Talk
Library-in-Residence

Library Transmissions: On Losing and Gaining Conceptual Languages

David Scott

Date and Time:: Friday 28 Nov 2025, 6.30-8pm
Location:: Majlis

For the second Library Transmission, The Otolith Group is delighted to welcome David Scott to Ibraaz as part of their Library-in-Residence. David Scott will present a lecture entitled On Losing and Gaining Conceptual Languages: Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa between Revolution and Reparation, from his forthcoming book on the reconsideration of the question of reparation and revolution through the work of Walter Rodney, followed by a conversation with Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun of The Otolith Group.

Throughout his influential books, essays, interviews and exhibitions, David Scott has sought to think and theorise the Caribbean as a world and the world through the Caribbean. The New World of the Caribbean provides Scott with a vantage point from which to analyse the histories of forms of domination and the prospects of emancipation that organise political modernity. His writing stages a series of encounters between the revolutionary texts of the New World imagination and the political sensibility of contemporary generations separated by worlds, times and spaces; in doing so, his writing reimagines and renarrates the changing relations of anti-colonial futures past to neo-colonial pasts present.

On Losing and Gaining Conceptual Languages: Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa between Revolution and Reparation.

How should we reread in the present representative texts of the insurgent 1970s, the great age of socialist and Pan-African radicalism? The text with which I have been concerned is Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, first published in 1972. This book is representative of the ethos of the radical anglophone Caribbean 1970s in the sense that it stages a vivid narrative of the relationship between the past of African enslavement, the present of underdevelopment, and the future of socialist revolution. However, we cannot continue to read it in this way in contemporary conditions in which the old horizons of revolutionary socialist transformation and Pan-Africanism have collapsed. And yet, something salient in Rodney’s book is calling it into a new present and provoking us to ask, how, now, to reread it. The question is: What strategies of rereading ought we to bring to bear on How Europe Underdeveloped Africa in order to excavate a new critical meaning from it in our present, in order to inherit its vision - its spirit, if not its letter - for the challenges we now face?

Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

David Scott teaches at Columbia University, New York, where he is the Ruth and William Lubic Professor in the Department of Anthropology. He is the author of seven books, Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (Minnesota, 1994), Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, 1999), Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Duke, 2004), Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Duke, 2014), and Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity(Duke, 2017), Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History (Columbia, 2024), and (with Orlando Patterson), The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue (Polity, 2023), and co-editor of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (Stanford, 2007). He is currently at work on two book projects—the first is a biography of Stuart Hall; and the second is a reconsideration of question of reparation and revolution through the work of Walter Rodney. David is the founder and editor of the journal Small Axe (www.smallaxe.net), the premier journal of the Caribbean and the African diaspora (published three times per year by Duke University Press), now in its twenty-ninth year, and director of the Small Axe Project.

As curators and theorists, The Otolith Collective has engaged in the conception, creation and convening of platforms that make public ongoing research. Throughout this practice runs a preoccupation with the essayistic as form and vehicle for thinking the aesthetic-political stakes of temporality and interscalarity. The urgency of platforming animates the Collective’s presentation of the work of Bahar Noorizadeh, Chimurenga Library, Emma Wolukau-Wanamba, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Lungiswa Gqunta, Tony Cokes, Rania Stephan, Ayo Akingbade, Sue Clayton, Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson, Lamia Joreige, Etel Adnan, Eyal Sivan, Black Audio Film Collective, Peter Watkins, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki and Anand Patwardhan to name but a few, throughout and beyond the UK.