Felwine Sarr in Conversation

Felwine Sarr is a Senegalese academic and writer. He is Anne-Marie Bryan Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University in North Carolina, after teaching at the Université Gaston Berger in Saint-Louis, Senegal, where he is Professeur Titulaire des Universités and agrégé in economics. His academic work focuses on economics, the ecology of knowledge, contemporary African philosophy, economic policy, epistemology, economic anthropology, and the history of religious ideas.

He has published Dahij (Gallimard 2009), 105 Rue Carnot (Mémoire d’Encrier 2011), Méditations Africaines (Mémoire d’Encrier 2012), Afrotopia (Philippe Rey, 2016), Ishindenshin (Mémoire d’Encrier, 2017), Habiter le Monde (Mémoire d’Encrier, 2017), Ecrire l’Afrique-monde (collective work co-edited with Achille Mbembe, Philippe Rey/Jimsaan, 2017), Restituer le patrimoine Africain (Philippe Rey/Seuil, 2018) with Bénédicte Savoy, Politique des Temps (co-edited with Achille Mbembe, Philippe Rey/Jimsaan 2019), La Saveur des derniers mètres (Philippe Rey, 2021), Traces (Actes Sud, 2021, translation into Wolof Watit, 2023, éditions EJO), l’Économie à venir (Les liens qui Libèrent, 2021) with Gaël Giraud, Les Lieux qu’habitent mes Rêves (Gallimard, 2022) and Le Bouddhisme est né á Colobane (Philippe Rey /Jimsaan, 2024).

Lauren Tate Baeza is a scholar of African art and political history. She is Curator of African Art at the High Museum of Art, where she spearheads an initiative focused on African modernism and 20th century art. For the museum, she has curated Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Mask and the Cross, Three Decades of Democracy: South African Works on Paper, and the forthcoming Ezrom Legae: Beasts. Baeza previously served as Director of Exhibitions at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, where she curated presentations from the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. Collection and organized numerous exhibits and programs engaging the visual and performing arts to address social issues. Baeza is a contributing editor at Art Papers and serves on the boards of the Still Artist Residency in Johannesburg and UCLA African Studies Center.

Axelle Karera is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Emory University. She works at the intersection of 20th century continental philosophy, the critical philosophy of race (particularly Black critical theory), contemporary critical theory, and the environmental humanities. In addition to forthcoming work on Blackness and ontology, she is currently completing her first monograph titled The Climate of Race: Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics, in which she examines the question of relationality in new materialist ontology and speculative realism’s purported return to metaphysics. More importantly, the book’s investigations attempts the discern the ethical crux of critical thought in the age of the Anthropocene, with the aim to attend to its powerful – and perhaps even necessary – disavowals on matters pertaining to racial ecocide.

Stéphanie Boulard is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literature and Cinema in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech. She specializes in 19th to 21st-century French literature with a particular emphasis on the novel and visual arts, including the relations between word and image, aesthetic and political dimensions in literary and artistic thinking and the notion of transgression in literature and the arts.  Author Rouge Hugo (2014), and co-author of Hugographies (2022), Dr. Boulard has published extensively on topics such as the French Revolution, violence and death penalty; myths and monstrosity; the dream; animal worlds; and migration and exile in literature and the arts.  She is also Co-Director of the Global Media Film Festival, a foreign film festival focused on issues of sustainable development, global ecology and social needs across cultures.