Featuring the author: Rebecca Louise Carter, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Brown University
With commentary from:
- Lisa Pina-Warren, Director of Victim Services, Nonviolence Institute, Providence, RI.
- Reverend Linda Watkins, Pastor, First Baptist Church, Pawtucket, RI.
- Laurence Ralph, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center on Transnational Policing, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University.
- Andre C. Willis, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Brown University.
ABOUT THE BOOK
“Grieve well and you grow stronger.” Anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter heard this wisdom over and over while living in post-Katrina New Orleans, where everyday violence disproportionately affects Black communities. What does it mean to grieve well? How does mourning strengthen survivors in the face of ongoing threats to Black life?
Inspired by ministers and guided by grieving mothers who hold birthday parties for their deceased sons, Prayers for the People traces the emergence of a powerful new African American religious ideal at the intersection of urban life, death, and social and spiritual change. Carter frames this sensitive ethnography within the complex history of structural violence in America—from the legacies of slavery to free but unequal citizenship, from mass incarceration and overpolicing to social abandonment and the unequal distribution of goods and services. And yet Carter offers a vision of restorative kinship by which communities of faith work against the denial of Black personhood as well as the violent severing of social and familial bonds. A timely directive for human relations during a contentious time in America’s history, Prayers for the People is also a hopeful vision of what an inclusive, nonviolent, and just urban society could be.
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Free and open to the public. Book sale, book signing, and reception to follow.
Presented by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the Department of Anthropology, and the Urban Studies Program.