ABSTRACT

The Laboratory for Speculative Ethnology is a direct response to race and racism in the worlds of art, design, and anthropology. Built upon a commitment to explore realness guided by principles of antiracism and afrofuturism, the voice of the Lab is one that says those unsayable things, those things that tend to remain dirty secrets held inside ivory towers and white-walled studios. The notion of “the savage slot” was elegantly and thoughtfully delineated by Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2003). His move was to identify the problematic ideological space occupied by anthropology as a discipline. (With this move a host of “native” anthropologists who may or may not slide into that savage slot so easily were also identified.) Trouillot situates the establishment of anthropology as a discipline and as an essential part of an emergent Western discourse he describes as “order-utopia-savagery” (28).