Migration History Seminar Series 2023/24 Kennetta Hammond Perry, The Prayers of David Oluwale: Writing History Along the Bias Grain Research and knowledge exchange

Kennetta Hammond Perry’s (Ph.D., Michigan State University) research examines Black diasporic communities and political formations shaped by and within the imperial bordering of Britain. Her first book, London Is The Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford, 2016) explores how a largely African Caribbean migrant community of Black Britons articulated claims to citizenship and publicly challenged the state to both acknowledge and remedy the ways in which anti-Black racism came to bear upon their lives in the decades following World War II.

Currently, she has completed a second book manuscript examining the life, death and legacy of David Oluwale, a Nigerian-born homeless man thought to have been murdered by police in Leeds, England in 1969. Drawing from Black feminist epistemologies, this study will contribute to burgeoning conversations within Black Studies and the discipline of History about how we ethically engage and demonstrate a duty of care in our historical writing about Black lives as they are represented in archives steeped in violence and disregard for Black humanity.