Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 10 minutes ago
SYMPOISUM | Thinking Through Tea: Art, Resistance, and Global Entanglements in the Age of American Independence (Thursday, May 7, 2026–Friday, May 8, 2026)
Marking the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, this program reconsiders American resistance not as a singular political rupture, but as a material and visual process shaped through objects, images, and everyday rituals. Rather than treating independence as an abstract ideal, it asks how freedom was experienced, negotiated, resisted, and contested through practices often far from the political stage yet deeply enmeshed in global systems of extraction and exploitation. From drinking tea and sweetening foodstuffs with sugar, to furnishing interiors with tropical woods, wearing imported or locally adapted textiles, or handling silver objects, these material acts encoded both refinement and refusal.
Thursday, May 7, 2026
Roundtable 1: Ritual, Tradition, and Fashion
This roundtable examines how everyday rituals—tea drinking, fashionable dress, and interior furnishing—became charged sites of negotiation in the decades surrounding the American Revolution. Far from being peripheral to political life, these practices were central arenas in which identity, allegiance, and resistance were actively produced and contested. Treating tea and related goods as both commodities and ritual objects, the session explores how colonial communities engaged global materials through practices of adaptation, refusal, and diplomacy. It considers how imported fashions and customs from Africa, the Caribbean, India, and England were reworked into hybrid practices that signaled loyalty, dissent, or strategic ambivalence, and in doing so challenged imperial norms.
Moderator: Mark Peterson (Edmund S. Morgan Professor of History, Yale University)
Speakers: Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Associate Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, Princeton University), Catherine E. Kelly (Professor of History and Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, William & Mary), and Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor (Professor of History and Associate Dean, Graduate Studies, University of California, Davis)
SYMPOISUM | Thinking Through Tea: Art, Resistance, and Global Entanglements in the Age of American Independence (Thursday, May 7, 2026–Friday, May 8, 2026)
Marking the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, this program reconsiders American resistance not as a singular political rupture, but as a material and visual process shaped through objects, images, and everyday rituals. Rather than treating independence as an abstract ideal, it asks how freedom was experienced, negotiated, resisted, and contested through practices often far from the political stage yet deeply enmeshed in global systems of extraction and exploitation. From drinking tea and sweetening foodstuffs with sugar, to furnishing interiors with tropical woods, wearing imported or locally adapted textiles, or handling silver objects, these material acts encoded both refinement and refusal.
Thursday, May 7, 2026
Roundtable 1: Ritual, Tradition, and Fashion
This roundtable examines how everyday rituals—tea drinking, fashionable dress, and interior furnishing—became charged sites of negotiation in the decades surrounding the American Revolution. Far from being peripheral to political life, these practices were central arenas in which identity, allegiance, and resistance were actively produced and contested. Treating tea and related goods as both commodities and ritual objects, the session explores how colonial communities engaged global materials through practices of adaptation, refusal, and diplomacy. It considers how imported fashions and customs from Africa, the Caribbean, India, and England were reworked into hybrid practices that signaled loyalty, dissent, or strategic ambivalence, and in doing so challenged imperial norms.
Moderator: Mark Peterson (Edmund S. Morgan Professor of History, Yale University)
Speakers: Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Associate Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies, Princeton University), Catherine E. Kelly (Professor of History and Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, William & Mary), and Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor (Professor of History and Associate Dean, Graduate Studies, University of California, Davis)
