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Decolonizing Knowledge, a Conversation with Felwine Sarr
September 27, 2024 at 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Due to inclement weather related to Hurricane Helene, this event has been postponed. We will update you with more information at a later date.
This event is part of the annual France-Atlanta series organized by Georgia Tech and the Embassy of France in the United States.
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.
In 2021, Time magazine featured Felwine Sarr 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], logical compensation for colonial predation. Felwine 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.
