Sita Balani & Jay Bernard: *Transitions: On Culture, Crisis, and the Human*

Join us at EBB for the presentation of Sita Balani & Jay Bernard's book *Transitions: On Culture, Crisis, and the Human*, published by Mack Books.

Part dialogue, part diagnosis, *Transitions* turns to the humanities to understand how we arrived at our present moment and what might carry us forward.

The legacies of Britain’s colonial past continue to shape the cultural landscape. The advent of AI has unsettled what it means to be human in the face of ruthless profiteering. In the aftermath of Thatcherism, ordinary people are surrounded by images of vast material wealth while having access to less and less – whether that be housing, public services, or cultural institutions.

In *Transitions: On Culture, Crisis, and the Human*, writers and friends Jay Bernard and Sita Balani consider these questions, taking the UK as a microcosm of the world. Guided by Stuart Hall’s notion of ‘conjuncture’, they draw on literature, social theory, and lived experience to offer an urgent account of our fractured present. From the personal and local through to the global, their dialogue is inflected by a commitment to the humanities, narrative, and universal horizons, in a political culture determined to devalue them.

Dr. Sita Balani is a lecturer in English at Queen Mary University of London. She is the co-author of *Empire's Endgame* (Pluto Press, 2021). She has published in Vice, Tribune, the White Review, Novara, Salvage, Ceasefire, Five Dials, Wasafiri, and Open Democracy. She has appeared on BBC3 and Novara Media, and is a regular speaker at events on anti-racism, feminism, education, sexuality, and colonial history.

Jay Bernard is a multifaceted writer, artist, film programmer and activist from London. They were named Foyle Young Poet of the year 2005 and selected for the Complete Works programme in 2014. Their pamphlet *The Red and Yellow Nothing* was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award in 2016. They were elected Fellow of the royal Society of Literature in 2018. Their poetry collection *Surge*(Chatto & Windus) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2019, the 2019 Costa Book Award for Poetry, the 2020 Dylan Thomas Prize and the 2020 RSL Ondaatje Prize. It won the 2020 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.