Claudia Jones: A life in exile with Isabella Kajiwara and Lola Olufemi

In today's episode, guest host Isabella Kajiwara is joined by black feminist writer and researcher Lola Olufemi in discussion of Claudia Jones: A Life in Exile by Marika Sherwood, the first book to chart her work in the movement for racial justice, focusing on her time in Britain.

They discuss the importance of remembering Claudia Jones as a communist, acknowledging the exile and persecution she faced due to McCarthyism in the U.S. and how her life was shaped by state violence and surveillance. Olufemi highlights Jones' efforts to bring an analysis of gender and race to Communist parties' understandings of exploitation, and how Jones harnessed cultural production as a mode of consciousness-building and resistance. Olufemi and Kajiwara discuss the challenges of sustaining revolutionary work amidst state surveillance and economic precarity, and what it will take for us to build truly inclusive and cross-disciplinary movements.

This episode is part of a mini-series inspired by our latest shado bookclub season: To Be Loved, Is To Be Remembered: Archiving for Liberation. We explored titles from Lawrence Wishart Books' Radical Black Women collection, curated in collaboration with the Black Cultural Archives to redress erasures of Black British and Black Transnational Feminist histories. These works shine a light on the lives and activism of Claudia Jones, Gerlin Bean and Amy Ashwood Garvey - three revolutionary figures whose legacies continue to shape global justice movements.

Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer, researcher and Associate Lecturer based in the design school at University Arts London. Her work focuses on the utility of the political imagination in the textual and visual cultures of radical social movements, examining the role cultural production plays in materialist resistance and collective conceptualisations of futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021), and the forthcoming Against Literature (2026).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.