Lecture by Onni Ahvonen
Monday, May 26th, 2025 | 18:00–20:00

Join us for a lecture by Onni Ahvonen, exploring utopianism and the politics of time within the Caribbean Black Radical Tradition — a tradition forged through the collision of colonial apocalypse and constant resistance.

The Caribbean has long served as a “dark laboratory” (Goffe 2025) of colonial modernity, racial slavery, and capitalist exploitation. Yet, it has equally been a space of unceasing liberation struggles. Drawing from the “dialectic of imperialism and liberation” (Robinson 2000), this talk will examine the freedom dreams that emerged through the anti-colonial and Black liberation movements, and the future horizons they sought to envision.

In attending to the complex and entangled temporalities that imbued these movements for decolonization, Black liberation, and socialism, Onni Ahvonen invites us to consider: What kinds of alternative horizons were invoked and anticipated? What meanings did liberation conjure amid the wreckage of colonialism and the Middle Passage? It’s to these worldmaking practices and imaginaries that this talk will turn to, in the attempt to offer some tools for (re)thinking what liberation might look like today amid, amid the crises of our own time.

The lecture is organized as part of Comread reading circle, which engaged during spring with Walter Rodney’s Decolonial Marxism.

About the speaker:
Onni Ahvonen is a doctoral researcher in world politics at the University of Helsinki. His dissertation focuses on utopianism and the politics of time in Afro-Caribbean political thought, centering figures such as Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Andaiye, C.L.R. James, and Sylvia Wynter. His research traces how radical political imaginaries emerge in struggles for decolonization, socialism, and Black liberation across the Caribbean and beyond.