David Scott

David Scott is the Ruth and William Lubic Professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author of Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (1994), Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (1999), Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004), Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (2014), Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (2017), and (with Orlando Patterson), The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue (forthcoming 2023). He has just completed a book titled “Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History,” and is now working on a biography of Stuart Hall. Scott was also the curatorial director of the exhibitions Caribbean Queer Visualities (Belfast, Glasgow, 2016, 2017), and The Visual Life of Social Affliction (Nassau, Miami, Rotterdam, 2019, 2020), and is the lead curator of Pressure: The Kingston Biennial 2022 (Kingston 2022). He is the founder and editor of the journal Small Axe and director of the Small Axe Project, in the context of which he curates a programme on Caribbean modernism.