We Will Dance with Mountains: VUNJA!

A Slow Study course with Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé


Join Báyò Akómoláfé and guests for a series of eight lectures and practice prompts from their 2023 live global course, We Will Dance With Mountains: Vunja! This downloadable digital Slow Study allows you to learn and explore from your home at your own pace.

 

What We Explore

We Will Dance With Mountains is an animist carnival-festival, a subterranean convergence of disarticulated bodies desirous of a new politics, and a cartography project set upon exploring vast terrains of failure as a gesture of refusal in a time when resistance not only feels inadequate to the task of decoloniality but programmatically linked to the continuity of the status quo.

Through curated sessions, teachings by revered guest teachers, emergent practices, lectures, and prayer exploring new nuances and complexities in the postactivism field, Vunja! longs to push toward the unthought, the yet-to-be-tried, and the surprising.

The longing of the course is to construct an approach/aesthetic that might help us move beyond the stuckness of our justice paradigms, move beyond critique, the exhaustion of leftist politics and electoral dynamics, the self-referentiality of cancel culture, the limitations of intersectional theory and representationalism, the failure of catch-up imperatives that the so-called Global South depends on, our unyielding dependence on nation-states, and our imaginations coterminous with the status quo.

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Question & Themes

  • A Pedagogy of the Cracks: Dr. Akomolafe has new things to say about cracks as sites of excess, as coagulative forces, and as instigators of exploratory experiments. Are cracks human things? In what sense do cracks birth postactivism?

  • Postactivism: Is postactivism just another feel-good “bypass” of real and urgent accountability? How do we understand the invitation to “slow down” in a time when to accelerate presents simultaneous considerations? What might response-ability look like now, where hope is in short supply?

  • White Synocopation:  A mass disabling or enlistment of bodies into postures that scandalize whiteness. The idea of syncopation as disability, as danceability, as infiltration, streams through the course. This ‘streaming’ is the soft, tender beats (anacrusis) that live between the grand downstrokes of the crusis. The anacrusis is the ecotone where whiteness folds in on itself, where the sensorium is breached, and where the cracks live. The anacrusis is the shimmering – and it is a strange, alien sound.

  • The Minor Gesture: The minor gesture, although it may pass almost unperceived, transforms the field of relations. More than a chance variation, less than a volition, it requires rethinking common assumptions about human agency and political action. To embrace the minor gesture's power to fashion relations, its capacity to open new modes of experience and manners of expression, is to challenge the ways in which the neurotypical image of the human devalues alternative ways of being moved by and moving through the world—in particular what Manning terms "autistic perception."

  • Play: We are inviting children to join us: we will work with them and their invitations to play as geophilosophies of our times.

  • Becoming-black: Becoming-black is not taking on black skin; it is the often pre-intentional/local flow of processes that enlists bodies of all kinds into the undoing of hegemonic stability. It is the choreography of matter in the unfurling of colonial coherence. Is there a different politics here – something to consider, to contest, to practice, to sit with?

  • blackness:In the morning, you won’t find me here: a meditation in blackness” by Bayo Akomolafe 

  • Trauma as Capture: How do our discourses on healing become forms of entrapment that reinforce colonial lines of sight? That reproduce Virtuvian bodies? What if justice gets in the way of transformation? What corporeal forms are reinforced with our commitments to healing?

  • The Afrocene in the Anthropocene: The paraterranean is Dr. Akomolafe’s recent conceptualization of a different public arrangement that can inform accountability today. We will explore the contours of this seditious mythopoeic space and how it reconfigures responsibility, privilege, and movement.

  • Distantism: Distantism refers to the privileging of the distance senses of hearing and vision - John Lee Clark - Distantism.

  • Asé as Embarkation: Dr. Akomolafe tells a story that names Simondonian pre-individual flows as the crossroads vocation of the trickster god, Èsù

  • Making sanctuary is cultivating nourishment for the monster, the cracks.

FAQ

  • Báyò Akómoláfé (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden ABáyòmi, the grateful life-partner to EJ, and a son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled “trans-public” intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell Our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak (along with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye). 

    Dr. Akómoláfé is the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies in Macalester College, Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA (August 2025), a Member of the Club of Rome and an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. Founder of The Emergence Network, he is currently lecturing at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California, and writing his third book, An Ocean of Milk: Morality, Desire, and the Monster at the Edge of the World.

  • Upon purchase you will receive a download link in your email inbox with the full coursework compressed in a zip folder. The links expires after 24 hours from purchase, so be sure to download within this timeframe. Once downloaded, you will have unlimited access to the curriculum which includes:

    – One (1) 75-page We Will Dance With Mountains Digital Course Book with emergent curriculum in PDF format
    – Eight (8) Main Audio files
    in MP3 format with over 10 hours of explorative and provocative listening content
    – Eight (8) Practice Audio files in MP3 format to support you along your way – to help digest what you’ve heard and to bring it a bit further into your own life
    Eight (8) Transcripts of Audio in PDF format

    Accessing Your Files

    • Due to lengthy articles, it may be best to engage with this course on a large screen device such as a laptop or desktop computer.
    • Your computer or device must be able to download, store and open ZIP, PDF and MP3 file types.

  • This course-festival, a celebration of openings, a conjuring of descent, a sharing of fugitive strategies, is not about telling the truth or channeling pre-formed universal ideas, and it does not try to wield answers for all; instead, our pedagogical-spiritual undertaking is a rejection of such suspiciously cohesive and totalitarian notions like “Truth” or “World.”

    This is inquiry at the edges of the recognizable, practice at the speed of child-like play—not a gathering to confirm what we already know, but a quest to sit with the shocking unthought. Even more critically, making sanctuary (the core concept that continues to be central to the imagination of the course) is for those on the run, those who need to move, those who must leave the familiar behind, and whose bodies have been rendered incapable of proceeding with the current state of affairs. This course is for fugitives – black identified bodies, brown identified bodies, white identified bodies and people all over the world who identify in other ways.

  • We offer two sliding scales ranging from $50-$350 based on your relative financial standing from. The range between the two scales is meant to reflect not only the incredible disparity in economic conditions between different parts of the world but also the historical reality of stolen wealth in many different forms generally from the so-called Global South to the North. Ultimately, the payment system is designed for those with more access to wealth to cover the costs of those with less access to wealth; we trust your discernment of how you personally fit into this global economic context.

    Profits from this course are shared between contributors and help us to continue to create meaningful content into the future.

  • Short of your personal displeasure with the content of the course and other unique cases (which we will consider deliberately if they arise) there are very few situations in which we might provide refunds. Please contact us connect@forthewild.world with any inquiries.

  • GUEST TEACHERS
    Geci Karuri-Sebina
    Mama V (formerly Eve Ensler)
    Sophie Strand
    Resmaa Menakem
    Orland Bishop
    Erin Manning 
    Mama Nef 
    Gogo Rutendo Lerato Ngara

    ARTISTS
    Ganavya
    Payam Yousefi
    Samora Pinderhughes
    Immanuel Wilkins 
    Shahzad Ismaily
    Rajna Swaminathan

    CURATOR / PRODUCER
    Jiordi Rosales

    FOR THE WILD NARRATION
    Ayana Young

    ILLUSTRATION
    Jia Sung

    AUDIO PRODUCTION
    Jackson Kroopf

    ADDITIONAL WRITING from For The Wild
    Julia Jackson

    DESIGN & LAYOUT
    Erica Ekrem

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The Syllabus


The course will include lectures by Báyò Akómoláfé, teachings by revered guests, live music from the original sessions, prayer, and embodied practices at the end of each episode to give texture to the text.

I. The Sensorium
On the process of becoming and the strange hospitality of failure, following a thesis of uncertainty.

  • Welcome by Ayana Young

  • Invitation by Jiordi Rosales

  • Introduction with Geci Karuri-Sebina

  • Lecture with Bayo Akomolafe

  • Practice with Jiordi Rosales


II. Dancing in the Afrocene: The Poetics and Promise of Decay
On how whiteness polices the cracks, and how imperative wellness triggers modern anxieties around uselessness.

  • Introduction with Bayo Akomolafe

  • Conversation between Bayo and Mama V (formerly Eve Ensler)

  • Lecture with Sophie Strand

  • Practice with Jiordi Rosales


III. White Syncopation
On co-becoming and the intra-active dynamism of the world.

  • Lecture with Bayo Akomolafe

  • Practice with Jiordi Rosales


IV. The Minor Gesture, the Paraterranean, and the Arachnean
A session of prayer, libation, and song—welcoming grief as a guiding force.

  • A Pause with Resmaa Menakem and Bayo Akomolafe 

  • A Prayer and Libation with Orland Bishop

  • Commentary and a Sung Prayer with Ganavya and collaborator Payam Yousefi

  • Conversation between Bayo and Erin Manning 

  • Closing with Mama Nef 

  • Practice with Jiordi Rosales


V. Hears in Red, Sees in Wet
On strange solidarities and gestures, and their capacity for different differences.

  • Introduction with Bayo Akomolafe

  • Introduction to Shahzad Ismaily’s music with Bayo and Ganavya 

  • Musical Interlude and Commentary with Shahzad Ismaily

  • Conversation between Geci Karuri-Sebina and Bayo

  • Conversation between Erin Manning and Bayo

  • Practice with Jiordi Rosales

VI. Ontofugitivity and Lines of Flight
On tracing the world in its becoming.

  • Introduction with Bayo Akomolafe

  • Music from Rajna Swaminathan introduced by Ganavya 

  • Lecture with Bayo

  • Practice with Jiordi Rosales

VII. Parallax
On how darkness holds complexity, and how our attentions hold space for the collective becoming.

  • Welcome by Geci Karuri-Sebina

  • Parallax with Bayo Akomolafe and Jiordi Rosales

  • Music from Samora Pinderhughes introduced by Ganavya 

  • Conversation and Prayer between Bayo and Orland Bishop

  • Practice with Jiordi Rosales

VIII. Prophecy
On the crossroads where beginnings end and endings begin.

  • Introduction with Bayo Akomolafe, Resmaa Menakem, Geci Karuri-Sebina

  • Prophecy from Bayo

  • Music from Immanuel Wilkins 

  • Closing Prayer with Gogo Rutendo Lerato Ngara

  • Practice with Jiordi Rosales