Northwestern Events Calendar

Oct
7
2015

In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre -Lara Pawson, Journalist

When: Wednesday, October 7, 2015
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, Conference Room, 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Abstract: Lara Pawson’s In the Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre is the first book in English to deal with the events surrounding the 27 May 1977 in Angola, when a former government minister, Nito Alves, led a protest, or a revolt, against the MPLA government. Unknown numbers of people were killed in subsequent reprisals. Through her accounts of conversations with witnesses, perpetrators, victims of brutality and bereaved survivors, Pawson illustrates the impact of the events of 1977 on the social and political culture of contemporary Angola. In her paper, she argues that her book challenges a ‘crisis of historiography’ that has to do with the way in which history has been defined by the stories of powerful male individuals and of organised politics. In particular, she reflects upon the obstacles faced by a left-wing writer in confronting the failings of revolutionary movements, and the shortcomings of politically committed historians and journalists who have uncritically accepted the preferred narratives of only one organisation or faction and dismissed the validity of alternative readings. She argues that despite their radical politics, these writers paid little attention to the politics of race, which continue to play out in Angola to this day. Beyond the purely practical difficulties of researching an incident of which written records are sparse and unreliable, Pawson suggests that to pin down a single, empirical narrative is neither possible nor desirable.

Bio: 

In 2014, Lara Pawson's first book was published, In the Name of the People: Angola's Forgotten Massacre. She has worked as a correspondent for the BBC — in Angola, Ivory Coast and Mali. She has also worked in London for the BBC — at the BBC World Service’s Africa service. She has written for a number of publications — the Guardian, New Humanist, frieze, the Times Literary Supplement, Open Democracy, the LRB, the FT, Wasafiri, Radical Philosophy, The Irish Times, and more — on various topics (books, art, politics, marriage). She has also written chapters in other people’s books — Communicating War: Memory, Media and Military (eds. Maltby & Keeble, 2007) and Rasna Warah’s Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits (2008).

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