Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Students explore the work of writers of colour
Throughout the BA (Hons) English Literature and BA (Hons) English and Creative Writing programmes, students explore a diverse range of historical and contemporary work by writers of colour, including writers from Africa and the African diaspora in Britain, the United States, and the Caribbean.
Below are examples of students’ engagement with and responses to that work in both creative and critical contexts.
Joanna Hemmings
(E)raising History: An Exploration into the Experimental Techniques of M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! and Jordan Abel's Injun
In her work for the Experimental Writing module, Joanna Hemmings examined M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 long poem Zong! to consider the literary techniques it deploys to interrogate and intervene into the historical silences and lost lives of the transatlantic slave trade. In her essay, Joanna positions Zong! as ‘an attempt to address a mode of thinking and language that has allowed the definition of black bodies as inhuman objects’, and a creative effort to give voice to those ‘silenced by historical violence or systemic prejudices that have been enabled by language’. Joanna discusses Jordan Abel's 2016 collection Injun as a comparative touchstone, defining the experimental techniques and construction of the work as an exploration of literary 'dead zones'. This essay was published in the LBU Review.
Lawrence Clarke-Russam
Confucius: Cultural hybridity and mixed-race selfhood in post-emancipation Jamaica
In the final year of their BA (Hons) in English with Creative Writing, students produce a Creative Writing Project—the culmination of their creative practice on the course.
For his project, Lawrence Clarke-Russam produced a radio play entitled Confucius, in which he explores cultural hybridity and mixed-race identity in the cultural battleground of post-emancipation Jamaica. As Lawrence explains in his introduction to the play, ‘Amid worldwide “Black Lives Matter” protests following George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Confucius began as a creative inquiry into the value of mixed-race experiences to discourses on racial and cultural identity’. The final play, Lawrence continues, ‘is an imaginary excursion into late nineteenth-century post-emancipation Jamaica (circa 1890)’. ‘Izziah, the play’s duppy-narrator’, Lawrence writes, ‘observes and commentates on an adolescent boy’s development of a mixed-race identity’. Gaps in the historical record opened up space for Lawrence to ask questions about how ‘mixed-race children navigate the cultural cross-roads of a Jamaica before “Jamaicanness”, a nation before nationhood’. Drawing on historical research, and a lineage of Caribbean writing including Anthony Winkler and Kei Miller, the play is written entirely in patois, to emphasise characters’ exclusion from Jamaica’s colonially-imposed English culture and to reflect the resistant and revolutionary rhythms of Jamaican language and culture.
Explore more
You can find out more about how students from the School of Cultural Studies and Humanities have explored the experiences of black and ethnic minority people here.
