Sterling Stuckey, Presidential Chair Professor of History at the University of California, Riverside, will address “The State of Scholarship on Slave Art and Labor” in his 7 p.m. lecture in Belk Auditorium. The talk is free and open to the public.

“Some argue that those Africans who were caught in the net became African Americans before they even left the African continent,” said Stuckey, author of Slave Culture (Oxford Press). “Many scholars have led us to believe those slaves were more Americanized than they really were.”

Stuckey contends that scholars should better examine the African ethnicity among slaves and acknowledge the influence the slaves’ African roots had on American culture.
“So much of what was thought to be American is black; its origins are African,” Stuckey said.

Stuckey plans to display images from The Middle Passage, a pictorial chronicle of the Atlantic slave trade created by the late Tom Feelings, a former USC art professor. He’ll also draw on South Carolina folklore from Tales of the Congaree, by E.C.L. Adams, and audio recordings of slave folk tales from Virginia recorded by William John Faulkner.

It wasn’t until post-Civil War Reconstruction that blacks in America began to think of themselves as American, Stuckey said. “They maintained that feeling of belonging even during the Jim Crow era,” he said.

“My main point, though, is that when we refer to the early slaves as African American, we are missing the larger question of what being American actually meant in that context,” he said. “We need to explore how the African culture shaped the early American culture.”

The Townsend Lecture series began in 1997 with funding from J. Ives Townsend, a 1941 USC graduate and professor emeritus at the Medical College of Virginia. The lecture series focuses on biology’s impact on society (spring lecture) and Southern cultural issues (fall lecture).