boundary 2

Category: Slavery and Freedom

  • Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Mandela's Reflections: Meditations and Interventions from the b2 Collective

    Editor’s Note
    from Paul Bové
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    Nelson Mandela died on December 5, 2013. Tony Bogues, a member of the boundary 2 Collective, was in South Africa, watching the endless coverage of the news and of Mandela’s life. Bogues had met Mandela during his time with the Jamaican government of Michael Manley, and he has spent considerable time working in South Africa, especially in Cape Town, on questions of freedom, archives, African and African Diaspora intellectual history, and political thought.

    At least one generation of intellectuals had stood against apartheid and reflected on Mandela as a political figure of freedom and liberation. Mandela never produced anything equivalent to the political writings of a Gramsci, Fanon, or Césaire. Because of the media and the global support for the struggles he led, Mandela acquired a resonance with effects across the globe. His career, with all its changes, posed challenges for thinking about politics.

    It seemed right that boundary 2 should take notice of Mandela and his influence. We decided to gather responses to Mandela as a political figure. b2 issued a call for very brief papers from several spots on the globe and from different generations. Our contributors have given us reason to feel this attempt was a success.

  • The Many Faces of Toussaint L' Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution

    imageBrown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice to host Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié and b2er Anthony Bogues for an exhibition and discussion of the Haitian Revolution and the portrayal of Toussaint L’Overture. Opens May 22. Discussion on May 24. See here.

    “The Haitian Revolution was an event of world significance which challenged the then dominant system of racial slavery. This exhibition by one of Haiti's leading artists, Edouard Duval-Carrié, will pay attention to the many different ways in which the leader of the Revolution, Toussaint L'Ouverture, was portrayed.” Read more.

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    Prof. Bogues on “Practices of Freedom” in December, 2013:

  • Anthony Bogues, "Practices of Freedom"

    Anthony Bogues, "Practices of Freedom"

    Anthony Bogues, at the introduction of the Ships of Bondage exhibit currently held in the Slave Lodge museum in Cape Town, South Africa (and features studies of the Amistad, the Sally, and the Meermin), speaks of slavery and freedom, representation, the sedimentary foundations of slavery, colonialism, colonial modernity and these historical processes that connected the world (41:56). Beginning with reflections on Toni Morrison’s Beloved and André Brink’s Philida, Professor Bogues asks, “How does one represent slavery?” alluding to the attempt “to represent what sometimes we cannot name,” as he wrestles with the idea of freedom as it pertains to the political, the historical and the practice of being human: his thoughts a direct contribution to what he calls “the public curriculum.”

  • Video: Slave–Citizen–Human

    Video: Slave–Citizen–Human

    http://youtu.be/Oi4mViR-IOA

    Tony Bogues, as a part of Brown University’s Graduate Student Colloquium on Slavery and Justice, engages issues of enslavement, an enslaved person’s transition to that of a “subject,” of a “citizen,” and how the idea of the human affects and is affected by narrative, memory and practice.

    “You can’t think about questions of war and conflict without thinking about questions of ‘subjects’ and ‘citizens’…Because what they revolve around, I would argue, are certain conceptions of ‘What does it mean to be human?’ and ‘What kind of accrue to those humans?’” -Anthony Bogues

  • Video: Africa Theorises (Tony Bogues and Achille Mbembe)

    Video: Africa Theorises (Tony Bogues and Achille Mbembe)

    Coverage of The University of Cape Town’s “Africa Theorises” has arrived – a conversation between our esteemed colleague Anthony Bogues and the renowned scholar Achille Mbembe. Topics include the “redrawing of the global intellectual map,” the “flight from theory” and “scientism,” the waning hegemony of the “Western Archive,” the possibilities of “liberty,” and the “modes of being human.”