2023 marks the 200th anniversary of the Demerara Uprising.
You may have heard about the Gladstone family’s recent apology for their role in slavery in Demerara, now Guyana. Now is your chance to meet Thomas Harding who recently published a book on the subject (White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery) and Juanita Cox, historian of the Windrush Generation and convener of Guyana SPEAKS. They will be in conversation with Chief Executive of TrustLab, Yasmeen Akhtar.
Conversation points will range from Britain’s legacy of slavery to questions around reparations. From the Jewish involvement with slavery to allyship between Jews and those descended from slavery.
Thomas Harding
Thomas Harding is a bestselling author whose books have been translated into more than 16 languages. He has written for the Sunday Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian, among other publications. He is the author of HANNS AND RUDOLF, which won the JQ-Wingate Prize for Non-Fiction.
Juanita Cox
Juanita Cox gained her PhD in 2013 from the Department of African Studies and Anthropology, University of Birmingham, and is a winner of the prestigious RE Bradbury Memorial Prize. She is currently the leading authority on the life and work of the Guyanese novelist, Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-1965) and is editor of the compendium, Creole Chips and Other Writing (2018).
Other publications include 'Buried in the Landscape: Edgar Mittelholzer's Creative Gene(sis)/Geni(us), and Revolting Subtexts' in Aje, L., Lacroix, T. and Misrahi-Barak, J. (eds) Re-imagining the Guyanas (2019). Juanita was a former Associate Fellow of the London Metropolitan University, where she lectured for three years in Caribbean Studies and Black British History. She co-founded the ground-breaking series Guyana SPEAKS in 2017, an education and networking forum, which has become a key monthly event in the calendar of the London-based Guyanese diaspora.
In 2019 she worked on the “Nationality, Identity and Belonging: An Oral History of the ‘Windrush Generation’ and their Relationship to the British State, 1948-2018” project at the University of London’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies and is now working at the Institute of Historical Research on a three-year AHRC-funded oral history project, “The Windrush Scandal in a Transnational and Commonwealth Context”. She is a trustee on the Board of the Oral History Society.
Yasmeen Akhtar
Yasmeen Akhtar is the Chief Executive of TrustLab and actively involved in the diversity, inclusion and reparations space
