Stephen Small: In the Shadows of the Big House

Stephen Small, Professor at the Dept of African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, valued WoW collaborator and author of the Small Talk series, makes his in-person debut at WoWFEST to discuss his latest book; In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana (Atlantic Migrations and the African Diaspora). Stephen, in conversation with WoW’s Creative Heritage Project Manager, Janaya Pickett, will trace the historical trajectory of plantations and slave cabins since the Civil War and explore what representations of slavery and slave cabins convey about the reconfiguration of the past and the rearticulation of history in the present.  

Considering such themes as the role of white ethnic identity in representations of elite whites and the extent and significance of Black voices and Black visions of representations of these plantations, Stephen and Janaya will discuss what these sites reveal about social forgetting and social remembering throughout Louisiana and the South. For Liverpool, a city only recently coming to terms with its immeasurable debt to enslaved Africans, and grappling with how to represent its slavery history, this event could not be more relevant.  

Stephen Small was born in Toxteth and moved to the United States in 1984. He earned his Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and is now a professor in the Department of African Diaspora Studies and Director of the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. He researches the history and sociology of Black people across the African diaspora, including the United States, Western Europe, the Caribbean and Brazil. In 2018 he published 20 Questions and Answers on Black Europe and is coauthor of Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums and coeditor of Global Mixed Race, New Perspectives on Slavery and Colonialism in the Caribbean, and Black Europe and the African Diaspora. In June 2023, the University Press of Mississippi published In the Shadows of the Big House: Twenty-First-Century Antebellum Slave Cabins and Heritage Tourism in Louisiana (Atlantic Migrations and the African Diaspora). 

Janaya Pickett is WoW’s Creative Heritage Programme Manager. She is a writer, local historian, and facilitator whose career began in 2014 as a volunteer on WoW’s Great War to Race Riots project, playing a key role in developing the hugely successful 1919 Walking Tours. Janaya has performed poetry at spoken word nights across the city, worked as Curator for WoW’s August 2021 installation Merseysounds, event manager for the LCRCA’s Generations for Change, and Project Manager for The Dorothy Kuya Archive Project. Janaya is currently undertaking a history MRes, researching Black Liverpool from the 1940s to 1970s.  

Victoria Gallery & Museum Cafe Ashton St, Liverpool L69 3DR  

Tuesday 7th May, 7pm

£5 

*These are difficult times. We know some people may struggle to afford full price tickets. If you would like to attend this event but can’t afford to, please contact info@writingonthewall.org.uk. All queries will be treated in confidence.     

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