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This event is a Core Conversation at the 2018 Pittsburgh Humanities Festival. See the full Core Conversation lineup here.

Vanessa German will interview Dr. Edda Fields-Black about The Requiem for Rice. This new musical work that begins as a lamentation for the souls of the dead who were enslaved, exploited, and brutalized on Lowcountry South Carolina and Georgia’s rice plantations; many remain unburied, their graves unmarked, and their tragedies unmourned. It ends in celebration of the critical role enslaved Africans’ ingenuity, technology, and industry played in the economy of the US South. Vanessa German will interview Dr. Edda Fields-Black about her collaboration with internationally-acclaimed artists – painter Jonathan Green and filmmaker Julie Dash – to produce this work in progress, some which will be performed at the Trust Arts Education Center just prior to the Humanities Festival.

Dr. Edda Fields-Black is an Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a specialist in early and pre-colonial African history whose research interests extend into the African Diaspora. Fields-Black’s first monograph Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora uses a unique blend of interdisciplinary sources and methods to chronicle the development of tidal rice-growing technology by the inhabitants of the West African Rice Coast region. Fields-Black also co-authored Rice: Global Networks and New Histories with Francesca Bray, Peter Coclanis, and Dagmar Schafer.

Vanessa German is poet, performer, photographer, and sculptor who creates works that explore the power of transformation and healing. She scours her Pittsburgh neighborhood searching for objects to incorporate into her art. “I surrender myself to the objects that call up to me,” she has said. Her intricate mixed-media sculptures combine doll parts, antique tins, cowrie shells, household objects, and African beads. With these three-dimensional collages German reclaims objects and words that symbolize the oppression of African Americans for generations, creating serene, if surreal, figures that call to mind religious icons.

A production of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and The Humanities Center at Carnegie Mellon University.