Ebron, Paulla A.


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Associate Professor
Ph.D. Massachusetts Amherst, 1993

Paulla Ebron joined the department in 1992. Ebron is the author of Performing Africa, a work based on her research in The Gambia that traces the significance of West African praise-singers in transnational encounters. A second project focuses on tropicality and regionalism as it ties West Africa and the U.S. Georgia Sea Islands in a dialogue about landscape, memory and political uplift. This project is entitled, "Making Tropical Africa in the Georgia Sea Islands." For the past four years she has taken a team of students to Charleston, South Carolina, to participate in the Stanford Sea Island Field School in collaboration with the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture.

Selected Publications: 

2015. "Which Memory" in Transatlantic Memories of Slavery. Elisa Bordin and Anna Scacchi, editors. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. pp. 133-160.

2015. “Writing and Rhythm.” with Anna Tsing. Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute. Vol. 21(3): 683-687.

2014. “Slavery and Transnational Memory: The Making of New Publics.” in Transnational Memory. Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Editors, Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney. Berlin; Boston: Walter de DeGruyter. pp. 147-168.

2008. “Strike a Pose: Capitalism’s Black Identity. In Recharting the Black Atlantic. Annalisa Oboe and Anna Scacchi, editors. London: Routledge Research in Atlantic Studies.

2007. “Constituting the Subject Through Performative Acts: The Making of West African Gendered Subjects.” Catherine Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh, Stephan F. Miescher, editors. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

2004. “Continental Riffs: Encounters with Mande Music.” African Identities 2(2):133-149. Also in Black Cultural Traffic. Harry Elam and Kennell Jackson, Editor. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

2002 Performing Africa, Princeton University Press.

2001. “Contingent Stories: Anthropology, Race, and Feminism.” In Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Praxis, Politics and Poetics. Irma McClaurin, editor. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers. pp. 211-232. Also Reprinted in Feminist Anthropology. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.

1999 Tourists as pilgrims: Commercial fashioning of transatlantic politics. American Ethnologist, 26(4):910, 931.

1998 Enchanted memories of regional difference in African American culture. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 100(1): 94-105.