Ed Emery - Wiki page

Ed Emery (writer and activist)

Ed Emery (born 1946) is an ethnomusicologist, writer, translator, printer, amateur oyster farmer, classics scholar and revolutionary activist. In the 1970s, he was involved in the political activist group Big Flame, and was one of the founder organisers of the UK-based Ford Workers' Group.[1] In 1976, he founded radical publisher Red Notes, which has published key texts of the Italian revolutionary Left since the late 1960s. Since the 1970s he has translated across a number of languages, including key works by Italian authors, notably playwrights Dario Fo and Franca Rame, and political theorist Antonio Negri. As a writer, he has regularly contributed to Le Monde diplomatique and co-authored two plays with Richard Fredman, Les Juifs de Salonique [2] and The Night Before Larry Was Stretched. He is founder and co-editor of the literary-political journal Eothen. He is principal organiser of the SOAS Ceilidh Band, in which he is maître de danse and plays fiddle and bones, and the SOAS Rebetiko Band, in which he sings and plays baglama and tzoura. He has constructed an extensive archive of revolutionary texts from the British and Italian Left, which is currently being catalogued for storage and public access. In 2015, for services rendered in the left political movement, he was elected Honorary Member for life of the SOAS Student Union.[3]

Contents

1 Translations

2 Archives

3 Theatre

4 Writings

5 Journalism

6 Music

7 Academia

8 Sport

9 Other activities

10 Bibliography

11 References

Translations

As one outcome of his political activism, Emery has been influential in producing English translations of key works from the Italian Operaismo movement, including texts by Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, Sergio Bologna and Romano Alquati and as well as the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci.[4] His edited and translated books [publishing as Red Notes] include: Italy 1977-8: Living with and Earthquake, a key text on Italian politics and operaismo;[5] The Italian Inquisition: 1979; and After Marx, Jail: Italy 1980-81. He has continued to translate recent work by Negri for Polity Press,[6] and during the 2020 lockdown he published a further set of titles under the Red Notes rubric.

Archives

Emery has also constructed an extensive archive of revolutionary texts from the British and Italian Left, which is currently being catalogued for storage and public access:

-- An archive of materials relating to the Italian Left in the 1970s, which is now kept in three locations - at the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics; at the University of Cambridge Library; and at the May Day Rooms in London.[7]

-- An archive documenting workers’ organisation at the Ford Motor Company in the UK during the 1970s. Currently housed at May Day Rooms. [8]

-- An archive of personal documents relating to the revolutionary Left in Britain, now housed at the May Day Rooms.[9]

-- His personal diaries of 40 years of political and cultural activity, housed in a restricted access archive at Peterhouse, Cambridge.

Theatre

Emery has translated many works from the theatrical oeuvre of Italian playwrights Dario Fo and Franca Rame. He was on-stage translator for Fo during his UK tour in 1982, and produced a book documenting the first UK performance of Franca Rame's play The Rape, published as Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Theatre Workshops at Riverside Studios 1982 through Red Notes. The book included transcriptions of theatre workshops held by Fo and Rame as well as two new translations.[10] Emery translated three Fo plays published in the collection which followed Dario Fo’s 1997 award of the Nobel Prize in Literature:[11] Mistero Buffo, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, and One was Nude and One Wore Tails.

His translations of the Dario Fo / Franca Rame works are now on a dedicated website in the public domain.[12]

Writings

Ed Emery is founder and co-editor of the literary journal Eothen.[13]

Author of Journal of the Plague Year 2020: Reports to the Serenissima (RN Books, London, 2022).[14]

Author of a diary of 40 years of political activity, currently being selectively edited for publication.[15]

Journalism

After translating for the English edition of Le Monde diplomatique for many years, Emery also began writing for the paper on music, culture, poetry, and Middle Eastern politics.[16]

Music

For twenty years (2000-2020) Emery has organised the annual Hydra Rebetiko Gathering devoted to Greek rebetiko urban blues music.[17] He works particularly on Greek, Arabic and Kurdish music, with a particular focus on migrant musicians in Calais and Dunkirk. [18]^[11][12] This has result particularly in the project entitled “Kurdish Songbook Project @ SOAS”.[19]

Principal organiser of the SOAS Rebetiko Band,[20] and the SOAS Ceilidh Band.[21]

He is the editor of the radio programme “Ed Emery’s Revolutionary Radio Show”, housed on SOAS Radio.[22]

His work on maqamic music and on medieval Arabic and Hebrew music is reflected in ongoing conferences organised by The Free University, of which he is the founder.[23] [24]

Academia

In 2000 he set up The Free University, an international conference-based network of colleagues researching a variety of topics. Under the umbrella of that university, and in conjunction with the History Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) he is the creator and organiser of a number of conferences in the field of Interdisciplinary Animal Studies: for example, the Donkey Conference, [25] the Camel Conference,[26] the Elephant Conference,[27] the War Horses of the World Conference [28] and the Sponges Conference.[29]

He is also the organiser of the first international conference on shit: “Merde Alors! An interdisciplinary conference on excrement, past, present and future” (SOAS, 2023 upcoming).[30]

Awarded M.Mus. [SOAS, 2010] for dissertation: Prolegomena for a musicology of the zajal: A contextualised comparison of forms of colloquial strophic poetry in Arabic musical culture in North Africa, Egypt and Lebanon

In 2016 he was appointed Research Associate at the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies at SOAS.[31] As author and co-author, he has been collected by libraries.[32]

Sport

Ed Emery is the founder of the Radical Riverists network and is a keen punter. Occasional winner of the single punting event at Hurley Regatta.[33]

Other activities

Ongoing activities as an amateur oyster farmer on a river in Devon.[34]

Bibliography

Web link for bibliography.

_________________________

NOTES