Collective Form and National Liberation symposium

Collective Form and National Liberation Symposium

Keynote Speakers

Dr Asha Rogers (University of Birmingham)

Dr Christian Høgsbjerg (University of Brighton)

How have collaboration and cooperation animated struggles for racial justice, national liberation, and decolonisation? How have these struggles been mediated – enabled or contained, for instance – by different collective forms? What happens when we think about the agents of anticolonial, liberation and racial justice movements as collectives, or members of different groups, instead of as individuals? What can scholars from different disciplines working in the field of postcolonial studies learn from each other about the history and future of collective form? How does the perspective of collective form change the questions we ask and the conclusions we draw in postcolonial studies?

This symposium aims to facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion of the relationship between collective form and national liberation. It is interested in collective form in its widest possible definition. ‘Form’ can be understood as a social organisation, political movement, literary or cultural genre, language, and/or spatial arrangement. ‘Collective form’ refers to any such phenomenon that is animated by collaboration or which pertains to groups, rather than individuals. ‘Collective form’ might be a way of understanding community theatre groups like the Sistren Theatre Collective, based in Kingston, Jamaica, whose performances addressed the legacies of empire and the intersections of race, class, and gender. Or it might help us to address the collaborative production and crowded formal composition of Staffrider, a community-based magazine published by Ravan Press in Johannesburg during apartheid.

Organised in collaboration with the Newcastle Postcolonial Research Group (NPRG), and with the support of the Leverhulme Trust, the symposium aims to address collective form as an interdisciplinary object of study in postcolonial studies. To that end, it aims to bring together scholars from literature, language and linguistics, history, politics, geography, cultural studies, and more.

You can find details about the symposium, including the full programme on the symposium website here: https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/collectiveform2024/