2023
The only way to start a new year is with a Mobile Homecoming practice. Still eating off of this essay by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, from the God of Everyday course.
Clotilde
Taught the story of the Clotilde to the New Generations Scholars Cohort 15 last January. Some notes from that lesson (I may have shared these already, but never too much):
Film explores descendants of last known U.S. slave ship https://www.axios.com/2023/01/15/film-descendant-us-slave-ship-netflix-clotilda
The film Descendant on Netflix (deserves ALL of the awards)
Searching for a Slave Ship https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/searching-slave-ship/ with the scholar mermaid Dr. Ayana Omilade Flewellen
Diving With a Purpose https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/diving-purpose/ with Dr. Tara Roberts
Ben Raines on the present-day impact of slavery on Africatown and the Gulf Coast broadly https://www.c-span.org/classroom/document/?19933
The Montpelier Descendants Committee
Kongo
Went down a quick rabbit hole on slavery in the Kingdom of Kongo and her neighbors…
Kajsa Ekholm Friedman, Catastrophe and Creation: The Transformation of an African Culture (Psychology Press, 1991).
Luc de Heusch, Mythes et rites bantous: Le roi de Kongo et les monstres sacrés (Gallimard, 1972).
Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, “The Atlantic Slave Trade from Angola: A Port-by-Port Estimate of Slaves Embarked, 1701–1867,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 46, no. 1 (2013): 105–22.
Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (UNC Press Books, 2014).
A truly mind-bending graphic created for Reuters in 2019 around the number of ships that participated in the slave trade, by Michael Ovaska, Lea Desrayaud and Samuel Granados.
Beyond
Thinking about the painter Julien Hudson.
Just encountering this 2018 exhibit by Fred Wilson called Afro-Kismet.