unknown date and photographer. Robinson has risen to increased prominence in the last few years partly due to the 2021 republication of his 1983 classic Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition by Penguin Books, and the purchase that some of his concepts such as ‘racial capitalism’ and the ‘Black Radical Tradition’ have had within activist communities around the Black Lives Matter movement. Our reading group will provide an opportunity to look at this work in-depth but also a rare opportunity to situate it in the context of Robinson’s entire oeuvre. Through a regular reading group, film screenings, artist talks,...