Thursday 28 July / Camden Art Centre Café & Garden / 7–9 p.m. / Free / Register

The White Review, in collaboration with Camden Art Centre, present The Pocket’s Delight, a discussion on essay writing, secrecy, and signs, with The White Review No. 33 contributors Francis Whorrall-Campbell and Rosa Campbell, alongside editor Izabella Scott.

The essay Pocket Theory, by Francis Whorrall-Campbell, operates as a speculative manifesto in response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. They argue that the ‘secretive’ pocket is a fitting home for chimerical, hard-to-define narratives, whereby ‘tucked inside we might find weird lives and weird literature’.

Secrets are also the subject of Let Them Know by Signs, an essay by Rosa Campbell (co-written with Taushif Kara) that traces the strange histories and causes of the conspiracy theory — ranging from the Kenyan belief that British colonisers were stealing the blood of Africans to strengthen anaemic Europeans to QAnon and Pizzagate.

Together with editor Izabella Scott, the essay writers will discuss encoded histories, rumours, misfit languages and fugitive politics.

ROSA CAMPBELL is a doctoral candidate in the history department at the University of Cambridge. Her work explores global histories of feminism. She is an editorial fellow at the public history magazine, History Workshop Online, and writes on a range of platforms for both adults and children.

FRANCIS WHORRALL-CAMPBELL is an artist, researcher and writer from the UK. Under the guidance of their own transness, they experiment with questions of bodily authority, knowledge and possibility to produce artwork and texts in various media and formats.