Newsroom
The Observer Book Club with Afua Hirsch
Invited experts
Afua Hirsch
Afua Hirsch
Join us for a powerful Observer Book Club evening with writer, broadcaster and lawyer Afua Hirsch as she returns to her acclaimed book Decolonising My Body, now out in paperback.
Upon turning forty, Hirsch had an encounter that forever altered her preconceived notions of ancestry and body image, leaving her questioning everything from body-modification rituals such as tattoos and piercings to the foundations of sexuality. Blending memoir, history, cultural criticism and on-the-ground reportage, she traces how colonial and patriarchal ideas about race, beauty, gender and power have been inscribed on her body - and how she has begun to reclaim it. From Eurocentric beauty standards to the politics of hair, she examines the ways colonial thinking still shapes how we see ourselves and each other.
Decolonising My Body charts her year-long journey of radical unlearning. In the Observer newsroom, Hirsch will reflect on what it means to unlearn inherited shame, to find joy in formerly policed parts of the self, and to imagine new forms of freedom and belonging. Together, we’ll ask: Who gets to feel at home in their own body? How do we disentangle ourselves from the gaze of others? And what might a truly decolonised relationship with our bodies look like today?
Invited experts
Afua Hirsch
Afua Hirsch
Join us for a powerful Observer Book Club evening with writer, broadcaster and lawyer Afua Hirsch as she returns to her acclaimed book Decolonising My Body, now out in paperback.
Upon turning forty, Hirsch had an encounter that forever altered her preconceived notions of ancestry and body image, leaving her questioning everything from body-modification rituals such as tattoos and piercings to the foundations of sexuality. Blending memoir, history, cultural criticism and on-the-ground reportage, she traces how colonial and patriarchal ideas about race, beauty, gender and power have been inscribed on her body - and how she has begun to reclaim it. From Eurocentric beauty standards to the politics of hair, she examines the ways colonial thinking still shapes how we see ourselves and each other.
Decolonising My Body charts her year-long journey of radical unlearning. In the Observer newsroom, Hirsch will reflect on what it means to unlearn inherited shame, to find joy in formerly policed parts of the self, and to imagine new forms of freedom and belonging. Together, we’ll ask: Who gets to feel at home in their own body? How do we disentangle ourselves from the gaze of others? And what might a truly decolonised relationship with our bodies look like today?