The pedagogical goal of this animist course is 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.
Blackness is the leitmotif of this course. This Blackness is neither a pan-Africanist dream associated with visions of eventual supremacy, repatriation and nationalist coherence nor an Afrocentric blackness, static and essential. It is not exclusively the identitarian adversarial concept associated with the identity dynamics in Afro-diasporic communities, and it is not a universal, disembodied promise of emancipation. In short, this Blackness is not a creature of the state or of justice. This Blackness, while secreted from the histories and stories and losses of black bodies, is the votive oil that marks the end of the “world”, seeks out cracks in the vast terrain of the Human (the Anthropos), and invites decolonial practices of fugitivity. This Blackness is discomfiting: an invitation to touch the threads of complicity without falling into the convenient traps of guilt; an invitation to map desire and struggle with failure. An invitation to struggle – not with the established powers we despise, but with our ironic entanglements with the sustenance of those very powers. An invitation to think.
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.
Here are some of the themes and questions we are likely to explore:
Blackness: 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?
Science as colonial force: As “heat domes” and heat waves become urgent climate events, short-circuiting air conditioners, reminding us of larger forces at work, global warming reasserts itself as a topic of concern during a time when our collective attention has been captured by a raging pandemic and the prospects of going outside, we revisit the epistemological strategy (scientific method) as the co-producer of contemporary anxieties and realities. While being careful about reductionisms such as an anti-science stance, in what ways do our modern forms of knowing – including the scientific method – determine and preserve how crises are made real to ‘us’? Why is it compelling to note that the ways we set about trying to understand and resolve our converging crises are also part of those crises?
Ecologies of trust: In a time of weaponized divisions and deep uncertainties, who do we trust? What do we consider trustworthy? How is trust stranger than we think?
Making sanctuary: How are we being invited into the work of making sanctuary? Who/what is called here? Who are the actors? And what are the promises of these seditious engagements?
The injustice of justice: Is justice enough? What if injustice in order to be itself requires justice to function well?
The shadows of recognition: In what ways do our strivings for recognition reinscribe the legitimacy of statehood and its undercurrents of violence?
Weird politics: In this age of the hyposubject – how might we conceive of, and practice, a ‘weird politics’?
Postactivism: Instead of asking “what do we do about the crisis?”, what does asking “what doings are we already imbricated with?” allow us to do, to notice, to try? How are the cosmovisions of modernity and liberal humanism ‘inadequate’ to the task of responding generously to the tragedies of contemporary politics and the crises facing the city? What do the concepts of postactivism, transraciality, becoming-black, and making sanctuary offer to our movements for a ‘better’ world? What new problems and shadows do they create?
Recovering from goodness: What if we are all embroiled in energetic currents of complicity with the matters we are most vehemently opposed to? What kinds of ethical formulations spring from a rejection of rectitude and a consideration of ‘inclinations’ as fugitive postures for end-times?
Braiding whiteness into chromatic strands of surprise: In what ways do our attempts to dismantle whiteness constitute a reinscription of whiteness, and how might a queering of power and identity disrupt the ways we fall into carceral dynamics with dominant and hegemonic bodies?
Candomblé: This Afro-diasporic religion assembles queer figures to mark/make home while its adherents gestate in a foreign place. In these times when home no longer feels welcoming, could the practices of Candomblistas inspire a politics of inquiry at sites of rupture?
An ecopsychology of trauma: If the ‘human’ is dislocated, broken open, can we still conveniently tether trauma to human experiences or reduce it to anthropocentric events? In what sense is a new ‘psychology’ – inescapably political – desired today?
Queer power and speculative strategies for the hyposubject: From acephalous protists making intellectual moves, to telepathic slaves conducting marronage and archetypal gods hiding in the ordinary, is power as controlled and as scarce as our knowledge-making practices tell us, or is realism limited? How is magic a matter of decoloniality? How is fiction a strategy of the fugitive and the hyposubject? How do we move towards totally new im/possibilities given the ways our justice-seeking performances fall into the traps of the impoverished familiar?
How do we collectively weave new temporalities of decolonial practice? What would it take to create a modest local fugitive practice and network of sharing during these strange times? A postnationalist ecstasy? What would it take to move ‘beyond’ critique and cancellations (without dismissing these as ‘evil’ or ‘wrong’) towards creation and conjuration (without constituting these as arrivals or final resolutions)?
Peace: At a time when conflicts and wars trouble international commitments to peace and stability, we want to examine the nature of these commitments, and if we can continue to think about peace in the same ways during a pandemic-distressed Anthropocene. For instance, is there hope for peace in the Middle East? In Africa? What does that look like, and what particular constraints work to reinforce violence? What does it mean for us to desire to “get back to normal” when the normal harbors violent secrets of its own?
Dance! (nothing to add here that has anything to do with words!)
