Posts

Critical Life and Quilting Points collaborative seminar: Theory after Ferguson - Fred Moten and Cedric Robinson

Image
Wednesday 20th March | 4:00-6:00pm | The Meeting Room (School of English) Please join the Critical Life Research Collective and Quilting Points for a special collaborative session. This session will take its cue from Quilting Point’s year-long consideration of Cedric Robinson’s work, reflecting on that work in the light of a thinker who takes aspects of Robinson’s ideas in a different direction: Fred Moten. To this end, we will consider two short essay interventions into the aftermath of the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri – a critical event, the ramifications of which have been felt over the past decade.   Both Robinson and Moten want to think through the relationship between the symbolism of the killing and the singularity of Michael Brown. Brown’s murder occurred at the end of Robinson’s career. Nevertheless, it provided a final opportunity for him, alongside his then-wife and collaborator Elizabeth Robinson, to set out their political commitments in ‘The

Robinson session 3: Robinson and the Decolonial

Thursday 29th February November | 5:30 – 7:00pm | The Alumni Room (School of English) We are happy to announce interdisciplinary reading group Quilting Points will return after a short break. Following our readings of  Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition  last term, we will begin this year by reading two short essays in which Robinson develops the ideas of that book in relation to thinking about the legacy of decolonial struggles on the African continent. In ' The appropriation of Fanon ', Robinson takes issue with what he sees as postcolonial theory's depoliticized conception of Fanon, and opens this up into a critique of the "native bourgeoisie", which he then develops in ' In Search of a Pan-African Commonwealth ', into thinking through the association between Pan-Africanism and the form of the Nation-State.  Everyone (at whatever level of study & whether enrolled at the University or not)  is welcome, and no prior familiarity w

Robinson session 2: The Black Radical Tradition

Thursday 30 th November | 5:30 – 7:00pm | The Alumni Room (School of English) For this session, we will begin to explore Cedric Robinson’s notion of the Black Radical Tradition, which Robinson argues is that which is formed out of the rejection of racial capitalism as an “unacceptable” (p.28) value for life. Robinson spoke about writing and teaching Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition backwards, and it is in this spirit that we suggest Chapter 7 as a great introduction to this concept, condensed to a couple of pages. If you want to understand Robinson’s full reasoning and historical analysis, you can also extend this by reading  Chapter 6. Please read however much you have time for. In these chapters, Robinson focuses not on the major intellectual figures Black Marxism is usually associated with, but rather on a long tradition of anticolonial movements which produce from within their struggle different modes of being and producing knowledge. Everyone (at wha

CFP | Quilting Points 2024: Racial Capitalism and Cultural Resistance

  Quilting Points Call for Papers     CFP | Quilting Points 202 4 :    Racial Capitalism and Cultural Resistance     01 st Ma y 2024    Call for Papers – PGR-led symposium   Deadline: 15th December     Abstracts: 250 -words    The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures that emerged from capitalism (2)   Cedric Robinson – Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (2021)   Originally published in 1983, Cedric Robinson’s work Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition has proved critical in thinking through the relationship between race and capitalism in a global context . It has experienced a renewed wave of interest over the last decade because of the purchase that some of his concepts such as ‘racial capitalism’ and the ‘Black Radical Tradition

Robinson session 1: Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

Image
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

Reading Cedric Robinson

Image
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, and othe