We Will Dance with Mountains: VUNJA!

A Slow Study course with Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé

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.

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