Tag Archives: Racism

Events

January 15th 2025- The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah

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On January 15th November 2025, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will host a discussion of The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah. Entry is free and everyone is welcome. We will meet at 10 John St, GL5 2AH.

This event has been rescheduled from December – when it was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances – many apologies. It was originally planned to mark the one year anniversary of Benjamin Zephaniah’s death – on the 7th December 2023.

On his own website, this is how the book is described: “Benjamin Zephaniah is old. So he decided to write his autobiography. It documents his life from the sound systems of Birmingham to the world stage.”

In the early 1980s when punks and Rastas were on the streets protesting about unemployment, homelessness and the National Front, Benjamin’s poetry could be heard at demonstrations, outside police stations and on the dance floor. His mission was to take poetry everywhere, and to popularise it by reaching people who didn’t read books. His poetry was political, musical, radical and relevant.

The Lifes and Rhymes of is the stunning autobiography of the poet, writer, lyricist and activist, Benjamin Zephaniah.

This event follows our discussion of “Speak Out!” – an anthology of work by the Brixton Black Women’s Group in October, and Angela Davis’ autobiography – but you are welcome to attend this event alone, and do not have been to any of our previous events to come along to this one.

Resources

About our events and the venue

Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend, though we will make a collection to cover costs – please bring some cash. We try to create a comfortable discussion space for everyone, including people who have not been part of a reading group or been to university. Anyone is welcome to listen to the discussion, though we encourage contributions only from those who have read at least some of the book we are discussing.

We will meet at 10 John St, GL5 2AH. This is near the centre of town, a short walk from Stroud Railway Station and a slightly longer walk from the Merrywalks Bus Station. There are stands to lock bikes to outside, and parking for cars nearby in either Brunel Mall, Fawkes Place, or Church St car park. There is a low step to enter the building, which is flat. There are no toilet facilities. Please get in touch if you’d like to get more of an idea of what the sessions are like or if you have any accessibility needs.

Events

November 27th 2024 – An Autobiography by Angela Davis

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On Wednesday 27th November 2024, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will host a discussion of An Autobiography by Angela Davis. Entry is free and everyone is welcome. We will meet at 10 John St, GL5 2AH.

The book is a powerful and commanding account of the life of trailblazing political activist Angela Davis, detailing her journey from a childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama to one of the most significant political trials of the century. From her political activity in a New York high school to her work with the U.S. Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and the Soledad Brothers; and from the faculty of the Philosophy Department at UCLA to the FBI’s list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. Told with warmth, brilliance, humour and conviction, this autobiography is a classic account of a life in struggle with echoes in our own time.

Find links to buy the book and free resources related to it below, as well as information about the venue for our events and our group. If you do not have time to read the full book, we recommend focusing on Part 4 – Flames. Download part 4 here (this is still a big section, over 100 pages). We welcome contributions to the discussion from anyone who has engaged with any of the resources – even if they haven’t finished Part 4 or the book, and anyone to join us to listen in even if they have not been able to engage with any of the resources.

We’ll be following this event with a discussion on autobiography by Benjamin Zephaniah in December, and it follows our discussion of “Speak Out!” – an anthology of work by the Brixton Black Women’s Group in October – but you are welcome to attend this event alone, and do not have been to any of our previous events to come along to this one.

Resources

AngelaDavisAutobiography-4FlamesDownload

About our events and the venue

Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend, though we will make a collection to cover costs – please bring some cash. We try to create a comfortable discussion space for everyone, including people who have not been part of a reading group or been to university. Anyone is welcome to listen to the discussion, though we encourage contributions only from those who have read at least some of the book we are discussing.

We will meet at 10 John St, GL5 2AH. This is near the centre of town, a short walk from Stroud Railway Station and a slightly longer walk from the Merrywalks Bus Station. There are stands to lock bikes to outside, and parking for cars nearby in either Brunel Mall, Fawkes Place, or Church St car park. There is a low step to enter the building, which is flat. There are no toilet facilities. Please get in touch if you’d like to get more of an idea of what the sessions are like or if you have any accessibility needs.

Events

Wednesday 30th August 2023: Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman

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On Wednesday 30th August 2023, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will discuss Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman. Noughts and Crosses is described as Young Adult fiction – this is the first time we’ve read such a book. It’s fitting to link to the BBC Bitesize intro page, which summarises the book as “a novel set in a dystopian Britain in which society is divided by racism. Dark-skinned Crosses are privileged in society over the light-skinned noughts. Against the odds, the main characters, Sephy and Callum, fall in love across the divide which leads them into danger. Malorie Blackman was inspired by real events from history and her own life when she wrote this novel.”

As usual we’ll discuss what we made of the book and how it might be relevant to us in our own lives. SRRG regular Asha will introduce the book for us. At this session, we’ll also provide a quick introduction to Stroud Radical Reading Group – mentioning the books we’ll be reading later in the year and providing a quick history of books we’ve read in the past. We enourage people to read the book but you are also welcome even if you haven’t read the book – to listen to the discussion and ask questions.

On this webpage you can find details to buy the book at a discount, free resources, and information about the author, the book, how our sessions work, and the venue. We’ll be in a new venue this month – the SISTER Summer School – an empty building Stroud in Internationalist Solidarity Together for Earth Repairs (SISTER) have reclaimed on Lansdown Road.

The book is available from Yellow Lighted Bookshop for £8.99, and you should be able to get a 12% discount: after adding the book to your ‘basket’, view your basket where there is an option to enter a ‘Coupon code’. Add the code “StroudRadical23” and click/tap “Apply coupon”.

Freely available resources related to the book are available below. We like to ensure everyone can attendee our sessions and get something out of them even if they can’t afford to buy a copy of the book or the time to read it. We would encourage people to read/listen to as much as possible, but you are welcome to attend and listen along even if you are unable to engage with any of the below.

Free resources

About the author and the book

Malorie Blackman has written over seventy books for children and young adults, including the Noughts & Crosses series. Many of her books have also been adapted for stage and television, including a BAFTA-award-winning BBC production of Pig-Heart Boy and a Pilot Theatre stage adaptation by Sabrina Mahfouz of Noughts & Crosses. In 2005 Malorie was honoured with the Eleanor Farjeon Award in recognition of her distinguished contribution to the world of children’s books. In 2008 she received an OBE for her services to children’s literature, and between 2013 and 2015 she was the Children’s Laureate. Most recently Malorie wrote for the Doctor Who series on BBC One, and the fifth novel in her Noughts & Crosses series, Crossfire, was published by Penguin Random House Children’s in summer 2019.

Published twenty years ago last year, Malorie Blackman’s ‘Noughts & Crosses’ broke the hearts of a generation of teenage readers, and its influence on Young Adult fiction can be felt across the genre with the themes of racism, diversity and conflict still as pertinent in this era of Black Lives Matter as they were when the series was first published.

Endorsements:

‘The Noughts & Crosses series are still my favourite books of all time and showed me just how amazing story-telling could be’ – Stormzy

‘The most original book I’ve ever read’ Benjamin Zephaniah

‘Unforgettable’ Guardian

Events

Books we will read in 2023

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Please see below a full list of the books we will read in 2023. Each monthly session will have its own page on the website providing links to excerpts (‘focus texts’) to enable those who aren’t able to buy/read full books to participate, discounted copies of the books, and audio/visual materials that act as alternatives/additions to the reading. For now, only January-May’s sessions has these details, but full details will be added, together with dates for sessions beyond January, ASAP.

* Wednesday January 25th: “We Fight Fascists: The 43 Group and Their Forgotten Battle for Post-war Britain”, by Daniel Sonabend

* February: “No Pasaran! Antifascist dispatches from a World in crisis”, edited by Shane Burley

* March: “Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics” by Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley

* April: “The Post-Internet Far-Right and Ecofascism“, both by Sam Moore and Alex Roberts

* May: “White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism”, by Andreas Malm and The Zetkin Collective

* June – The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below by Peter Gelderloos

* July – After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration, by Holly Jean Buck

* August: Noughts and Crosses, by Malorie Blackman

* September: Disaster Anarchy – Mutual Aid and Radical Action by Rhiannon Firth

* October 2023 – Old Gods, New Enigmas by Mike Davis

* Nov 2023 – Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence by The Care Collective

Events

The Purpose of Power – by Alicia Garza. August 2022

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On Monday August 29th 2022, from 7.30-9.30pm at The Exchange, Brick Row, Stroud (GL5 1DF), Stroud Radical Reading Group will discuss Alicia Garza’s book The Purpose of Power: How to build movements for the 21st Century (discounted copies are available from a local bookshop – click the previous link/see below).

Our events are free to attend, though we will collect donations to cover the costs of venue hire on a donate-what-you-can-afford basis. We try to ensure the discussions are welcoming to new people, including people who have never been to a reading group before – and you don’t have to have been to university. You don’t even have to have read any of the book – you can just come along and listen to the discussion. Some free resources including a sample chapter we’ll focus our discussion on are included below though, and we’d encourage people to read/listen to as much as they can ahead of the session.

“Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag when Alicia Garza wrote what she calls ‘a love letter to Black people’ on Facebook. But hashtags don’t build movements, she tells us. People do.

Interwoven with Garza’s experience of life as a Black woman, The Purpose of Power is the story of how she responded to the persistent message that Black lives are of less value than white lives by galvanizing people to create change. It’s an insight into grass roots organizing to deliver basic needs – affordable housing, workplace protections, access to good education – to those locked out of the economy by racism.

It is an attempt not only to make sense of where Black Lives Matter came from but also to understand the possibilities that Black Lives Matter and movements like it hold for our collective futures. Ultimately, it’s an appeal to hearts and minds, demanding that we think about our privileges and prejudices and ask how we might contribute to the change we want to see in the world”

– Publisher information about the book

We will focus our discussion on Chapter 1 – which is available free. We encourage people to buy a copy of the book and read as much as possible, but appreciate not everyone can afford this in terms of either money or time – or may prefer audio/visual content. Below we provide links to another excerpt from the book, and two interview with Alicia Garza (one a video, the other text), which are all freely available.

The Exchange has step-free access. We will keep windows open for ventilation, hand sanitiser is provided, and we ask people who are ill to stay away (whether they are ill with covid or something else). Attendees do not generally wear masks but we will be respectful to anyone who chooses to and other members may wear masks at request of other attendees – let us know your preferences in advance. Please contact us if you have any accessibility requirements – or other questions about how the events work.

Resources

Events

The Black Panther Party – a graphic novel history. 23rd July 2022

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On Saturday 23rd July 2022, from 7.30-9.30pm, Stroud Radical Reading Group will meet at The Exchange, Brick Row, Stroud to discuss David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson’s graphic novel history of The Black Panther Party (discounted copies are available from a local bookshop – see below).

Our events are free to attend, though we will collect donations to cover the costs of venue hire on a donate-what-you-can-afford basis. We try to ensure the discussions are welcoming to new people, including people who have never been to a reading group before – and you don’t have to have been to university. You don’t even have to have read any of the book – you can just come along and listen to the discussion. Some free resources including a sample chapter we’ll focus our discussion on are included below though, and we’d encourage people to read/listen to as much as they can ahead of the session.

The Exchange has step free access, but please contact us if you have any accessibility requirements – or other questions about how the events work.

“Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was a revolutionary political organization that stood in defiant contrast to the mainstream civil rights movement.

This gripping illustrated history explores the impact and legacy of the Panthers, from their social, educational, and healthcare programs that were designed to uplift the Black community to their battle against police brutality through citizen patrols and frequent clashes with the FBI, which targeted the Party from its outset.

Using dramatic comic book-style retellings and illustrated profiles of key figures, The Black Panther Party captures the major events, people, and actions of the party, as well as their cultural and political influence and enduring significance.”
– Publisher information about the book

We’ll focus our discussion on Chapter 3: Birth of the Panthers, which you can read online or download as a pdf below (some of the text may be a little blurred, apologies). The sample chapter is made freely available under fair use rules to ensure everyone can participate. However, we’d encourage everyone to read as much of the book as possible, if you are able to afford a copy.

Resources

Click to buy a copy from The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop – add the book to your basked, click to ‘view your basked’, where you’ll see a ‘coupon code’ option – enter code “StroudRadical”, then proceed to the checkout where £1.92 will be taken off the RRP of £15.9 to make the price to pay £14.07 (before any delivery costs – you can pick up for free from Nailsworth, Chalford or Tetbury).

If you prefer audio, or would like to add to your reading, try this podcast where David F. Walker speaks about the book with Alyssa Milano for her Sorry Not Sorry podcast.

Chapter 3 – together with the cover and some of the introductory pages:

blackpanthergraphicnovelhistoryDownload

Events

July 21st 2021: Zami by Audre Lorde

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Our next session will be on Wednesday 21st July, 7.30-9.30pm on Zoom (contact us for details).

We will discuss Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde on 21st July. This is the second in a series of three texts on Feminism, to be followed by Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici (August 18th). Full details for that session to be added to the website ASAP. In June we discussed Lola Olufemi’s Feminism, Interrupted – Disrupting Power (click to catch up with free excerpts/audio-visual content).

Order the book from the Yellow Lighted Bookshop. Once you’ve ordered the book(s) you want, enter “StroudRadical” to the “Coupon Code” box at the checkout, click “Apply Coupon” – and the bill will be reduced by 10%. You can then either collect from Nailsworth, Tetbury or Chalford shops, or have the book(s) delivered by RoyalMail or the Bike Drop (£3.50 for delivery.

Audrew Lorde was an American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist. Zami is a “biomythography”, a term coined by Lorde that combines “biography” and “mythology”. As well as Lorde’s life, the book explores racism, lesbianism, mother-daughter relationships, and McCarthyism (accusations of treason related to Communism, named after the US Senator and the ‘red scare’ era of 1940s and 1950s America).

“A little black girl opens her eyes in 1930s Harlem, weak and half-blind. On she stumbles – through teenage pain and loneliness, but then to happiness in friendship, work and sex, from Washington Heights to Mexico, always changing, always strong. This is Audre Lorde’s story. A rapturous, life-affirming autobiographical novel by the ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet’, it changed the literary landscape.”

– from the Penguin Classics edition

There is a 50 minute audio recording of Audre Lorde reading excerpts of the book and speaking about her life available on YouTube (at the link and embedded below).

Want to read more? You can read Lorde’s 1980 paper “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” (pdf) at the link.

Events

October 28th – “The Black Jacobins”

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On October 28th we will discuss “The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution” by C.L.R. James. The discussion will take place on a Zoom video call – please register (free) to access the details and be sent a reminder on the day.

In Black Jacobins, CLR James provides the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803 and the story of the French colony of San Domingo. It is also the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces – helping to form the first independent nation in the Caribbean, and inspiring anti-colonial movements around the world.

The book obviously contains considerable references to the brutality of enslavement, and to racist ideas and commentary.

The full text of The Black Jacobins is available online for free in different formats. We encourage people to read the whole book, and as much as possible if not.

For those who know they will only have time for a section, our introducer Jeremy Green recommends Chapter 2 – The Owners. Click below to download Chaper 2 and introductory pages.

BlackJacobinsIntroCh2OwnersDownload

Black Jacobins as full text .pdf or .mobi files via link

This is the third session in our Geographies and Histories of Racial Capitalism series – but readers are welcome to join if they have not attended previous events.

Events

September 30th 2020 – The Many-Headed Hydra

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As part of our series of discussions exploring Geographies and Histories of Racial Capitalism (monthly online events till November 2020), on September 30th 2020 we discussed “The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic” by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker.

Read a summary of The Many-Headed Hydra and our discussion on Amplify Stroud.

The full text of The Many-Headed Hydra is available online as a pdf, and as ever we encourage people to read as much of the book as possible.

We focussed our discussion on the Introduction and Chapter 6 – “The Outcasts of The Nations of The Earth” – download this section as a .doc text file.

Marshaling an impressive range of original research from archives in the Americas and Europe, the authors of The Many Headed Hydra explore the foundations of our modern global economy, and show how ordinary working people led dozens of rebellions on both sides of the North Atlantic. The rulers of the day called the multiethnic rebels a ‘hydra’ and brutally suppressed their risings, yet some of their ideas fueled the age of revolution. Others, hidden from history and recovered here, have much to teach us about our common humanity.

Chapter 6 explores the the “structure of New York’s commerce”, at a time of slavery and imperialism – part of what the authors call their recovery of a “lost history of the multiethnic class that was essential to the rise of capitalism and the modern, global economy”. As Sukhdev Sandhu writes in his 2001 review of the book for The Guardian: “A central chapter of the book is concerned with what came to be known as the New York Conspiracy. In March 1741, radicals set fire to New York. Fort George, the prime military fortification in British America, was reduced to ashes. Soon, other metropolitan landmarks were torched. These were no random conflagrations. Lying on the west side of Manhattan, Fort George was a site of huge strategic importance for the Atlantic trade and a nodal point of the Britain-Africa-Americas triangle. Slaves and slave products were imported there. It was also populated by a swarm of people whose labours underwrote the city’s wealth, but who themselves were wholly despised.”

The chapter places the events of 1741 in context of a cycle of “multiracial conspiracies” and rebellions of the 1730s and 1740s, and notes how repression of these led to the promotion of “a white identity” in order to “produce new discipline and a different solidarity”.

Content warning: this chapter includes an image of a painting entitled “The hanging of an African in New York”. The book as a whole features other images of this nature, as well as some graphic descriptions of (racist and/or sexual) violence, and quotes historical racist texts.

This event will be followed by two further discussions exploring Geographies and Histories of Racial Capitalism:

October 28th – “The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution” by C.L.R. James

November 25th – “(B)Ordering Britain: Law, race and empire” by Nadine El-Enany.

Events

Geographies and Histories of Racial Capitalism. SRRG 2020 series 3

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Between July 29th and November 25th, Stroud Radical Reading Group will host a series of discussions exploring Racial Capitalism. Each of these events will be held on the last Wednesday of the month, 7.30-9.30pm – online via video call (we will continue to assess when it may be appropriate to host indoor events). You will need to register for the events via Eventbrite in order to access details of the video calls (this is free, will prevent any ‘trolling’ of calls, and enable reminders).

As ever, Stroud Radical Reading Group events are free to attend. Please contact us about any accessibility requirements. We aim to make the sessions a welcoming space for anyone interested in the topics. You do not need to have a university education or have ever been to a reading group before, and we even welcome people who have not read the text but would like to listen to the discussion. Please contact us if you have any questions or would like to know more about how the sessions are run. If you are on Facebook, please also join our Facebook group.

July 29th – Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore

We will start this series by focussing our discussion not on a text but on a 17 minute Antipode Foundation film – “Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore”.

For those who wish to read a short text to accompany this video, we recommend “Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty-first century (pdf)” by Camilla Hawthorne. Referencing the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and the Black Radical tradition, this paper explores how “scholars of Black Geographies insist that racism and capitalism are fundamentally intertwined and that this relationship is both structured by and structuring of space”.

Download – Camilla Hawthore: Black Matters are Spatial MattersDownload

September 30th – “The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, slaves, commoners, and the hidden history of the revolutionary Atlantic” by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker

The expansion of trade and colonization in the early seventeenth century launched the first global economy, a vast, diverse, and landless workforce was born. These workers crossed national, ethnic, and racial boundaries, as they circulated around the Atlantic world on trade ships and slave ships, from England to Virginia, from Africa to Barbados, and from the Americas back to Europe.

Marshalling an impressive range of original research from archives in the Americas and Europe, the authors show how ordinary working people led dozens of rebellions on both sides of the North Atlantic. The rulers of the day called the multiethnic rebels a ‘hydra’ and brutally suppressed their risings, yet some of their ideas fuelled the age of revolution. The full text of The Many-Headed Hydra is available online as a pdf. We will focus our discussion on the Introduction and Chapter 6 – “The Outcasts of The Nations of The Earth”, but please read as much of the book beyond this as you are able to. For more details of the event: Many Headed Hydra.

October 28th – “The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution” by C.L.R. James

CLR James provides the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803 and the story of the French colony of San Domingo. It is also the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces – helping to form the first independent nation in the Caribbean, and inspiring anti-colonial movements around the world.

The full text of The Black Jacobins is available online as a “.mobi” ebook file. We encourage people to read the whole book, and as much as possible if not. More details of this event: The Black Jacobins. Download the intro and Chapter 2 as a pdf via the link below:

BlackJacobinsIntroCh2OwnersDownload

November 25th – “(B)Ordering Britain: Law, race and empire” by Nadine El-Enany.

(B)ordering Britain argues that Britain is the spoils of empire, its immigration law is colonial violence and irregular immigration is anti-colonial resistance. The British Empire, about which Britons know little, can be remembered fondly as a moment of past glory, as a gift once given to the world. Meanwhile immigration laws are justified on the basis that they keep the undeserving hordes out.

Bordering Britain argues that – no matter what the law, media and political discourse dictate – people with personal, ancestral or geographical links to colonialism, or those existing under the weight of its legacy of race and racism, should have every right to come to Britain and take back what is theirs.

We will focus our discussion on the introduction to Bordering Britain – available free online (pdf) as a sample chapter from the publishers. You are welcome and encouraged to read more, but we appreciate that the £20 price tag for the hardcover book (and sadly the e-book version as well) may be unaffordable – which is why the focus of our discussion will be on the freely available text.