EXHIBITION LAUNCH EVENT

Monday 8 July 2024, 6.00pm BST

Exhibition Launch:
Audrey Richards and the Making of African Studies

Curated by Andrew Bank (UWC, Cape Town)

Dedication to Jean La Fontaine (b. 1931), Jo Gladstone (b. 1938) and Marilyn Strathern (b. 1941).

Audrey Isabel Richards (1899-1984) was a central figure in the histories of African anthropology, the British school of social anthropology and British (and American) African Studies. Launched on the 125^th anniversary of the birth of Richards in London, this exhibition draws on a trove of fresh archival sources, inter alia, photographs in family albums and little known images from Audrey Richards Photographic Collection at the RAI, to highlight successive stages in Richards’s long Africanist career. Associated with Andrew Bank’s current biography-in-progress, the exhibition will be divided into four parts: I. Childhood and youth, 1899-1930; II. Bemba Fieldwork and ethnographic writing in Northern Rhodesia and South Africa, 1930-1940; III. Inter-disciplinary research development at the Colonial Office and the East African Studies Institute, 1940-1956; and IV the making of Cambridge and British African Studies, 1956-1975. The exhibition is dedicated to three former female students and intellectual friends of Audrey Richards who have profoundly shaped Andrew Bank’s progressive appreciation of Richards’ Africanist and feminist legacies.

Guest Speakers (in decreasing order of age):

Jean La Fontaine
Raymond Apthorpe
Jo Gladstone
Marilyn Strathern
Jenny Kuper
Sarah King
Andrew Bank