The Penn Museum invites you to unlock the human experience through
literature. Join us for a unique twist on the classic book club model
featuring carefully curated books with cultural connections, moderated
by Penn Museum curators and special guests. A new book will be
featured each month, from June through December. Each month, Between
the Lines participants will meet three times through interactive video
conferencing: a kickoff, a check-in, and a concluding meeting at the
end of the book. Readers are encouraged to continue the conversation
and chat beyond these virtual meetings in the private Between the
Lines Facebook Group. The moderator will share additional connections
to the collection, supplemental readings and videos, and guiding
questions through the virtual meetings and Facebook group. July's
Featured Book Barracoon: The Story of the Last 'Black Cargo' by Zora
Neale Hurston In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama,
just outside Mobile, to interview 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the
millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to
America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the
story of this integral part of the nation's history. Hurston was there
to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his
capture and bondage 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was
outlawed in the United States. In 1931, Hurston returned to Plateau,
the African-centric community three miles from Mobile founded by Cudjo
and other former slaves from his ship. Spending more than three months
there, she talked in depth with Cudjo about the details of his life.
During those weeks, the young writer and the elderly formerly enslaved
man talked about Cudjo’s past—memories from his childhood in
Africa, the horrors of being captured and held in a barracoon for
selection by American slavers, the harrowing experience of the Middle
Passage packed with more than 100 other souls aboard the Clotilda, and
the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.
Barracoon brilliantly illuminates the tragedy of slavery and of one
life forever defined by it. About the Moderator: Deborah Thomas R.
Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology Deborah Thomas, Ph.D., is
interested in the afterlives of imperialism, in the forms of
community, subjectivity, and expectation that are produced by
violence, and in how these are expressed and mapped. Her current
projects probe these issues in very different ways: one, for example,
looks at the massive investment by the Chinese state and Chinese
companies into infrastructures and consumer markets throughout the
Caribbean in order to examine how the intensified Chinese presence
displaces earlier colonial and imperial Western hemispheric relations,
and how people are responding to these processes. Thomas is also a
filmmaker (Bad Friday and Four Days in May) and co-curated the
Museum’s special exhibition Bearing Witness: Four Days in West
Kingston. She recently began work on a new film project on the
Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church in Jamaica. Having been a professional
dancer before becoming an anthropologist, Thomas has long been
committed a fusion of creative practice and scholarly research. In
2018, she launched the Center for Experimental Ethnography, a
cross-school and interdisciplinary Center at Penn that supports
creative research production among students and faculty. $5 General
Admission. Includes 3 meetings.
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07/07/2020 Last update