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What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.
—Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre”, Liberator, July 1965
Hadiya Sewer
Hadiya Sewer is a Visiting Scholar in the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. She holds a BA in Sociology from Spelman College and a MA and Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University. As an African philosopher her interdisciplinary research interests include: structural racism, American colonialism, feminism, environmental justice and radical political theory. Her dissertation, “Possession: an Ethnographic Phenomenology of American Colonialism in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands,” uses the U.S. Virgin Islands as a case study to trace the conceptions of freedom and the human that exist in this part of the dependent Caribbean. Sewer’’s work is motivated by the questions, “what does it feel like to be colonized today?” and “what are the processes by which colonialism is normalized and accepted?” She is the co-founder and President of St.JanCo, a nonprofit that pursues land rights for the preservation of identity, history, and culture on St. John, USVI.
Brown University, Visiting Scholar