Literature Must Fall, Hajar Press and Shadow Heroes present an online panel discussion that explores questions around representation, paternalism, white fragility and class in the literary establishment, as well as the ways in which people of colour can navigate, understand or dismantle a system that seeks to co-opt and undermine them. Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Zarina Muhammad and Azeezat Johnson will come together to discuss all this and more, in a panel chaired by Kavita Bhanot.
The panellists will bounce off clips from LMF’s recent film ‘Where Are All the White Voices?’, an adaptation of a play that was performed at the Literature Must Fall festival in 2019. The film is a humorous take on diversity panels, reversing the gaze to show how absurd, patronising and even violent mainstream conversations about marginalised literature and writers can be. Attendees will be sent a link to the film when they register.
Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a poet, writer and educator who disrupts narratives about history, knowledge, race and violence. Performances based on her debut poetry collection, Postcolonial Banter, have millions of views online. She is the author of Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia (Pluto Press, 2022), and her work has featured in The Guardian, gal-dem and across radio and TV. Suhaiymah has been commissioned to write plays by the Bunker, Royal Court and other theatres and has essays in numerous antiracist anthologies.
The White Pube is the collaborative identity of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad under which they publish reviews and essays about art, video games and food. You can find them at thewhitepube.com or on Twitter and Instagram at @thewhitepube.
Azeezat Johnson is a Black geographer at Queen Mary University of London and a member of the Geographies of Embodiment (GEM) Research Collective. In 2018, she co-edited The Fire Now: Anti-racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence. Her current Leverhulme project works with Wasi Daniju to explore a Black feminist politics of home-making. She tweets as @azeezatj.
Kavita Bhanot is ECR Leverhulme Fellow at Leicester University. She is the editor of three anthologies, including Too Asian, Not Asian Enough, and is currently co-editing an anthology on translation (Tilted Axis). Her fiction, nonfiction and academic work has been shared widely, including the landmark essay ‘Decolonise not Diversify’. Kavita co-founded the Literature Must Fall Collective and is writing a book exploring her ideas around literature (Pluto Press).
Hajar Press is an independent and proudly political publishing house run by and for people of colour. Hajar publishes books by writers of colour with original and transformative ways of seeing, imagining and remaking our world.
Shadow Heroes is an educational initiative that explores translation as a social justice practice through schools workshops and training for translators.
Literature Must Fall is a movement committed to de-mystifying and de-sacralising literature through critical awareness. The platform organises events, discussions, workshops and performances as well as publishing articles that foreground a resistance to supremacies, hierarchies, and invisibilised assumptions.
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