Join the Center for the Study of Global Change (CGC), the African Studies Program, IU Global (OVPIA),the Department of African American & African Diaspora Studies (AAADS), and the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology for a series of events with Dr. Kern Jackson, IU Folklore PhD 2004.
Film Screening, January 30, 7pm, IU Cinema: Descendant, a Sundance award-winning documentary, follows the descendants of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to arrive in the US that brought captive Africans to Alabama more than 50 years after slavery was made illegal in the US. The film screening will feature a Q&A with Dr. Jackson will follow the screening. This film is being screened as part of the IU Global Film Festival series and is free to all attendees. Get tickets here.
Talkback, January 31, 5:00pm: The “talkback” will be a moment for folks to reflect more deeply upon the film Descendant, where Dr. Jackson will give more details about the community in Africatown and the discovery of the Clotilda as well as an open discussion on folklore, descendancy, and storytelling. This event will be held at the Ferguson International Center, room 421.
Kern Michael Jackson, Ph.D., is a folklorist with an extensive academic career in ethnography, oral history, material culture, and literary folkloristics. He holds a doctorate in Folklore and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University-Bloomington (’04) and is currently the director of the African American Studies program at the University of South Alabama. In 2022/23 the documentary film he co-wrote and co-produced, Descendant, invited us to revisit our community ties, offering a profound glimpse at our history as something immediate, personal, and riveting in the present. But this film is not only a work of art; it is a piece of scholarship, one that flows out of decades of research in folklore.