Diana Pinto
Enlightenment at Last! Unveiling the Kant Statue, Lagos, Nigeria, September 30, 2084
(An iconoclastic exercise in intellectual speculation)
To celebrate the 300th anniversary of Immanuel’s Kant’s essay “What is the Enlightenment?” a prestigious elderly Nigerian intellectual, born in 1989, reminisces on his personal political and cultural struggles as he sought to defend Kant’s Weltanschauung in a fractious Nigerian world throughout the 21st century. His dialectical relationship to “Western civilization” and commitment to Kant’s ethical and intellectual standards independently of one’s origins and country serve as a lynchpin in our own collective assessments of who we are and what we stand for.
Diana Pinto studied at Harvard University and is a historian and writer. Formerly a Consultant to the Political Directorate of the Council of Europe, she is interested in pan-European identities and Jewish communities in Europe after 1989. She is the co-founder of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Moscow School of Civic Education, now in exile in Riga. She has served on the board of the London Institute for Jewish Policy Research. Pinto is the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Collegium Budapest, Fulbright. She is the author of Israel has Moved (2013, German version: Israel ist umgezogen, 2013).