Materialising Memory: Gail Lewis and Alia Syed
A Teach-In organised in solidarity with the UCU Strike at Goldsmiths, University of London.
This workshop is the fourth and final in the series Feminist Tools for Working Across Difference, the CHASE-funded PhD training programme organised across the Courtauld Institute, Birkbeck, Goldsmiths, and Sussex University, in collaboration with the Feminist Duration Reading Group (FDRG) and the Goldsmiths Centre for Feminist Research.
Designed to support researchers activating auto-ethnographic, archival, feminist and decolonial methodologies, the workshop explores how under-represented histories are embodied and brought into material form. Guest speakers Gail Lewis and Alia Syed share tools for working across life writing and filmmaking, archival research, and critical thought.
Navigating intersections of family history, subjective formation, and cultural heritage, the workshop draws inspiration from Gail Lewis’s landmark essay ‘Birthing Racial Difference: Conversations with my mother and others’ (2009), and the acclaimed experimental films of Alia Syed.
Gail Lewis’s ‘Birthing Racial Difference’ uses autobiographical material to examine how 'race' has operated as a structuring principle in Britain since the end of the Second World War. Staging an encounter between lived experience (revealed through memory) and psychoanalytic and sociological texts, it shows how 'life' is both captured by these traditions of thought and how it exceeds them. The article focuses on the material and emotional registers of intersubjectivity across the divisions of black and white. It is punctuated by brief musical interruptions, illustrating the pervasive presence of gendered, raced and sexed in popular cultural artefacts.
Drawing on her Welsh-Indian heritage, Alia Syed makes experimental films that disrupt traditional narrative structures to create complex explorations of migration and colonialism, identity and place. Her work delves into geography, memory, and the fragmented nature of diasporic identity.
Format
This workshop takes place in three parts. Part 1 centres on an out-loud collective reading of Gail Lewis’s ‘Birthing Racial Difference.’ After a break we will watch and discuss recent film work by Alia Syed. In Part 3 participants will share their own research projects and ideas for the critical and creative activation of personal and family archives, stories, and memories.
Join Us
You can reserve a free place for this workshop here:
Reading for the event will be circulated in advance. Please bring a copy with you as we will read from it together during the meeting.
Access
The Students’ Union is wheelchair accessible - with the exception of the smoking areas on the top floor. The venue has a level access entrance and a lift up to the first and second floors. If you have any further access needs or requests, please contact feministduration@gmail.com .
Bios
Gail Lewis was born in London where she continues to live. A distinguished psychotherapist, sociologist, and activist, Gail who has made profound contributions to Black feminist, anti-racist, and socialist thought and activism including as co-founder of the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and member of the Brixton Black Women's Group. Gail is Reader Emerita of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and has held positions at academic institutions including LSE, City University of New York, and Yale.
Alia Syed was born in Swansea, and lives between London and Glasgow. A celebrated experimental filmmaker and artist, for over four decades her moving image practice has investigated the boundaries of language, personal and collective memory, cultural diaspora, identity, and representation. Alia’s films have been shown internationally including at BBC Arts, Chelsea College of Arts, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5th Moscow Biennale, MoMA, New York, and Reina Sofia museum, Madrid, and have been the subject of solo exhibitions in New Delhi and at Talwar Gallery, New York.
*** SOLIDARITY WITH GOLDSMITHS UCU! ***
*** This event is organised in full solidarity with industrial action being taken by members of Goldsmiths UCU. UCU members are already undertaking a full and indefinite strike in response to plans for £20million in staff cuts, for which Goldsmiths Senior Management announced 100% pay deductions. Please consider donating to the strike fund. Further information on UCU action and the strike. ***
