David Scott is the president of Small Axe Inc., the director of the Small Axe Project, and editor of Small Axe. He teaches in 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), and Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (2014), and co-editor of Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors (2007). He is currently at work on two book projects: one, a study of the moral imperative of reparations for New World slavery; and the other, a biography of the life and work of Stuart Hall.
“The Temporality of Generations: Dialogue, Tradition, Criticism” New Literary History, 45, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 157-81, special issue on “Interpretation and its Rivals.”
“The Tragic Vision in Postcolonial Time” PMLA 129, no. 4 (October 2014): 799-808, special issue on tragedy.
“The Theory of Haiti: The Black Jacobins and the Poetics of Universal History” Small Axe 45 (November 2014): 35-51.
“A Reluctant Pessimist?” Social and Economic Studies vol. 65 (March 2016), forthcoming.
“C. L. R. James, Totalitarianism, and the Sense of the Tragic,” Introduction to C. L. R. James, Preface to Criticism, Robert Hill ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, forthcoming).
Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017, forthcoming).