Black Arts in contemporary Britain

literary visual performative

Università degli Studi di Padova
Archivio Antico
15-16 January 2010

This seminar aims to provide an interdisciplinary forum for a critical investigation of the multi-ethnic topography of British culture. The focus is on the articulation of new identities and forms of third millennium citizenship as prefigured, for example, in Paul Gilroy's idea of "conviviality" and Stuart Hall's adhesion to a "civic nationalism".
In an increasingly fruitful pairing between transculturality and interdisciplinarity, we bring together perspectives from literature, cinema, theatre and the visual arts, particularly through the work of authors of African and Caribbean origins.
Multi-ethnic Britain showcases how all arts concur in representing, performing, dramatising, staging, picturing and sounding identity, combining narrative patterns with performative and visual strategies, thus leading to the formation of syncretised formats.

programma

friday 15 january

14:00 registration

14:15 greetings

14:30 Annalisa Oboe (Padova) introduction

14:45 Bernardine Evaristo (London) Mixing it up: challenging the myth of superiority and nationhood through stories that offer new perspectives on history

15:30 coffee break

16:00 panel 1
Francesca Giommi (Padova) The location of blackness in 3rd millennium Britain
Alda Terracciano (London) Black British theatre: transnational politics and cultural practices
Francesco Cattani (Bologna) Swamping the Country: Ingrid Pollard's cartography of Englishness
Adriano Elia (Roma) Pressure (1975): from Black Power to 21st-century British citizenship
Amanda Nadalini (Ferrara) 'A New British Grammar': Jackie Kay's The Lamplighter

18:15-18:45 Bernardine Evaristo
reads from her work

20:00 conference dinner

SATURDAY 16 JANUARY

9:00 Louise Yelin (New York) Black Subjects, British Subjects: identity and self-fashioning 1967-2009

9:45 panel 2
Pietro Deandrea (Torino) Contemporary slavery in the UK and its categories
Sara Parolai (Genova) Fighting for Human Rights: black music and dub poetry in Britain
Itala Vivan - Enrico Dodi (Milano) Africa on My Mind: the Black British architect David Adjaye

11:15 coffee break

11:45-13:45 Assemblea Soci AISLI