Festival of Ideas: an unclassified syncretism

Catherine Hall and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse discuss the Legacies of British Slave Ownership. They explore the importance of new histories, reparations, working to decolonise education and shifting collective memories to imagine new futures.

The most recent wave of Black Lives Matter protests rejuvenated popular debates over the removal of statues of British slave owners from public spaces. The fall of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol and calls to remove statues of Winston Churchill, Lord Nelson and Cecil Rhodes has forced the British public to reconsider questions of history and colonial legacies.

Read more about our #ReconstructionWork project here.

Speakers:

Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of History and Chair of the Centre of the Study of British Slave-ownership at UCL. She has written extensively on the history of Britain and its empire including Civilising Subjects (2002) Macaulay and Son (2012) and, with others, Legacies of British Slave-ownership (2014). From 2009-2016 she was principal investigator on the LBS project www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs. She is currently writing a book on Edward Long, Jamaica and racial capitalism. She is a trustee of the Stuart Hall Foundation.

Ruth Ramsden-Karelse is founder and co-convener of the Oxford Queer Studies Network and a DPhil candidate in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. The inaugural Stuart Hall Doctoral Studentship, in association with Merton College, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and the Stuart Hall Foundation, supports her research on the world-making capacity of collaborative works by self-described gays and girls from communities formerly classified “Coloured” in Cape Town, South Africa, from 1950 to the present, with a specific focus on the Kewpie Photographic Collection. Ruth’s writing has appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

On Friday 23^rd May, 2025 University of Sussex Stuart Hall Fellow Bleue Liverpool presented new work at the Brighton Festival as part of her Fellowship. Bleue collaborated with musician and sound artist Ibukun Sunday to create ‘an unclassified syncretism’, an audio-visual intervention within the Meeting House Chapel at the University of Sussex. Through this event, the duo sought to composite metaphysical abstractions of Paul Gilroy with research into migration narratives and landscapes of south-east English Channel coastline port culture. The event was part of the Festival of Ideas, a collaboration between the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex and Brighton Festival.

Bleue Liverpool shares reflections on her experience of the collaboration below, alongside production photographs of the audio-visual work plus a new text building upon the themes of project.

– So what do we know ?
– You mean, what are we willing to tell ?

Well, we know that the practice of syncretism in the 18^th century Afro-Caribbean, enabled the subjugated to insurgently gather, speak, & remember – right under the gaze of the colonial eye. We’re aware that our ancestors, ambitious as they were, on the night of the 14^th of August 1791, came together in ritual that embedded West African Vodou resistance – a legacy of the Fon Kingdom – into appropriated Christian systems and iconography. Allegedly the appropriation of the Catholic Church’s appliances deeply disturbed colonial administrators, whom were utilizing the system to “civilize”, “assimilate”, “commodify” our ancestors’ dignity. Subsequently, this ritual and a carefully calculated eclipse brought on a rebellion – sugar everywhere – a rupture, in the politics, that made a case of Identity.

– But Ibukun, you’re from that port Lagos, in Nigeria… South North Atlantic?
– Yes
– Me too, from a port, in the North North Atlantic…
– Yes
– A Pan-African conversation when we gather, no? when we commune?
– Yep… it’s old & ongoing
– What is?
– The conversation

The ports of Calais, Dover, Newhaven Port and Dieppe have had a great deal of increased activity in the 21^st century. They are coming, the Others, moving from east to west, using container lorries in any attempt to flee civil rights atrocities, seeking employment, a better life than history. The border-industrial complex is having a field day, acquiring oxygen detectors, attempting to catch whomever before land. Asylum claims are easily accumulated, strategically neglected, and ultimately unclassified – leaving the politics to place the Others in Hotels. They stay in these hotels sometimes for years, a room for a family, unable to seek employment, without access to fundamental natural law actions e.g. cooking for oneself. These hotels, conduits, elongated liminal spaces forge new identities, the nature oscillates in spite of fixity.

– a form of syncretism?
– Yep

In a cafe around Waterloo, down a spiral staircase to a basement that could easily recreate London’s Great Fire of 1666, he comes to my table slowly but densely. “The word “race” was utilized in the same way that in our contemporary the word “culture” is used. That the project of cultural studies is a more or less attractive candidate for institutionalization. The national character ascribed to the concept of modes of production is a fundamental question, ethnohistorical specificity of dominant approaches of cultural politics. That what was initially felt to be a curse – the curse of homelessness or the curse of enforced exile gets repossessed. It becomes affirmed and is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged standpoint.”^[1] I ask him if slavery was integral to the economic fruition of western civilization, how is the western world economically dependent on asylum seekers despite nationalism?

– Our inflections transfigure West to East, North to South.
– Yea… Of course.
– We need to find axis points.
– hmm
– Where do we gather to speak?
– They have Churches.
– Yes Ibukun, they have Churches.

As an Intermedia artist, collaboration has become an integral improvisational utility in circumventing a collective memory. By facilitating Pan-African conversations that take on unorthodox and unconventional mediums – such as sound and video artistic experimentation – new sonic-visual methodology is spontaneously generated that perhaps gives insight on not only acts of resistance but on cultural preservation. What was most appreciated on my side was that the Stuart Hall Foundation gave Ibukun and I the opportunity to come together finally for what will be a ongoing collaboration. In addition, the opportunity to wander, with naïveté, around the coast of South-East Sussex with nothing more than a handi-cam, generously provided by the media department of the University of Sussex, was pivotal. The camera gave me permission to wander, and that in itself from the position of my specific identity: revolutionary.

– Bleue Liverpool, November 2025

View a video excerpt of ‘an unclassified syncretism’ below.