Virtual Moderated Discussion
Sandra Benites (Guaraní Ñandeva), Adjunct Curator of Brazilian Art, Museum of Art of São Paulo

Anita Ekman, Visual and Performance Artist

Christoph Irmscher, Director, Wells Scholars Program, Provost Professor, Department of English, Indiana University

Luciana Namorato, Associate Professor, Director of Portuguese, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Indiana University

Moderated by Alejandro De La Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies and of History, Harvard University

How do we confront the history and legacy of Louis Agassiz’s extensive archive of images of African and Indigenous Brazilians made in Manaus, Brazil in 1865 and housed at Harvard’s Peabody Museum? Four distinguished panelists reflect on the historical moment when these pictures were taken, discuss racist displays of Indigenous people in Brazil and elsewhere, and, by bringing to light respect for different epistemologies, explore ways to contend with them today. Panelists will be writer and historian Christoph Irmscher (contributor to the recent Peabody Museum Press book about Agassiz images, To Make Their Own Way in the World), Brazilian performance artist and photographer Anita Ekman, literary critic Luciana Namorato, and Brazil’s first Indigenous art curator Sandra Benites of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP).

Cosponsored by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, and the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University (ALARI).