Transnational anthropologist J. Lorand Matory will deliver this year’s Bertha Maxwell-Roddey Distinguished Africana Lecture at 5 p.m., Monday, Oct. 15, in the Rowe Arts Building.
Matory, director of the Center for African and African American Research and the Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, will discuss “Global Migrations and the Crisis of Identity in Black America.” An award ceremony and reception will immediately follow the lecture.
Author of “Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé,” Matory has conducted anthropological research in Brazil, Nigeria, Benin Republic, Trinidad, Jamaica and the United States. The work won the Herskovits Prize for the best book of 2005 from the African Studies Association.
In 2010, Matory received the Distinguished Africanist Award from the American Anthropological Association, and in 2008, he delivered the prestigious Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures at the University of Rochester. The lectures will be published by the University of Chicago Press under the title “Of the Race but above the Race: Stigma, Class and Ethnic Identity in Black America.”
The UNC Charlotte Africana Studies Department inaugurated the Maxwell-Roddey Lecture in 2008 as an annual intellectual and social forum on pertinent issues facing Africa-descended populations globally and regionally. It honors Bertha Maxwell-Roddey’s pioneering contributions to the development of Africana studies as an academic discipline and to the building of black cultural institutions in greater Charlotte and nationally.