February 25, 2026
University of Southern California

Deborah Thomas (University of Pennsylvania)

The Ethnography Studio co-sponsored with the USC Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Van Hunnick History Department, Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, and Department of Anthropology a talk by Deborah Thomas titled, “From Island to Island to Island: The Intimacies and Abandonments of Empire.”

This talk—a multi-media prose poem—thinks through some of the important, though lesser-known, middle passage histories that inform diasporic movement, cycles of dispossession and abandonment, and potential repair. It touches on issues related to African burial grounds, the ethical treatment of human remains worldwide, and the cultural phenomenon of kumina, a Congolese-based ritual practice that was established in Jamaica by Africans who had been liberated in St. Helena, an island in the South Atlantic that was central to the circuits that brought together Europe, West Africa, South Africa, and the Caribbean and that reoriented the center of the universe to Europe from the Mediterranean and overland silk route trades. How do we think through the legacies of these long histories and these forgotten circuits? In what ways might we conceptualize repair?

 

Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Exceptional Violence, and Modern Blackness, and co-director of the documentary films Bad Friday and Four Days in May. She is the recipient of several awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, and she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Prior to her life in the academy, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.