Event

Penn Professor Salamishah Tillet Presenting:

Sites of Slavery:

Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination

Almost fifty years after the major victories of the civil rights movement, African Americans continue to have a vexed relationship to American citizenship and the civic myth of the United States as the land of equal opportunity and justice for all. In “Sites of Slavery ,” Tillet examines how contemporary African American artists and Writers such as Mary Francis Berry, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Bill T. Iones, and Kara Walker reconstruct “sites of slavery” — the allegations of a sexual relationship between Thomas Iefferson and Sally Hemings, the characters Uncle Tom and Topsy in Harriet Beecher StoWe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” African American tourism to West African slave forts, and the legal challenges posed by the modern reparations movements — in order to challenge our national amnesia about slavery and model a racially democratic future.

Tillet is assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at Penn. Tillet has Written for the Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Nation, NPR, and The Root. She is also co-founder of A Long Walk Home, Inc., a non-profit organization that uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to end violence against girls and women.

This event is being held in conjunction with the Penn Center for Africana Studies. Light refreshments will be provided.

All events at the Penn Bookstore are free and open to the public.