Date and Time
- Thursday, Nov 5, 2026 6pm - 8pm
Location
Museum of the African Diaspora
685 Mission St
Details
In conjunction with After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora, this special First Thursday program brings together chef and cocktail creator Nelson German, James Beard Award–winning cookbook writer and culinary anthropologist Andréa Lawson Gray, in conversation moderated by Jamaican-born chef, restaurateur, and community leader Nigel Jones.
Inspired by the exhibition’s exploration of diaspora and reinvention, the conversation turns to food and drink as living forms through which memory, identity, and cultural continuity are continually remade. Across ceramics, food, and drink, the program considers how creative practices preserve lineage while embracing reinvention. These themes open onto broader questions: How is culture carried across time and distance? How do memory, migration, and rupture generate new forms of expression? What survives displacement, and what must be reinvented?
Drawing from the forthcoming book Caribbean Cocktails: Drinks & Bites from the Afro-Latino Diaspora, the conversation explores how ingredients such as rum, sugarcane, citrus, and botanicals hold histories of trade, labor, resistance, and exchange. German and Lawson Gray consider the Caribbean not as a fixed geography, but as a site of circulation where African, Indigenous, and European influences collided to produce new aesthetic and culinary languages. Drinks and bites from Caribbean Cocktails will follow the conversation.
