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IMAGINING THE NEW AND THE  RADICAL BLACK IMAGINATION:

Walking with Franz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter

In this catalytic lecture, Prof Anthony Bogues explores 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. 

Biography

 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.

 Prof Bogues has received numerous awards for his scholarship and research. His scholarly work operates at the intersections of political theory, intellectual history, cultural studies, literary theory, art history and philosophy. His wide-ranging areas of expertise include African and African Diaspora Political and Philosophical Thought; Twentieth-Century Black Radical Thought; Methodologies in the Study of Political Thought; Literary and Cultural theories; History of Haitian and Caribbean Art as well as Caribbean Intellectual History, Political Thought and Politics. 

 Amongst major projects with VIAD, including the long-term research praxis titled the Imagined New, (or, What Happens when History is a Catastrophe?), Prof Bogues is the convenor of the UNESCO project Mapping Global Anti-Black Racism. In 2023, he was the curator of the art documentary, This Life: Black Life in the Time of the Now, which premiered in December at Art Basel, Miami and directed the documentary series, Caribbean Lives. He has curated/co- curated art exhibitions in the Caribbean, South Africa and the USA. Prof Bogues is an associate editor of the Caribbean journal BIM; he sits on the board of the Center for the Arts in Port Au Prince, Haiti and is a member of the editorial collective, Boundary 2. He is the co- convenor and co-curator of the Global Curatorial Project - a curatorial and exhibition project on the global history of racial slavery and colonialism - with the National African American Museum of History and Culture at the Smithsonian. The exhibition opens on December 13, 2024, in Washington DC. Prof Bogues is currently completing two visual documentaries titled Unfinished Conversations which tell the oral/visual stories of racial slavery and European colonialism and their afterlives.

 He is currently working on a manuscript titled Black Critique, and co-editing selected unpublished writings by Sylvia Wynter. As a scholar of Sylvia Wynter, he is also completing an intellectual biography of the Caribbean theorist, alongside working with the Haitian Artist, Edouard Duval-Carrié on an art historical book dealing with the Haitian Revolution. Prof Bogues is also writing a series of biographies, one on the Haitian artist André Pierre, a second titled The Life and Times of Micheal Manley, and a third on C.L.R. James.

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