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The Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies is delighted to announce the relaunch of its Caribbean Studies Seminar Series for the academic year 2021/22. These seminars will actively promote intellectual engagement and knowledge exchange by providing scholars - including postgraduate students and early career researchers - with the opportunity to present their interdisciplinary, comparative and integrated research on the Caribbean.

Black British Magazines Posed for their "True" African Nature

Chair: Nick Brown 
Speaker:Kadija George (School of Advanced Study, University of London)



This paper examines the presence of Pan-Africanism in two Black British magazines; Tropic, at the start of Britain granting its colonies political independence and Staunch during what has been termed the “Black British period’. Tropic magazine was launched in 1960 as an A4 monthly lifestyle and current affairs periodical. Despite the lifestyle designed covers of Tropic which were always of a Black woman or girl-child from different countries, stories were included in each issue that were concerned with independence and the development of new nations in Africa and the Caribbean and features on African diasporic life in Britain that reflected Africa, the Caribbean, Black Britain and in less depth, Black America. Tropic signalled a new beginning and a new era when people of African descent had arrived in Britain post WW2, claiming to represent the 250,000 “coloured” people in Britain. Staunch was launched in 1978, as an A4 cultural, quarterly community periodical. For publisher Don Kinch, whose aims, and objectives for producing Staunch were about Black self-determination and Black self-help, his magazine illustrated the commonality and unifying message of Pan-Africanism. Although both magazines had Caribbean publishers, yet their publishers prioritised promoting Pan-African thought and action. 


Dr Kadija George Sesay FRSA, Hon FRSL, has worked in book and periodical publishing for several years. She published SABLE LitMag for 15 years until 2015. She is the Publications Manager for Inscribe, the Black British Writer Development Programme at Peepal Tree Press for which has published a series of poetry and fiction anthologies. The forthcoming Glimpse anthology is the first anthology of Black British speculative fiction, edited by Leone Ross. Kadija co-convened ‘Narrating the Caribbean Nation’ the first Peepal Tree conference in 2012. She has (co)edited several anthologie and is a co-author with Professor Joan Anim Addo and Dr Deidre Osborne of This is the Canon: Decolonize Your Bookshelf in 50 Books. Kadija was awarded her doctorate from Brighton University where she researched ‘Black British Publishers and Pan-Africanism: 1960-1980.’ She was a Kluge Research Fellow at the Library of Congress in 2019 and awarded an Honorary Fellowship by Goldsmiths College, in 2022. She is the creator of the AfriPoeTree, app. to be launched in Spring 2022. 
 

Seminar Programme

Winter term
25 January 2022 
22 February 2022
22 March 2022

Summer term
26 April 2022
10 May 2022
14 June 2022

Organisers: Eve Hayes de Kalaf (IMLR) and Jack Webb (Manchester)

The Caribbean Studies Seminar Series is organised by the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) in collaboration with Race, Roots and Resistance (University of Manchester)


All are welcome to attend this free seminar, which will be held online via Zoom at 16:00 BST. You will need to register in advance to receive the online joining link. Please click on the Book Now button below to register.

Download guidance on participating in an online event (pdf)

Please consider supporting CLACS's mission to train the next generation of scholars in Latin American and Caribbean Studies: https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/research-centres/centre-latin-american-and-caribbean-studies-clacs/support-clacs