The matter of the aesthetic within conventional thinking is of a category that defines beauty often understood as a “sensuous activity” that divides art and society. Some thinkers have recently argued that there is an “aesthetic regime” which informs historical art narratives. This argument elides the issue of the making of the object. These seminars will trouble the conventional categorical usage of the aesthetic. Within the Caribbean, arguments about the aesthetic emerge during the early 20th century in Haiti and Cuba while in the Anglophone Caribbean explicit debates continue well into the 1970s with poets and writers like Kamu Brathwaite and Wilson Harris. In Caribbean culture the issue of the aesthetic straddles visual, musical, and literary cultures. The seminars will explore the various formulations of the aesthetic that emerged within the Caribbean and explore the ways in which Caribbean cultural practices have troubled the meanings of the aesthetic while practicing an alternative formulation of an “aesthetic regime.
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The emergence of the African as “folk” agency in Caribbean visual culture.
Mon, May 1, 20236:00 pm to 8:00 pm -
The Love Axe debate
Tue, May 2, 20236:00 pm to 8:00 pm -
What is this thing called naive art? What is folk art? What is intuitive art? Is there a Caribbean Modernism – if so, how is it constituted?
Wed, May 3, 20236:00 pm to 8:00 pm -
Lecture: “There is a Philosophy of History which resides in the arts of the Imagination"
Thu, May 4, 20237:00 pm
Anthony Bogues (Ph.D., 1994, Political Theory, University of the West Indies, Mona) is a writer, scholar, curator, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice; Professor of Africana Studies, Royce Professor of Teaching Excellence (2004-2007); and currently the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the departments of Political Science, Modern Culture and Media. History of Art and Architecture and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.Bogues’s major research and writing interests are intellectual, literary and cultural history, radical political thought, political theory, critical theory, Caribbean and African politics as well as Haitian, Caribbean, and African Art. He is the author of Caliban’s Freedom: The Early Political Thought of C.L.R. James (1997); Black Heretics and Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (2003); and Empire of Liberty: Power, Freedom and Desire (2010). He is the editor of From Revolution in the Tropics to Imagined Landscapes: the Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié. ( 2014 ); Metamorphosis: The Art of Edoaurd Duval -Carrie (2017) as well as two volumes on Caribbean intellectual and literary history: After Man, Towards the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter(2005) and The George Lamming Reader: The Aesthetics of Decolonisation (2011) He is the co-editor of a special issue of the Italian journal Filosofia Politica ( 2017 ) on Black political thought and the co-convener of the international project, “Towards a Global History of Political Thought.” Additionally he has curated and co-curated shows in the United States, South Africa and the Caribbean and published numerous essays and articles on the history of criticism, critical theory, political thought, political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history as well as Haitian Art. Bogues is a member of the editorial collective for the journal boundary 2 and was an honorary professor at the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.( 2006-2017), and now a Visiting Professor and Curator at the University of Johanesburg. He is a member of the scientific committe of Le Centre d’Art in Haiti. He teaches courses on Africana political philosophy, cultural politics, intellectual history and contemporary critical theory and comparative literature of Africa and the African Diaspora as well as courses on the history of Haitian society and art.