(Highlight Notice) The Diasporic Everyday: Labour, Creativity, Survival

Certain binary oppositions remain prevalent in Western culture, and have done so since the Enlightenment. The production of civilised culture has and is often thought to rely upon the availability of significant leisure time, being long understood as the province of a privileged elite. Beauty and function, too, often sit in a rigid dichotomy, and aesthetic appreciation even now can be associated with the mind in opposition to the body. It is difficult to overstate the power of these historic dichotomies or the extent to which they still shape discussions about art and creativity throughout British and other national cultures. But it is also hard to overstate diasporic culture's capacity to dislodge their entrenched powers of assumption. In a wide variety of creative spheres, throughout the historic territories of the diaspora, the dichotomisation of leisure and art, and indeed of beauty and purpose, founder, growing powerless to explain the different, democratic, achievements of African peoples. Carnivals flower amid grinding violent poverty; Africa-tinged pit barbecue flourishes on the plantation; dances seem somehow to confound the ordeals of physical work; and in an array of other contexts expressivity asserts itself within an everyday life difficult to escape. The story of the blues that Langston Hughes once told, in other words, seems neither isolated nor unique. Invented in the field itself, as he speculated, and chiefly "to relieve the monotony" of difficult work, this functional lyricism instead only exemplified an alternative diasporic mode in which expressivity of all kinds happened amid racist toil and guarded against its multiple physical and psychological pains.

Alongside the blues among other lyrics of survival our new network explores some of the other key accomplishments of the diasporic everyday. It places Arthur France's establishment of the Leeds carnival at a time of extreme institutional racism into a wider diasporic pattern of active cultural resistance. It draws together US and UK food scholars to consider how slave cooks throughout the Black Atlantic interwove African food traditions into their everyday work, carving out new cultural and economic resources in a situation that remained sadistically hostile to African culture in the round. And it also welcomes back to Leeds Susan Kiguli, our East African alumnus, who has now won acclaim throughout the continent for her own explorations in oral poetry. Kiguli's involvement in our network promises to enrich our interdisciplinary reflections on the different, and differently indispensable, roles verse has performed among diverse diasporic communities uninterested in Eurocentric dichotomies of beauty and function.

Each of these everyday activities is fascinating in its own right, and through our roundtables our network will deepen understanding of them all. Above all we aim, however, to deepen our understanding of the diasporic philosophy which stands behind each such manifestation, unlocking the liberating, democratic investment in everyday creativity that they hold in common. Beauty, in the diasporic everyday, often manifests itself through function; basic imperatives of hunger and survival animate inspiration; and the permanence and perfection of the monument often seems less important than the moment of creativity itself. Yet as they thus synthesise this alternative cultural sensibility, our roundtables will also call attention to the ways in which it reflects outwards and onto those other vernacular or creative traditions, beyond the diaspora, which also confound agreed dichotomies of work and leisure and beauty and function. By the end of our programme, indeed, it will be clear that Hughes's "Story of the Blues" amongst other diasporic affirmations offer liberation to us all, confirming that all have access to art and creativity--that all culture, even, might belong to the everyday of us all.

The ultimate purpose of this network is to find a language that will recognise the creative lives of a constituency somewhat overlooked, even now, by the academy. Our roundtable discussions are academic occasions, and they will build towards a new academic statement or theorisation of the diasporic everyday. But nonacademic speakers will play a central role in this process, and the language which we will thus together pursue will strive towards a double affirmation. It will draw upon recent revisions of Lefebvre, and even Richard Hoggart's classic Leeds study The Uses of Literacy, in order to make an academic argument about the need to recognise the creativity of local everyday cultures, starting with those of the diaspora. And in doing so it will offer to those within the diaspora itself an overarching theory, developed in discussion, which reflects back to them what they might already know: that diasporic creativity has long occurred in everyday time, has often aimed at survival, and thus upsets leading European rhetorical claims about the meaning and function of culture.

The personnel as well as the intellectual framework of The Diasporic Everyday as such offers ample opportunities for new pathways to impact. The award of this AHRC grant would enable us both to develop this intellectual message of affirmation and then to carry it along the routes of dissemination made available through the involvement of our nonacademic members. The extended (three day) visits of our international scholars offer particular opportunities to plan public outreach programmes. When the US ethnomusicologist Shannon Dudley and the Trinidadian ethnographer Gabriel Hosein arrive for our roundtable on carnival, for example, we will plan a further offsite event, in discussion with Emily Marshall and Max Farrar, to share their expertise with north Leeds audiences involved in their own carnival. As Warnes has also, over the last two years, been collaborating with the organisers of the Leeds Indie Food festival, the visit of the brilliant US food scholar Psyche Williams-Forson raises the prospect of another public event on another history of everyday diasporic practice. At the end of both occasions questionnaires will ask audience members about their own relationship to creativity as well as their sense of the role of the university in the life of the city. Thus these events, although small in scale, will produce measurable and meaningful impacts that will in turn feed into our ongoing research.

Far bigger in scale is the public engagement event at the heart of the network: the performance of oral poetry from the East African poet Susan Kiguli alongside diasporic Leeds poets in the summer of 2017 on the new stage of the David Oluwale Memorial Garden. This event will also begin with a statement, from Warnes and Farrar, both on the Diasporic Everyday and DOMA's cultural ambitions for the city. To spread the word of our work on the diasporic everyday we are thus planning a public event of similar size and ambition to February 2016's Oluwale Now. As with Oluwale Now we will publicise this event via the established channels of our network and institution: through the offices of the David Oluwale Memorial Association, the Leeds West Indian Centre, and other organisations represented by our participants, and amongst the schools and colleges familiar to the School of English's increasingly successful access programmes. Questionnaires and social media will again provide a key source of measurable information about these events. As these will include questions not only about the oral poetry itself but also the diasporic everyday concept which frames it, the information we harvest from this event will feed back in and shape our plans for further public work as well as the orientation of our final publication. By these means The Diasporic Everyday will thus intensify and transform the community relationships that we have developed since Oluwale Now.