28 October 2026, 5:30pm for 6pm.
Venue: Humanities Grad Centre (South West Engineering Building, East Campus, Wits University) or online via Zoom.
Outline of the conversation:
In The Subversive Seventies (one of whose sections gives the forum its title) Michael Hardt undertook a wide-ranging reflection on the 1970s (including BC and Steve Biko), showing not only how we are in a deep sense connected to the political productivity of the 70s but also how excavating a number of its key intellectual innovations allows us to retrieve tools for our present struggles. In a recent preface to a special issue of Small Axe that centers the intellectual legacy of Walter Rodney, Scott directly engages with Hardt’s assertation that the 70s represent the beginning of our own time in a way that also attempts underline the discontinuities between the 70s and our present. More importantly, Scott questions whether the emancipatory visions developed in the 70s need to be reformulated within the problem space that characterizes our present.
The forum intends to engage both orientations and opens with a keynote conversation between Hardt and Scott, facilitated by Noor Niegtafodien, in order to rethink ‘our’ relation to the 70s in a moment in which the disappointments and limits of the historical vehicles of left politics In South Africa are increasingly apparent.
Please RSVP for in-person attendance here and online participation here
The readings folder is shared after you have RSVP’d. For the keynote conversation we recommend reading the 70s and Us section in Hardt’s The Subversive Seventies as well as Scott’s The Inheritance of the Subversive 1970s.