Deborah A. Thomas
Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the 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: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica and Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica. Thomas co-directed the documentary films Bad Friday and Four Days in May, and she is the co-curator of a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston. 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.
In this session we will be discussing artistic practice, the body as archive and Deborah’s new book “Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance” which is currently out on Duke University Press.
You can listen to this months session with Deborah here on Spotify
Or here on Soundcloud.
Gathering As Praxis 