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Independent Lens “Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness”

Independent Lens “Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness”

Credit: Courtesy of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL/ITVS

Llewellyn Smith and Christine Herbes-Sommers

Boston, Massachusetts

Using photo-montage re-creations, interviews, animation, original field footage, and recordings, this film will examine the forgotten legacy of Melville Herskovits, a controversial Jewish anthropologist whose writings in the ’40s and ’50s challenged widely held assumptions about race and culture by insisting that people look at the world through each other’s lives and histories.