Following an online screening and Q&A with artist Subash Thebe Limbu in 2022, we are delighted to present an in-person screening of Ningwasum (2021) and Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous (2023), followed by a live Q&A.
The screening (55 mins) will be followed by a discussion and Q&A led by Nicole Thiara where Subash will discuss how his work draws on and develops Indigenous Futurism as well as Adivasi Futurism.
Ningwasum (2021) is a Yakthung science fiction documentary film/video-work narrated by Miksam, a time traveller from a future Indigenous Nation. The film follows two time travellers, Miksam and Mingsoma, played by Subin Limbu and Shanta Nepali respectively, in the Himalayas weaving indigenous folk stories, culture, climate change and science fiction. The film explores notions of time, space and memory, and how realities and the sense of now could be different for different communities. Drawing from Adivasi Futurism and inspired by Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism, Ningwasum imagines a future from an Indigenous perspective where they have agency, technology, sovereignty and also their indigenous knowledge, culture, ethics and storytelling still intact.
The plot of Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous (2023) depicts a conversation between two indigenous figures from different historical timelines, the first a real 18th century Yakthung warrior called Kangsore fighting the colonial army, and the other an astronaut and time traveler from the distant future. They discuss the space-time continuum from their perspectives, and in doing so, ask the viewers — who exist between the past and future — to investigate their own relationship to the passage of time. The time traveller indicates what the future might look like for us or possibilities we want to strive for, while the warrior reminds us of the fight against colonialism and struggles we shall overcome.
In the future, the Indigenous nationalities will have created a technique called thakthakma – which literally means to ‘weave handloom’, a term inspired by our ancestors’ weaving practice – a technique of entering different timelines or in other words weaving time. So, Subash thinks of his works as weaving stories that are not linear but intricately interwoven. And along the same vein, this work plays with the idea of time as not something rigid but ductile or weavable, which in turn paves the way for questions like how we might want to weave the future.
This event is part of the third series of CADALFEST and organised in collaboration with Formations and the Bonington Gallery. CADALFEST (Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival) is an international festival series dedicated to the writing and performance arts by writers whose work creatively resists caste discrimination and social exclusion in India: Dalit Adivasi Text.
Happening in Nottingham during the time of this event, we recommend visiting the exhibition Kolam (கோலம்) that has been curated by Raghavi Chinnadurai at Primary, Nottingham. This exhibition explores themes connected to our event, and also features Osheen Siva who exhibited at Bonington Gallery in Spring 2024.
Image: Subash Thebe Limbu, NINGWASUM 2021, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
Subash Thebe Limbu (he/him) is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist from Yakthung Nation (Limbuwan) from what we currently know as Eastern Nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, painting and podcast. His Yakthung name is ᤋᤠᤱᤛᤠᤱ Tangsang (Sky).
Subash has MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2016), BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University (2011), and Intermediate in Fine Art from Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu. His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction. Notion of time, climate change, and indigeneity or Adivasi Futurism as he calls it, are recurring themes in his works.
Subash is the co-founding member of Yakthung Cho Sangjumbho (Yakthung Art Society) and Haatemalo Collective. Based in Newa Nation (Kathmandu) and London. Follow Subash on Instagram.
Manish Harijan is a Nepal born artist who lives in Sheffield, UK. He was the recipient of the NAE Open Future Exhibition Prize in 2023, and the resulting exhibition, Untouchable Utopia, is currently showing at New Art Exchange until 11 January 2025.
The son of a shoemaker from the so-called lower caste or Dalit in Nepal, Manish questions the injustices inflicted upon minorities and the lived experiences of vulnerable populations in all societies around the world. His work traverses East and West, casting iconic images from religion to pop culture, smoothly embedding them in one canvas to create bold, beautiful and thought-provoking paintings. Inspired by Nepali art traditions of Thangka and Paubha, Manish also borrows styles from graphic novels, especially manga and popular superhero comics.
Manish’s compositions reference a variety of subjects from social issues of caste discrimination to art history, merging local stories with the global, fairy tales with current news pieces, mythology with facts — questioning both the portrayal and the portrayed. In 2012, for his first solo exhibition at Siddhartha Art Gallery in Kathmandu, Manish brought together these themes challenging the status quo of tradition, hierarchy, religion and beliefs in Nepal. Unfortunately, the gallery was vandalised and Manish was sent death threats and accused of being anti-Hindu for portraying Hindu gods in superhero costumes. The exhibition was shut down and a court cases were filed; UNESCO issued a press release to support the artist’s freedom of expression.
Deeply affected and saddened by the state of affairs, Manish moved to the UK, where he enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts programme at Sheffield Hallam University. While at University, he redoubled his commitment to explore the rights of marginalised people through art, participating in art projects that gave voice to the rights of populations that are vulnerable, stateless and at high-risk. He graduated in 2019 and was awarded the Dianne Willcocks Lifelong Learning award.
Manish is one of the artists whose paintings has been shortlisted and acquisitions for the UK’s Government Art Collection 2020/21. His works have also been exhibited at Welt Museum in Vienna, Museum of Communication in The Hague, Nepal Art Council in Kathmandu, Yorkshire Art Space in Sheffield, India Art Fair in New Delhi, CKU Copenhagen in Denmark, October Gallery in London, ROSL Gallery in London, Bloc Project Sheffield, Artist’s Journey #3 in the UK and Solo show at Yorkshire art space gallery 2022 at Sheffield UK. Besides paintings, Manish also experiments with installations, sculptures and multimedia. He works at his studio in Yorkshire Art Space
Neeraj Bunkar is a PhD Scholar at the Department of Humanities at Nottingham Trent University with a specific interest in Caste, Dalit, Rajasthani folklore, Oral History and Cinema. He is researching Rajasthan-based Hindi cinema from the Dalit standpoint. He published, ‘Spring Thunder: Adivasi Resistance for ‘Jal, Jangal, Jameen’’ (2022) and the book review, ‘Subalternity at the Centre: A Young Diary Demands Radical Change’ (2024) the Economic and Political Weekly. He regularly contributes to platforms such as Forward Press and RoundTable India.
Nicole Thiara (she/her) is co-lead of Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Research Network Series Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature and its Follow-on Grant On Page and on Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts.
She teaches postcolonial and contemporary literature at Nottingham Trent University. Her area of research is Dalit and diasporic South Asian literature and her current research project is the representation of modernity in Dalit literature.
Mrigakshi Das, from Odisha, India, is a PhD candidate at the School of Arts and Humanities at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Her research interests include Adivasi and Dalit literature, as well as decolonial and postcolonial studies. Her current research explores Adivasi literature and cinema, focusing on expressions of Adivasi identity and otherness through these mediums.
The CADALFEST series [Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival] has taken place in various locations in the UK and in India between October 2022 and February 2023, with the opening and final events taking place in Nottingham. These events included poetry, music, drama performances and films, along with Workshops, Masterclasses and public discussions with practitioners of both folk and contemporary performative art forms with the contribution of academic researchers who introduced performances, conducted interviews, contributed to the discussions, and more.
The aim, in the CADALFEST series, is to bring people from different walks of life together, sharing perspectives, enjoying themselves and learning from each other. Creativity and empowering energy channelled through the folk and performing arts productions takes centre stage— the horrors of casteism should not be ignored but the joy of togetherness, limitless creativity and social empowerment strategies should come to the forefront in a much more visible way.
Established in 2020, Formations is an event programme led by NTU’s Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group in collaboration with Bonington Gallery. The series foregrounds the work of underrepresented writers, academics, artists, intellectuals and activists worldwide who address inequalities of all kinds, often bringing people from different places and working practices together for important conversations.
In the spring term at Nottingham Trent University, students on NTU English module Black Writing in Britain were joined by poet and Caribbean literature and culture specialist Emily Zobel Marshall and novelist Jacqueline Crooks.
In March 2024, poet and Caribbean literature and culture specialist Emily Zobel Marshall visited NTU to read from and discuss her new poetry collection, Bath of Herbs.
Emily Zobel Marshall is a Reader at Leeds Beckett University, specialising in African and Caribbean folklore and literature of the African diaspora. Emily is also an expert in the role of trickster figures in the literatures and cultures of Africa and its Diaspora and has published widely in this area. Bath of Herbs is a vivid collection of poetry drawing on the poet’s life and history, including her childhood in rural Wales, mixed race identity, the British North, Martinique, illness, recovery, mourning, and family.
In this event held at NTU’s Clifton campus, Emily reads from and discusses her poetry, her literary inspiration from her grandfather, the writer Joseph Zobel, and answers questions from NTU English students on Jenni Ramone’s Black Writing in Britain module.
In April 2024, students on NTU English module Black Writing in Britain were joined by novelist Jacqueline Crooks.
Jacqueline Crooks was born in Jamaica and moved to London as a child. Her short story collection, The Ice Migration, was longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize in the Political Fiction category, and she has also been shortlisted for the Asham and Wasafiri New Writing awards. Her short story, ‘Silver Fish in the Midnight Sea’, was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2019. Her stories have appeared in Wasafiri, Virago, Granta and Mslexia. Fire Rush is her debut novel and it has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Jhalak Prize, and the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, and chosen as an Observer Best Debut Novel of the Year and a New Yorker best books of 2023. The narrative of Fire Rush takes place between late 1978 and early 1982. It is the story of Jamaican-British woman Yamaye, her friends, her search for her mother, and dub reggae.
In this event, Jacqueline Crooks reads from and discusses her novel in conversation with Jenni Ramone.
For the third and final event from our Plants Beyond Empire series, Claire Reddleman and Sophie Fuggle will explore how plants have become aligned with human ideas about time, seasons and cycles.
Many plants have been co-opted into colonial and capitalist ways of understanding time. Reddleman and Fuggle will begin by taking up the case of the Ginkgo Biloba – often described as a ‘living fossil’ due to the fact it has remained unchanged for over 80 million years.
Drawing on Claire Reddleman’s research, and its arrival in Britain in the 18th Century, they will consider the ways in which the ginkgo has become an important presence in the British landscape. The speakers will then look at the castor bean, a very different plant, which has been used by humans for at least 24,000 years. In the late 19th century, the castor bean’s best-known product, castor oil, started to be used as a lubricant for car and aircraft engines. It enabled greater speed and fluidity, and joined fossil fuels in the service of capitalism’s quest for ever faster, ever more efficient movement. Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and others call this era the ‘plantationocene‘, to identify how capitalism, colonialism and labour have, often destructively, shaped the natural world.
Free – open to everyone.
Taking place online via YouTube.
Plants Beyond Empire is a new series of conversations starting in February 2024, as part of our Formations programme, in partnership with the Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. The events will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond.
Sophie Fuggle’s research focuses on connections between empire and ecology. She has conducted extensive field and archival work in French Guiana, New Caledonia and Vietnam looking at the legacy of France’s overseas penal colonies. Most recently she has begun to explore the colonial, cultural histories of the castor bean plant.
Claire Reddleman is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester and works on digital cultural heritage, visual methods, mapping and contemporary art including her recent project ‘Ginkgos of the British Isles‘. She is a photographic artist and can be found online at www.clairereddleman.com / @reddlemap
Photo credit – dendrologista by Claire Reddleman. Map credit – 1725 Kaart van de provincie Utrecht, François Halma, collection of Universiteitsbibliotheek, Utrecht
Join Katharina Massing and Jen Ridding for an online talk exploring how Birmingham Botanical Gardens is working with local communities and visitors to highlight its colonial connections and diversify voices within plant interpretation.
Birmingham Botanical Gardens was founded in 1832, originally as a site of botanical and horticultural research and later with a greater emphasis on leisure and wellbeing.
Similar to many Botanic Gardens, its collection is linked to colonial expansion and trade. These links can be observed throughout the site, for example through the economic plants in the glass houses or the ornamental plants from China at the Wilson border, named after the ‘plant hunter’ Ernest Henry Wilson who brought plants over to the UK.
Katharina Massing and Jen Ridding will look at how the garden is working with local communities and visitors to highlight some of these colonial connections and diversify voices within plant interpretation.
Free – open to everyone.
Taking place online via YouTube.
Plants Beyond Empire is a new series of conversations starting in February 2024, as part of our Formations programme, in partnership with the Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. The events will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond.
Katharina Massing is a museum and heritage expert interested in holistic approaches to the safeguarding of landscape and traditional knowledge and sustainable heritage practices. She teaches and researches on ways museums can engage with and communicate anthropogenic changes. At the moment she is involved in a project between Nottingham Trent University and Birmingham Botanical Gardens that investigates diversifying ways in which plant stories are told.
Jen Ridding is currently the Head of Engagement & Learning at Birmingham Botanical Gardens. A dynamic cultural leader, Jen is experienced in strategic development of Learning, Audience Development, Engagement and Visitor Services. Skilled in bringing people, stories and ideas together, Jen has a successful track record in designing innovative engagement strategies across a range of arts, heritage and culture settings.
Photo credit: Birmingham Botanical Garden (2024). Photo courtesy of Katharina Massing
Join artist Rebecca Beinart for a free online talk where she will share stories and work-in-progress from her long term research into plant-human relationships, medicine and porous bodies.
During this talk she will share a short film made in collaboration with Usha Mahenthiralingam and Freddy Griffiths. The work explores the Island site in Nottingham – that once housed the Boots pharmaceutical factories and is currently under redevelopment – and spills out into histories of plant medicine, land, bioprospecting, pharmaceutical production, and thinking with plants and fungi.
Plants Beyond Empire is a new series of conversations starting in February 2024, as part of Bonington Gallery’s Formations programme, in partnership with NTU’s Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. The events will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond.
**No audio between 04:36 and 07:46, presenter repeats the start of her talk after the screening of the film later in the event. At 22:42 the speaker cut out, which has been cut from the video. This causes a small pause that lasts 6 seconds**
Rebecca Beinart is an artist, educator and curator, based in Nottingham. She develops research-based, collaborative and site-based projects that evolve through long-term engagement with places and people. She makes sculpture, installation and performance, and uses live engagement and public dialogue to reflect on collective histories and futures, social and environmental justice, knowledge-making, and the politics of public space.
Photo credit: Film Stills, Freddy Griffiths. Courtesy Rebecca Beinart.
Join Ather Zia in conversation with with Amir Kaur Aujula-Jones and Trang Dang, as part of the When I Dare to be Powerful conference at Bonington Gallery.
Amir Kaur Aujla-Jones and Trang Dang are in conversation with Ather Zia about writing as a powerful tool to amplify the voices of women active in the Kashmir conflict. Their voices are often ignored in a dominant narrative that fails to give them agency and instead writes them as victims of the conflict.
This event is part of online talks series leading to the in-person conference When I Dare to be Powerful, on 21 June at Bonington Gallery. The international conference will bring filmmakers, artists, writers and activists, together with conceptual thinkers and cultural theorists in order to answer pressing questions relating to voice as an agent of change.
Bio:
Ather Zia, Ph.D., is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Gender Studies program at the University of Northern Colorado Greeley. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (June 2019) which won the 2020 Gloria Anzaldua Honorable Mention award, 2021 Public Anthropologist Award, and Advocate of the Year Award 2021. She has been featured in the Femilist 2021, a list of 100 women from the Global South working on critical issues. She is the co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak (Women Unlimited 2020), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (Upenn 2018) and A Desolation called Peace (Harper Collins, May 2019). She has published a poetry collection “The Frame” and another collection is forthcoming. Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. Ather is also a co-editor of Cultural Anthropology.
Amir Kaur Aujla-Jones (she/her) has a BA (Hons) in History from the University of Sussex, a MA in Education from the University of Nottingham and a PhD in Sociology from Nottingham Trent University. Dr Aujla-Jones’s research has focused on race and gender equality using an intersectional lens. Her PhD thesis examined the lived experience of Black, Asian, and Mixed-race girls in predominantly white English secondary schools. Dr Aujla-Jones is part of Conscience Collective, an international network based in the UK aiming to extend understanding of climate and social justice.
Trang Dang (she/her) is a PhD researcher in literary studies at Nottingham Trent University, funded by NTU Studentship Scheme, and previously graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a BA and an MA in English Literature. Her PhD project focuses on Jeff VanderMeer’s weird fiction, exploring narratives of co-existence between humans and nonhumans and the role of new weird novels in portraying the current climate crisis. Her main research interests are contemporary literature, cli/sci-fi, critical theory, and continental philosophy. She has published on the topics of animal studies, American culture and politics, and the Anthropocene.
This event will take place at Bonington Gallery.
This event has now sold out, please email boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk to be added to the reserve list
What truths are your poems telling? If not for the reality of your poems, what truths would never be spoken at all? In Poetry as Ferocity Workshop: Writing Your Truth with Radical Honesty, we’ll chart a course for radical honesty in verse, seeking to grow stronger roots for your poems to anchor themselves.
Focusing on work by female Caribbean poets Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné and Safiya Sinclair, we draw on their powerful subversion in writing. Using innovative exercises, we unlock the most potent ways to tell the truth our poems require.
Poets have always been political agitators, defenders of the right to wield uncomfortable truths. What truths do you bring to the table, ready and roaring to be told?
NOTE: This workshop is open to people aged 18 and over. This workshop involves discussion of potentially triggering content and strong language.
Shivanee Ramlochan is an Indo-Trinidadian poet, critic, and essayist, whose first poetry collection, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (2017), was shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize. Ramlochan’s next work, the creative non-fiction Unkillable, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in Autumn 2023. Shivanee is the Book Reviews Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine and works closely with Bocas Lit Fest, the Caribbean’s largest literary festival.
This event will take place at Nottingham Contemporary.
To correspond with Hollow Earth: Art, Caves & The Subterranean Imaginary all are warmly invited to Channelling Queer Depths: An Evening with Poet Shivanee Ramlochan. Shivanee will give readings from her ground-breaking collection Everyone Knows I am a Haunting (2017), followed by a conversation with PhD queer literary researcher, Tom Lockwood-Moran. A particular point of interest will be Shivanee’s upcoming work of creative non-fiction, Unkillable (2023) how a writer channels their queer self through dangerous, unorthodox and taboo subjects. This event will explore how and why poetry chisels beneath the world’s surface to expose queer depths, particularly informed by Shivanee’s experience of Trinidadian cultures and subcultures.
Free. Booking required.
We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event.
This event is partnered with the Formations programme at Bonington Gallery and their free workshop Writing Your Truth with Radical Honesty with Shivanee on Wednesday 16 November.
Find information about getting here and our building access and facilities here.
There are no audio descriptions for this event.
If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.
Due to COVID precautions, please do not attend this event if you/someone in your household is currently COVID-19 positive, has suspected symptoms, or is awaiting test results.
Staff and visitors are welcome to wear a face covering in all areas.
Shivanee Ramlochan is an Indo-Trinidadian poet, critic, and essayist, whose first poetry collection, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (2017), was shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize. Ramlochan’s next work, the creative non-fiction Unkillable, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in Autumn 2023. Shivanee is the Book Reviews Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine and works closely with Bocas Lit Fest, the Caribbean’s largest literary festival.
Tom Lockwood-Moran is a PhD queer literary researcher, funded by Midlands4Cities (AHRC), writing his thesis in English Literature, entitled: ‘Queer Resistance(s): Contemporary Caribbean Communality’. Tom’s project is supervised by experts from both Nottingham Trent University and The University of Leicester. Thomas is currently an Hourly Paid Lecturer in Postcolonial Texts at NTU within English, Culture and Media.
This free, online-in conversation event with writer Gogu Shyamala is part of our Formations series, hosted in partnership with Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre. This segment of Formations, CADALFEST, relates to the Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival (CADALFEST) taking place across India and in Nottingham. CADALFEST is the first international festival series dedicated to artists whose work creatively resists caste discrimination and social exclusion in India.
This event will take start at 4 pm (GMT) and 8.30 pm Indian Standard Time.
Gogu Shyamala will discuss her literary and academic work to mark the republication of her short story collection Father May be an Elephant, and Mother Only a Small Basket, But…, by Tilted Axis Press in March 2022. Her focus on the perspective of Dalit women and children as well as her stories’ celebration of Dalit strength and culture will be explored. Gogu Shyamala will tell us about her choice of, and experimentation with, the short story form, and how she sees her role as writer, academic and activist. We will also discuss land relations and the link to caste, sexual violence, inter-caste love and other key concerns of her fiction and academic writing.
Gogu Shyamala will be in conversation with Sowjanya Tamalapakula, Bethan Evans, Judith Misrahi-Barak and Nicole Thiara and the session will conclude with Q&A with the online audience via YouTube chat.
Tilted Axis is a non-profit press publishing mainly work by Asian writers, translated into a variety of Englishes. Founded in 2015, Tilted Axis are based in the UK, a state whose former and current imperialism severely impacts writers in the majority world. This position informs their practice, which is also an ongoing exploration into alternatives – to the hierarchisation of certain languages and forms, including forms of translation; to the monoculture of globalisation; to cultural, narrative, and visual stereotypes; to the commercialisation and celebrification of literature and literary translation. Tilted Axis values the work of translation and translators through fair, transparent pay, public acknowledgement, and respectful communication. They are dedicated to improving access to the industry, through translator mentorships, paid publishing internships, open calls and guest curation.
Dr. Gogu Shyamala is one of the foremost contemporary Dalit writers in India, as an author, researcher, editor, and biographer writing in Telugu.
Her English collection of short stories, Father may be an elephant and mother only a small basket, but… is a landmark in Indian literature; the collection was also translated into German and some of the short stories into French. She produced an anthology known as Nallapoddu (Black Dawn), which is a collection of 51 Dalit women’s writings (from 1921 to 2002) from across the Telugu-speaking Indian federal states. It has one of critical acclaim in literary world. She wrote a biography of the first Dalit woman legislator, Cabinet member and Endowment Minister in the former state of Andhra Pradesh, India. She worked on domestic violence and Dalit women. She is the co-editor of Anthology of Dalit writing in Telugu published by Oxford University Press. She has participated in the World Conference against Racism, and in literary events in Australia, Germany and Jaipur. Mentoring rural students on access to Higher Education and researching specific causes for dropouts, Gogu Shyamala also made documentary film called Memetla Saduvaale (Merit Interrupted).
Her writings are part of the syllabus in higher education in several Indian states and as well as the University of San Francisco in the USA. Her writings were translated into Indian languages such as Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati. She holds a PhD in the area of Dalit Women Biographies, Gender and Caste in Telangana, from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She received several awards including Gandapenderam, she been worked as Research Fellow at Anveshi and as residence fellow at IEA Nantes in France on Dalit folklore and art farms. At present she is working as an independent scholar researching and writing biographies of rural Dalit women. She studies Dalit women’s literature and the history and mythology of Dalit literature as well as collecting palm leaf manuscripts of Dalit Puranas for contemporary scholarly studies.
Sowjanya Tamalapakula holds a PhD in the area of Violence, Gender and Caste from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.
Areas of study include gender and intersectionalities with particular emphasis on the issues of Dalit women. She is currently teaching and guiding in the School of Gender Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad. She teaches intersectionalities, sexuality, cinema, media and women’s writing for post-graduate students. She has published in various national and inter-national journals on gender, caste, cinema and media. Her recent paper ‘Caste-ing Queer Identities’ published in NUJS-Law Review journal is a critique on how caste operates in the queer intimate spaces.
Another paper titled ‘Politics of Inter-caste Marriage among Dalits: “Political as Personal”’ has been published in Asian Survey, University of California, Berkeley. She has been invited to contribute a paper ‘“Whatever Happened to Jogta, Jogtin?: Instrumentality of Religion in non-Brahman Cultural Assertion and Marginalization of Dalits’ for the Journal of Critical Philosophy of Race, Penn State University. She contributes regularly to Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle, The Wire, The News Minute, The Citizen, The Print, Youth Ki Awaz, Velivada and Roundtable India.
Bethan Evans is a recently qualified Doctor of Philosophy in English, specialising in black British literature, specifically the black British short story and its position in the publishing industry. Her thesis is titled ‘Publishing Black British Short Stories: The Potential and Place of a Marginalised Form’. Bethan has written articles for the Literary Encyclopedia and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism, and is currently co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, due for publication in 2025. She is the Project Officer for ‘On Page and On Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’.
Judith Misrahi-Barak is Associate Professor at University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France, where she teaches English and postcolonial literatures. Her prime areas of specialization are Caribbean and Indo- and Sino-Caribbean literatures in English, diaspora and migrant writing. She has published numerous articles and book chapters in edited collections, among which Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (Om Dwivedi, ed. Rodopi, 2014); Turning Tides: Caribbean Intersections in the Americas and Beyond (Heather Cateau and Milla Riggio, eds. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2019); or Windrush (1948) and Rivers of Blood (1968): Legacy and Assessment (Trevor Harris, ed. Routledge, 2019). She is General Editor of the series PoCoPages (Pulm, Montpellier). Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean is the latest volume (2020).
http://www.pulm.fr/index.php/collections/horizons-anglophones/pocopages.html
Her latest publications are a chapter on Edwidge Danticat’s short stories (Bloomsbury Handbook on Edwidge Danticat, 2021), an article in a special issue of The Caribbean Quarterly on Sino-Caribbean literature (2021), and Kala pani Crossings: Revisiting 19th century Migrations from India’s Perspective (co-edited with Ashutosh Bhardwaj, Routledge, 2021).
Her monograph entitled Entre Atlantique et océan Indien: les voix de la Caraïbe anglophone was published with Classiques Garnier (Paris, 2021).
Dalit literatures are among her more recent interests, and she was Co-Investigator on an AHRC Research Network series on ‘Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature’ (2014-16) and is now Co-Investigator on an AHRC Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement on ‘On Stage and on Page: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’ (2020-23).
Caste in Cinema, co-edited with Joshil K. Abraham, is forthcoming with Routledge (November 2022).
Nicole Thiara is Co-Director of Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Research Network Series, ‘Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature’ and its Follow-on Grant ‘On Page and on Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’.
She teaches Postcolonial and Contemporary Literature at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her area of research is Dalit and diasporic South Asian literature and her current research project is the representation of modernity in Dalit literature.
Her publications include Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography: Writing the Nation into Being (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), ‘The Colonial Carnivalesque in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52: 6 (2016), ‘Subaltern Experimental Writing: Dalit Literature in Dialogue with the World’, Ariel 47:1-2 (2016), pp. 253-80, and with Annapurna Waughray, ‘Challenging Caste Discrimination with Literature and Law: An Interdisciplinary Study of British Dalit Writing’, Contemporary South Asia 21:2 (2013), pp. 116-32. With Judith Misrahi-Barak and K. Satyanarayana, she co-edited the critical volume Dalit Text: Aesthetics and Politics Re-imagined (Routledge, 2019) and special issue on Dalit Literature in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54 (1), March 2019 with our Open Access editorial ‘Why Should We Read Dalit Literature’ accessible here.
FORMATIONS looks forward to welcoming audiences for both online and in-person events in 2022-23. This year, events include conferences, author events, creative writing workshops, and wellbeing workshops. This year’s speakers discuss places including Trinidad, India, the US, Canada, and the UK. Themes our speakers consider include land and nature, voices and sound, borders and hospitality.
FORMATIONS is a public events series which foregrounds under-represented artists, writers, thinkers, and activists, run by NTU’s Postcolonial Studies Centre and Bonington Gallery.
This segment of Formations, CADALFEST, relates to the Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival (CADALFEST) taking place across India and in Nottingham. CADALFEST is the first international festival series dedicated to artists whose work creatively resists caste discrimination and social exclusion in India.
Adivasi and Dalit Futurism: Artists Subash Thebe Limbu and Osheen Siva in Conversation
Thursday 20 October, 2022
4 pm – 5pm (BST), online
In Conversation with the Dalit Feminist Writer, Gogu Shyamala
Thursday 27 October, 2022
4 pm – 5 pm (BST), online
Ningwasum Film Screening and conversation with Subash Thebe Limbu
Thursday 24 November, 2022
7 pm – 8:30 pm, online
Channelling Queer Depths: An Evening with Poet Shivanee Ramlochan
Tuesday 15 November, 2022
6:30pm – 8pm, at Nottingham Contemporary
Poetry Workshop: Writing Your Truth with Radical Honesty
Wednesday 16 November, 2022
5:30 pm – 7:30 pm, at Bonington Gallery
Nottingham Trent University second year BA English, BA Creative Writing, and BA Secondary English Education students have collaborated with students at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Canada to write, edit and publish a special issue of the Literary Cultures journal, focused on representations of land in modern and contemporary literature wherein land may be perceived as vulnerable or under threat.
Watch their online segment, which includes discussions of the articles written for the journal special issue, the accompanying book and film reviews, as well as the on-campus event in January 2023 with poet Jo Dixon.
Thursday 23 February, 2023
12:30pm – 1:30pm, online
more info
This online roundtable is a pre-conference event on Dalit magazines with editors and subject experts from West Bengal and Maharashtra.
Wednesday 5 April, 2023
7pm – 8pm, online
more info
To coincide with Cedar Lewisohn’s solo exhibition earlier this year, Patois Banton, join us for a free online talk by Dr. Joseph T. Farquharson, this will be followed by a Q&A with Ramisha Rafique.
Thursday 13 April, 2023
6:30pm – 8:30pm
more info
Professor Gus John and poet Yolanda Lear join Jenni Ramone’s Black Writing in Britain students and Formations audiences for a special event on the history of New Beacon Books and its place in the history of Black British publishing, writing, and activism.
Thursday 15 June, 2023
6:30pm – 8:30pm
more info
Join us for a free screening of a newly-translated documentary that explores the emergence of performance art in Cuba in the 1980s. The screening will be followed by a conversation with film director and artist Glexis Novoa.
When I Dare to be Powerful International Conference will bring filmmakers, artists, writers and activists together with conceptual thinkers and cultural theorists to answer pressing questions relating to voice as an agent of change.
The conference period begins on 26th April and runs through to the one-day conference in June, all information can be found here.