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Date and Time

5th September 2024

Location

Conway Hall
25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL

Speakers
  • Robin D. G. Kelley
  • Imani Mason Jordan

The Stuart Hall Foundation is thrilled to welcome internationally renowned historian and writer Professor Robin D. G. Kelley to our third Autumn Keynote, responding to the theme of our 2024 programme Catastrophe and Emergence.

Professor Robin D. G. Kelley will join us at Conway Hall, London, to deliver a keynote that examines this current conjuncture, traces the histories constituting it, and considers the political and creative possibilities that might emerge from what was.

He will organise his keynote around brief reflections on anniversaries marking key moments of Catastrophe and Emergence. He will consider: the Berlin Conference and its aftermath; World War I as a war between empires over colonies; and how the end of World War II marked the defeat over fascism and the reinforcement of colonial domination through the UN Charter. Professor Kelley will think through these moments to trace the colonial dialectic and the many different chapters and phases of resistance to it – thinking about resistance as always in a state of emergence, never complete, never finished, always in motion.

A chaired discussion and audience Q&A led by interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor and curator Imani Mason Jordan will follow the keynote.

Full details of the the Catastrophe and Emergence programme here.

Attendees can either attend in person at Conway Hall in London, UK, or join online via a livestream. 

Tickets* are now on sale and cost £20 full / £15 concession / £10 online, plus booking fee.

Live online captions and BSL interpretation will be available. For any additional access information, please contact us on info@stuarthallfoundation.org

* All ticket proceeds go directly to support the charitable work of the Stuart Hall Foundation and Conway Hall Ethical Society. The Autumn Keynote is a key fundraising event for the Stuart Hall Foundation, helping to maintain and improve our programmes so that we can continue to bring you events like these while facilitating the development of a new generation of creative and intellectual practitioners.

Image: Professor Robin D. G. Kelley

The event is in partnership with Conway Hall Ethical Society supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust, Cockayne Grants for the Arts, a donor-advised fund held at the London Community Foundation, and Words of Colour.

Speakers

Robin D. G. Kelley

Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA.  His books include the award-winning, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination; Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class; Yo’ Mama’s DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America; Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times; Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original; and Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies, co-edited with Colin Kaepernick and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.  Kelley is currently completing two books, Making a Killing: Cops, Capitalism, and the War on Black Life and The Education of Ms. Grace Halsell: An Intimate History of the American Century. His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, New York Times, Spectre, Monthly Review, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and The Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor.   

Imani Mason Jordan

Imani Mason Jordan (b. 1992, London) is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor and curator interested in poetics and performance. Imani has written numerous articles, reviews, essays, poems, plays and love letters, some of which they have published. After completing their MA in Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths in 2019, their pamphlet OBJECTS WHO TESTIFY was published by Taylor Le Melle at PSS.

Imani began their writing practice with a keen focus on interdisciplinary liberation texts and writing toward revolution; their writing remains inherently political. Since 2016, they have developed a keen interest in oration, experimentation and practices of reading aloud, from which they have synthesised a performance practice that centres writing and collaboration as well as using the speaking voice as an instrument.

Recent performance/audio projects include EARTHLY ACCOMPLICE (2023) with Felix Taylor, TREAD/MILL: WIP (2021-); ATLANTIC RAILTON: LIVE (2021) with Ain Bailey & WELCOME NOTE IN A WELCOME SPEECH (2019-22) with Libita Sibungu. They are featured in two tracks on the 2020 album BRASS (by Moor Mother & billy woods) and continue to collaborate with Moor Mother on various projects. Imani is currently touring as a performer in Eve Stainton’s IMPACT DRIVER, and directing Ebun Sodipo’s theatrical debut, VITORIA : BURACO, for LIVE COLLISION: 2024. Alongside Samra Mayanja, Imani is co-founder of PAPERFLESH PUBLISHING, which facilitates the international and local gathering of intellectually rigorous black writers in order to study-create-unearth liberation texts across-over-beyond our own time-language-geography-genre.