30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Tamara Lanier writes about fighting Harvard to reclaim her ancestor's narrative
As Lanier learned, the daguerrotypes of Renty, his daughter, Delia, and several other enslaved people had been created for the use of Louis Aggasiz, a Swiss scientist then at Harvard and now known mostly for his
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'I was excited because I had heard so much about this man,' she says. Knowing that Renty's image had been used as part of Agassiz's pseudoscientific project to prove white supremacy made her feel queasy. 'I knew that was not his legacy. I thought it was so bizarre that
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The journey Lanier describes, driving to Cambridge to see the image in person at Harvard's Peabody Museum, being turned away, then
The Supreme Judicial Court
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Lanier hopes readers will take heart from her story. 'Everything that my mom told me, I was able to later substantiate. That's how accurate our oral history was, and is,' she says. 'So many people have these stories and they don't know what to do with them. Write it down, that's the first step. This is our history.'
Tamara Lanier will read at 6 p.m. Wednesday, February 5, at
.
And now for a few recommendations….
Because we simply can't squeeze all the books we want to talk about within the limits of these pages, I hope to highlight a few titles you should look for at your local bookstore this week. From 'The Buddha of Suburbia' to 'My Beautiful Laundrette,' Hanif Kureishi has has spun adventurous and often subversive tales about sex and race set amid English conformity. In '
A pair of novels draw from history's inspiration. In '
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Finally, two takes on machines and humanity. From David Hajdu, whose '
Kate Tuttle edits the Globe's Books section.
