All families have secrets. They carry with them painful stories. Families move. Families escape. Families rebel. Families colonise. Families resist. Families re-settle. Families hide. Families lose and acquire property. Families find and lose employment, land, loved ones.
As part of Black History Year you are invited to a performative workshop to contribute to decolonising the University of Westminster Curriculum. Moving away from traditional modes of imparting knowledge through hierarchical orders, the workshop provides a space for equal knowledge co-creation, where all participants and their stories are assembled together, as we all have arrived from somewhere and have a story to tell. We will spend the workshop making visible the hidden stories of our ancestors’ journeys and how they have been shaped by colonialism.
This workshop practices what Sam Okoth Opondo calls “para-diplomacy”, as a decolonising approach to mediating estrangement. In the workshop we will act as amateur diplomats, sharing the censored genres of postcolonial experience. Using an experimental pedagogy our workshop will collate the usually untold stories – the colonial debris into a shared archive. We invite participants from all backgrounds to share family stories of place and (dis)placement, travel and arrival, escape and refuge, dispossession and resettlement to forge new forms of relationality.
For the workshop, all participants must prepare the following:
- Bring in to share an untold or secret story of your ancestors' postcolonial travel, whether from a colonising nation or the colonised
- Reflect on how your ancestors' untold story shapes part of who you are today
- Bring in an object that signifies this untold story
The workshop performs a feminist ethic of prioritising those stories that remain hidden from the public view, and it adopts a queer understanding of family as diverse and ever-changing relations. Your stories will be shared with other family stories and therefore we ask you to reveal the moments that you are comfortable bringing into the public sphere. We look forward to creating this collective archive with you.
Book your place for Sharing Untold Stories of Postcolonial Journeys here.
Any questions or if you need further information please contact us on:
Ipshita Basu: [email protected]
Catherine Chiniara Charrett: [email protected]
