Tag Archives: black lives matter

Statement of Solidarity with BAME Students from Department of English

At a time when our English Department community is already facing the challenges caused and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, we also want to reflect and act on recent events in the US and the UK surrounding police brutality, institutional racism, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

The whole UK university sector, including King’s, needs to address issues such as the BAME awarding gap, the continuing presence of Prevent on our campuses, the need to decolonise the curriculum, the lack of people of colour in permanent faculty positions and leadership positions, and the level of surveillance and oppression faced by BAME students.

As an English Department, we want to stand together to work in solidarity towards racial liberation and we also want to do what we can to provide resources to centre these issues for our students.
Below is a list of various resources that we hope will provide support for those of you who have already been dealing with the impacts of racism or white supremacy directly, and information for those of you who are engaging with these issues in newer ways.


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Erasing History? Colston in Bristol

by Brian Murray, Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, King’s College London

The toppling of the statue of slave trader and MP Edward Colston during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Bristol on 7th June has led to a predictable wave of outrage at the ‘erasure of history’. But what kinds of history might a statue be said to embody or project? The Colston statue was 125 years old. But it is also an idealised late-Victorian representation of seventeenth-century subject (unveiled 174 years after Colston’s death). What did Colston mean to Bristolians in 1895? Contemporary reports of the statue’s erection in the Bristol Mercury – accessed via the British Library Newspapers database – offer a glimpse of the new monument at its first unveiling.
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