(Highlight Notice) The Diasporic Everyday: Labour, Creativity, Survival

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Certain binary oppositions remain prevalent in Western culture, and have done so since the Enlightenment. The production of civilised culture has and is often thought to rely upon the availability of significant leisure time, being long understood as the province of a privileged elite. Beauty and function, too, often sit in a rigid dichotomy, and aesthetic appreciation even now can be associated with the mind in opposition to the body. It is difficult to overstate the power of these historic dichotomies or the extent to which they still shape discussions about art and creativity throughout British and other national cultures. But it is also hard to overstate diasporic culture's capacity to dislodge their entrenched powers of assumption. In a wide variety of creative spheres, throughout the historic territories of the diaspora, the dichotomisation of leisure and art, and indeed of beauty and purpose, founder, growing powerless to explain the different, democratic, achievements of African peoples. Carnivals flower amid grinding violent poverty; Africa-tinged pit barbecue flourishes on the plantation; dances seem somehow to confound the ordeals of physical work; and in an array of other contexts expressivity asserts itself within an everyday life difficult to escape. The story of the blues that Langston Hughes once told, in other words, seems neither isolated nor unique. Invented in the field itself, as he speculated, and chiefly "to relieve the monotony" of difficult work, this functional lyricism instead only exemplified an alternative diasporic mode in which expressivity of all kinds happened amid racist toil and guarded against its multiple physical and psychological pains. Alongside the blues among other lyrics of survival our new network explores some of the other key accomplishments of the diasporic everyday. It places Arthur France's establishment of the Leeds carnival at a time of extreme institutional racism into a wider diasporic pattern of active cultural resistance. It draws together US and UK food scholars to consider how slave cooks throughout the Black Atlantic interwove African food traditions into their everyday work, carving out new cultural and economic resources in a situation that remained sadistically hostile to African culture in the round. And it also welcomes back to Leeds Susan Kiguli, our East African alumnus, who has now won acclaim throughout the continent for her own explorations in oral poetry. Kiguli's involvement in our network promises to enrich our interdisciplinary reflections on the different, and differently indispensable, roles verse has performed among diverse diasporic communities uninterested in Eurocentric dichotomies of beauty and function. Each of these everyday activities is fascinating in its own right, and through our roundtables our network will deepen understanding of them all. Above all we aim, however, to deepen our understanding of the diasporic philosophy which stands behind each such manifestation, unlocking the liberating, democratic investment in everyday creativity that they hold in common. Beauty, in the diasporic everyday, often manifests itself through function; basic imperatives of hunger and survival animate inspiration; and the permanence and perfection of the monument often seems less important than the moment of creativity itself. Yet as they thus synthesise this alternative cultural sensibility, our roundtables will also call attention to the ways in which it reflects outwards and onto those other vernacular or creative traditions, beyond the diaspora, which also confound agreed dichotomies of work and leisure and beauty and function. By the end of our programme, indeed, it will be clear that Hughes's "Story of the Blues" amongst other diasporic affirmations offer liberation to us all, confirming that all have access to art and creativity--that all culture, even, might belong to the everyday of us all.