Our first event of 2021 will be a roundtable on the afterlives of slavery featuring three special guests: Deborah Thomas (UPenn), Tavia Nyong’o (Yale), and Lorgia García Peña (Harvard). We will be building on the conversation we started during our reading group session of November 18, 2020, when we discussed excerpts of Thomas’s, Nyong’o’s, and Peña’s latest books (see below). Danielle Roper (UChicago) will moderate the discussion.
The roundtable will be held on January 19, 2021, at 4pm (CST)/5pm (EST). Click here to register for the Zoom webinar.
Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also core faculty in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, holds a secondary appointment with the Graduate School of Education, and is a member of the graduate groups in English, Africana Studies, and the School of Social Policy and Practice. She is the author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Entanglement, Witnessing, Repair (Duke, 2019), Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011), and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and The Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004), and is co-editor of Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (2006). In Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Thomas theorizes the roots of contemporary state violence in Jamaica and in post-plantation societies in general. Drawing on visual, oral historical, and colonial archives, Thomas traces the long-term legacies of the plantation system and how its governing logics continue to shape and replicate forms of violence.
Tavia Nyong’o is Chair and Professor of Theater & Performance Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Professor of African-American Studies at Yale University. His current research and teaching interests span black queer cultural and performance studies, contemporary art and aesthetic theory, speculative genres, afrofuturism, and black sound studies. His second book, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (NYU, 2018) won the Barnard Hewitt award for best book in theater and performance studies. Departing from millennial debates over post-blackness and afro-pessimism, Nyong’o argued that the drama of black life exceeds the social conditions that seek to negate it. Taking up a broad spectrum of performance and performative aesthetics, Afro-Fabulations locates the intersection of blackness and queerness in speculative modes of social life. He is currently embarking on a study of critical negativity in the twenty-first century.
Lorgia García Peña is the Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of History and Literature. She is the author of The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, 2016), a study of the impact of stories—historical and fictional—on the national and racial identity of a people. Offering the Dominican experience as case study, this book shows how the stories of a nation create marginality through acts of exclusion. These exclusionary acts are linked to the tensions between colonial desire and the aspiration for political independence. The book also shows how these official stories of exclusion, though influential in shaping a country’s identity, are always contested, negotiated, and even redefined through acts of resistance linked to the tensions between history — what is perceived as evidence of fact — and fiction — what is presumed to be invention: cultural productions, oral histories, and rumors. The Borders of Dominicanidad is the winner of Winner of the 2017 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, the 2016 LASA Latino/a Studies Book Award and the 2016 Isis Duarte Book Prize in Haiti and Dominican Studies.
Summary
Theorizing the Afterlives of Slavery: A Roundtable
Tuesday, January 19, 4pm CST/5pm EST
Featuring Deborah Thomas (UPenn), Tavia Nyong’o (Yale), and Lorgia García Peña (Harvard).
Moderator: Danielle Roper (UChicago)
Registration is required. Please click here to register.