The New Age of Empire Professor Kehinde Andrews
Event details
As part of our Black History Month programme, join us for this timely and fascinating talk with Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, on his recent book The New Age of Empire.
The New Age of Empire takes us back to the beginning of the European Empires, outlining the deliberate terror and suffering wrought during every stage of the expansion, and destroys the self-congratulatory myth that the West was founded on the three great revolutions of science, industry and politics. Instead, genocide, slavery and colonialism are the key foundation stones upon which the West was built, and we are still living under this system today: America is now at the helm, perpetuating global inequality through business, government, and institutions like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO.
The West is rich because the Rest is poor. Capitalism is racism. The West congratulations itself on raising poverty by increments in the developing world while ignoring the fact that it created these conditions in the first place, and continues to perpetuate them. The Enlightenment, which underlies every part of our foundational philosophy today, was and is profoundly racist. This colonial logic was and is used to justify the ransacking of Black and brown bodies and their land. The fashionable solutions offered by the white Left in recent years fall far short of even beginning to tackle the West's place at the helm of a racist global order.
Offering no easy answers, The New Age of Empire is essential reading to understand our profoundly corrupt global system. A work of essential clarity, The New Age of Empire is a groundbreaking new blueprint for taking Black Radical thought into the twenty-first century and beyond.
"If you want to get beyond gestures and slogans and to the truth, this is the book to get you there" Russell Brand
"Kehinde Andrews is a crucial voice walking in a proud tradition of Black radical criticism and action" Akala
About the speaker
Professor Kehinde Andrews
Professor Andrews also wrote Black to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century and Resisting Racism: Race, Inequality and the Black Supplementary School Movement and is editor of the Blackness in Britain book series with Bloomsbury. Kehinde has written opinions pieces for outlets including the Guardian, Independent, Washington Post and CNN. He is founder of the Harambee Organisation of Black Unity; and editor-in-chief of Make it Plain.