Black History Month 2023 - Upcoming Events on Campus (Week 2)
Black History Month 2023
Black History Month events continue across campus this week – we hope you enjoyed our Tasting Table last Wednesday, where we shared African-inspired bean fritter snacks with staff and students on campus!
A snapshot view of our Tasting Table, where staff and students shared inspirational black women who had influenced their lives - as well as sampling some African-inspired bean fritter snacks prepared by our Catering team!
Week 2 Events
Coming up this week, there's still time to book onto and attend the following events:
Anti-Racism and Allyship Workshop – Wednesday 11th October, 1:00pm-16:00pm
Jo Cox Centre – Multi-Faith Room 1 or virtually via Teams
This workshop covers privilege, microaggressions and how to be an ally, whilst also creating a safe space for teams to ask questions, share experiences and reflect on our previous behaviour. The outcome of the workshop is to widen knowledge and invite colleagues to reflect on their position of privilege, microaggressions and allyship.
If you would like to attend, please complete this MS Form with your attendance preferences. (25 in-person places available)
Trainers: Hannah Alipoor and Erika Montgomery
Black History Month Book Club: Thursday 12th, 1:15pm-1:55pm
SB3/01a - Library Seminar Room or join virtually via Teams
Join us as we discuss Chapter 3 of ‘The Vanishing Half’ by Brit Bennett, facilitated by Alison Sharman (Academic Librarian, Business School & Computing and Engineering):
‘One of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2020 and covering the themes of identity, race and gender, this book tells the story of two identical twin sisters who grow up together in a small Southern black community until at the age of 16 they decide to run away. Years later, one sister ends up living with her black daughter back in the same town she had tried to escape whilst the other secretly passes as white. Find out what happens in the next generation when their daughters’ storylines intersect…’ - Alison Sharman
Digitised copies of the chapter are available on HudReads ahead of the session.
Black History Month Book Club
Throughout October, we will also be platforming a range of literature with something for everyone, fiction and non-fiction, from black female and non-binary authors in line with the theme of Saluting our Sisters.
Our Black History Month Book Club picks throughout the month were inspired by Black History Month’s list of 'Black British Female Authors you should read', as well as suggestions from our Black History Month working group. The titles will also soon be available via HudReads.
Black is the Body – Emily Bernard
'Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book.'
In twelve intensely personal, interconnected essays, Emily Bernard sets out to tell stories from her life that enable her to talk about truth, race, family and relationships, and much more.
She observes the complexities and paradoxes, the haunting memories and ambushing realities of growing up black in the South with a family name inherited from a white man, of getting a PhD from Yale, of marrying a white man from the North, of adopting two babies from Ethiopia, of teaching at a white college and living in America's New England today.
Ultimately, she shows us that it is in our shared experience of humanity that we find connection, happiness and hope. (Penguin Random House)
Don’t Touch My Hair – Emma Dabiri
Straightened. Stigmatized. 'Tamed'. Celebrated. Erased. Managed. Appropriated. Forever misunderstood. Black hair is never 'just hair'.
This book is about why black hair matters and how it can be viewed as a blueprint for decolonisation. Over a series of wry, informed essays, Emma Dabiri takes us from pre-colonial Africa, through the Harlem Renaissance, Black Power and on to today's Natural Hair Movement, the Cultural Appropriation Wars and beyond. We look everything from hair capitalists like Madam C.J. Walker in the early 1900s to the rise of Shea Moisture today, from women's solidarity and friendship to 'black people time', forgotten African scholars and the dubious provenance of Kim Kardashian's braids.
The scope of black hairstyling ranges from pop culture to cosmology, from prehistoric times to the (afro)futuristic. Uncovering sophisticated indigenous mathematical systems in black hairstyles, alongside styles that served as secret intelligence networks leading enslaved Africans to freedom, Don't Touch My Hair proves that far from being only hair, black hairstyling culture can be understood as an allegory for black oppression and, ultimately, liberation. (Penguin Random House)
Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A few years ago, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received a letter from a childhood friend, a new mother who wanted to know how to raise her baby girl to be a feminist. Dear Ijeawele is Adichie’s letter of response: fifteen invaluable suggestions—direct, wryly funny, and perceptive—for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. Filled with compassionate guidance and advice, it gets right to the heart of sexual politics in the twenty-first century, and starts a new and urgently needed conversation about what it really means to be a woman today. (Penguin Random House)
Noughts & Crosses – Malorie Blackman
Noughts & Crosses was as one of the UK’s best-loved books - this is a modern classic and a seminal piece of young adult fiction. Malorie Blackman has written over seventy books for children and young adults, including the Noughts & Crosses series.
‘Malorie Blackman's ground-breaking, award winning series charts the lives and loves of generations as it takes on race and equality with breathtaking drama and heart wrenching sadness. Set in an alternate reality, where the inferior Noughts live as second class citizens in a world run by Crosses, the four books explore the violent politics of a unstable world, and the ordinary lives caught up in in its terror. Beginning with Noughts and Crosses - and the romance of Seph and Callum - and ending with Double Cross, it is a gripping sequence, and an important, relevant story for our time.’ (Penguin Random House)