How (and Why?) to Think Radically: An Interview with Anthony Bogues

Hello and welcome to the fourth

installment of the University of

Pittsburgh Humanities podcast,

a series devoted to exploring the

humanities, their intersections with

other disciplines, and their value

in the public world.

I'm Dan Kubis, assistant director of

the Humanities Center at Pitt.

And my guest today

is Anthony Bogues, the Asa Messer

professor of Humanities and Critical

Theory at Brown University, where he

also serves as professor of Africana

Studies and director of the Center

for the Study of Slavery and

Justice.

It is important for us to think

about the humanities

as a way in which we can

understand the world as something

that we do.

That is we make,

whether for good or bad, but

that we make it.

Professor Bogues began his academic

career at the University of the West

Indies in his native Jamaica and

moved to Brown in the year 2000.

He is focused on a broad range of

topics throughout his career,

including intellectual and political

history, literature and literary

criticism, and most recently, the

visual arts.

In all of his writing, Professor

Bogues encourages readers to

question the limits of inherited

critical categories and to capture

as much human experience as possible

in the language and concepts they

use to understand the world.

At the core of his work are his

readings of artists and thinkers who

have been excluded from the Western

tradition, including Sylvia Wynter,

George Lamming, C.L.R.

James, and, more recently, the

Haitian painter Edouard Duval

Carrié.

For Professor Bogues, these figures

and their work have the potential to

rewrite Western intellectual history

in a new, more fully human way.

Not only because they are new voices

to the tradition but because they

understand and value the arts'

ability to express so broad a range

of human experience.

In his focus on the radical

political potential of marginal art

in artists, Professor Bogues

maintains a sense of optimism

and a respect for what intellectuals

like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz

Fanon, and others have been able to

accomplish in the past.

He also strives to break down

barriers that separate the

university from the rest of the

world, an effort that he says comes

partly from his work in politics and

journalism before he entered the

university.

I began by asking him about this

history and about what motivated him

to begin his career as an academic.

So I want to begin by asking you a

bit about your career because you're

not someone who has spent your

entire career in an educational

setting.

You worked for the People's National

Party and also the Sugar Workers

Cooperative Council in Jamaica

before becoming an academic.

Can you talk a bit about why you

made the decision to become an

academic and enter the university?

I'm not sure you want to hear that

story because that story

is very much, very much a pragmatic

story. And it's not a story

that was

driven by a certain passion.

It's a pragmatic story in that

those of us who were

handed a certain set of positions

in the country--

it became very clear in the 1980s

that the geopolitical

and the internal political

situations had shifted dramatically

to the right, in my view.

And those of us who

had spent a great deal of our time

not thinking about the

university but more

thinking about a certain kind of

activism to transform

the society.

Some of us decided that we needed to

think about what next to do,

given the fact of the shift-- the

geopolitical and internal

shifts.

And that's how I ended up doing my

Ph.D. It wasn't just my passion

that says I would.

It was to say, "Okay, what next

do I do?"

given the set of circumstances

in which I lived at that point

in time.

What that has meant, though, is

that my

relationship to the humanities

is not one in which

is conventional.

In other words, that

there is a way in which the

humanities, the

things around questions of

citizenship, things are all a

certain sort of classical European

text.

And what has happened

is that, certainly, as

a scholar of the humanities,

I've been driven to

think through things in a different

ways. Part of that comes from a set

of experiences,

but also part of it comes from

trying to think about

the world in a different way.

And therefore,

for me, humanities in the

university is

about, quite frankly, trying

to bring the world into the

university, trying to

think about how we

can understand this

complicated world that we now live

in through a

critical lens

of various fields of the

humanities.

Well, you also spent the first seven

years of your academic career based

in the University of the West Indies

in Jamaica.

And then most of the year since

based at Brown in

the U.S.

Does the effort you describe of

bringing the world into the

university differ for you in those

two locations?

Absolutely. Because when you

are in Jamaica or when you are in

South Africa, just for argument's

sake, two places that I

work in, the

world is at your doorstep and

in your face all the time.

You cannot escape it.

Any theoretical formulations

that you are developing, whether

they be literary, philosophical,

or historical, or even

artistic,

have to take into account the

world that faces

you. In the United States,

particularly in an elite university

like which I

now teach and which has been

very good and which I

have a great deal of affection for,

the

world is more outside

of. And you have to

struggle a bit more to bring the

world in.

And it is, I think,

that struggle, certainly,

in the United States about bringing

the world in, about trying to find

ways of analysis,

particularly critical analysis

about the world-- a kind of

different hermeneutics

that takes the world into

consideration.

It is that I think that I've tried

to spend some time trying to think

about because I live in the States.

Well, I also want to ask you about

your writing and

to start by asking you about C.L.R.

James, who is the figure

that you've returned to most

frequently throughout your career.

Can you say a bit about why he

has played such a central role

for you and what it is about his

work that keeps you returning to it

time and time again?

I mean, I think that for James,

as so many persons may know, is

considered to be the most

important 20th-century Caribbean

intellectual. He

wrote historical text and

political theory.

He wrote on literature. He wrote on

Shakespeare.

He wrote Mariners, Renegades, and

Castaways is the book on

Herman Melville. He

wrote on philosophy on Hegel.

And he

wrote on cricket, Beyond a

Boundary, among many other things.

And what has always been

interesting in the breadth

of work that C.L.R.

has done is that he has always been

trying to think about the

world and to think about it

historically and contemporaneously.

In other words, always trying to

think if something appears in

the world, whether it is

a piece of art

or whether it is a

sort of fiction-- new fiction

writers,

whether it is a historical

phenomenon or, sorry,

a contemporary phenomenon.

He is always trying to think through

how can we think about that in

relationship to a set of

things called history, politics, and

so on, without identifying

those of any singular

disciplines.

Because if you remember, C.L.R.

never went to university.

So that was, in my view, a great

advantage in many ways in that

he, therefore, meant he did not

become attached to any particular

discipline, disciplinary protocol

of formation.

So my consistent return to

C.L.R is a return to

trying to understand a certain

method, a certain way

of looking at the world, a certain

engagement with the world,

and to understand that that

engagement actually begins

with the people from below.

And so that

if-- that is the most important

influence, I think, intellectually

in my intellectual life.

Alongside that, I think you have to

put W.E.B. Du Bois,

and you have to put Frantz Fanon,

and Sylvia

Wynter as

figures with whom I draw from--

Hannah Arendt.

People who I draw from - Michel

Foucault - but don't necessarily

agree with in many, many

ways. Because I think

part of being a certain kind of

critical scholar is

that you should

not necessarily begin

with a certain framework

which you have adopted,

whether it is a Jamesian framework,

a Foucauldian,

or Wynterian framework, although

I know in the Academy we like to do

that. Somebody is a [inaudible], somebody is a Foucauldian, somebody is a

whatever. But

really, to try and understand

that each of these particular

figures

who obviously shaped what you think

because you read them often,

that they essentially

are figures who ask all sorts of

questions about life and

human experience at that point in

time-- in the time that they are

operating.

And therefore, to try and think

about those questions and to

try and think about, therefore, a

certain tradition that may

constitute those questions.

So that's how I operate.

But for James, who's

really, as you say, pivotal--

he's pivotal because

of the ways in which he operate.

The way he crosses,

what we would say the academy, he

crosses disciplinary boundaries

seamlessly

and that, I think, is fascinating.

Well, your description of the way

that you draw from other writers

work without wholly adopting their

frameworks actually reminds me of

the way that you approach Hannah

Arendt, and in particular, her

approach to politics.

You write of Arendt's politics that

it is simply too narrow because

it doesn't include social

considerations. And that we can see

this narrow view, her narrow view,

in some of the political positions

she held.

Yet Arendt is still,

for you, one of the most important

thinkers of the 20th century.

And you say one of the most

important political philosophers of

the 20th century more broadly.

Yeah, because I think that one of

the things that she does,

and where I began to find her

important, was her approach

to political philosophy.

Bear in mind that my PhD is in

political theory, political

philosophy.

Okay. So I had to spend time within

that discipline. And

I was very uneasy

with what I was reading in

the discipline. I mean, you read it,

and you had to write papers, etc.,

about it, but there was a very,

very profound unease.

And I think that unease

only became clear to me

as I began to read Hannah

Arendt again differently. No, not

just totalitarianism,

but began to read her entire works.

What became clear to me was

that she was developing

a framework of thinking about

political philosophy that was

not drawing from the conventional

way in which academic political

philosophers thought that is from

Plato, etc., etc.

That she was trying to think about

the age in which she lived then

and then trying to work through that

age. But are sort of resources that

she had. She studied all the

Heidegger, etc.

And she studied philosophy, and

so Kant was important to her.

I think phenomenology obviously

was important to her, even though I

think she breaks it later

on.

But there is a way in which--

for her, the

politics became a very important

way to think about life.

Not

in the platonic sense of political

knowledge, which is how we were

studying this thing, but to think

about a certain practice of

politics.

And it is that I take

from her a way in which she looks

upon politics as

a way of having to do with

associations, of having to do

with questions of neutrality

and beginnings, of having to do with

issues about how we must

live together. All those kind of

things, to me, are critical issues.

What I disagree with Hannah Arendt

is that, and she makes this very

clear in a remarkable book On

Revolution,

is that for her,

the problem with revolution,

she would argue,

was that - and why it fails

in many places, that is, she has in

her mind the French Revolution

of 1789 - is

in fact, when she says,

the social makes an appearance.

And she

says a social makes an appearance in

the Russian Revolution.

It makes an appearance in the

French Revolution.

It does not make an appearance in

the American Revolution.

And the success of the American

Revolution and its sustainability,

she argues, is because the social

has not appeared.

I want to disagree because I would

want to say that I think that

if you think about politics

as not having anything to do with

the social, then you are going to

run into a whole host of

difficulties with the sort of

questions that are on the agenda

of the political.

Questions of how you manage risk,

questions of gender, questions of

sexuality, and quite frankly,

questions of a certain forms of

radical equality that have to

do with issues

of economic life.

And so, while I respect

her, as you said, and actually

returned to her quite often just to

read her

and have admiration for her, I

also have profound disagreements.

Because I think that position

of evacuating

the social led her to one of the

most atrocious mistakes

that she could have made in her

life, which is not to support

the movement for integration

in the United States and to actually

end up on the side of

segregation objectively.

And that reminds me of one of your

earliest essays on James,

which you published in Caribbean

Quarterly in the early nineties,

where you were trying to bring the

letters that he wrote into his

political framework rather

than saying with some other

critics at the time that, "Well,

political concerns are

one thing and social concerns are

another." James, in those letters,

was writing, for example, about the

way that interpersonal relationships

can affect the success or failure of

left-wing political groups.

And that was a broader way of

looking at politics than some other

critics thought at the time.

Yeah, no, I mean, I appreciate

that. As I said, I had not even

finished my dissertation,

but I recall being very

fascinated with these letters

and doing exactly that, trying to

say that James

is an extremely political

person.

He's a political personality, par

excellence.

That's how he organizes his entire

life, even when he's thinking about

art, literature,

history, etc.

And therefore, to me, those letters

meant that he gave us

an interior view

of a supremely

political figure, as he was

trying to navigate both a personal

relationship and as well as his life

at that point in time.

What I would want to say,

though, is that

in Beyond a Boundary,

C.L.R said something which has

stuck in my mind and which has

shaped, I

think, my work and

thinking over the last

decade or

so.

And he has a passage in Beyond the

Boundary in which he says

that-- it was

published in 61.

He has been to the Caribbean where

he was a Federal Labor Party

secretary.

He has had to leave United

States and so on.

He's in his sixties, early sixties,

and he has a passage

that says that

his politics and his history

did not tell him everything.

And he says, "The question that

I have to ask is, what did men,"

bear in mind he's his writing

in the sixties, "what did men

want and how

are we able to tell what

men wanted?"

I have pondered that passage

for many, many, many

times because what he is saying

there-- this is a book on cricket.

What he is saying there is that

history and politics, which he was

deeply involved in for 24,

30 years or more, did not

tell everything about the human

experience.

And so he is trying to find

out what it is about the human

experience that I need to know.

He doesn't give us any answers.

Beyond the Boundaries is partly

autobiographical.

But I like to hear what people-- I

like to listen to what people have

to say about themselves

and take them seriously, even

if I disagree with them.

And so this business

of the gap that

is there in human experience,

that history and politics cannot

necessarily tell you,

what is it?

And that, in fact, is something

that I've been really

thinking through.

And, in fact, part of it led

to

a rethinking and a refitting

of my-- a retooling of myself

intellectually to study art.

Because as I was saying to myself,

"Okay, perhaps this will give

me the a way

to think about that gap and

what that gap might mean." But it

also tells you the way I think about

our work and writers.

In other words, I'm not a

Jamesian nor

a Foucauldian or

Arendtian or [inaudible] or

whatever.

I read, James says something,

I say, "You know, this is really

critical. What does that mean?"

And I then think about my own work

and what it is that I'm doing, the

questions I'm trying to work

through. And then trying to figure,

"Okay, he may have something there.

Let me try and think about what that

might mean."

Well, I'm glad you brought up your

work on art because last year your

book on Edouard Duval Carrié came

out, and I thought that was

a fantastic book for two reasons.

First of all, I'm not very familiar

with Edouard Duval Carrié's work

myself, so I really enjoyed

being able to become better

acquainted with it.

But also because in reading your

introductory essay,

I felt that having read a number of

your other works, the concerns

in that essay were recognizable

to me. But it also seemed like you

had learned

a new vocabulary or a new

way of approaching the work because

it was painting rather than some

of the other works-- literary

works, historical works that you'd

written about in the past.

Can you talk a little bit about your

preparation for writing that essay?

Well, let me tell you what happened.

I was chair of Africana Studies for

six years.

In my final year

as chair of Africana Studies,

I began to

think about this business of

art.

But I was thinking about art

specifically in relationship

to Haiti because I work

a great deal on Haiti.

And you cannot work a great

deal on Haiti without not thinking

about art.

And I was trying to think about the

ways in which art

may actually be a language,

a historical language

for Haiti,

not just the vernacular in the way

some people talk about, but actually

historical language.

After being chair,

I spent about a year,

nine months to a year,

doing nothing else but

reading as hard as I could

about art, art history,

Western art history, African art

history, Caribbean art history,

etc., trying to think

about

how does somebody who is

trained as a political theorist

who becomes into, what some

people call in the academy, an

intellectual historian

and does literature

and so on

and cultural studies. And

how does one that person

begin to take on

this business of art, art history,

and artistic production?

So I spent quite frankly about nine

months to a year just reading,

thinking, making notes about that.

And in the middle of that, I did

a major exhibition,

which is one of the single largest

exhibitions of Haitian art in this

country since 1979.

It was done with both at RISD, Rhode

Island School of Design,

and at Brown. To put

together that

meant that I

traveled all over this country

to where every single Haitian

painting was that I knew

and just spent time talking to

people on the paintings

and spent time with people

who understood Haitian

art.

And quickly began to realize,

as I was doing that, that

I was bringing something else.

And I was asking a different set of

questions that

the ways in which Haitian art was

being portrayed as primarily

exotic or naive,

or having this

link to voodoo religion

only rather

than beginning to see it as one

stream. I was beginning to.

And that its history

had to do with a certain

relationship to

surrealism and André Breton

and so on.

I was beginning to have a lot

of trouble with all of that.

And the exhibition which was put

together appeared in 2011,

was called Reframing Haitian Art.

And because I was beginning to think

through just in two years, how

do I reframe this?

The critics' reaction to it was

that, "This is really great, but

we're not quite sure what's

happening here, and it needs more

curatorial thing and so on." In

part because of what I think was

happening was that we

were going against the grain

at that point in time.

They expected the voodoo [crosstalk]

Yes, yes, yes.

That was there.

But what was also there was what I

call everyday.

Everyday people getting married,

people eating in a restaurant,

people playing games, children

and mothers and fathers walking.

I mean, Haitian artists were

painting those kind of scenes,

landscapes and so on, weddings

and so on. I mean, I remember going

through

thousands of paintings and thinking,

"My God, everybody gets married

in here." It's always a

wedding sort of thing.

But there

was a-- I think a lot of the critics

said, "Oh, it was great." Some

critics say it was great.

It portrayed

a different way in which we

might be able to think about it.

And then some critic says, "Well,

it's okay, but we're not so sure."

Right?

And so on.

But at that point,

I made up my mind

that what needed to happen

in relationship to both the art

of Haiti and of the Caribbean and of

Africa was actually a reframing.

Trying

to think through

a different genealogy of

these artistic

practices.

And so that's what you begin to see.

When I

was [asked?] to do the thing for

Edouard, they

said they wanted a catalog.

And I said, "No, we don't need a

catalog. We need a book." And I

persuaded them we needed a book on

Haitian art. And that's what

we did.

And it was the language that

you speak about is really a language

that operates at this level.

One, it operates

with a sort of

- I'm not a trained art historian -

but it operates with a certain

familiarity with artistic

genres and so on.

But more importantly, I think it

operates with a way

in which this is trying to

talk about the interiority

of this particular process.

I'm seeing this whether

it is voodoo paintings

of [inaudible] or

what is the work of [inaudible],

what is the work of Hector

Hyppolite, or Andre Pierre or

of Edouard Duval Carrie himself or

Myrlande Constant. Trying to think about

what do these painters

and these artists have to say to us

about Haiti that we are not hearing.

And what do they have to say about

art in general?

What that then led

to was a - what

you may not have seen - an essay

which was published in

Paris in by the

Museum Grand Palais

on Haitian Art, which I wrote.

In which I essentially

argued that this idea

of modernism and Haitian art and

surrealism was really a problematic

one. And that we needed to

disaggregate all of that and begin

to think of a different genealogy.

And also, quite frankly, I began

to think through Africa, African

art and spent some time in South

Africa doing

similar work. So my work on art

begins with a query,

and I'm trying to think through

Haitian history.

But I was moved, I think, much

further.

Where it go?

I have no idea.

What I would say to you is that,

to me, it is one of the most

exciting things that I'm doing.

And has your work with painting and

other visual arts informed your

thinking about literary texts and

other kind of texts of that sort?

It has informed my thinking of

literatures, informed my thinking

about history. This informed my

thinking about politics.

And what I need to do

is to actually step back and try to

think through. And I feel

the need intellectually about how

does one integrate all of this

into something.

Is there something that is happening

here that I need to think about?

So I want to talk about two other

figures that have been important for

you, and that is George Lamming and

Sylvia Wynter.

With both of them, you describe them

as anti-colonial writers.

And you use that language of

anti-colonial instead

of calling them nationalist writers.

I wonder if you can talk about that

language and, in particular, whether

that connects to this idea that

in both of them, there's the

potential for a new beginning

or in creating something new.

Is that language that you use to

describe them connected

to that potential in their work?

You're very kind, but I think you

also have an insight

in that what I am trying to

do is the following.

I am saying that both these figures

in their separate ways

have attempted to

think through a set of human

experiences of the colonized

coming from the perspective of the