Thinking (in) Our Post-Bandung World
2018-19 CUSP Distinguished Speaker Series
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
6:00–8:00 p.m.
Davis Auditorium, Schapiro CEPSR
In 1955, a conference was organized in Bandung, Indonesia, between Asian and African countries, most of them already independent States, others, like Ghana (then called Gold Coast) fighting to end colonialism. The Bandung Conference was a milestone in the movement of decolonization that marked the end of the notion that imperial Europe represented universalism and therefore the model to which the rest of the world should strive to conform itself. Does that mean that in a post-Bandung world, a world of plurality of languages and cultures, all equivalent, the pursuit of universality is meaningless? That is the question this presentation will address, by examining in particular the opposition of many French intellectuals to “postcolonial studies” in the name of universalism..
Biography
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a professor at Columbia University in the departments of French and Philosophy. He is currently the Director of the Institute of African Studies. His areas of research and publication include History of Philosophy, History of Logic and Mathematics, Islamic Philosophy, and African Philosophy and Literature.
His latest publications in English include Islam and the open society: Fidelity and Movement in Muhammad Iqbal’s Thought, Dakar, Codesria, 2010; African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude, Seagull Books, 2011; The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, Dakar, Codesria, 2016; Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition, New York, Columbia University Press, 2018.