The IRGG welcomed David Scott, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, for the launch of his new book Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory Justice (Duke University Press) at the Yale Bookstore.
Omens of Adversity examines the experience of postcolonial, postsocialist temporality through a case study of the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983), and the repercussions of its collapse. Scott engages with broader, enduring issues of political action and tragedy, generations and memory, liberalism and transitional justice, and the possibility of forgiveness. Ultimately, Scott argues that the palpable sense of the neoliberalpresent as time stalled, without hope for emancipatory futures, has had far-reaching effects on how we think about the nature of political action and justice. Faculty and graduate students from across the University joined Scott for a conversation that began at the Yale Bookstore and continued over dinner at The Study Hotel.
Professor Scott is also the author of Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality, and editor of small axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism.