43rd Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series
Food, and its links to African traditions, Black diasporan histories, climate chaos, and social justice, will be the subject of the 43rd Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series on February 18th at the Newark Museum.
And an array of dishes, from African American regional cuisine to New Orleans and Caribbean food, will be served. They will also be the subject of scholarly lectures with mass appeal, which is what the MTW series does best.
Speakers this year include New Orleans food writer and critic Lolis Eric Elie, author of Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country and Treme: Stories and Recipes from the Heart of New Orleans; and legendary culinary historian Jessica B. Harris, a leading authority on food of the African Diaspora and author of New York Times bestseller High on the Hog, the basis for the acclaimed Netflix series.
The title of this year’s event is Beans, Greens, Tomatoes: Food Accessibility and Justice in the Black Diaspora. In addition to listening to lectures about food, attendees are invited to share their own food memories and what they reveal about family and culture. Said Lacey P. Hunter, organizer of the series, “This is a rare opportunity to engage with a group of leading, high-impact scholars of food and food justice.”
Speakers include Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, cultural historian, professor, and chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park. She is the author of Eating While Black: Food Shaming and Race in America; Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, and co-editor of Taking Food Public: Redefining Food in a Changing World.
Also speaking will be Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black, specialist in the trans-national history of West African rice farmers, peasant farmers in pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the South Carolina and Georgia Low country during the antebellum period. Author of Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora, forthcoming book ‘Combee’: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War, and co-author of Rice: Global Networks and New Histories.
The series, which will be held from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., is sponsored and organized by the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture and the Modern Experience at Rutgers-Newark.