The City by the Water.

LEEDS (England); ENGLAND

Considering the life of Leeds immigrant David Oluwale, which he first explored in his collection of essays ‘Foreigners’, Caryl Phillips approaches the life of Leeds city as a combination of personal histories and physical constructions. The telling of Oluwale's life serves to highlight the place of individual stories in the construction of a city's history and illustrate how the individual is himself subject to the physical and ideological constructions of the city. Delineating the emergence of Leeds as a city, Phillips outlines some of the major architectural and ideological reconstructions that the city has undergone, highlighting how the space remains marked by its history. He emphasizes the importance of the people in the city, actively seeing these ‘individual’ physical markers and engaging with them. This engagement with the city's colonial past, Phillips insists, is one of the most important ways in which people can develop a postcolonial sense of history and thereby prevent the injustices and loss of human dignity that David Oluwale suffered. Phillips' reading graduates into an illuminating conversation with John McLeod, Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures in the School of English, University of Leeds, and a question and answer session with the audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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