Americanist Dinner Forum: An Evening with Dr. Tashima Thomas

Dinner buffet opens at 5:30pm, presentation starts at 6:00pm.

Edible Extravagance: The Visual Art of Consumption in the Black Atlantic explores visual consumption’s intersection with art and culture while expanding notions of racial blackness from a diasporic perspective. This talk will focus on how sugar, bananas, cacao, and pineapples are just a few examples of how food, art, and visual culture informed global appetites and shifted artistic production.

Tashima Thomas is an art historian, gastronome, curator, and cultural critic. She currently serves as Assistant Professor of Art History at Southern Methodist University specializing in the art of the African Diaspora. She received her PhD in Art History from Rutgers University and focuses on food pathways, visual and material culture, racial formation, Afro-Gothic as an aesthetic and theoretical framework, and the environmental humanities. Her book manuscript Edible Extravagance: The Visual Art of Consumption in the Black Atlantic is under contract with SUNY Press, The Afro-Latinx Futures Series. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, exhibition catalogues, and edited volumes.