bringing ideas to both our students as well as the communities, and there is no better wayy to bring ideas to a group and through reading the great books so thank you for organizing the festival and the first offer is exciting to me. all the authors connect to the college's mission in different ways. this one especially to of course we havee a creative writing program and a masters of fine larts and creative writing. a lot of those folks this book been to some different ways but it certainly is the kind of book we want to be talking about here. so we are so excited for this firstg offer. u.aunt lois is now going to introduce. >> friend and a board member to festival. the curator of oprah's book club. she has a big job there. for this year's overall pick we all think we know the civil war, gone with the wind, the ku klux klan,, plantation, slavery but t shows the meaning of being american is linked to the south and of that our understanding andd its history and culture is the key to understanding the nation in its entirety. the professor of african-american studies at princeton university and as well as awards including the 2019 biography prize from the foundation. [applause] >> welcome. i am so pleased to be here. thank you, everybody for coming, first of all. it's a pleasure to be here. i guess the first thing is that we need to me to do something. it was really interesting. what would you say in answer to that question? >> absolutely. first of all, i love that you posed that question thatis we tk about this because the image in florida tends to be south florida and miami and disney. the first sentence of the chapter is -- >> i was going to cite that. the point is that the panhandle is the deep south as much alabama and georgia but it's also in the biblical sense letters, argumentative letters. florida is in some ways like texas a nation unto itself but also teaches a great deal about the history of the country. the way you remember good. spain was here first and in terms of european encounters it's where you are aware of the incredible diversity of indigenous people over multiple generations as well as multiple groups of europeans. it's a deep south because you can point to very clear things. orange county. the highest rate. >> i was stunned by that statistic in your book. >> people makeou the south you can't deny so we pretend that isn't at the center when of course it is. one of the things i keep saying in the book i talk about there's all these dates but all of them are in the south so if you could start florida is a part of the united states and the reason that you have the encounters is because it is a land of incredible abundance and so this desire to figure out what can we do with this. you combine that with so much wealth produced and so it's what enables the united states to become a global power and i think that this is important the reason washington, d.c. is in the south and i know that is another place we could argue about but it's because the southern colonies had to pay the revolutionary war data because that's the way the prosperity was. and then the way that the government is organized. the electoral college, the colle separation of powers combined. these have to do with southern southerninterests because they e nation about. the whole nation is indebted for better or worse. >> i never thought about it that way, i not as the engine, the architect in many ways in the country but let's step back a little bit and return to the florida chapter leader. i loved how the book is divided for those of you that haven't read it, it's so rich in every note and cranny with interesting facts that i haven't read before in many cases. and organizing the book by region, sheio doesn't cover evey region of the country. the book opens with a scene in 1804 in new orleans where people are it struck me as if you are there reading that chapter and that cnn particular so where did you get that detail. >> i am an archive junkie. i just lovee to -- and i love newspapers. so much of the detail comes from newspapers. in the newspapers you can find the colors. for me the real task is to combine the scholar, the researchers to get the sensory and emotional. that's the aspiration but there's something once we get through the story and think about people living in feeling and breathing, i think that is especially useful. >> what are you trying to convey innv that? >> part of the argument is i want us to get out of the british inclination. in this moment when thehe purche is taking place and there's all this tension between the americans and the french and they wind up having this physical battle over because they are different. the way they did it took longer so there was conflict over the timehe for a french song but thy were not for their dance yet and if this turns bilotti. it's a metaphor but it's real there were real cultural tensions. and that language was also used to talk about politics. the different interests to compete in the desires for the accumulation and power and control of land and at the end e and all those things. so it's a moment that captures so much about the century. and i think we forget the conflict is over what's going on globally and this country is in the center of that. >> it also conveys the multiculturalism of the country. talk about that. >> i think that there are places coming in florida is one of them and louisiana where the parent because there's multiple communities but there's a multiculturalism that exists all the way through. among the indigenous groups that we forget and that is part of what i try to get at the florida chapter talking about the differentt politics and differet indigenous groups the caribbean and the southern united states for thelo global powers. he laughed and said i am from honduras. my grandmother was from belize. then he tells me this story of his grandmother who moved to savannah he falls in love with a honduras woman and others moments you feel like i'm i am vindicated with the book and because these movements have happened for so long, we talk about them like they are new. but it's just the history and it's important to tell. one of the things that struck me about the book also is that it's a mixture of exploring figures from the past but coming at them from a different point of view and everyy day people and sprinkling the stories throughout. so how did you arrive at that notion? t >> i wanted tonr break the genre of the travel narrative as opposed to saying i'm going to go to these important historic sites. i wanted it to feel like a set ofha encounters. to come with me and a traveler with me. you don't have to agree butha i want to point some things out that you would find interesting. so, as we are traveling and he encounters with people the landscape and artifacts and thea want to dig a little deeper and also capture some of the south indian. so when i talk to somebody, that conversation is so shaped by the local place and that is part of the truth of the place. >> let's go to harpers ferry. he went to harpers ferry because it's important in our country's history o and you can recount fr the audience in case they i dont know. but in the meantime, you had this whole internal dialogue going on in your head thinking about, then you encounter someone that is a reenactment of the civil war. so -- i hadn't read confederates in the attic when he was living. then i read it and was so frustrated because he's so sympathetic to the confederate and actors and i'm frustrated with them and then he has won conflict in the book. i thought i wouldn't be able to have this kind of conversations. yet i get to west virginia and that is the first conversation i have. this is a man who is an archivist by profession. he's the reenactor for the regimen and he spends his leisure time working, volunteering at harpers ferry that is the site of the raid that he intended to emancipate and tried to start a civil war that would free black people before it happened but in some ways he failed like almost immediately they were defeated into some people thought it was a suicidee mission like frederik douglass. harriet tubman was like i'm not feeling well. it wasn't an very well thought out plan but a passionate one driven by a deep sense of justice. so that's where i started in west virginia partially because everybody was like you're going to west virginia by yourself. but i went and we had a conversation. i called him bob in the book. that's not his name but it was interesting because part of me was like i'm not going to confront him and i've been socialized. his passion is to live inside history and yet i couldn't figurere out why. and i couldn't ask him. he told mese a story and for the reenactors if you read confederates in the attic you also know this and it helps me because i knew the questions to ask because i read that book. so he tells me he goes out into a field and they tell him to take off your glasses because everything has to be authentic for the g time period so he's le okay i have to get glasses. so it's super expensive. it took a long time then he gets them and says i couldn't see out of them anyway because they were so thick back then but for me it was such a poetic moment. you look tos. the confederate ls and there's a lot you can't see. so we were looking. >> if you were to write a list of the pros and cons of the deep south, you talk about some of the businesses and the companies that were originated. talk about that aspect a little bit. >> so much of our culture emerges from the deep south. certainly all of our soda. all of it. i get irritated when you take those quizzes and they say do you call soda coca-cola or pop and if you say coca-cola, southern. that's like a georgia thing and also texas but lots of others. there's so much carbonated beverage a everywhere and coca-cola is in the favorite everywhere. anyway, that's an aside. so there's food culture, walmart culture, the fact that amazon comes from a person that is a native of houston. theou grocery store is a southen concept and so much of this is a drive to convenience. the fact that we are a car culture. so there's a convenience thing, innovation and it's always matched with the experience of explanation and hard living for poor folks or marginalized folks. so that part of who we are is rooted in the south but it's also what gives birth to a repot that shapes so much. american music is southern music and southern music from the other side and music that comes outeo of people's encounters wih the land and labor countries and blues music, jazz. and i guess that is the pro. >> and the beauty. >> thinking about the florida chapter again and especially the area in florida to talk about this area in terms of its beauty and what she saw there. >> i have to say quickly she was born in alabama like me. what is so interesting is that this is a woman that is a native. she goes to high school at florida baptist academy in jacksonville individually howard university, morgan state university and is trained as an anthropologist and so much of her life is both writing fiction but also doing anthropological discoveries of the history of african cultures across the americas and caribbean's and traces the retentions and folktale, she's a folklore but also a key part of culture as it were. she's a participant observer so she's very invested in the story of her independent black down. the first independent black town. yes, thank you. she's also kind of ornery and a rascally and outspoken and a brilliantut storyteller but part of what i find so important about herea is for me that is te threat. in some ways what we are talking about before, the reality of all of the multiculturalism of southern history gets flattened into many ways. she's tracking that in the 1920sin and 30s. amazing journalist and telling iestories about race both in tes of the violence and intimacy. >> there was a new book that camebu out recently. >> which was edited by my advisor. >> and skip gates wrote the forward. you write in the book that a nation is an imagined community and then you say that in our country that is difficult. why is that? >> i think there is a fundamental tension between a narrative of an ever more perfect union, a multiracial inclusive democracy sort of ellis island narrative and the history of from the beginning pushing people off of their land, grinding down people'ss lives into virtually nothing but labor. >> and of the heterogeneity evolved. >> and the heterogeneity that resulted in the design to the exclusivity so i told the story of an ancestor. i thought about her a lot as this woman and her parents were born in maryland. so early 1700s at the very least to live and see the country built and established without being considered as a member. if it is not an anomaly in our history. that part makes it very hard to have the other aspirational part. >> i'm thinking again to the harpers ferry chapter i can't remember the name of the guy that was executed you point out he wassi executed on the basis f opposing the country and opposing the government and yet he wasn't a citizen. >> he wasn't considered a citizen so how could he have committed treason. i want to ask something that i hear a lot of people say and i don't agree with it but i just wanted your take on it. some of it is the outgrowth of the project and asserting that as the true date the country was born. but there's a lot of talk now about the critical race theorymu and aren't we just going into this too much. as in there too much emphasis on everyone. so i guess my question to you is how do you refuse that? >> i would say first of w all it was very disorienting when people started talking about the critical race theory because i was a law professor and they were not talking about critical race theory. >> critical race theory is a subgenre of the scholarship that focuses on the idea that in the context of antidiscrimination law it was possible to actually still have discriminatory practices while saying you c wee colorblind. so to have us think about how do you remedy racial inequality in the context where there is no explicit reference as a sort of shorthand. so it is a kind of rare field it's not even central to study but it has been influential. it felt disturbing to people and my reaction in part was i think by not teaching the history of racial inequality of slavery of jim crow and various forms of experiences of indigenous people of latino people and asian americans you stifle the moral imaginations of our children and when there's sort of these formulations it's sort of alarming to me because i don't ever have this idea that white children can identify with the suffering of others. i don't think we should have or think in that way. avi think all of us have the capacity to have a kind of moral imagination where we can identify with the suffering of others but also that we can see ourselves and people who don't belong to our same categorical group. >> and also how can read reconcile our differences if we haven'td acknowledged the truth. >> that is the core but i think this question around kids for me is so potent because when you have children and they find someone that they think of as heroic they don't think that person isn't categorically like me so i can't imagine myself being movedan by them. but i want to say this. we are in m the midst of argumes over the dominant narrative of the country. one of them is a lost cause narrative. >> lost cause meaning -- >> of the confederacy. can you for championing of the confederacy. but i think that we are going to have to sort of let go of this idea that there is a single narrative and we are going to have to understand our history as the history of debate around the questions of who ought to be a citizen. what roleld should different people play. what does democracy mean in this detail. what is representation. i don't think that we h have a single narrative because these conflicts and band flow but they are always there. >> and we don't have a single founding moment as you point out in terms of florida how many founders and it doesn't diminish our founding fathers by admitting that there's other beginnings into their findings. >> that it is bright and the founding fathernt and this is really important when people talk about over journalism with the constitution, they didn't agree. c so they were making compromises. when you take those documents as though they were deeply held beliefs, they had to make compromises because they didn't agree so again there's always these negotiations and sort of enshrined as though -- >> i have a wonderful job i've been with opera for ten years and i curate the book club and run the coverage for opera daily.com and our new quarterly. one of the privileges of the job is to get to talk to people like you, to read books like this not only for professional reasons but because i love themhi personally and one of the things i think that was your aim with this book was to pull side of the veil. so talk l to us a little bit abt what pulling aside the veil means and what your intention was ultimately but he wanted people to take away from the book. >> first of all i just want to thank you so much not just with this book but with your support of the others just so much. i love that you read what i am trying to do. pulling aside the veil is actuallys asking questions thats an invitation. this isn't a book that as a metaphor the intellectual writer and founder of the naacp. for the novels and scholarships and the field of american sociology in the articles of the atlantic he published the book and introduceshe the metaphor. it's a metaphor that is based. it represents the color line. the space between black-and-white communities and the time period because of jim crow and those that live behind the veil can see out but those outside at a funeral service can see the face of the person suffering. it's also a metaphor about african-american follow beliefs that if a baby is born with a veil over their face, a membrane that they are gifted with second sight and they can see ghosts and the other side and understand the complexities of this world and the world beyond. so to pull aside the veil in many ways is an invitation to the world of the kind of knowledge from those behind the veil. the various sorts so i'm taking it out of the experience of african-americans that are trying to open it up for those of us that are behind the veil on so many different ways because it is a way of rethinking and reordering the consumption of who we are and i'm so thrilled that there are people that are willing to travel here with me to do that cox welcome, everybody. we are here for the prize project ceremony.

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