In June 2004 Sekou Sundiata addressed a national gathering in Pittsburgh, “Diversity Revisited/A Conversation on Diversity in the Arts.” Sundiata’s speech, “Thinking Out Loud: Democracy, Imagination, and Peeps of Color,” makes explicit the fact that he shared the meeting’s general impatience with the status quo on multiculturalism and that this impatience propelled his turn to the conjoined forces of democracy and imagination. “Democracy,” like “citizenship,” is for him not only a feature of political systems or a matter of state but rather a repositioning of the subject: “a humane social practice that . . . brings together the inner need for the freedom to be who you are with the outer need for a social and political and economic ecology . . . for the whole human being.” Sundiata’s“humane social practice” emerged from his weariness with the politics of protest and the politics of administered diversity in favor of citizenship in a changed key, “new ways of imagining and acting in the world.”
Source
Academia. 12 Dec 2011.