About Summer Scholars Lunchtime Talks
The Summer Scholars season of lunchtime talks is hosted by the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania at the Library and showcases the exciting and wide-ranging research into our Americas collections by the Institute’s Visiting Fellows and associates, as well as Library staff.
Free. No need to book, just drop-in.
‘Another wedding ain’t gon’ happen here’: Resisting Marriage Tourism at Plantations
Laura Wilson explores contemporary Black authored texts that write back against slavery and the plantation from a present-day setting, via genres such as Afrofuturism, magical realism, and dystopian horror; in particular, the short story 'Broom' by Kelechi Okafor, in which a Black woman is invited to a rich white wedding held on a plantation in North Carolina. Okafor invokes the spectral presence of those formerly enslaved on the plantation to disrupt the wedding, calling attention to the absurdity of holding marital ceremonies at these traumatic sites. Wilson pairs her reading of this story with recent scholarship on US heritage tourism and the contentious legacies of plantation locations.
Sound Recordings from the Americas
The British Library Sound Archive is home to over seven million sound recordings spanning music, spoken word, oral history, and wildlife and environmental sounds. In this playback and tell session, Michele Banal will present a selection of sound recordings from the Americas, drawn from the Sound Archive’s World and Traditional Music collection. The session will combine listening with informal discussion of the stories and contexts behind the recordings.
Image: © Laura Wilson.
More information
About the speakers
Laura Wilson received her PhD from the University of Mississippi and is currently turning her dissertation – On Southern Soil: The Art and Ecology of Racial Uplift, 1895-1950 – into her first monograph. Her newest project explores how contemporary Black authors, from 1970 to today, challenge dominant representations of the plantation. She has published on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Zora Neale Hurston, and is the co-editor of a collected volume entitled The Living Legacy of African American Studies: Its Past, Its Present, and Its Future(s), under contract at UGA Press. She is a Collection Metadata Systems Analyst at the British Library.
Michele Banal is Lead Curator of World and Traditional Music in the British Library Sound Archive. His research interests include audiovisual ethnomusicology, the music of West Africa, and the music of the Black diaspora. Since joining the British Library, he has been increasingly interested in issues of archival representation and digital recirculation of intangible cultural heritage documented in archival sound recordings.
About the Eccles Institute
The Eccles Institute builds, curates and preserves the Americas and Oceania contemporary collection at the Library and champions knowledge and understanding of these regions through a rich programme of fellowships and awards, cultural events, research training, guides to the collections and initiatives for schools.
For more information about the Institute and our collections, contact eccles-institute@bl.uk or visit our blog.
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