CERLAC presents The Michael Baptista Lecture Series 2021-2022

CERLAC presents The Michael Baptista Lecture Series 2021-2022: 

Envisioning Emancipatory Horizons in the Caribbean and Latin America: Unsilencing the Unthinkable 

A Panel for Black History Month

In Silencing the Past (1995), Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued that the unthinkable is “that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives, that which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the questions were phrased.” 

He proposed the Haitian revolution was unthinkable because it was too radical to be formulated in advance of its deeds. What habits of thought, language, labour, identity divisions and knowledge sustain unthinkable(s) in the present and the region(s)? What transnational solidarities are needed in the here and now to challenge the enduring legacies and reinventions of colonial divisions and the deeply divisive, unequal, violent and hierarchical systems which threaten us? What might we learn from the Black struggles of the past and groups already at work on alternatives in different spaces? How are visual artists, writers and performers prefiguring imminent possibility? 

In this panel scholars, activists and artists reflect on unthinkable(s) in the historical and contemporary social, racial, environmental, and political landscapes of the Caribbean and Latin America and, through their work imagine emancipatory horizons.