Celebrate the publication of Ben Pitcher’s new book with Vron Ware, Subhadra Das and Sivamohan Valluvan. The event will be followed by a drinks reception from 6.30pm.
About the book
Prehistoric human life is a common reference point in contemporary culture, inspiring attempts to become happier, healthier or better people. Exploited by capitalism, overwhelmed by technology and living in the shadow of environmental catastrophe, we call on the prehistoric to escape the present, and to model alternative ways of living our lives.
In Back to the Stone Age: Race and Prehistory in Contemporary Culture, Ben Pitcher explores how ideas about race are tightly woven into the powerful origin stories we use to explain who we are, where we came from and what we are like. Using a broad range of examples from popular culture – from megaliths and museum mannequins, to television shows and best-selling nonfiction – Pitcher demonstrates how prehistory is alive in the 21st century. He argues that that the way we look back at our prehistoric past provides revealing insights into present-day anxieties, obsessions and concerns.
Back to the Stone Age shows that the human past is not set in stone. By opening up the prehistoric to critical contestation, Pitcher places racial justice at the centre of questions about the existence and persistence of Homo sapiens in the contemporary world.
About the speakers
Vron Ware is Visiting Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. She has written extensively on race, gender, nationalism and whiteness. Her most recent book is Return of a Native: Learning from the Land (Repeater Books, 2022).
Subhadra Das is a writer, historian and broadcaster specialising in the history of scientific racism and eugenics. She is the author of (Un)Civilised: 10 Lies that Made the West (Hodder & Stoughton, 2023).
Sivamohan Valluvan is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. He writes on racism, nationalism, multiculture and cosmopolitanism. He is the author of The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-First-Century Britain (Manchester University Press, 2019).
Location
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2HW
