Fifty years into Jamaican independence and twenty years after the publication of his seminal work Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson sits down with renowned anthropologist David Scott to discuss his creative and scholarly work and their implications in the contemporary moment. This is the closing event of our semester of revisiting “foundational texts” (see schedule here). The suggested reading for this event is the Introduction to Slavery and Social Death. The seminar will be held on May 4th from 4pm-6pm at CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5114 located at 365 Fifth Ave, New York, NY.

Orlando Patterson, a historical and cultural sociologist, is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and the author of, among other volumes, Slavery and Social Death, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, and most recently, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries. He has also published three novels: The Children of Sisyphus, An Absence of Ruins, and Die the Long Day. A public intellectual, Professor Patterson was, for eight years, Special Advisor for Social policy and development to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica. The author of three novels, he has published widely in journals of opinion and the national press.

David Scott is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, where he specializes in the study of Caribbean and South Asian culture and Postcolonial thought more broadly.  The editor of Small Axe, he has published several seminal works of Caribbean thought, includingRefashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, and Conscripts of Modernity: the Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (which we read at the inaugural discussion session of the Caribbean Espistemologies Seminar).

Co-sponsored by the Caribbean Epistemologies Seminar and the PhD Program in Sociology