"'Committed an Outrage': War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction in the Historical Imagination and Politics of Kara Walker"

The Department of History will host a lecture on Wednesday, February 17, 2010.  The keynote speaker will be Thavolia Glymph and entitled "'Committed an Outrage": War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction in the Historical Imagination and Politics of Kara Walker."

Thavolia Glymph is an associate professor of African American Studies and History at Duke University. Her book Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) received the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award from the Labor and Working Class History Association. Dr. Glymph is also the author of several essays on slavery, emancipation and the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, economic history, and southern women. Additionally, she was co-editor of two volumes in the Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation series.

Professor Glymph’s talk will address the radical nature/performance and revisionist politics of Kara Walker’s "Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War" and "Bureau of Refugees" series.  Kara Walker is an award winning artist best known for her use of the black and white silhouette, a 19th century women’s or “ladies” art form, to explore issues of gender, sexuality and violence in slavery and now in Civil War and Reconstruction or, more correctly, in our contemporary imaginations of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction.

For more information, please contact Elsa Barkley Brown.