Independent Radical Publishing
How much do we change when we move to a new country? What do we embrace, resist, leave behind? Can we really, one day, become “truly” British? And what does that even mean?
Becoming British is a 6h durational performance installation created by Lora Krasteva. It challenges and interrogates national identity and notions of belonging through the perspective of first generation migrant artists and communities. At the intersection of installation, live art and a broadcast, Becoming British is a task-based performance that portrays the demands put on us as migrants whilst celebrating the quirks of Britishness we are ready to embrace and highlighting the uncomfortable truths that are part of it too.
Pluto Press supports the projects by supplying a selection of critical texts for one of the Becoming British tasks (the Evidence Table), in which excerpts of the following books might be read.
We invite our audiences to spend more time with the items of this digital Becoming British library, learning more about the themes and topics that have informed the creative work.
Explores the different facets of how austerity in Britain is a form of institutional violence
The follow-up to Peter Fryer's modern classic, Staying Power
Britain is a land shaped by oil. How does that impact its past, present and future?
The book that changed the conversation on the contemporary museum
A history of the social movement that brought down Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
An explosive account of a secret group of mercenaries based on newly declassified documents.
A reassessment of Scottish politics and society in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century
Highlights the entanglement of British class and sexuality, in a society saturated by the rhetoric of diversity
An insightful analysis examining race, the state, the media and criminalisation in Britain
A Marxist investigation into the forms of resistance occurring in the UK call centre today
Explores how 'Britishness' functions as a tool of violent racial bordering
Examines the ways in which the 'Left Behind' have been used to symbolise and foment social divisions in contemporary Britain
Tennis is much more than Wimbledon! This story reveals the hidden history of the sport.
A rigorous examination of 'dispersal', which forms the basis of the government's asylum policy
How is Britain enacting colonialism at home?