STUDY

Long term projects at Deptford People’s Heritage Museum are shaped by traditions of ‘study’ developed in contexts of community resistance. Within the Black radical tradition, study is the name given to knowledges produced by communities, their analysis of dispossession and their conceptual re-definition of freedom. According to Fred Moten and Stefano Harney study is the ‘incessant and irreversible intellectuality’ that emerges through the activities that communities produce in their everyday acts of analysis. Historical projects like the Birmingham School for Cultural Studies, CERFI (Paris), the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute, produce knowledge from immediate issues in the lives of local protagonists, who name and theorise them, attending to deeper and more specific conjunctures than those named by the apparatus of the state, the police, charity industrial complex and the academic-led processes in which they are often seen as objects. Radical traditions of study go deeper and require that we understand the current and historical forces that have come to shape the moment as we experience it, so that we can actively intervene. Feminists like Andaiye from Guyana’s Red Thread collective and Central American popular education processes like ‘Naming the Moment’ do this by altering the tools for analysing oppressive social relations to serve both the close articulation of everyday conditions and the mobilisation of communities affected by them.

Deptford People’s Heritage Museum studies in different ways: reading groups, community roundtables, walks, participatory displays, listening and recording, through collective writing and more conventional social research methods. Our current study in The Monument is the Struggle.

The Monument is the Struggle (a study of studies)

The Monument is the Struggle is a long-term project composed of many smaller study groups. It takes as its impetus the development of the Deptford Dockyard, an important site in British histories of enslavement, the plantation and British imperialism, which is scheduled to become a luxury housing complex on the south side of the Thames. De-sedimenting colonial histories of the Deptford Dockyard, the study explores how the logics of colonial administration, geography, finance, community organisation and resistance figure in today’s experiences of Deptford and in the process of the Dockyard development. Local study groups work through reading sessions, walks, curricula, long term research projects and campaigns that consider how the histories of enslavement, the plantation and colonial administration that emanated from the Deptford Docks resonate in our/their lives to compose a stronger analysis of both power and resistance.

These studies are in process and are documented on this website and via QR code plaques across the neighbourhood. The Monument is the Struggle is composed of study groups including:

Black Autonomous Spaces
Abridged Reading List
  • Joan Anim-Addo. The Longest Journey: A History of Black Lewisham (1995)
  • George Beckford. ‘Plantation Capitalism and Black Dispossession’ in The George Beckford Papers. Karl Levitt (ed). Canoe Press (2000)
  • Orlando Patterson. Slavery and Social Death. Harvard (1982)
  • Lisa Robinson, Communities in Motion, New Art Exchange (2023)
  • The Ubele Initiative. A Place to Call Home 2.0: Community asset ownership Initiative in the African diaspora community (2023)
  • River Logistics and Plantation Imaginaries: The Dockyard Dispositive
Abridged Reading List
  • Samir Amin Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment
  • Ann Coats, Five Hundred Years of Deptford and Woolwich Royal Dockyards and counting.
  • Nahum Dimitri Chandler ‘Practice of W. E. B. Du Bois as a Problem for Thought—Amidst the Turn of the Centuries’ in BEYOND THIS NARROW NOW Or, Delimitations, of W. E. B. Du Bois. 2022. duke university press
  • Ruth Gilmore Wilson. Infrastructures of Feeling in Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation. Verso (2022)
  • Harvey, D. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press
  • Luxemburg, R. 2003. The Accumulation of Capital. London: Routledge.
  • Katherine McKittrick, Plantation Futures, Small Axe (2013) 17 (3 (42)): 1–15.
  • Walter Rodney. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. 1972
  • Julius Scott. The Common Wind. Verso, 2018.
  • Bunge, W et al. Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution (Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation). University of Georgia Press. 2011.
  • Voice for Deptford. Our Aims https://voice4deptford.org/who-we-are/aims/
  • Philip MacDougall, ed., Transactions of the Naval Dockyards Society, Volume 11, Five Hundred Years of Deptford and Woolwich Royal Dockyards (Naval Dockyards Society, Portsmouth, January 2019), pp. 1-17)
  • The Naval Dockyards Society, Proceedings of the 2013 Conference dedicated to the Deptford Dockyard. (2013)
  • Abigail L Swingen. Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire. Yale University Press, 2015
Monumental Slang
Abridged Reading List
  • Elliott-Cooper, Black Resistance to British Policing, MUP 2021
  • Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1969
  • Steve McQueen, Uprising, 2021
We Are Here…We are On the Move

Reading List

Carceral Logics of the East India Company
Children’s Museum
Abridged Reading List
  • Kehinde N. Andrews, Back to Black: Black Radicalism and the Supplementary School Movement. Phd Thesis. 2011.
  • Black Education Movement, George Padmore Institute.
  • The Freedom School Curriculum Document http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/ED_FSC.html
Andaiye Reading Group
Abridged Reading List
  • Andaiye, The Point is to Change the World. (Pluto Press 2020)
  • Toni Morrison. City Limits, Village Values (1981)
  • Black Audio Film Collective, Twilight City (1989)
  • Hortense Spillers – Shades of Intimacy (ongoing)
  • Gail Lewis. “Birthing Racial Difference: conversations with my mother and others” (2009); Studies in the Maternal, vol. 1 (1), an e-journal, available at MaMSIE.bbk.ac.uk
  • Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla My Love (1971)