UFH Colloquium: ELVIS IMAFIDON (SOAS) - Colouring Being and Being Coloured: The Politics of Chromatic Ontologies
Christopher Allsobrook
There is little philosophical engagement with chromatic ontologies as the colouring of being. Perhaps most evident in the racial discourse of blackness and whiteness, chromatic ontologies unfold as forms of substance ontologies, but such unfolding is fundamentally determined by dominant power structures. Focusing on chromatic ontologies of race, sexuality and ecosystems, I examine in this talk the dynamics and politics of colouring modes of being and of being the object of colouring. I argue that there are two levels of chromatic ontologies: the ontic and the political. At the ontic level, colouring being and being coloured unfold as an is-ness that does not demand an ontological point of view. At the political level, colouring being and being coloured is carefully curated as a substance ontology that reduces modes of being to the properties of colour. The latter, I argue, is, by its very nature, rigid, reductionist, and exclusionary. I then explore the approximations of being in sub-Saharan African places as a meaningful way of articulating chromatic ontologies.
Dr Elvis Imafidon is a Reader in African Philosophy, Chair of the Centre for Global and Comparative Philosophies, and Head of the School of History, Religions and Philosophies at SOAS University of London. He is also a Research Associate at the African Centre for Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science, University of Johannesburg. His research interests include African Philosophy, the philosophy of difference, the philosophy of corporeality, the philosophy of healthcare, ethics, and ontology, primarily from African philosophical perspectives. He is the author and editor of several books including Doing African Philosophy: Beyond Textuality and Individual Authorship (Bloomsbury 2026), African Philosophy and the Otherness of Albinism: White Skin, Black Race (Routledge 2019), Handbook of African Philosophy of Difference (Springer 2020), and African Philosophy and Deep Ecology (Routledge 2025).
Date: Tuesday 21st April 2026
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Regards, |
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Christopher Allsobrook DPhil Philosophy (Sussex) Director, Centre for Leadership Ethics in Africa c: +27 (82) 699 3845 |
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