Led by guest Judith Casselberry (Geoffrey Canada Associate Professor of Africana Studies Bowdoin College)
What is heritage? A Bloodline? A Political Line? A Spiritual line? How and why do we define our heritage in the ways that we do? What does that tell us about ourselves, our relationships, our obligations? Americans have a uniquely fraught relationship to heritage because of our history of (at least) two Americas—most recently put in stark relief for White America by George Floyd’s lynching three years ago. Yet, our interpretations of history/heritage always speak to the present. What from our past do we fold into ourselves in the present? What do we reject? Why? How can we liberate ourselves, each other, and craft righteous lives by facing the complexities of our heritage?
Judith Casselberry is Geoffrey Canada associate professor of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College, teaching courses on African American women’s religious lives, music and spirituality in popular culture, music and social movements, and issues in Black intellectual thought. Her interest in African American religious and cultural studies, with particular attention to gender, guides her research agenda. She is author of The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentecostalism (Duke University Press, 2017) and co-editor with Elizabeth Pritchard of Spirit on the Move: Black Women and Pentecostalism in Africa and the Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2019) She is currently working on a biography of cultural icon Grace Jones entitled Solving the Mystery of Grace Jones: It’s the Holy Ghost. Casselberry’s interest in links between lettered and performed scholarship comes from her career as an academic and performer. As a vocalist and guitarist, she currently performs internationally with Toshi Reagon and BIGLovely.
Music by Grace Lewis-McLaren