Day of the Slave: A Carnival Conversation

Join Windham-Campbell Prize recipient Kei Miller and scholar Amanda Reid for a compelling conversation on history, memory, and the radical origins of Caribbean Carnival. The title "Day of the Slave" directly references the historical roots of Canboulay—the precursor to modern Carnival born when enslaved people were forced to extinguish fires in the sugarcane fields. Following Emancipation, formerly enslaved people reclaimed those nighttime rituals into an annual street celebration of freedom, endurance, and defiance. Miller, an acclaimed writer whose work explores space, power, and ritual, joins Reid, a historian of Caribbean dance and performance, to examine how these histories remain embedded in contemporary movement, masquerade, and song. Together, they will discuss how a ritual forged in the brutality of the plantation transformed into an enduring expression of liberation, offering an illuminating look at the deep history behind the celebration.

Amanda Reid is an Assistant Professor and Director of Dance in Yale's Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies Department. She is a historian who writes and teaches about queer of color critique, West Indian migration, and post-colonial caribbean black radicalism. Her current manuscript project, Smaddification: Dance and Decolonization in Jamaica, explores maximalist queer diaspora aesthetics in Jamaican concert dance to theorize West Indian regional visions of blackness, bodily freedom, and cultural autonomy. Her writing can be found in Theatre Journal, Women & Performance, The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies (OUP, 2026) and Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings, 2nd ed. (OUP, forthcoming). Prior to coming to Yale, Amanda was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Humanities Center (2020-2022). She received her PhD from the Department of History at the University of Michigan.