How can we not write about everything? Vron Ware talks with Ruth Wilson Gilmore about her new book, "Return of a Native: learning from the land” (Repeater Books, 2022).
In Return of a Native: learning from the land, Ware demolishes the fantasy that the English countryside exists as an escape from modern life. Writing about rural protest, land ownership, food production, war, colonial history and everyday life, Return of a Native: learning from the land reveals why it is so important to understand how even the smallest place both contributes to and is the product of world historical forces.
Vron Ware is Visiting Professor at the LSE Dept of Gender Studies, and has taught at the University of Greenwich, Yale University, and Kingston University. Her first book, Beyond the Pale: white women, racism and history (Verso 1992/2015), broke new ground by insisting on the importance of a gendered reading of the histories of colonialism, enslavement and abolition, and by demonstrating the relevance of this past for contemporary anti-racist feminist politics. Since then, she has continued to write on gender, race, the social construction of whiteness, national identity, militarism and the cultural heritage of war. Other books published include Out of Whiteness: color, politics & culture (with Les Back, Chicago 2002) and Who Cares about Britishness? (Arcadia 2007). In 2012 she published Military Migrants: fighting for YOUR country (Palgrave) which was the first book-length study of institutional racism in the modern British Army. Her most recent book is Return of a Native: Learning from the Land, published by Repeater Books (2022).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Co-founder of many grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network, Gilmore is author of the prize-winning Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (UC Press). Recent projects include Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Race and Difference, co-edited with Paul Gilroy (Duke), and Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation (Verso, May 2022). Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition is forthcoming from Haymarket. Honors include the American Studies Association Angela Y. Davis Award for Public Scholarship (2012); the Association of American Geographers Harold Rose Award for Anti-Racist Research and Practice (2014); the SUNY-Purchase College Eugene V. Grant Distinguished Scholar Prize for Social and Environmental Justice (2015-16); the American Studies Association Richard A Yarborough Mentorship Award (2017); The Association of American Geographers Lifetime Achievement Award (2020); the 2020 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Cultural Freedom Prize (with Mike Davis and Angela Y. Davis); and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021).
Marsha Henry is an Associate Professor in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Marsha’s research interests focus on critical military and peacekeeping studies; the political economy of sexual violence in postconflict settings; and intersectional feminist theories and methodologies.
This online public event is free and open to all. The event will be held on zoom so please register in advance to get the zoom link here.