By Jo Manby
Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was in my opinion, and that of many others across the world, one of the greatest writers in the English language. This post presents a timeline of this extraordinary woman’s life.
By Hattie
As part of Black History Month 2019, we hosted an event with writer, poet, and director Elmi Ali called ‘The Afrofuturist Toolkit’. During the workshop the participants explored the theories behind Afrofuturism and created some of their own work envisioning the future of society. Ali’s overarching message was that Afrofuturism can take any form and is all around us, demanding a space in the future for Black people defined by themselves. “It looks to the past to define and make sense of the future.” According to Ali, ‘ism’ can be understood to mean “how something could be”.
Becki Kaur has recently submitted her PhD, which explores how professionals working in the domestic abuse sector understand, explain, and address ‘honour’-based violence. We’re excited to have her working with us on a six-month project to develop the library’s resources on this very important topic.
I’ve heard some people say that, by the time it gets to the end of their PhD, they’ve fallen out of love with their research topic. In this respect, I consider myself fortunate. Although the nature of my area of research – ‘honour’-based violence – is (to put it nicely) deeply unpleasant, I feel as passionate about raising awareness of the subject as I did when I started my research journey four years ago. So, when the opportunity arose to work with the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre (AIUC) to help develop ‘honour’-based violence-related resources, I didn’t have to be asked twice!
Cataloguer and book reviewer Jo has been taking a good look at our Politics section…
At this early stage of the twenty-first century, we are living through a period of global turmoil and social change. Revolutions in communications, technology and the reach of surveillance unfold at a gathering pace, interwoven with an upsurge of political revolutions and coups-d’état.
Next in her series of library indepth posts, cataloguer and book reviewer Jo looks at my favourite section – Arts, Media and Sport
Filled with the brilliant colours and sounds of visual art and music, the swish of fashion and dance, the flash of camera and moving image, the million tongues of literature and the rising cheer of the sports arena, the Arts, Sport and the Media section divides into six subsections.
Next in her series of library indepth posts, cataloguer and book reviewer Jo takes a look at our Criminal Justice section.
Analysis of the section title ‘Criminal Justice’ brings me to wonder whether the two concepts (crime and justice) are exact opposites of each other. Are they mutually exclusive? Why not simply ‘Crime and Justice’?
Just as in the well-known phrase, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, so one man’s crime can be another man’s justice, and indeed vice versa. How else could you explain miscarriages of justice, judicial decisions based on prejudiced information or opinion, vigilantism, or the ramifications of political protest, whether violent or non-violent?
A topical subject at the moment, immigration.
Beneath the headlines, however, is a complexity of economic, social and political movement and motivations for movement, a tangled network of transnational relationships that criss-cross the globe and a morass of successive legislation and policymaking underpinning it.
Next in her series of library indepth posts, cataloguer and book reviewer Jo takes a thoughtful look at the Culture and Identity section.
Working at the Centre, we’re often dipping into books and other publications as we go about our day-to-day duties, but it’s impossible not to, at some point, take a book out and read it thoroughly – the subjects are so interesting.
One I read recently from cover to cover was Isabel Fonseca’s Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, an ethnographic study of the Eastern European Roma whom she lived among for several years as she travelled through Albania, Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria (among other countries) in the early 1990s. The book traces their migratory patterns, the origins of their indomitable spirit and their ability to survive the dual impositions of being forbidden to settle at the same time as being forbidden to roam.
In our new position on the Lower Ground Floor, next to City Library, in the newly refurbished Central Library, we have retained the same subject sections for our books but the layout of our collection is much more light, airy and spacious. Following on from Education, I’ve been taking a fresh look at the History section.
Do you like coffee table books? I know I do.
Sometimes there’s nothing nicer than picking up an outsize tome packed with illustrations, and relaxing with it over a coffee. Some are very light reads, others more substantial.
Strolling among the shelves of the Centre, I came across one of the more substantial kind – The Illustrated Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (published 1996). Having seen the 2013 film based on his memoirs, I spent a happy couple of hours absorbed in fascinating pictures, trying to assess how accurate the cinema experience had been. Who was Nelson Mandela? If I wanted to get to know him, I’d surely meet him in these pages.
Or so I thought…
It’s all hands on deck here this week as we get ready for the reopening of Central Library, incorporating us and our Archives+ partners. No time to write a proper post this week, so I thought I’d share this from the Archives+ blog – a few sneaky peak pictures from inside!
www.manchesterarchiveplus.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/a-quick-peek-at-archives
Central Library reopens this Saturday (22nd), which is also the first day of the Manchester Histories Festival – there will be loads going on, so come on down and see for yourself, and don’t forget to visit our library on the Lower Ground Floor!
This title caught my eye: The Skull Measurer’s Mistake. Skull measurer? Mistake? What could this mean? We know it’s not great to measure our waists inaccurately, as we burst out of our clothes if they’re too small. But skulls?
Once I’d picked up Skull Measurer (published 1997) I was hooked. The rest of the title tells you why: and Other Portraits of Men and Women Who Spoke Out Against Racism. Concisely and deftly Sven Linqvist navigates the intellectual currents around the ethnic stereotyping that characterised popular imagination on both sides of the Atlantic during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and those who opposed it.
Over the coming months our cataloguer and book reviewer Jo will be profiling sections of the library. First up, the Education section…
The Education section is of primary importance in some ways since the driving force behind the original founding of the Centre and the Trust was the commemoration of the life of Ahmed Iqbal Ullah, the 13 year old Bangladeshi student murdered in a racially motivated attack in a Manchester school playground, 1986.
This afternoon I’ve been sorting through some boxes of journals and other publications that have been sat in our back room waiting to be sorted and catalogued. Among them were these lovely reports by the Minority Rights Group.
The Roving Reader Files
Books are like stray animals – they’re looking for a good home…
The shelves of the Centre bear evidence that someone out there agrees with me. The other day I came across two books, inscribed by the hand of a kind-hearted individual who, it seems, scoured public library book sales for any waifs or strays needing tender loving care and rehabilitation.
The Roving Reader Files
I often wonder how books find their way into the Centre. Sometimes it’s simple, but sometimes it’s not so straightforward. I’m always intrigued when individual items bear marks which give a little glimpse of their story. Here’s an example.
A New System of Slavery. The Export of Indian Labour Overseas 1830-1920, by Hugh Tinker, was published by Oxford University Press for the Institute of Race Relations, in 1974. It was the first comprehensive survey of how and why populations from the Indian subcontinent were resettled around the British Empire, providing the indentured labour that produced plantation crops after slavery was abolished in the nineteenth century.
As an addendum to my last post, did you know that Basil Davidson once walked the hallowed corridors of Manchester University?
He was appointed a senior Simon Research Fellow for the academic year 1975/76, doing library research for another book on the Centre’s shelves – his Africa in Modern History: The Search for a New Society, published in 1978. How intriguing that he may have spent many hours on campus, in the Main Library and perhaps the Dover Street Building (where the Department of Sociology was then based).
Nice to know Manchester played its part in helping Basil restore to Africans their history and culture, don’t you think?
If anyone bumped into him and has any memories to share, do let us know…
Come what may, we are here to stay!
I imagine if you came across the Asian Youth Movements in Manchester, Bradford and other towns and cities during the 1970s and 80s they would have made quite an impression on you. I knew very little about this fascinating bit of recent history until earlier this month when we welcomed author Anandi Ramamurthy to launch her new book Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movements.
In a nutshell, during the 70s and 80s young Asians joined together to protest against the racism and inequality they experienced in their communities and from the government. These grassroots organisations held rallies and marches, protested against deportations and produced leaflets, newspapers and posters to spread their message.
She can be found here every week, settled in some quiet corner of the library brandishing a notepad and a quizzical look, or roaming around the shelves, picking up books seemingly at random, letting out sudden exclamations or shaking her head sagely… we never quite know what she’s up to, but she’s agreed to report back on her findings as our very own reader in residence.
Look out for her guest posts, in which she’ll reveal hidden stories, make unusual connections and share her insights into using the collection for research.
Since taking up my post at the AIU Race Relations Resource Centre back in June, people keep telling me what an important collection this is.
A couple of quiet summer months gave me an opportunity to explore the library and build up my own picture of why this place is so unique. That’s one of the reasons I’ve started this blog – to share interesting ideas and items from the collection as I uncover them. But for now here are a few initial thoughts…
aiucentre.wordpress.com 