Why is it so hard to break up with the Confederacy?
That’s the question posed by Daily Show field producer CJ Hunt in the award-winning documentary “The Neutral Ground.” The film, which debuted at the 2021 Tribeca Festival, recounts New Orleans’ recent struggle — more than 150 years after the end of the Civil War — to remove monuments honoring the Confederacy and white supremacy.
At 7 p.m. March 8, Hunt and Sue Mobley, a member of New Orleans’ City Planning Commission and director of research at Monument Lab, will discuss “The Neutral Ground” in a free Zoom conversation sponsored by the American Culture Studies program (AMCS) in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
Joining Hunt and Mobley will be Geoff Ward, director of the WashU & Slavery Project and professor of African and African-American studies in Arts & Sciences; and Rebecca Dudley, an AMCS Harvey Fellow and a doctoral candidate in anthropology in Arts & Sciences.
The conversation is free and open to the public and is presented as part of AMCS’s monthly Americanist Dinner Forum, which explores topics relevant to American culture studies through lectures, discussions, workshops and other events. An audience Q&A will immediately follow. Registration is required and an advance link to view the film will be distributed to all registrants.
The event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences’ forthcoming Memory for the Future studiolab, with support from African and African-American Studies, the WashU & Slavery Project and the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity (CRE2), as well as the departments of history and sociology, the Brown School, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the College of Architecture.
For more information or to register, visit amcs.wustl.edu.
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