Erasure and inclusion poetry, and the British monarchy’s involvement in the slave trade.

The Eccles Centre’s Summer Scholars season of free in-person lunchtime talks explores the exciting and wide-ranging research into the Americas collections at the British Library by the Eccles Centre’s Fellows and Award winners. The talks take place in the Knowledge Centre and attendees are welcome to bring their lunch. Tea and coffee are available.

Erasure and Inclusion of the Enslaved; a Poetic Discourse

Erasure poetry is created by erasing words from existing text and creating a poem within the confines of that page. In this talk, Roy McFarlane draws on his forthcoming poetry collection, Living by Troubled Waters, and shares Erasure and Inclusion (to make known) poems created in response to researching reports, advertisements and articles in early 19th-century British and Caribbean newspapers. The poems bring to life the voices of the runaways, the caged and the enslaved who were executed for wanting freedom.

The Queen’s Silence

Brooke Newman discusses research for her next book, The Queen’s Silence, a work of original research and narrative synthesis that explores the way the British monarchy invested in and expanded the transatlantic slave trade and African bondage for nearly three centuries. 

Roy McFarlane is a poet, playwright and former Youth & Community Worker, born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage. He is the National Canal Laureate and former Birmingham Poet Laureate. Lover of Jazz and walking with herons, his third collection Living by Troubled Waters (Nine Arches Press) will be coming out in October 2022.

Brooke Newman is an Associate Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University where she specialises in the social, cultural, and legal history of early modern Britain and the British Atlantic during the age of slavery. She is the author of A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race, and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (Yale University Press, 2018), and co-editor of Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas (University of Nebraska Press, 2014).

Image from The Barbados Mercury and Bridgetown Gazette, Saturday 24 January, 1824. EAP 1086/1/23/1/4

This event is organised by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. The Eccles Centre exists to support and promote creative research and lifelong learning about the Americas, through the world-class collections of the British Library.

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