CLOSING REFLECTIONS Facilitated by Saidiya Hartman & Anthony Bogues

From 10-12 May 2019, VIAD and the Centre for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ, Brown University) collaboratively hosted a series of curated conversations and interdisciplinary engagements, entitled: The Imagined New (Or, what happens when History is a catastrophe?) – Working Through Alternative Archives: Art, History and the African Diaspora.

This gathering of thinkers, curators and artists was the first of three such colloquia planned, rather than following a conventional conference format, this gathering brought together a community of local, Continental and Afrodiasporic scholars, curators and artists recognised for their work and preoccupations with creative and curatorial practices related to legacies of slavery, colonialism and apartheid – as well as alternative approaches to history-making, the ‘archive’, and the political work of the radical Black imagination.