Writers and academics Thomas Glave and Professor Stephen Small come together at Liverpool Literary Festival for a conversation about transnational Black culture on both sides of the Atlantic, including the distinctive history and experience of Black Liverpool from the 1970s to the present day.
The discussion is chaired by Dr Amal Abu-Bakare, Lecturer in the Politics of Race and Decolonial Studies at the University of Liverpool, bringing together perspectives on diaspora, race, colonialism, sexuality, community and the movement of Black culture between Britain, the Caribbean and the United States.
Thomas Glave is a Jamaican-American writer and professor whose work spans fiction, essays and cultural criticism. He has written extensively about Jamaica, Black queer experience, racism, colonialism and the Caribbean diaspora, and is the editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. His new essay collection, En Pointe, Off Kilter, continues that engagement with race, history and belonging.
Stephen Small brings a particularly important Liverpool perspective. Born in Liverpool 8, he is Professor of the Graduate School in the Department of African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and has spent decades researching the history and sociology of Black communities across the diaspora.
His new book, Black Liverpool – ‘The real thing’: West African, West Indian and Afro-American culture at the end of the twentieth century, places Liverpool itself at the centre of a transatlantic cultural story. It examines a city whose Black community is among the oldest in Britain and whose history has been shaped by connections to West Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas.
That local focus makes the event especially valuable for Black History Month. Liverpool’s relationship with Black history cannot be understood only through the city’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. It also includes generations of Black residents, seafarers, families, activists, musicians, writers and community organisers who created lives and culture in the city itself.
Taking place at the Victoria Gallery & Museum, this conversation offers an opportunity to hear two major scholars and writers examine Black Liverpool not as an isolated local story, but as part of a much larger network of diasporic exchange that has shaped Black identities across the Atlantic world
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