Ta-Nehisi Coates Presents "The Message"

Description

This event is rescheduled to May 1 after cancellation in February.

Please join the Chloe Center and Morgan State University's Program for the Study of the Middle East & North Africa for a landmark event. Award-winning, bestselling author and Baltimore native Ta-Nehisi Coates will speak with Nathan Connolly (Johns Hopkins history) and Sara Rahnama (Johns Hopkins PhD '18) to address the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world and how it relates to his new book, The Message. Coates will address how traveling to Senegal, South Carolina, and, particularly, the occupied West Bank caused him to rethink how he had accepted certain myths about politics, history, and social change.

Doors will open at 6 p.m., and the event will begin at 7 p.m. Books will be available for purchase.

The Chloe Center will provide free roundtrip transportation to Johns Hopkins undergraduate and graduate students to this event. Please RSVP and reserve a seat on the buses, which will depart from both the Homewood and East Baltimore campuses.

About The Message:

Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language, but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.

In the first of the book's three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind. Then he takes readers along with him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he reports on his own book's banning but also explores the larger backlash to the nation's recent reckoning with history and the deeply rooted American mythology so visible in that city—a capital of the Confederacy with statues of segregationists looming over its public squares. Finally, in the book's longest section, Coates travels to Palestine, where he sees with devastating clarity how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground.

Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country's most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world—and our own souls—and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

This event is free and open to all.