In the context of the current political demands to reflect upon centuries of colonization, how should one reread and re-engage with Walter Rodney’s 1972 text How Europe Underdeveloped Africa? Are there questions about history and politics that need to be rethought in order to produce a critical relationship to such a text? Rodney’s book emerged in the context of the African (and Caribbean) socialist revolution. In a sense, not only the historical but also the conceptual conditions of that project have collapsed. Revolution is no longer a self-evident telos, politically or even organizationally. Can we rethink the ideas about social change embedded in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa so as to connect them to contemporary conceptions of a radical reparatory politics?


David Scott is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York, US.

 

Further events featuring David Scott:

Fri., 9.6.2023 18:00–22:00
The Sonic Vernacular: Blackness, Sound, and Fugitivity
Screenings, Performance Lecture

Fri., 7.7.2023 16:00–20:00
on movement(s) and collectives—Black Radicals in/and Berlin
Keynote Conversation