Until 20:30 @ The Meena Centre, Hockley, Birmingham
Finding A Voice: Asian Women In Britain Book Launch and Discussion
Forty years after its first publication, this path-breaking book is being republished. The 2018 edition includes a new introduction by the author Amrit Wilson, a preface by Meena Kandasamy, and a remarkable new chapter titled ‘In conversation with Finding a Voice: 40 years on’ in which younger South Asian women write about their own lives and struggles weaving them around those portrayed in the book. It also contains a series of historic photographs.
First published in 1978, Finding a Voice established a new discourse on South Asian women’s lives and struggles in Britain. Through discussions, interviews and intimate one-to-one conversations with South Asian women, in Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and English, it explored family relationships, the violence of immigration policies, deeply colonial mental health services, growing militancy at work and also friendship and love. The seventies was a time of some iconic anti-racist and working-class struggles. They are presented here from the point of view of the women who participated in and led them.
Join us to celebrate, reflect, remember the past and strategise for the future with the author, in conversation followed by a Q&A. Snacks and drinks will be provided. A limited number of books will be on sale at a 40% reduced price of £10.00. The event is supported and hosted by Women2Gether and Birmingham Black Sisters.
‘The women in the book were standing on the threshold of today’s neoliberal era. Some of them had witnessed and noted its onset. Their intense struggles both public and private are profoundly important today, many of them are being fought again on a changed terrain.
If we can resist the continual buzz that tells us we are deviant when we fight back, that we should seek self improvement rather than social transformation, that we need role models and not sisters in struggle; if we can remember our rich collective past, we will find ourselves stronger in the battles ahead’
Amrit Wilson, Reclaiming our collective past as an act of resistance’ — introduction to the 2018 edition of Finding a Voice.
Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain, by Amrit Wilson, published by Daraja Press, 2018, ISBN 978-1-988832-01-2
HERitage stall this Saturday 29th January at St Cuthbert's hall, Amble. Come along, see you there