Orlando Patterson in Conversation

Fifty years into Jamaican independence and twenty years after the publication of his seminal work Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson sits down with renowned anthropologist David Scott to discuss his creative and scholarly work and their implications in the contemporary moment. This will be the Caribbean Epistemologies’ closing event of the semester of revisiting “foundational texts.” The suggested reading for this event is the Introduction to Slavery and Social Death.

Orlando Patterson is a historical and cultural sociologist, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and the author of Slavery and Social Death, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, The Ordeal of Integration, and most recently, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries. He has also published three novels: The Children of Sisyphus, An Absence of Ruins, and Die the Long Day.