BU Research Blog

2021 marks the centenary of two of the twentieth century’s most important critical thinkers: Raymond Williams and Paulo Freire. Bournemouth Associate Professor Hywel Dix, who has published extensively on both, has been invited to give the closing keynote address at an online symposium dedicated to exploring connections between the two figures and their legacy at the University of Campinas in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

This keynote address will explore the place of race and religion in the work of Williams and Freire. Beginning with a discussion of William Empson’s Structure of Complex Words (1951), it will argue that the work of Empson was a greater influence on Williams’s work than has previously been realised, both in the adoption of a historical approach to linguistics and its application to the sociological analysis of culture. However, there are also two key elements in Empson for which there are no equivalent in Williams: specifically, the idea of a Christian sensibility and a Eurocentric perspective which fails to incorporate racial diversity. Williams’s Culture and Society (1958), Keywords (1976) and Marxism and Literature (1977) are all rooted in the work of Empson but say virtually nothing about either religion or race and the jettisoning of these areas of thought relative to the earlier writer has a series of very precise effects. Positively, it enables Williams to move away from the Eurocentric racial politics of Empson so that although Williams himself has rightly been criticised for his inability to incorporate racial diversity, his work can at least be read as a corrective to his predecessor’s in this regard. On the other hand, since race and religion are closely related in Empson’s thinking, getting rid of one simultaneously entails getting rid of the other. This has the effect that the opportunity to identify forms of counter-hegemonic relationships that a sociology of religious organisations can provide is missed – and Williams interprets organisations of religion solely as organs of the dominant ideology. The problem with this assumption is that it fails to account for how the kinds of relationship that typify faith-based communities (of all kinds) are inflected by experiences of race and can provide instances of counter-hegemonic solidarity. This, the chapter will provide, is why it is worth reading Williams alongside his exact contemporary Paulo Freire, because in Freire’s work a connection between a critical racial politics and an acknowledgement of the contribution certain religious communities can potentially make to that politics can be re-established. In doing so, it adds nuance to our current thinking about race.

The symposium will take place on August 26, with the keynote at 7.30 pm UK time. Anyone interested can register to attend the online symposium at https://www.fe.unicamp.br/agenda-de-eventos/coloquio-internacional-centelhas-de-transformacoes-paulo-freire-raymond-williams