#blackbritish

recessland 2024, shot by hamda

I imagine the claiming of duppies exhausting and brutal. Requiring only the majestic and relentless to bring them home. It is their presence that stops the beating of hearts - too beautiful to remember to draw breath. Installation by: @hewdjlocke #intheblackfantastic #phd #phdstudent #phdresearch #phdstudentsofinstagram #blackbritish #blackbritishhistory (at Night Dreams) https://www.instagram.com/p/CiiwjMQKCAQ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

WAKE WORK: “a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this epistemology with our known lived and un/imaginable lives.” Christina Sharpe uses the ‘wake,’ in all it’s definitions to explore the legacies of slavery and how they manifest. Wake wake offers a way forward, a way to dismantle the signifiers of race (Stuart Hall) so we can create a new analytic to imagine new ways to live as legacies of slavery. My copy tells it’s own story I guess - some pages underlined with definitions and reminders and exclamation points. Other pages I am silent - depending on my whereabouts I’m either swallowing tears or allowing them to fall. In essence this book broke and mended me. Or maybe it answered questions that I didn’t know I should be asking. Either way, it spoke to my Blackness, me as a legacy of slavery - in my womanhood, motherhood, sexuality and offered the creative in me a way forward. But. How does wake work survive? As a writer how does my wake work survive publication and marketing strategies in British publishing? It’s a question (and a book) I’ll refer to often. #phdjourney #phd #phdlife #phdlife #blackbritish #blackbritishhistory #blackbritishculture #blackbritishwomen #christinasharpe #wakework https://www.instagram.com/p/ChRHkvhqAqG/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

I’m naturally curious. Annoyingly sometimes so, finding myself in the second of year of a part-time PhD isn’t really that surprising! There is always a question brewing, an answer somewhere, waiting for me to turn it over, understand it and then apply/share/nurture it. I’ve been that way forever and school has often given me the structure to find the answers. Lockdown provided the time and room to question, to wonder, to watch. Like many of us death, mourning and grief was loud. And, in some ways so extreme. If you were fortunate enough to not lose a loved one then, like me, you probably questioned, pondered the deaths that were frequently discussed on the news, on social media and potentially in your home. We all had access to the coronavirus figures that represented the lives lost and the very last moments of lives that were stolen in horrific and cruel ways. I knew I formed part of the collective grief - the weight in me, the tiredness and new ache told me that my body, at least, was reacting. But would should I do with this new feeling? How should I honour these deaths? The African diaspora has such a complex relationship with grief and so the questions began: • How does death figure in Caribbean diasporic literatures and cultures today? How is grief felt, displayed, shared, and understood? • How does the colonial past shape current practices of grief? • How can practice-based methods interrogate the fragments of the colonial archive and the cultural genealogy of grief differently? • How can creative practice respond to Stuart Hall’s understanding of Black culture as a site of ‘strategic contestation’ to provide new forms of Caribbean-British expression of mourning? So, I find myself in the second year of a creative-practice PhD with @birkbeckuol , supervised by Dr. Emily Senior and Dr. Jodie Kim to hopefully find answers and missing pieces of me.

Posted @withregram • @blackoutdoors1 Our hike is featured on BBC Countryfile #HadriansWall episode. Click the link in my bio to watch! #BlackBritish #walks #RomanBritain #BlackHistory #DiversifyOutdoors #BlackOutdoors #HW1900 #bipoc #naturelovers (at Hadrian’s Wall) https://www.instagram.com/p/ChLWNSvoDBl/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

A year before he died, Ephraim broke up with his long-time girlfriend and began an affair with Paul Flowers. "I was openly gay, but Ephraim wasn't ready to call himself gay at the time," Flowers remembers.