Dr Hayley Toth, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow

What will your research seek to do?

My project examines how Black activists theorised and practiced cultural collaboration as a form of organised resistance against systems of oppression. It challenges the focus on individual authors and texts in postcolonial studies, aiming to clarify the relationship between cultural practices and political participation.

What do you hope to discover with this research project? 

I’m excited to find out how Black activists around the world valued co-writing, cooperative publishing, communal reading, and community theatre as forums for political education and the redefinition of themselves and the nation.

By revisiting anticolonial and liberationist activism as a history of collective form, I hope to create new avenues of enquiry in postcolonial studies and promote a rethinking of form as a socio-political and literary object of study. 

What led you to get involved in your area of study and this project? 

My PhD critically examined dominant assumptions about reading in postcolonial studies. It sparked my interest in how the discipline has focused on reading and writing as political activities, and in clarifying the connections between cultural practices and political change.  

How have you found your first full year?

I’ve had a busy first year; reading, writing and disseminating research. Highlights for me include:

• building a culture around ‘collective form’
• organising an international, interdisciplinary symposium: Collective Form and National Liberation. This brought together researchers working on cultural collaboration and theories and practices of collective politics
• collaborating with Newcastle’s Star and Shadow Cinema. We hosted a screening of the guerrilla anti-apartheid film Mapantsula to coincide with Freedom Day
• presenting at two conferences, at the University of Leeds and Freie Universität Berlin
• contributing to the Newcastle Postcolonial Research Group, co-organising reading groups and regular work-in-progress seminars

What have you got planned for the next academic year?

Next year my plan is to head to Chicago to visit the archives at Chicago Public Library. I’m interested in its holdings on the National Alliance of Black Feminists and hoping to learn more about the organisation’s consciousness-raising workshops. From there, I’ll start to draft the second, planned chapter of the monograph based on my fellowship. I plan to use some of the material from that draft chapter to produce a journal article too.

Alongside this archival and writing work, I aim to solicit abstracts from speakers at this year’s symposium for a special issue of a journal. This will likely be a medium/long-term project, but I’m looking to at least get a journal on board in 2024/25 so that we can share some of the thoughts and discussions with a wider audience in the near future. I’d also like to present research at another couple of conferences next year for experience and feedback.

What advice would you give to someone following the same path?

Don't worry about following your proposed plans to the letter.

Things change. The research generates new ideas, new goals, and new research agendas. There have been times when I wanted to change, delay or scrap planned trips and outputs. People advised me that it’s better to be responsive to the research itself, not any preconceived ideas about what you thought the fellowship would entail.

Ask your mentor and other colleagues (as well as your funder) for their advice.

My mentor Neelam Srivastava has been brilliant in offering both practical and research advice, while still very much empowering me to make my own decisions.

It’s okay to feel a bit lost.

Allow the research to steer you in new directions. Seek support if you’re struggling to pull together new, disparate threads of the emerging project.

Be present in the research.

I suppose I’m trying to enjoy the process and be motivated by the questions and challenges it brings up, rather than obsessing about outputs.