Our Offerings

Story Circles Confronting the Historical Grief of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade

Story Circles Confronting the Historical Grief of the Transatlantic Slave Trade is a project of the Center for theater and pedagogy of the oppressed, funded by RI Humanities and offered in thought partnership with the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (NESAWG). The Center for theater and pedagogy of the oppressed (CTPO) is a hybrid, digital and in-person, popular theater and popular education portal which combines established pedagogy and practice with new innovations in applied theater to address, unmask and dismantle all forms of oppression everywhere. Our mission is to bring the full improvisational swag of our ancestors to bear on 21st century challenges to humanity.

Using the story circle process of John O’Neil of the historic SNCC, Free Southern Theater, CTPO seeks to engage artists, humanists, activists and everyday citizens, with the history of enslaved Africans in New England, with a particular focus on Bristol, RI and the DeWolf family’s legacy as one of the largest slave trading families in the United States. The preservation of primary source materials through the Linden Place Mansion and the Bristol Historical Society allows us to reassess and reimagine the stock story narrative about the North/ South binary that we are told about slavery and black resistance in the United States. Of particular interest, due to the intersectional nature of oppression that they endured, Black female abolitionists who self liberated from slavery, in order to confront the transatlantic slave trade, are a primary focus of the stories that we will offer to prompt our conversations.

What is a Story Circle?

According to the Brazilian pedagogist, Paulo Freire, our method of arriving at conscientizacao is to see, to analyze and to act. In this case, to reclaim the subverted history of our ancestors and foremothers. This method offers opportunities for healing and to raise consciousness. We will work together to address: #6. Oppression manifests as denial of the resources with which to make History, Toward A Working Definition of Oppression: What Constitutes Oppression, developed by the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB) collective. Our common critical exploration allows us the means to confront the tragic legacy of the slave trade– systemic institutionalized racism and the clear erosion of democracy in the US.

In celebration of Black history commemorations this summer, we will gather to honor Juneteenth, Independence Day and Black August. We will gather on Zoom, Sundays at 4pm.

Please feel free to bring a glass of sweet tea and/ or a plate from your Sunday super in anticipation of entering a community of care, of respectful and robust conversation, laughter, (possibly tears and frustration) and to celebrate the brilliance of ourselves, each other and our ancestors. This series is meant to offer opportunities to initiate good trouble and needed action wherever you rest in the World. We look forward to coming together.

Schedule

• June Story Circle: Juneteenth Celebration: From Grief to Resilience 

• July Story Circle: Independence Day: "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"

• August Story Circle: Black August: What Happened to New Goree?