Lacuna: A Reading Group - led by PSS

PSS, a South East London based collective focusing on publishing and reading, is hosting a free reading group. Our first meeting in Glasgow will be held inside the Clubroom space during The House that Heals the Soul summer exhibition.

Within discourses that analyse the continuing British colonial present lies a recurrent confrontation with gaps in lineage, catalogue and record. These gaps are especially relevant in the context of libraries, whereby the process of cataloguing operates simultaneously as capture and erasure. Our position is that these omissions from record, though actively produced, can not be addressed simply by ‘making visible, rendering comprehensible, or restoring to presence,’ (Vimalassery, Pegues, Goldstein, 2016). There is always already an impossibility of recuperation when ‘listening for the unsaid… in fragmented discourse’ (Hartman, 2008).

PSS analyses material in collaboration and exchange with other readers. For this session we will read three texts, implementing working to undo and refuse knowability rather than to fill-in or represent.

Printed texts for this group will be made available in the exhibition space leading up to the reading session. Read in advance if you can, though it is not necessary to finish each text in full in order to participate. If you would like to read the texts in their original published context, please follow the links below

If you require an accessible version of the text please contact us at pssss@pssss.co

Reading List

Barnor Hesse, ‘Diasporicity, Black Britain’s Post Colonial Formations’ in UnSettled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, London/New York: Zed Books, 2000

Jay Bernard, ‘Surge’ in Beacon of Hope: New Beacon in Poetry and Prose, New Beacon Press, 2016. We will focus on Poems 2 - 6.

Jackie Kay, Trumpet (excerpt), London: Picador, 1998.

Optional further reading:
Hartman, S. "Venus in Two Acts." Small Axe, vol. 12 no. 2, 2008, pp. 1-14. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.

Vimalassery, M. & Pegues, J. H. & Goldstein, A. "Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing." Theory & Event, vol. 19 no. 4, 2016. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/633283.