Talk
Library-in-Residence

Library Transmission: Black Marxism in Britain

Barnaby Raine and The Otolith Collective

Date and Time:: Wednesday 3 June, 6–8pm
Location:: Minassa

Historian Barnaby Raine explores the surprising utopias of Black Marxists in Thatcher's Britain, followed by a conversation with Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Collective.

This lecture will revisit a distinctive Black Marxism in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s, to suggest that it offers resources for thinking about universal human freedom and strategies to get there.

Connecting well-known figures like Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Darcus Howe and A. Sivanandan to the neglected pages of The Black Liberator and to revolutionaries in the Black Parents Movement, Brixton Black Women’s Group and Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), the lecture will chart a shared terrain of argument and its futures past.

Grappling with the dawn of our neoliberal present, Black Marxists produced a politics of free time and a criticism of every kind of nationalism that we might encounter differently now in a changed world, amid many crises in the slow death of Western civilisation.

Doors open at 5.30pm; event starts at 6pm and ends at 8pm.

The Otolith Collective are supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Artwork from The Black Liberator, Vol 1 No.4, 1972.

Barnaby Raine is a historian who recently completed his PhD at Columbia University. He currently teaches at the University of Essex and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. He is an editor at Salvage journal. This lecture draws on his doctoral research and his experiences organising Jewish solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle.

The Otolith Collective is a long-standing artist led organisation supporting intergenerational and intragenerational art practices, research-led projects, writing and process-based forms of development. They create environments that nourish discourse and discussion, co-commission artists, and curate exhibitions and programmes with a wide range of collaborators, organisations and institutions here and elsewhere. Theirs is an international project based on transnational and translocal vision who are committed to maintaining and animating an experimental and worldmaking approach. Performing across disciplines such as visual art, performance, new music, film and video, new technology and critical writing, we draw a diverse range of audiences. The OC has curated seminal exhibitions and platforms on the work of figures such as Black Audio Film Collective, Mark Fisher, Harun Farocki, Bahar Noorizadeh, The Chimurenga Library, Chris Marker, to name but a few.

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