Seminars

Sheila D. Collins will discuss her forthcoming book, White Conspiracy in the Mississippi Delta: The Trials and Triumph of Eddie James Carthan to be published by the University Press of Mississippi later this year. It tells the dramatic story of a young Black mayor, among the first to be elected since Reconstruction in a biracial town in the Mississippi Delta, who was railroaded out of office in the early 1980s by white supremacists. Because he refused to be the white power structure’s “good little boy,” he was subjected to a four-year period of harassment designed to make his governing impossible. When he still refused to bow, he was framed on four felony charges, one of which was capital murder. This book relates the gripping tale of prosecutorial misconduct in post-Civil Rights Mississippi and the dramatic multiracial civil and human rights campaign that rallied to Carthan’s defense. Collins takes the readers into the Mississippi Delta, the heart of the Old South, a land of fierce contradictions and dark secrets, where the appearance of racial progress hides widespread political corruption and where America’s “original sin” is dressed up in new clothes.

In December 2020, the northeastern Brazilian city of Salvador launched its climate plan, articulating a vision for a socially inclusive, green, resilient, and low-carbon Salvador by 2049. This target date celebrates the city’s 500th anniversary and commemorates Salvador as the first capital of the Portuguese colonial empire. Based on 24 months of anthropological research in Salvador’s São Bartolomeu Conservation Unit, this presentation foregrounds Candomblé (an Afro-Brazilian religion) as its practitioners navigate the socio-political and spatial flux brought on by Salvador’s climate transformations. I propose Afro-religious praxes as a lens for deepening our understanding of the impacts of state-led urban climate adaptation, mitigation and conservation projects. I show how these projects appropriate and marginalize Afro-religious praxes and also reveal how practitioners unsettle them through ecologically based ancestral relationships with spiritual entities, such as Orixás.