Children of the Plantationocene

Location: 820 Social Sciences Building, Social Science Matrix at UC Berkeley

Join the Department of African American Studies for a talk from our first scholar in residence of the Banned Scholars Program: Dr. Alisha Gaines.

In “Children of the Plantationocene,” Alisha Gaines considers two interrelated questions: MacArthur Genius Tiya Miles’s 2020 query in The Boston Globe, “What should we do with plantations?;” and Christina Sharpe’s question in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, “how do we defend the dead?” In a sociopolitical moment mired by miseducation, Gaines seeks refuge in Saint Toni Morrison’s novel, A Mercy, to reconcile the place and value of the plantation to and for Black Americans. In so doing, she insists we can begin to understand how slavery’s afterlives shape the ecological presents we all inherit.

Alisha Gaines is the Timothy Gannon Associate Professor of Arts and Sciences in the Department of English and affiliate faculty of African American Studies at Florida State University. She is also the Co-Humanities Director of the Evergreen Plantation Archaeological Field School in Edgard, LA. She earned a PhD in English and a certificate in African and African American Studies from Duke University in 2009. From 2009-2011 she held a Carter G. Woodson postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia.

For more information about the event, please contact: Barbara Montano at [email protected] or 510-664-4324.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Barbara Montano at [email protected] or 510-664-4324 with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days in advance of the event.

Host or Publisher Black Studies Collaboratory