Tré Ventour-Griffiths
Contact
- Email: k2242434@kingston.ac.uk
- Location: Kingston School of Art, Knights Park
- Faculty: Kingston School of Art
- School: School of Creative and Cultural Industries
- Department: Department of Humanities
- Personal website
Research project: Northampton(shire) is the Place for Me: Creative Responses to Provincial England's Caribbean Diaspora, 1948-1985
Abstract
Written published works about post-war Caribbean communities have in large, centred on major cities including London, Birmingham, and Leeds. This research centres on my home, Northamptonshire, in the East Midlands, to decentre popular focuses on cities through the production of creative non-fiction – based on oral history testimonies. Accessible history texts about Caribbean communities in provincial Britain are lacking in the mainstream. Though many Caribbean people moved to British cities from the 1950s, these are not the only places that have a postwar Caribbean history. This thesis positions Northamptonshire as one such site of Caribbean settlement from as early as 1948, including the first generation of British-Caribbean children that followed.
- Research degree: PhD
- Title of project: Northampton(shire) is the Place for Me: Creative Responses to Provincial England's Caribbean Diaspora, 1948-1985
- Research supervisor: Professor Sara Upstone
- Other research supervisors:
Biography
Tré Ventour-Griffiths is a neurodivergent essayist-poet, public historian, sociologist, and cultural critic, who speaks and writes on subjects broadly contained within Black British history, neurodiversity, intersectionality, cultural criticism, and insurgent politics.Northampton-raised, Tré's doctoral research is about Northants' postwar Caribbean story. Based on 100+ hours of interviews with Northamptonshire people (1948-1985), it aims to show England's Caribbean communities settled and thrived beyond London and other major cities. This aims to decentralise a ‘cityfied Blackness' that for decades (via film, TV, documentary, and popular literature), has been imposed as the total sum of postwar Black Caribbean experiences. Much to the exclusion of those arrivals who settled and raised families in England's towns and the countryside, further to Wales, Scotland, and in Ireland.
Links to work here - https://linktr.ee/treventoured
Areas of research interest
- Spoken Word Poetry
- Autoethnography
- Blackness/Mixedness in Provincial Britain
- Regency Whiteness in English Literature (+ Screen Adaptations)
- Neurodivergence and Intersectionality
- Superhero Narratives in Politicised Contexts
- UK Empire Honours System
- British and American Film Industrial Complex
Qualifications
- BA Creative Writing - University of Northampton
- MA Race, Education and Decolonial Thought - Leeds Beckett University
Funding or awards received
- Kingston BME Studentship
Publications
Selected Publications:
2024 "Welcome to Mutant High": Neurodivergent Students at Xavier's School for the Gifted" (PubPub)
2023 "I Am Kenough": Guy DeBord, Barbie, and The Society of the Spectacle (Medium)
- Get Out of Midsomer: How the Whiteness of Country Estates Should Go Bump in the Night (Medium)
- Big Trees/Small Axe: Does the UK Honours System Divide and Rule Black British Culture? (The Commoner)
- COVID-1984: Wake MBE Up When Black Lives Matter, in: COVID-19 and Racism: Counter-Stories of Colliding Pandemics (Policy Press).
2022 The House of Black X-Cellence: Public Monumentalism and the Spectacularised Black British Past (Race Reflections).
- Northampton's Infinite Playlist: Whiteness, the Arts, and the Land of Shoe and Boot in Cahoots (PubPub).
2021 Man-Made: For The Victims And Survivors Of Male Violence And The System That Enables It (Ink, Sweat and Tears).
- Comment: Exploring Northamptonshire's Black debt (NN Journal).
- No More Black Messiahs: Let Black History Bask in Ordinariness: Thinking About Black Excellence in the Life of Walter Tull. (Leeds).
2020 To Decolonise Creative Writing, You Need to Embrace Its Activist History (WonkHE).
2019 Historical, Not Hysterical: Beyond The Long Song (Medium).
2018 The Amazing Adventures of Walter Tull (The Nenequirer)
2017 The Empire Shuts Its Mouth (The Nenequirer)
Conference papers
Conference Appearances
2024 Beyond London's Borders: Northampton's Alt. History of Reggae, 1973-1982 (Century of Sound, University of the West Indies)
- Being Black, Being (Un)Well: Health and Heritage, Keeping it Colonial? (Historic England)
2023 "An Intersectionality of Struggles": Black Youth Movements in Northampton, 1977-1985 (Race and Socially Engaged Research, York St. John)
- The House of Black X-Cellence: Monument Culture and the Spectacularised Black British Past (PGR Decolonisation, Salford University)
- The Metahuman Antithesis: Parables of Neurodivergence in Marvel's X-Men (Neurodiversity, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour).
- "By the Order of the Peaky Blinders": Erased White Terror and Black Resistance in UK Period Dramas (PGR Social History Conference, Edinburgh)
- Northamptonshire is the Place for Me: Creative Responses to Provincial England's Caribbean Diaspora, 1948-1985.
2022 Out of Many, One People: Mixed-Race, History and the Black Atlantic (Teach for All)
- Big Trees/Small Acts: How UK Honours System Dictates Black British Storytelling (Diaspora Screen Media Network, BCU and Northampton)