Part of University of Bristol's Framing the Critical Decade: After the Black Arts Movement I'm excited to let you know that I will be a keynote speaker in conversation with Dr. Josie Gill (University of Bristol) on Monday 21st at 4:15-6pm.

This 2 day conference aims to bring together scholars from across the humanities, critics and artists to engage questions around ‘Black British-ness’ and Black British creative production during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Often perceived, and dismissed, as a by-product of the social, critical and political milieu of the 1980s, the Black Arts Movement in Britain has been, until recently, largely packed away as something no longer relevant in a global, multicultural, even post-racial world. Building on and responding to a growing interest in reassessing the role of the Black Arts Movement in the construction of contemporary ideas around race, national identity, gender and aesthetics (see recent exhibitions such as Thin Black Line(s) (Tate, 2012), Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience (V&A and Black Cultural Archives, 2015) and Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain (Tate Liverpool, 2014) and the opening of the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton), the conference asserts the continued and dynamic presence of the ‘Critical Decade’.

 It is the organisers’ aim that by bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines – art, the history of art, visual culture, literature, history, critical theory and sociology, to name a few – the conference will yield new ways of thinking about narratives of creative production in Britain at the turn of the twenty-first century.

In association with the Transnational Modernisms Research Cluster, History of Art Department, University of Bristol