Foreword

Co-founders: Laila Sumpton, Dr Pen Woods and Prof Victoria de Rijke.

Poetry is a wonderful tool for exploring history: you can move between centuries in a matter of lines and condense, unpack and amplify all the complex emotions that colonial history brings up. Our project has been lucky to work with some incredible poets, schools, artists, museums and academics so that together we can find new ways to explore the stories of materials crucial to the rise of the British Empire: sugar, cotton, tobacco and gold.

Poets Laila Sumpton, Nick Makoha, Sandra A. Agard and Keith Jarrett have worked with students to explore this history in a multisensory way so that they can bridge past and present, and investigate how these narratives feel alongside their own identities. We hope you enjoy the journey the poems in this collection will take you on, and consider your own connection to sugar, cotton, tobacco and gold and the global histories they encompass.

Racism and colonialism are historic interrelated conditions of culture and society with complex legacies that underpin our social and cultural relations today. They are also contingent. The role that racism and colonialism play in culture and society is remade by all of us every day in our relations with each other. Education and emotional engagement enable us to reset how we want to live the legacies of racism and colonialism in our society now and in the future. As this collection makes vividly apparent, poetry affords a unique platform for us to do this anti-colonial work and make its rich plurality visible to each other and available to be celebrated and learned from. This is the contribution that Poetry Vs Colonialism offers to help us work towards antiracist and anti-colonial futures.

Thanks to the support of Arts Council England, Keats House, Middlesex University, Culture Mile London, the University of Newcastle and Queen Mary University of London, we have built a committed network of arts and heritage professionals keen to continue working together on how we can make space for creatively investigating colonial histories. Although this work lies at the heart of what some are calling ‘the culture wars,’ we are certain that a more inclusive history is vital for a more equal future. Poetry Vs Colonialism is a way to do just that.