Making Alternative  Freedoms:  Slavery , Freedom and the Making of the Modern World

Thursday 23 January 2020
6pm in the Boyd Orr Lecture Theatre 1 (Room 203)

Professor Bogues leads the Brown University Centre for Slavery and Justice, a research centre which emerged from Brown University’s investigation into its connections to slavery and the slave trade.

One  central  feature of the so called making of the modern, has been that of liberty.  The emergence of ideas of liberty occurred during the formation and consolidation of European colonial empires and plantation racial slavery.  Using the Haitian Revolution and the political ideas of Black abolitionism in the Caribbean and the Americas, this talk will map how alternative practices and conceptions of freedom emerged from the ideas and practices of the enslaved. The talk will end with the argument that these ideas of freedom are central to  the history of freedom and may hold relevance for freedom practices today.

Anthony Bogues is the Asa Messer professor of Humanities and Critical Theory and the Inaugural director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University.  He is also a Professor of Africana Studies at Brown. He is a writer and curator. He has  authored/ edited 9 books in the fields of intellectual history, political thought and Haitian Art. He is currently a curator and Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He has held humanities fellowships at Stanford University, Dartmouth College and University of Cape Town where he was a Mellon Visiting Professor.

He is currently the co- convener of two curatorial projects, a historical curatorial project on Slavery and the Making of the Modern  World; and a contemporary art project 'This Life: Black Archaeologies of the Now'.  He has curated numerous art shows in the Caribbean, USA and South Africa.

First published: 14 January 2020

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