Watch, Read, Listen

Huntington curators share stories about some of the Library’s most remarkable and surprising acquisitions. This program is presented by Rare Books LA.

Dr. Sowande’ Mustakeem, Associate Professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, reconstructs the significance of water and power in how slavery is remembered, exploring the roles of bondpeople, sailors, and slave ship surgeons during the centuries of racial calamity at sea. By centering maritime history and culture in the realities of transoceanic slaving, we gain greater insight into the entangled nature of the human manufacturing system and make greater meaning of the lives of the dead, thereby ensuring the future of collective historical remembrance. This program is the 2020 Kemble Lecture in Maritime History.

Tang Qingnian 唐慶年, the 2019 Cheng Family Visiting Artist at The Huntington, screens the video artwork that has been the focus of his yearlong residency. A conversation with the artist follows a virtual screening of his new video. A new musical work composed by pipa virtuoso Wu Man 吳蠻 and shakuhachi artist Kojiro Umezaki 梅崎 康二郎, commissioned by The Huntington, accompanies the video.

Phillip E. Bloom, June and Simon K.C. Li Curator of the Chinese Garden and Director of the Center for East Asian Garden Studies, examines a selection of gardens from Song-dynasty (960–1279) China that explicitly thematized both the sensual and intellectual pleasures of gardening. The talk argues that close attention to the pleasures afforded by Chinese gardens enables us to reconcile their myriad, often contradictory, functions.

Robert Bonner, professor of history at Dartmouth College, probes the deep history of the images, words, and ships that cast odium on the slaveholders’ rebellion of the 1860s. This lecture is a Rogers Distinguished Fellow’s Lecture in Nineteenth-Century American History.