We Will Dance With Mountains: VUNJA!

A Slow Study course with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe

THE SYLLABUS

I
The Sensorium

Geci opens the course. Bayo emphasizes that the course itself is a process of becoming. The thesis is uncertainty. How might we feed it? How might we remember the strange hospitality of failure? 

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

This session wonders about the ways whiteness polices the cracks, and how wellness and the imperative of wholeness operationalizes modern anxieties about demise, disability, and 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

We are in a processual co-becoming of things. Nothing is static, and things are not predetermined, rather, as Bayo explains, the world is intra-actively dynamic. 

Lecture with Bayo Akomolafe
Practice with Jiordi Rosales

IV
The Minor Gesture, the Paraterranean, and the Arachnean

Let this session of prayer, libation, and song wash over you. Let your grief guide you. 

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

What kinds of strange solidarities and gestures can make 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

Let us trace together – not to locate where we are, not to arrive at a product, but to touch 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

How does darkness hold complexity? How do our consciousnesses, our attentions hold spacefor the collective, for what is becoming of all of us? 

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

 Join us at this 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

Suggested Financial
Contributions

 We offer two sliding scales based on your relative financial standing. 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.

The different levels marked by Friend, Supporter, and Partner do not convey any material differences in your experience. They simply mark different contribution amounts within each scale.

As you decide what amount to pay, we ask that you not only consider your present-day financial situation governed by income but also factors including:
– Historical discrimination faced by your peoples
– Your financial wealth… Do you have retirement savings?
– Your access to income and financial wealth, both current and anticipated… How easily could you earn more income compared to other people in your country and in the world? Do you expect to receive an inheritance?
– People counting on your financial livelihood including dependents and community members
– The socio-economic conditions of your locale (Relative to other places in your country and in the world)

Sliding Scale 1

– For people with medium to high access to wealth in the global context –
As a general rule of thumb: Middle class and Upper/Owning class people in the Global North; Anyone with investments, retirement savings, or who expects an inheritance

Friend $150 USD
Supporter $250 USD
Partner $350 USD

Sliding Scale 2

– For people with lower access to wealth in the global context –
As a general rule of thumb: Most people in the Global South and people who’ve been systematically disadvantaged or are Poor/Working class in the Global North

Friend $50 USD
Supporter $75 USD
Partner $100 USD

The pedagogical goal of this animist course is to theorize the breaks, to stay there, to serve those disarticulated by, distressed with, and disenchanted from, dominant politics and its counteroffensive activisms – those tired of usual ways of speaking, exhausted with forced compliance, and longing for other ways of becoming response-able to these interesting times. The course offers reframes inspired by traditions and insights and readings that present a fugitive break from the usual. In other words, the curricular focus of this course is to put wounds to work, to treat them as portals and cracks connected with larger territorial shifts instead of matters to be eradicated by a dominant mode of being. 

But the aim of the course is not helping people “get it” or arrive at a fixed consensus – the aim is not even to find solutions to our problems; the unique invitation of this festival is to compose a celebratory trans-local politics of going invisible, a postnationalist/posthuman aesthetic of meeting the world differently, a falling-apart-together, a coming alive in another way. We want to track new senses, share recipes of eating and being eaten, invite new smells and sights.

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe (again surrounded and often prompted by the silent genius of his children’s noisemaking!) will be the chief instigator curating themes and teachings.

Themes and questions to explore:

• 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."  - The Minor Gesture

• 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.

We call this village, ‘Vunja’ – a Swahili word for ‘dancing in the breaks.’

We Will Dance with Mountains is an aesthetics of the endtime, an exploration of Dr. Akomolafe’s postactivism as a pragmatic politics of rethinking accountability, social justice, and responsivity in the ruins of modernity. This is not a course premised on gaining mastery, getting to the point, achieving consensus, healing trauma, winning enlightenment, speaking truth to power, raising consciousness, or building on progressive ideals. This is an unspeakable traveling together from points-of-no-return, an ungrammatical vocation in becoming crippled together, a walking into Dunbar Creek together, a falling-apart-together, a tracing of new lines of errancy, a fugitive ethnographic study of the hidden worlds lurking behind white sight, a decoration of the walls of the cracks, a cultivating of bewilderment together, and a sitting-together-until-something-happens.