For this year’s Autumn Keynote, the Stuart Hall Foundation invited internationally renowned historian and writer Professor Robin D. G. Kelley to respond to the theme of our Catastrophe and Emergence programme. The event took place on Thursday 5th September at Conway Hall, London, as well as online.

Professor Kelley’s keynote was organised around reflections on anniversaries marking key moments of Catastrophe and Emergence. Tracing the colonial dialectic and the many different chapters and phases of resistance to it, his keynote framed resistance – ever in motion, ever in a state of emergence – within the current conjuncture. “Abolition and revolution are not the same thing,” he noted. “The meanings of abolition and revolution are both contested. But I would argue today’s abolitionists are revolutionaries.”

Abolition continued to be a focus of the discussion between Professor Kelley and interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor and curator Imani Mason Jordan as the pair sat in conversation following the keynote. An audience Q&A also took place, and Newham Bookshop held a stall with literature on sale.

In partnership with Conway Hall Ethical Society supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust, Cockayne Grants for the Arts, a donor-advised fund held at the London Community Foundation, and Words of Colour.