One of the great intellectuals of our time, committed to the decolonization of knowledge from an African perspective, Senegalese thinker Felwine Sarr is invited for the first time in Atlanta to present his work and his intellectual journey. Felwine Sarr will be in conversation with Lauren Tate Baeza, Curator of African Art at the High Museum of Art and Axelle Karera, Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Emory University. Felwine Sarr is an economist, philosopher, novelist, musician and publisher. In 2021, Time magazine featured him as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. His thinking is developing in different directions and on several fronts at once. With philosopher Achille Mbembe, he is the initiator of the “Ateliers de la pensée,” which has been bringing together writers, thinkers, artists, and academics from Africa and the diaspora in Dakar since 2016. The same year, he published Afrotopia (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), an essay on the future of the continent and the need to pursue decolonization. Together with art historian Bénédicte Savoy, he is also the author of the landmark “Rapport sur la restitution du patrimoine culturel africain” (The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics, 2018), Sarr now teaches at Duke University, where he brings knowledge produced in Africa and promotes an ecology of knowledge from different geographies and traditions. More recently, he has played a major role, alongside numerous intellectuals, activists and citizens, in the defense of Senegalese democracy, and advocates a deepening of democracy in Africa. Today, he is working to create a “pluriversity” in Dakar, a university based on the plurality of knowledge. This event is presented by the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University and Villa Albertine, the French Institute for Culture and Education. It is free and open to the public, and registration is required. This event is the second in a two-part series with Felwine Sarr in Atlanta, initiated by Villa Albertine. The first program, Spaces of the Soul: Felwine Sarr on Literature, Music, and Dreams in Conversation with Stéphanie Boulard, will be held on Thursday, September 26 from 4-6 p.m. in the Scholars Event Theater (Room 1280), Price Gilbert Memorial Library, Georgia Tech, 704 Cherry St NW, Atlanta, GA 30332 |