Affrilachia: Testimonies with Chris Aluka Berry

February 11, 2025
12:00pm - 1:00pm

“Affrilachia,” a term first coined by Kentucky poet Frank X Walker, refers to the cultural contributions of African Americans who live in Appalachia. Although Black Americans have greatly influenced the popular culture landscape in this region, their stories, trials, and triumphs are often undocumented because Appalachia is perceived as wholly white. In this stunning visual history, storytelling photographer Chris Aluka Berry gives voice to the broad spectrum of African Americans who have lived in the Appalachian region over the centuries. Berry immersed himself in the communities and lives of Black Appalachians to present the diversity and commonalities of the proud people in the region. His intimate and revealing photographs capture African Americans in various settings—churches, homes, revival services, family gatherings, and celebrations. Completing this collection are powerful narratives from the people who inhabit these places, and contributions from Appalachian writers Kelly Elaine Navies and Maia A. Surdam, whose poignant and powerful poems and essays offer historical perspective and broaden the book's archival importance.

Presenter Bio

Chris Aluka Berry (b. 1977) is an American photographer who lives in the Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina. He grew up among the pine trees and cotton fields of rural South Carolina. Aluka’s upbringing in the South by his white mother and Black father made him sensitive to questions of racial representation, which influenced his early foray into photography and continues to inform the questions he asks and images he makes. His education as a photographer began at The State Newspaper in Columbia, SC, where he excelled in long-form storytelling. While there, he was named the SC News Photographer of the Year four times and received the Ambrose Hampton Award for Outstanding Journalism and the Judson Chapman Community Journalism Award. After leaving the newspaper to pursue a freelance career, he provided photography for clients such as Time, NPR, The Atlantic, LA Times, The New York Times, London Free Press and many other clients. His photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries, and are part of permanent and private collections throughout the U.S., including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, DC. For more than eight years, Aluka worked on his first book, Affrilachia: Testimonies, published by The University Press Kentucky in October 2024. The book documents the Black experience in the southern Appalachian Mountains of Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. This experience renewed Aluka’s belief in the power of photography to preserve history and illuminate our shared humanity. To earn his living, Aluka makes photographs for various community-based, nonprofit, and corporate clients across the U.S. However, it is his personal documentary work that feeds his soul. He has begun a second volume of Affrilachia: Testimonies and nears completion of his ongoing fine art project, “Fear, Death, and the Other Side.”

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