Anthony Bogues

Anthony Bogues is a scholar, writer and curator. He is the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory, Professor of Africana studies and African and African diaspora art and the inaugural director of the center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. He is the author / editor of six volumes and has published over 80 essays in the fields of intellectual history, political theory and Haitian / Caribbean art. He has curated several major shows in the USA and the Caribbean. He is currently working on a book on freedom, serves as the series editor for the collected works of Sylvia Wynter and is a co-convener for the global curatorial project on slavery and colonialism. His edited volume on the history of black political thought will be published in 2019. He is a visiting professor in the Faculty of visual arts at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.

In Slavery’s Wake: Freedom, Race and the Human

This project grapples with the ways in which colonial modernity and racial slavery historically structured not only economic and social structures and our present lives but also the categories of self, the human and questions of freedom. Working through the legal and philosophical categories of citizenship and the human, the project wrestles which how the general history of thought about being human is deeply rooted in colonial epistemologies. Probing the object and art collections of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen, the research project will think about the ways in which visual culture both worked and shaped the categories of the human and freedom during the period of Europe’s colonial empires. The project will also think about the afterlives of these categories deeply implicated in colonialism as we act in the present and how we may create possible new languages in creating new modes of livity.