The NewBridge Project Gallery is closed throughout March. NewBridge Books will be open as usual.
Join us for the launch of our new reading and discussion space, The Reading Room at The NewBridge Project. Our first event will launch the new book “Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia” by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan who will be in conversation with the author Preti Taneja. Tangled in Terror is published by The Reading Room partner Pluto Press.
Tuesday 22 March
6.15 pm – 8.30 pm
The NewBridge Project Reading Room
With Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan and Preti Taneja
Join us for a thought-provoking discussion guided by Preti Taneja in conversation with Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan about her new book, Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia. We will be moving far beyond superficial discussions of Islamophobia as a moral deficiency and instead asking difficult questions about a world-system founded on dehumanisation, occupation and destruction. The discussion will invite you to question not only the interconnected nature of Islamophobia with other oppressions, but also the ways that language hides and obscures such violence, the ways we may use language to resist such violence, and more.
A central preoccupation of the book is the question of safety, and why so many of us have become less safe through the ‘security’ agenda of states across the world. In preparation for this conversation we ask you to consider what safety looks like to you. When have you felt most safe in your life? What is safety predicated upon? And how far is the gap between the measures and institutions we are currently told “keep us safe”, and the realities of our engagement with such institutions and measures?
Ahead of the event we invite you to watch / listen to these poems by Suhaiymah, This is Not a Humanising Poem and British Values.
Schedule
6.15pm – The NewBridge Project Gallery, Reading Room and Bookshop Open (prayer room available)
6.40pm – Conversation with Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan and Preti Taneja
7.25pm – Break with Food and Refreshments
7.35pm – Questions and Group Discussion, ending with a reading or poem.
8.30pm – Ends
We have a room available for any attendees who need to pray – feel free to use this at any time. We understand maghrib prayer will be around 18:25 on 22nd March so there will be time to pray for anyone who would like to do so before the conversation begins at 18:40.
About Tangled in Terror
From the creator of The Brown Hijabi blog, Tangled in Terror shows that until the most marginalised Muslims are safe, nobody is safe. Islamophobia is everywhere. It is a narrative and history woven so deeply into our everyday lives that we don’t even notice it – in our education, how we travel, our healthcare, legal system and at work. Behind the scenes it affects the most vulnerable, at the border and in prisons. Despite this, the conversation about Islamophobia is relegated to microaggressions and slurs.
Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan reveals how Islamophobia not only lives under the skin of those who it marks, but is aninternational political project designed to divide people in the name of security, in order to materially benefit globalstakeholders. It can only be truly uprooted when we focus not on what it is but what it does.
Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a writer, poet, educator and activist, disrupting ideas of history, race, knowledge and violence. Her poetry performances based on her book Post- colonial Banter have millions of views online and she was the National Roundhouse Poetry Slam runner-up in 2017. Suhaiymah has written for the Guardian and gal-dem and her work has featured across radio and TV stations. She has been commissioned to write plays by The Royal Court and other theatres.
‘One of Britain’s most promising young voices’ – Priyamvada Gopal, author of Insurgent Empire
Preti Taneja is a writer, activist and Professor of World Literature at Newcastle University. Her debut novel We That Are Young (Galley Beggar Press, 2017) won the Desmond Elliott Prize for literary fiction and was shortlisted for awards including the Folio Prize and the Prix Jan Michalski. Her writing has also been published in The White Review, the Guardian, Vogue, and the New Statesman and in translation around the world.
Preti has taught writing in prisons, worked with arts practitioners from Kashmir to Kosovo mediating their own conflict and post conflict zones, and with young people across socio-economically disadvantaged areas of the UK who want to get published. Preti’s critically acclaimed second book Aftermath is a creative non-fiction lament on trauma, terror, prison and grief: it will be published in the UK on April 7 with the Sheffield-based independent press, And Other Stories.
The Reading Room is a new collaborative project where people can read, learn, listen, and share ideas.
Through linking up with other spaces across the country, we’ve created libraries stocked with thought provoking books, where reading groups and opportunities to meet authors are being established, providing resources and activities that hope to catalyse creativity, collaboration and conversation.
The organisations involved share a common goal – to support and empower people within their communities. This project has been initiated in partnership with independent publisher Pluto Press, and the Left Book Club, and over time, each local hub will develop to reflect and serve the community within which it sits, making each space responsive and unique.
As well as physical library spaces, The Reading Room will open up forums to debate local issues that affect everyday lives. Taking the lead from our communities, these topics may include inequality, the environment, precarious employment, LGBTQ+ issues, structural racism and much more.
Come visit our space at The NewBridge Project (or find your local library!), start reading and borrowing books.
We have a room available for any attendees who need to pray – feel free to use this at any time. We understand maghrib prayer will be around 18:25 on 22nd March so there will be time to pray for anyone who would like to do so before the conversation begins at 18:40.
Food and refreshments will be available
Free
The NewBridge Project
Shieldfield Centre
4-8 Clarence Walk (off Stoddart Street)
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE2 1AL
The NewBridge Project is accessible. You can find out more here, or feel free to contact us prior to visiting if you require additional information regarding access and facilities.
The NewBridge Project is supported by Arts Council England, Newcastle Culture Investment Fund, Newcastle University’s Institute for Creative Arts Practice and the North of Tyne Combined Authority.
