Critical Whiteness: US and UK perspectives

Convened in collaboration with The Centre for Research on Race and Rights at the University Nottingham, this panel discussion focuses on the subject of critical whiteness - from its emergence as an area of enquiry through to its significance within contemporary struggles around race and class.

Speakers include Professor David Roediger, author of The Wages of Whiteness (1991), Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past and Toward the Abolition of Whiteness; Professor Sharon Monteith, co-director The Centre for Research on Race and Rights and author of books including Advancing Sisterhood? and American Culture in the 1960s; Marquese McFerguson, perfomance poet and founder of Art Can Change the World among others.
6.30pm - 8.30pm
Free, The Space

David Roediger is a Foundation distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at The University of Kansas. Roediger’s research interests are strongly focussed on race and class in U.S. history and he has had numerous books published on the subject including, The Wages of Whiteness and Working toward Whiteness (1991) – often cited as a groundbreaking study into the formation of white working-class racism in the United States. His most recent publications include The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. History) (2012) written in collaboration with historian Elizabeth D.Esch, and Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All, How Race Survived U.S. History (2014). He is currently working on a project about middle class history from 1830 to present day and is the president of the American Studies Association.

Sharon Monteith is a professor of American studies at the University of Nottingham and the Director of the AHRC-funded Midland3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. Her research works across history, literature, media, film, and cultural studies with particular focus on the American South and the Civil rights movement. Her books include Advancing Sisterhood?: Interracial Friendships in Southern Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 2000) which explores relationships between black and white women across a selection of white female American literature, and American culture in the 1960s (Edinburgh University Press, 2008) which charts the changing face of major forms of American culture throughout the Twentieth-Century. She has also edited the book The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American South (2013) and The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Media (2011) with Allison Graham. Monteith is currently working on completing SNCC’s Stories: Narrative Culture and the Southern Freedom Struggle of the 1960s for the University of Georgia Press. She was awarded the Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship at the University of Memphis in 2001.

Marquese Mcferguson is a performance poet and founder of Art Can Change the World - an initiative set up to use the arts (performance, literature and visual) as a way to educate and inspire people from diverse backgrounds about social and cultural issues. After earning a BA in Studio Art and a Masters Degree in Interpersonal and Organizational Communication, Marquese created the stage name ‘A.P.O.L.L.O’ (A Person Only Lives Once) and began writing poetry as a way to come to terms with the loss of his mother to Cancer. Through his performance poetry, Marquese was named Arkansas Spoken Word Live Champion in 2009 and has gone on to become an award winning slam poet. As well as this, he has spent the last decade educating in universities, high schools and middle schools and devotes time to working with at risk youths in after school programmes.