A journey through slavery at the Whitney Plantation
Location
Fairhaven Auditorium
(FA 300)
The Whitney Plantation is located in St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana, about an hour west of New Orleans on the Mississippi River. This former indigo then sugar plantation is now open to the public as a museum with a focus on slavery. At Whitney, the visitors are offered a unique perspective on the lives of Louisiana’s enslaved people through the use of restored historic buildings, museums exhibits, memorial artwork and hundreds of first-person slave narratives. As a site of memory and consciousness, the Whitney Plantation Museum is meant to pay homage to all the people who were enslaved in Louisiana and elsewhere in the US South. In his lecture, Dr. Seck will present the history of the Whitney Plantation in the wider context of the Atlantic slave trade and will touch many topics related to the cultural legacies of slavery in Louisiana.
Speaker Name
Date
Quarter
Speaker Bio
Ibrahima Seck is a member of the History department of Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar (UCAD), Senegal. His research is mostly devoted to the historical and cultural links between West Africa and Louisiana with a special interest for religious beliefs, music, foodways, and miscellaneous aspects of folklore. In 1999, he defended a doctoral dissertation entitled “African Cultures and Slavery in the Lower Mississippi River Valley, from Iberville to Jim Crow.” Dr. Seck is now holding the position of the director of research of the Whitney Plantation Slavery Museum, which is located between Wallace and Edgard in St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana. He is the author of a book on this historic site entitled “Bouki fait Gombo: A History of the Slave Community of Habitation Haydel (Whitney Plantation) Louisiana, 1750-1860. [New Orleans: UNO Press, 2014].