IMAGINING THE NEW AND
THE RADICAL BLACK IMAGINATION:
WALKING WITH FRANTZ FANON AND SYLVIA WYNTER
PUBLIC LECTURE BY DISTINGUISHED VISITING PROFESSOR PROF ANTHONY BOGUES IN COLLABORATION WITH VIAD
LIBRARY BUILDING, UNIVERSITY OF JOHANNESBURG, CORNER KINGSWAY AVENUE AND UNIVERSITY ROAD, AUCKLAND PARK, JOHANNESBURG
14 August 2024
In this inaugural lecture commemorating the appointment of Prof Anthony Bogues as Distinguished Visiting Professor in VIAD Research Centre, Prof Bogues impactfully explored the ways in which the radical imagination operates as both a cultural and political space maker in the writing practices of Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon’s writings and political praxis. Walking with the words of Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks and two essays from Wynter, namely, ‘“We Know Where We Are From” The Politics of Black Culture from Myal to Marley’ and her equally important ‘Jonkonnu in Jamaica: towards the interpretation of folk dance as a cultural process’, he suggests that the need to consider the work of the imagination in radical anticolonial thought and practices has reached a lacuna in critical thought. Stirring a reflection that requires movement, Bogues argues that in the age of neoliberalism, as an ideological force of modernity, it is the black radical imagination which opens new possibilities for human life.
The Beloved Collective were invited to perform alongside the lecture given by Prof Bogues. The Beloved Collective is a configuration of multi-disciplinary artists brought together by Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga to attend to moments of experimentation. The Beloveds are izithandwa zabantu who pursue a kind of poetry outside the bounds of disciplines and their disciplining norms. They move in slow seasons of non-work and delight in performances that transgress expectations of the artists’ individual modes. Theirs’ is an unravelling of the mysteries of creativity, as a work of love.
The Beloved Collective holds space, at this event, through experiments in sonic walking. Drawing in-breaths from the writings of Prof Anthony Bogues and his insights into freedom as a practice, the collective attends to the body as echo chamber. Pertunia Msani, Sbusiso Shozi and Modise Sekgothe reverberate from encounters of being-with-self, being-with-others and being-black-in-the-world as they release sonic expiration, in response to the call to imagine the new. Doing the intimate and vulnerable work of listening to the acoustic architectures of their bodies, this moment of holding space through experimentation invites wading through the noise of distraction, tuning into the act of ‘walking with Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter’ and deep listening for the sake of freedom.
“There is a relationship between aesthetics and politics because there is a relationship between imagination and politics. What we have is limited imagination today about possibilities because we are trapped in a certain neocolonial and neoliberal framework that says there’s no other way of life. But there are other ways of life if we refuse to be what [they] want us to be.”
Anthony Bogues 2024
ABOUT PROF ANTHONY BOGUES
Anthony Bogues is a writer, scholar, curator and the author/editor of 11 books and over 100 articles in the fields of African and African Diasporic Political and Philosophical Thought; African and African Diasporic Intellectual History; and Caribbean art. He is the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Africana Studies, professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the inaugural director of the Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ) at Brown University. He is a Visiting Professor of African and African Diasporic Thought at the Free University of Amsterdam; a Distinguished Professor at large at the Africa Institute, Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates; and has recently been appointed as a Distinguished Visiting Professor and Curator at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
