About this Event
Please join Morgan State's Program for the Study of the Middle East & North Africa and the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism for this landmark event. The award-winning, bestselling author and Baltimore native Ta-Nehisi Coates will speak with Sara Rahnama (Morgan State, History) and Nathan Connolly (Johns Hopkins, History) to address the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world. Coates will address how traveling to Senegal, South Carolina, and occupied Palestine caused him to rethink how he had accepted certain myths about politics, history, and social change. This event has been rescheduled from when it was originally set to take place on February 11 but was cancelled because of inclement weather.
Doors will open at 6 p.m., and the event will begin at 7 p.m. Books will be available for purchase.
For students in the Hopkins community who need transportation, please note your campus location when checking out. Free buses will be available. Please reserve a seat by April 24.
This event is free and open to all to be accessible to as many students and community members as possible. We ask attendees who are able to consider a suggested donation of $20. Your support will enable our program to fund study abroad travel for Morgan students who lack the financial resources to otherwise do so. Study abroad is a critical tool for Morgan students to experience new cultures and expand their understanding of the world. Every contribution, no matter the size, helps makes that possible.
About :
Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic "Politics and the English Language," but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.
In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book's banning, but also explores the larger backlash to the nation's recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book's longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.
Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country's most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Murphy Fine Arts Center, 2201 Argonne Drive, Baltimore, United States
USD 0.00
