Hidden Histories
Saturday, May 6 | 4:00 PM - 5:00 PMBrower Center - Tamalpais Room
- History & Biography
- International
- Literary
After attending this session, you’ll never again view your lunchtime PB&J or that spoonful of sugar in your morning coffee in quite the same way. In Slaves for Peanuts, journalist Jori Lewis, who received a Whiting Award for her work, traces both natural and human history as she reveals the long and tortured story of the crop’s entanglement with human bondage in west Africa. Deeply informed by original research and featuring richly detailed historical characters, Lewis’s book is an important new contribution to the history of global slavery. Swiss author Dorothee Elmiger’s Out of the Sugar Factory, a finalist for the German Book Prize, is a work of fiction that’s been described as “hallucinatory” but is also thoroughly grounded in historical research. Elmiger’s protagonist (also named Dorothee Elmiger) is an archivist, an obsessive collector of objects related to the violent history of the global sugar trade, which unfolds through a kaleidoscopic narrative that’s as intellectually engaged as it is self-reflexive. This revelatory session will be moderated by Ariana Proehl, KQED culture reporter.
Book signing information: Bookshop West Portal, at the venue
With the support of the Center for the Art of Translation