B. Brian Foster is an ethnographer and multi-medium storyteller working to document and interpret the culture, folklore, and placemaking practices of Black communities in the rural U.S. South. For the last ten years, he has set his work in several towns and small communities in north Mississippi, where he was born and raised. Brian’s areas of expertise include the sociology of racism and race, place studies, urban/rural sociology, and qualitative methods. His perspective and theoretical orientation are rooted in the histories and paradigms of Black Sociology and the Black Radical Tradition.
Brian has written two books. I Don’t like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020) chronicles the growth and development of blues tourism in the Mississippi Delta. His second book Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight (2024) is a collaborative photo-essay collection featuring the work of award-winning photographer Richard Frishman. Frishman’s hyperpixel photographs document vestiges of racism, oppression, and segregation in the U.S. (e.g., a set of double doors that once was a “Colored Entrance,” the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma), and Foster’s essays blend memoir and personal storytelling with ethnographic reporting and sociological analysis to offer piercing commentary on the realities and histories captured by the photographs.
Brian is working on a new book—Casino Town—which interrogates the cultural, environmental, and human impacts of casino development in the Mississippi Delta. He is also building an expansive archive of oral history interviews and photographs focused on the histories and placemaking practices of Black communities in the rural South.
October 17, 2024
It’s Only Hidden if you Don’t Like: Race, Ghosts, and the Archive—Public Lecture
Time: 6:00pm
Location: Business Innovation Building 108
Event Description: Drawing from his new book, Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight, B. Brian Foster tells a collection of stories that together show the importance of seeing the environment-the buildings we enter, the roads we travel, the things we are surrounded by-as part of the nation's collective biography. From this perspective, Foster talks about his larger research and storytelling agenda—documenting and interpreting the culture, folklore, and placemaking practices of Black communities in the rural U.S. South. The lecture is located on the first floor of the Business Innovation Building. The lecture is accessible by stairs and by a walk-up ramp. Parking is available at the Zoellner parking garage.
*This is a 5x10 event.
