Event overview
A lecture by Les Back
You only have to walk through the streets of South East London to feel its paradoxes.
In the thirty years I have been associated with Goldsmiths, University of London - as both a student and teacher – I am compelled increasingly by the curriculum to be discovered in the hidden archive of the streets.
Strolling out of the lecture hall or seminar room into this uncelebrated corner of the Capital has always offered a different kind of extra-mural education, if you are willing to get your shoes dirty.
In my talk I want to take you on a walk through postcolonial London in the footsteps of demonstrators and marchers protested competing visions of postcolonial London life. I also want to take you to where reggae blues dances offered a very different kind of rhythm – called steppers – and embodied way of being in the city.
In the late seventies and early eighties New Cross and Deptford on the south bank of the Thames was ruined by de-industrialisation, dock closures resulting from containerisation and urban decline. 150,000 jobs were lost between 1966 and 1976 as the economic heart was ripped out of London’s dockland communities.
Richard Hoggart, author of the classic study The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Warden of the college when I first came to Goldsmiths as a student in 1981, wrote in his memoir that the ‘district’ – as he used to refer to the college’s surrounding areas – is commonly known as “the arsehole of London”.
Signs of British empire are everywhere from the ship weather vane on the top of the local town hall to the ghost of John Evelyn, stockholder in the East India Company, who in 1671 contributed to the construction of the New Cross Road.
From the middle of the twentieth century this part of the city also provided a home for post-war colonial citizen migrants largely from Jamaica and the small Caribbean islands of St Lucia, Barbados and St Kitts. The same year that I moved to New Cross, over a dozen young black Londoners died in a fire at a house party.
My point of departure is that within a square mile of the college – literally on its doorstep – unfolded a history of anti-fascist struggle, anti-racism and black liberation, the traces of which still remain albeit uncelebrated and hidden partially in the bustle of everyday life.
Bio
Les Back teaches sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His main fields of interest are the sociology of racism, popular culture and city life. His work attempts to create a sensuous or live sociology committed to searching for new modes of sociological writing and representation.
This approach is outlined in his most recent book The Art of Listening (Berg 2007). He also writes for newspapers and magazines on topics ranging from football and music to politics and higher education and he has been involved in making documentary films.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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7 Nov 2016 | 5:30pm - 7:30pm |
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