Karrabing Film Collective member and Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology & Gender Studies, Columbia University, Elizabeth Povinelli, will show images, read from and discuss her new book The Inheritance, a graphic memoir about a young girl, “Elizabeth,” growing up in Louisiana during the 60s and 70s in the midst of racial desegregation under the shadow of her family’s fraught relationship to “Carisolo/Karezol,” their ancestral Alpine village. Through text and drawings, The Inheritance mixes humor and tragedy to chronicle the gaps, absences, oversized affects, and divergences of memory and history that engulf the protagonist, “Elizabeth,” and her siblings as her father’s family fights about what led them to flee their Alpine village during the First World War and what forms of will were necessary to survive a period of ugly nativism in the US. As “Elizabeth” tries to make sense of the family’s violent Alpine legacy, she lives in a world that doesn’t think of her as Carisolian, but as a white Catholic living in the Bible Belt South during racial and Native American social justice struggles. The Inheritance juxtaposes hand-drawn, montaged historical images, and personal reflection to recreate the frictions of social memory and to make explicit the obscured social logics that define our individual and collective pasts and futures.

This talk will be alongside Karrabing Film Collective’s Day in the Life exhibition at WTS from 14th-31st August.