Renowned Author Caryl Phillips Lecture and Workshop at Northumbria

Clare Elliott

On Tuesday 26th May colleagues in American Studies and English welcomed the critically-acclaimed author Caryl Phillips to the University. Phillips is one of the most highly acclaimed novelists and essayist of his generation. His numerous works of fiction and non-fiction include The Lost Child (2015), Colour Me English (2011), Dancing in the Dark (2005), The Atlantic Sound (2000) and Crossing the River (1994) He was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for his novel, A Distant Shore (2003) and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Crossing the River. His many other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Phillips' lecture for staff and students.

The University held two main events that day. The first was a Creative Practice and Critical Engagement Workshop which was attended by literature and creative writing students. This was an inspiring event where Phillips answered questions about his novel Crossing the River. After a long interview with Dr Clare Elliott, Phillips engaged with several students in discussion about this text and his other work. We talked about how Phillips’s fiction and non-fiction deals with the Black Diaspora and notices a tension between a sense of homelessness and an African belonging that is often experienced by his diasporan characters. We discussed issues of class and race and how Phillips connects the two in his writing and we talked about gender, place and identity, and reimagining histories of migration. In the latter half of the workshop creative writing students were asked to write a short piece with these themes in mind. The exercise was fruitful and the author gave a full critique of each short story. In the evening we had the pleasure of hearing from Phillips again as he read from his new novel The Lost Child. This was a public event where the audience heard Phillips in conversation with Professor Brian Ward and Dr Clare Elliott. We talked about The Lost Child as a response to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; themes of education, class and race in the novel as well as music and literature more broadly. The day was full, enriching and thoroughly enjoyed by all!

The Shadow of Selma: Selma and the Voting Rights Act, 1965-2015

The programme for the upcoming conference on Selma and the Voting Rights Act is now available. See the panels and plenary session below, or download the full programme here. The Northumbria University website notes that the American Studies programme will host "its own 'Shadow of Selma' initiative with a major international conference marking the 50th anniversary of the Selma protests and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The conference runs on April 8 and 9 and culminates with a public lecture by celebrated journalist and author Gary Younge at The Sage, Gateshead. Younge’s lecture will also launch the 60th Anniversary Conference of the British Association for American Studies, which is coming to Northumbria for the first time."*

The Shadow of Selma: 

Selma and the Voting Rights Act, 1965-2015

Northumbria University American Studies International Conference

April 8-9 2015
Sponsorship: Northumbria University and the US Embassy, London

WED. 8TH APRIL
City Campus East 1 Room 007

9.00-9.20 Coffee & Tea

9.20-9.30 Introduction from Professor Brian Ward

9.30-11.00: PANEL A: Selma and Grassroots Organisation

Chair: Dr. Ashley Riley Sousa (Middle Tennessee State University)

Dr. Ben Houston (Newcastle University)
“Before the Bridge: Grassroots Activism in Selma”

Professor Alma Billingslea-Brown (Spelman College)
“Selma: Bridge, Boundary and Beyond”

11.00-11.30 Coffee & Tea

11.30–1.00 PANEL B: Selma and Media Coverage

Chair: Dr. Joe Street (Northumbria University)

Mark Walmsley (Leeds University)
“‘They Couldn’t Just Write it the Way it Wasn’t Anymore’: Examining Mainstream Coverage of the 1965 Selma Campaign”

Professor Aniko Bodroghkozy (University of Virginia)
“Mediating Selma: 1965, 2015”

1.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00-4.00 PANEL C: Responses to Selma and the Voting Rights Act

Chair: Dr. Randall Stephens (Northumbria University)

Professor Tony Badger (Northumbria University)
“Backlash or Adjustment? The White South responds to Selma”

Professor Clive Webb (University of Sussex)
“‘We cannot escape the same challenge’: Britain, France and the US Voting Rights Act”

Dr. George Lewis (Leicester University)
“Sidelining Selma’s Segregationists: Memory, Strategy, Ideology and Agency”

7.00 Conference Dinner at Blackfriars Restaurant

THU. 9TH APRIL

9.00-9.30 Coffee & Tea

09.30-11.00 PANEL D: The Supreme Court, Voting Rights, and Economic Citizenship

Chair: Kristine McCusker (Middle Tennessee State University)

J. Douglas Smith (Colburn Music Conservatory)
“The Dirksen Amendment and the Effective Repeal of the Voting Rights Act”

Dr. Lynn Itagaki (Ohio State University)
“Shareholder, Debtor, Voter: Economic Citizenship in the Roberts Court Deregulation of Campaign Finance Reform and The Voting Rights Act”

11.00-11.30 Coffee & Tea

11.30-1.00 PANEL E: Race, Voting, and Wealth in the South Since 1965

Chair: Professor Brian Ward (Northumbria University)

Dr. Devin Fergus (Ohio State University)
"The Third Reconstruction: The Racial Wealth Gap and the Post-Civil Rights US South"

Dr. George Derek Musgrove (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) (co-author with Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Ohio State University)
“The decline of ‘freedom politics’ in the midst of the Second Redemption: black voter mobilization and white voter suppression in the Alabama Black Belt, 1965-2010”

1.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00-3.30 PANEL F: Shelby County vs. Holder (2013) and the South Today

Chair: Dr. Nick Hayward (Northumbria University)

Dr. Barbara Combs (University of Mississippi)
“Purpose Nor Effect: How the Rise of Colorblind Racism Opened the Door For the Supreme Court Decision in Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder”

Dr. James Hall (Rochester Institute of Technology)
“A Newer New South:  Reading Shelby County v. Holder in Post Racial America”
 
5.00-6.30 Keynote (at the Baltic, with the British Association of American Studies Conference): Gary Younge (The Guardian)

Introducing the Film Selma

Brian Ward

A screenshot from an original newsreel of the
1965 Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights.

It's always a nerve-wracking experience for a professional historian to watch a feature film or television drama that purports to depict real events, particularly if it’s on a topic where we like to claim some expertise. Will the drama get the basic facts and chronology right?; will the on-screen characterisations ring true?; will the film get the clothes and hair right?

As a historian of the US South and the civil rights movement, all those thoughts were rushing through my mind as I watched the Oscar-nominated Selma for the first time, especially knowing that I had been asked to deliver introductions to the film in Newcastle at special screenings at the Star and Shadow and Tyneside cinemas.

As I explained to those audiences, the good news is that Selma is a powerful, often inspirational film that only occasionally plays fast and loose with the historical record or offers up dubious interpretations of events. The film recounts the story of the historic campaign for Voting Rights in an Alabama city where a mix of white violence, intimidation, and legal chicanery meant that in 1965 only 383 of a potential black electorate of more than 15,000 were registered to vote. A series of nonviolent demonstrations met with brutal, sometimes lethal white resistance from local law enforcement agencies and vigilante groups. The protests culminated in the events of Bloody Sunday, March 7, when state troopers, some of them mounted on horseback, beat and tear-gassed marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge as they tried to walk to Montgomery, the state capital, to protest before Alabama governor and segregationist icon George Wallace. A march two days later led by Martin Luther King was aborted on what became known as Turnaround Tuesday, but a third march, attracting as many as 25,000 supporters from around the nation, eventually made it Montgomery. read more>>>

Showing of film Selma with Intro Lecture by Prof Brian Ward, January 31

The North East premiere of the new feature film Selma will take place at the Star & Shadow Cinema at 2pm on Saturday, January 31, a week before its official release.  The movie tells the story of a pivotal moment in the African-American fight for voting rights in the 1960s South. Northumbria Professor in American Studies Brian Ward will give a short introductory talk on the film before the screening.

Film critic A.O. Scott writes of the movie in a recent New York Times review:

While entirely satisfying on its own, “Selma” seems to contain the seeds of at least a dozen other movies — a reminder of how fertile the civil rights era is and how poorly it has been explored by popular culture. Spike Lee and Denzel Washington gave us a fine Malcolm X (who shows up here briefly, played by Nigel Thatch), but how long will we have to wait for a biopic devoted to Bayard Rustin (Ruben Santiago-Hudson), Amelia Boynton (Lorraine Toussaint) or Andrew Young (Andre Holland)? Or for a daring director to tackle the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, whose internal tensions and impatience with Dr. King surface here in arguments between James Forman (Trai Byers) and the future Congressman John Lewis (Stephan James)? Where is the premium-cable mini-series about Diane Nash (Ms. Thompson) and James Bevel (Common)? The Martin Luther King-Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo) buddy movie? The “Law & Order” spinoff about the career of the Justice Department lawyer John Doar (Alessandro Nivola)? They are all here, in miniature, but “Selma” made me impatient for more. . .

Edmund Pettus Bridge scene from the film.

“Selma” is not a manifesto, a battle cry or a history lesson. It’s a movie: warm, smart, generous and moving in two senses of the word. It will call forth tears of grief, anger, gratitude and hope. And like those pilgrims on the road to Montgomery, it does not rest.*

The showing of the film at the Star and Shadow will also serve as a fundraiser for the Journey to Justice/Shadow of Selma Project. In Spring 2015, J2J/SoS will bring an exhibition on the US Civil Rights Movement and its connections to struggles for social justice and democracy in the North East to the Discovery and Great North Museums, as well as running various public engagement and educational events on similar themes.

Tickets cost £10 each and are available here.

For more information on tickets and Journey to Justice, contact Bethany Elen Kirtley Coyle. For more information on the Star & Shadow, go here.