Inaugural Lecture for Prof Anthony Bogues's appointment as Distinguished Visiting Professor in VIAD

IMAGINING THE NEW AND THE RADICAL BLACK IMAGINATION: WALKING WITH FRANTZ FANON AND SYLVIA WYNTER
In this catalytic lecture hosted on the 14th of August 2024, Prof Anthony Bogues explored the ways in which the radical imagination operates as both a cultural and political space maker in the writing practices of Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon’s writings and political praxis. Walking with the words of Fanon's book 'Black Skin, White Masks' and two essays from Wynter, namely, ‘”We Know Where We Are From : The Politics of Black Culture from Myal to Marley”’ and her equally important ‘Jonkonnu in Jamaica: towards the interpretation of folk dance as a cultural process’, he suggested that the need to consider the work of the imagination in radical anticolonial thought and practices. Stirring a reflection that requires movement, Bogues argued that in the age of neoliberalism, it is the black radical imagination which opens new possibilities for human life.
The Beloved Collective held space, at this event, through experiments in sonic walking. Drawing in-breaths from the writings of Prof Anthony Bogues and his insights into freedom as a practice, the collective attended to the body as echo chamber. Pertunia Msani, Sbusiso Shozi and Modise Sekgothe reverberated from encounters of being-with-self, being-with-others and being-black-in-the-world as they released sonic expiration, in response to Bogues’ call to imagine the new. Doing the intimate and vulnerable work of listening to the acoustic architectures of their bodies, the moment of holding space through experimentation invited wading through the noise of distraction, tuning into the act of Bogues’ Inaugural DvP lecture on ‘walking with Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter’ and deep listening for the sake of freedom.
The Beloved Collective is a configuration of multi-disciplinary artists brought together by Nondumiso Lwazi Msimanga to attend to moments of experimentation. The Beloveds are izithandwa zabantu who pursue a kind of poetry outside the bounds of disciplines and their disciplining norms. They move in slow seasons of non-work and delight in performances that transgress expectations of the artists’ individual modes. They practice an unravelling of the mysteries of creativity, as a work of love.
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