Discussing New World slavery as irreparable evil with David Scott. We consider the destruction of forms of life through slavery and colonialism and consider why there is a renewed demand for reparations now. David Scott is Ruth and William Lubic Professor, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York. He is also the founder and editor of the journal Small Axe (smallaxe.net), the premier journal of the Caribbean and the African diaspora (published three times per year by Duke University Press), now in its twenty-ninth year, and director of the Small Axe Project.
David Scott is the author of seven books, Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (Minnesota, 1994), Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, 1999), Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Duke, 2004), Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Duke, 2014), Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (Duke, 2017), Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History (Columbia, 2024), and (with Orlando Patterson), The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue (Polity, 2023), and co-editor of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (Stanford, 2007). He is currently at work on two book projects—the first is a biography of Stuart Hall; and the second is a reconsideration of the question of reparation and revolution through the work of Walter Rodney.
