Please join the Franklin Humanities Institute at the Nasher Museum of Art for this exhibition closing event on John Akomfrah’s Precarity (on view until September 2)!

The Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University presents an interdisciplinary panel of humanities faculty on Precarity, the three-channel video by acclaimed British filmmaker John Akomfrah. Precarityis about the life and myth of Charles “Buddy” Bolden, the New Orleans cornet player credited as the first jazz musician. Part documentary, part costume drama, part music video, Precarity addresses history, memory, mythology, cultural identity, health, race, and many other issues facing U.S. society today.

Roundtable panelists:

Laurent Dubois
Professor of Romance Studies and History
Faculty Director of the Forum for Scholars & Publics at Duke University

Michael Hardt
Professor of Literature
Co-Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute Social Movements Lab

Deborah Jenson
Professor of Romance Studies
Co-Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute Health Humanities Lab

Shambhavi Kaul
Assistant Professor of the Practice of Filmmaking, Art, Art History & Visual Studies

Pedro Lasch
Associate Research Professor, Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Director of the Franklin Humanities Institute Social Practice Lab

Mark Anthony Neal
James B. Duke Professor and Chair of African and African American Studies
Director of Duke Council on Race and Ethnicity (DCORE)
Host of Left of Black

Moderated by Franklin Humanities Institute Director Ranjana Khanna

Event schedule:

5 PM Optional screening of Precarity (45 mins)
5:45 PM Light Hors d’Oeuvres
6 PM Panel in Lecture Hall
7:15 PM Light Reception
8 PM Optional screening of Precarity (45 mins)
Cash Bar Open 5:30-8 PM

This event is part of the Franklin Humanities Institute’s Water series. With multiple events over the coming academic year, this new series will cover many aspects of humanistic and artistic responses to water, from oceanic voyages to lives built around rivers, from aquatic aesthetics to refugee migration, from water shortage to floods, and from water conceived through sacred forms to aquatic lifeworlds and ontologies.

Photo of Akomfrah installation by J Caldwell.