Presentation Date:
This session, focusing on Cutting for Stone, was hosted on May 7th, 2014 by the Committee on African Studies. It featured Wendy Belcher, Assistant Professor in the Princeton University department of Comparative Literature.
View a recording of the session here: http://cmes.adobeconnect.com/p7y3ulmar9v/
Accompanying Non-Fiction Reading:
“Transforming Ethiopia’s health care system from the ground up.” Harvard School of Public Health. August 2012.
“Siblings travel from Ethiopia to help save brother’s life.” Seacoast Online. April 2014.
Other resources:
Harvard student, Amy Alemu, developed an interactive art project in connection with the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974, available publicly online.
Difret – 2014 documentary from the Netherlands about the controversial tradition of abducting girls and forcing them into marriage, known as “telefa.”
Michigan State University, National Resource on African Studies, like Harvard, has an “Exploring Africa Unit” which has a module which focuses on Ethiopia and it’s history, with suggested activities and an extensive timeline.
About the presenter:
Professor Wendy Belcher specializes in medieval, early modern, and modern African literature. Her current research addresses the circulation of African thought in Europe and England before the nineteenth century. She works at the intersection of diaspora, postcolonial, and eighteenth-century studies, theorizing transcultural intertextuality as a form of discursive possession in which African discourse animates representations in the English canon. These scholarly interests emerge from Professor Belcher’s life experiences growing up in East and West Africa, where she became fascinated with the richness of Ghanaian and Ethiopian intellectual traditions.
About the book:
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.
Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles--and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.