Gullah Voices: Traditions and Transformations

FAIN: BH-250863-16

University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT 06269-9000)
Robert W. Stephens (Project Director: February 2016 to present)
Mary Ellen Junda (Co Project Director: September 2017 to present)

Two one-week workshops for seventy-two schoolteachers on the history and cultural memory of the Gullah people, as expressed through the arts.

The University of Connecticut, in collaboration with Penn Center, the Georgia Historical Society and other sites in the Coastal Lowlands, will present two one-week NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture Workshops in Savannah, GA on July 9-14 and July 16-21, 2017. The sessions will examine the artistic expressions of the Gullah, direct descendants of slaves who worked the rice plantations on the coastal islands off the shores of South Carolina and Georgia. Their history, stories, beliefs, and creative expressions are critical antecedents to African-American culture and the broader American mosaic, as we know it today. The workshop format will follow the African tradition, where the arts are studied as interrelated living experiences rather than as separate entities. Immersion experiences will take place at Penn Center, St. Helena Island, SC; Sapelo Island, McIntosh County, GA; the Georgia Historical Society and Pin Point Heritage Museum, Savannah, GA.