{"id":2035,"date":"2023-02-10T15:22:23","date_gmt":"2023-02-10T15:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hosting.northumbria.ac.uk\/warephemera\/?p=2035"},"modified":"2023-02-10T15:28:57","modified_gmt":"2023-02-10T15:28:57","slug":"introducing-the-team-5-may-sumbwanyambe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hosting.northumbria.ac.uk\/warephemera\/introducing-the-team-5-may-sumbwanyambe\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing the team #5: May Sumbwanyambe"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Who are you, and what do you do?<\/h3>

Hi, my name is May Sumbwanyambe, I\u2019m a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Northumbria University. I’m also a playwright, scriptwriter and librettist, and I’m currently completing a PhD on contemporary creative writing on historical Black lives at the University of York.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Where do you live?<\/h3>

I split my time between Glasgow, Edinburgh and Newcastle.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Which interests, personal or professional, link you to this project?<\/h3>

Practice research in scriptwriting is my primary research method, supported by critical reflection on practice as well as historical research. The central question underlying all of my research is, \u2018How can practice research in scriptwriting investigate how the past informs the present?\u2019 Also, the subject matter of my practice research is the lives of persons of African\/Caribbean descent in Scottish public life, with a particular focus on drawing ideas from the American philosophical movement of post-blackness and applying them to the literary genre of British historical drama.<\/p>

Whilst working on this project I have found Tavia Nyong’o\u2019s reflections<\/a> on Saidiya Hartman\u2019s formulation of a \u2018critical fabulation\u2019<\/a>\u00a0in \u2018Unburdening Representation\u2019 to be a really useful impulse on thinking about how we structure stories starting from ephemera. Or rather, how we play with and rearrange \u2018the basic elements of the story, by representing the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view\u2019.<\/p>

On this project I am attempting, as she describes, \u2018to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done\u2019. This critical fabulation allows me to refuse \u2018the coercive mimeticism that would demand\u2019, as Hartman outlines,\u00a0 that I produce \u2018a \u201cromance\u201d to fill in the missing voices of the archive\u2019. My tactic is \u2018to mine \u201cthe figurative dimensions of history\u201d itself; to zero in on those points where archival reconstruction and narrative invention come into maximum tension \u2013 and to (re)produce the sense of instability and potentiality relating to the events of the Glasgow 1919 race riots that the ephemera I\u2019m working from is focused on.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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What kinds of ephemera would we find preserved in your home?<\/h3>

I\u2019m not much of a hoarder in truth, so the main kinds of ephemera you\u2019d be likely to find in my house are clippings from newspapers that were important to me for one reason or another, or perhaps ticket stubs to plays I might have seen in the theatre. Really interestingly I found some ephemera in my house when I was recently renovating \u2013 we were doing the floor and we found old cards and letters underneath a bookshelf built into the wall beneath the floor boards. It was too hard to resist reading these lost documents that, like the layers of paint and wallpaper we found around the fireplace, told their own fascinating story about people who once lived in this house.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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