A luta continua: A conversation with Michael La Rose

Founded by Michael La Rose’s father John La Rose, New Beacon Books is rooted in the work of Caribbean intellectuals challenging the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Emerging as a hub for political and cultural organising in London’s Finsbury Park neighbourhood, the bookshop’s origins are closely tied to the Black supplementary school movement in the UK, which addressed educational gaps and institutional racism. As a bookshop, New Beacon is committed to children’s literature and representation, navigating the complexities of class within Black communities. Today, it remains a crucial resource for education and activism.

Black Atlantic Museum is a digital project based on archival research, commissioned contributions and interviews. It seeks to examine Black cultural production and its influence on contemporary art and exhibition histories in the years since the publication of sociologist Paul Gilroy’s seminal work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993).

Over the final quarter of 2022, we will publish the first round of this project, beginning to make public a long-term commitment at Afterall to identify, visualize, study and teach through the intersections between contemporary art, cultures of the Black Atlantic and the liberatory imagination. During this period, we will slowly plot out our first round of research, conducted since January 2021, making an invitation into a set of open categories of enquiry to be added to in the future.

Black Atlantic Museum is funded by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

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