Sugar and Slate

Sugar and Slate by Charlotte Williams is an award-winning memoir first published in 2002 and now available in a new edition with a foreword by Hazel V Carby, the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Professor Emeritus of American Studies Yale University

"It is the exploration of geographical, racial and cultural dislocation, Sugar and Slate is in the finest tradition of work to have emerged from the black diaspora in recent times.” The Guardian

It is Williams's Welshness that make the examination of her mixed-race identity distinctive, but it is the humour, candour and facility of her style that make it exceptional… an engaging and perceptive voice describing an engrossing and particular personal story.” Gary Younge, The Guardian

The excavation of these cultural histories is enriched by personal histories, stories of Williams’ immediate and ancestral family, and anchored throughout Sugar and Slate by Charlotte Williams’ own life history and pursuit of the security found through sense of belonging. She reveals the intimate afterlives of imperialism and empire showing how legacies of colonization, race and racialization are lived by individuals and enacted in and shaping everyday relationships. These entanglements are gently unravelled in her account of the stages of her father’s lifelong struggles to throw off the mantle of being a colonial subject in diaspora: they begin with Denis Williams coming to know himself as West Indian during his first journey into exile in the mother country; continue as he fails to reconcile his colonial inheritance of a European mind with his desire to fully embrace the spirit of his African descent; and appear to resolve, or at least to reach an apparent settlement with his return to live in Georgetown.  Hazel V Carby the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Professor Emeritus of American Studies Yale University

Several on-line and in person launches in Wales and the United States are planned. Trade advertising.

Books Council Book of the Month for October