The Way of the Weird: Britain’s Empire and Its Afterlives
This lecture explores how horror was a useful tool for Tré in studying how racism impacts him in relation to streets and buildings. In other words, it forced him to coexist with the colonial ghosts that remain trapped in Britain’s physical geographies, from buildings to statues. Focusing on my experiences – like at galleries, museums, and country houses – this lecture considers how the racist energy found in colonial places left there by the dead like former enslavers, impacts the spirit bound to empire’s shadow. I come from cultures where being connected with the dead (as ancestors) is normal. Yet, colonial spaces attack my sense of self.
Ghosts reflect what a society says is memorable and so often, the UK frames white ghost stories around middle-class anxiety and property, but not what that privilege enables. Focusing on histories of empire as histories of the present, this lecture thinks about racism upon the spirit via the ghosts in popular places like: enslavers and enslaved on rural estates; wo/men disembodied by UK immigration policy; and the residue of slave-based wealth in today’s pubs and British rail? Ghosts.
Speaker Bio:
Tré Ventour-Griffiths is a disabled freelance historian-sociologist, creative writer and Black history consultant with interests in place history, real and imagined hauntings, pop culture, and violence: from the overt to the institutional. He just submitted his PhD: a creative writing project that combines UK Black regional history with nonfiction to tell a Black Caribbean folk history of Northants. Beyond his PhD, Tré examines the ways Black Britain is haunted by afterlives of the British Empire, including the slave-based wealth etched into many heritage sites romanticised in period dramas, like Jane Austen screen adaptations. Much of his other work looks into the history, questions of identity, and social commentaries, in UK-US film and television. He has written and presented on texts like Marvel, Star Trek, horror, and period dramas, from Call the Midwife to Bridgerton. As a travelling scholar-creative, Tré writes on Substack as The Avid Pedestrian.
Website: https://treventour.com
Writing + More: https://linktr.ee/treventoured
Curated & Hosted By:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
