A reading  SERIES

WITH

HOLLY GRAHAM

AND THE LEFTOVERS READING GROUP

May 28th
June 25th
July 23rd
August 27th
Sept 24th 
October 28th

All sessions 7-9pm, last Thursday of the Month

Everyone is welcome to turn up to attend this event. However, we encourage you to join the Leftovers mailing list and receive details of texts and event sessions. 

Food and drink are provided at reading sessions

There Aint No Jack in the Union Jack is a reading group series that considers anti-racism, memorialisation and care through a 6-month reading of Paul Gilroy’s seminal book There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987), exploring the cultural politics of race in the UK. 

Led by artist Holly Graham, each reading works within the framework of Leftovers, a group for reading otherwise, which meets monthly at TACO!

In this Leftover reading series, Holly will bring Gilroy’s book into dialogue with other texts, including material from the developing Rolan Adams Legacy Archive, a collection of materials being developed by Holly and the family of Rolan Adam’s as part of her ongoing project Action! Holly’s project seeks to memorialise Rolan Adams and the collective anti racism actions it inspired in the early 1990’s in Thamesmead and SE London. 

Holly’s textual enquiry will consider racial violence, far-right sentiment and anti-racism then and now, and the shifting symbolism of the British Union Jack and St George Cross, in light of its resurgent use in the 'stop-the-boats' flag-flying and far-right populist politics.  
 
Each session will draw on specific themes within Gilroy’s text, including Race & class, law & dissent, remembrance, multiculturalism, the far right and counter organising.

All texts will be shared with attendees two weeks before the reading group takes place, and will be downloadable from this page. While it is not essential to have read the texts before the event (we will be reading extracts together during the session), we do encourage you to read them if you can, to make the most of the sessions. 

Texts for Session 1 / 28 May 2006 : Local & National, Then & Now   (access and download here)

Key texts:

• Paul Gilroy, Intro to 2002 edition of  There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack – written 24 yrs ago, and 15 yrs on from original publication of the book, interesting context to race in the UK at that time, to offer food for thought in relation to our current context.

• Xaira Adebayo, Widening the Archive of Space, Race and Racialised Violence: The Local Histories of Thamesmead, Bexley and Greenwich in race and radical histories, 2023

From the Rolan Adams Legacy Archive:

• CARF (Campaign Against Racism & Fascism), No.3 June/August, 1991, ‘Britain on Black Alert’, ‘No Justice, No Peace’, ‘Anti-Arab Racism: Europe Unites’, pgs 4-6

Further reading:

• Eddie Chambers, Black People and the British Flag

Definitions of racism


TACO! encourages a range of diverse voices to join the group, to participate in generous and respectful discussion.

To take part in group reading sessions, receive reading texts and future discussion dates, or to find out more information, please sign up to the Leftovers mailing list. 


Holly Graham graduated from MA Printmaking at the Royal College of Art in 2014. Recent exhibitions and projects include: To Us It Just Looks Like A Lemon: Bothy Residency, Southwark Park Galleries (2019); On Board II, Art Licks & Espacio Vista, Madrid; BOUNDS, Skelf, Online (2019); The Oval Window, Gerald Moore Gallery, London (2019); The Romance of Flowers, Kingsgate Projects, London (2018); Common Third, Copperfield, London (2018); Carefully Cleansed of Labour and Softened by Cooking, Compressor, London (2018); and Sweet Swollen, Jerwood Visual Arts: Project Space, London (2018). Holly is Head of Artist Development at Turf Projects, Croydon, and is Co-Founder of Cypher BILLBOARD, London
Leftovers is an informal reading and discussion group. The group meets monthly and provides a supportive, peer-led space for close and speculative readings of texts from cultural and critical theory, philosophy, literature, poetry, and popular media.

Texts shared and read through the group are made permanently available via the TACO! Artist Research Library.