The Anemy of the Liberal Script for Science: Apocrypha, Misology, Misoneism, and Cryptomnesia with Professor Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui – CDTS

Join the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies for “The Anemy of the Liberal Script for Science: Apocrypha, Misology, Misoneism, and Cryptomnesia,” a public talk with Professor Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui. 

This Public Talk is part of a 2023-2024 Andrew Mellon Sawyer Seminar titled “Evasion: Thinking the Underside of Surveillance.” It is co-sponsored by the Black Research Network.

About the Talk:

The viability, if not success, of self-constitution during marronage depended on consciousness, language, and self-imposed scripts or imaginaries of the future. These were predicated upon conceptions of the material conditions (including of governance, economy, society) and moral precepts (of say law, ethics, and culture) of new political orders. The implied orders and their properties and functions have eluded political theory, in part because the latter’s linguistic and symbolic precepts belong to the arsenal or assemblages of thought that marronage was intended to subvert. The following deals with limits of the ‘liberal script’ as a means of both understanding and ‘policing’ marronage. In the first instance, the terms of maroon’s conceptions of freedom appear in liberal canons arbitrarily as insignificant, as if dissociable from modernity and its underlying processes. On the other hand, the archives of liberal orthodoxies foreclose any other script of freedom but its own. The underlying mechanisms of foreclosure of thought in relation to freedom is at the heart of this lecture. 

About Professor Grovogui:

Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui is originally from Guinea, where he attended Law School before serving as law clerk, judge, and legal counsel for the National Commission on Trade, Agreements, and Protocols. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988. Prior to joining Cornell University’s Africana Studies, Grovogui was professor of international relations theory and law at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International Law (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions and Order (Palgrave, April 2006). Grovogui has recently completed and submitted a book manuscript titled The Gaze of Copernicus: Postcolonialism, Serendipity, and International Relations (University of Manchester Press). He is working to complete the companion book, tentatively titled ‘Quilombo’s Horizon: Moral Orders and the Law of the Commons.’ 

Sponsors 

• The Evasion Lab
• Mellon Foundation
• Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies
• Black Research Network
• African Studies Centre
• VP International Office