Panizzi Lectures 2024: Spaces of Black Study

To consider Black bibliography is to evoke an array of histories of print from across the Black diaspora, all of which have their own genealogies, their own timelines, their own print formats, and their own modes of publication, distribution and circulation. How can we profitably think across these histories, to map them not as a seamless or homogenous field of inquiry, but as what has been called “a constellation of relational possibilities”?

In the 3rd and final lecture in this series, Elizabeth McHenry looks into the archives of Black print culture across the twentieth century and across the Black diaspora, to suggest how books and their spaces became agents of thinking blackness otherwise, as sites of love, study and struggle.

Part of the lecture series ‘Black Bibliography, Here and Now’, which asks what are the stakes and challenges of studying the history of Black print? What is Black bibliography, and how can renewed attention to it lead us to a better understanding of the ways Black writing has been produced, conceptualized and valued? This series of lectures by Elizabeth McHenry grapples with these questions by examining the work current scholarship in Black Bibliography is doing to expand our knowledge of Black print culture, and what it has the potential to do going forward.

All attendees are invited to join a drinks reception in the Knowledge Centre Foyer following the final lecture in the series.