Please join the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities “Sites of Inquiry” research group for a guest lecture by Professor Deborah A. Thomas (University of Pennsylvania). Organized in partnership with the Van Hunnick History Department, the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, the Department of Anthropology, and The Ethnography Studio. 

FROM ISLAND TO ISLAND TO ISLAND:  THE INTIMACIES AND ABANDONMENTS OF EMPIRE

This talk – a multi-media prose poem – will think through some of the important, though lesser-known, middle passage histories that inform diasporic movement, cycles of dispossession and abandonment, and potential repair.  It will touch on issues related to African burial grounds, the ethical treatment of human remains worldwide, and the cultural phenomenon of kumina, a Congolese-based ritual practice that was established in Jamaica by Africans who had been liberated in St. Helena, an island in the South Atlantic that was central to the circuits that brought together Europe, West Africa, South Africa, and the Caribbean and that re-oriented the center of the universe to Europe from the Mediterranean and overland silk route trades.  How do we think through the legacies of these long histories and these forgotten circuits?  In what ways might we conceptualize repair?

Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Exorbitance:  A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Exceptional Violence, and Modern Blackness, and co-director of the documentary films Bad Friday and Four Days in May. She is the recipient of several awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, and she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Prior to her life in the academy, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.  

Please direct any questions to [email protected].

Individuals with disabilities who need accommodations to attend this event may contact Zachary Mann, [email protected]. It is requested that individuals requiring accommodations or auxiliary aids such as sign language interpreters and alternative format materials notify us at least 7 days prior to the event. Every reasonable effort will be made to provide reasonable accommodations in an effective and timely manner.

This program is open to all eligible individuals. The USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities operates all of its programs and activities consistent with the University’s Notice of Non-Discrimination. Eligibility is not determined based on race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or any other prohibited factor.