Rashauna Johnson - "Sweet Home Feliciana"

Rashauna Johnson will discuss Sweet Home Feliciana: Family, Slavery, and the Hauntings of History. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

At the Co-op.

RSVP Here — please note your RSVP is requested but not required.

About the book: In this tapestry of intersecting stories, including those of her own family, Rashauna Johnson charts the global transformation of a rural region in Louisiana from European colonialism to Jim Crow. From her ancestor Virgil to her cousin Veronica and her hand-sewn Mardi Gras memorial suit more than a century later, this history is one of triumphs and trauma, illustrating the ways people of African descent have created sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance. Johnson uses her grandmother's birthplace in East Feliciana as a prism to illuminate foundational, if fraught, aspects of US history including colonialism, slavery, war, citizenship, and unfinished freedom. The result is a portrait of the world in a family, a family in a region, and a region in the world that insists on the bristling and complicated relationships of people to place and creates a new understanding of what it means to be American.

About the author: Rashauna Johnson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago. She is also the author of the prizewinning book Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions.