This course is a series of lectures and practice prompts from our 2021 global course– We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks!– edited into a learning journey for you to explore from your home at your own pace.

We Will Dance With Mountains is a carnivalesque course in postactivism (a formulation of Bayo), a matter of fissures, fault lines, cracks, openings, seismic shifts, endings, and fugitive marronage. The course (often described as an expedition or a wild adventure by previous participants) is about recuperating our connections with a ‘world’ that can no longer be seen as dormant, mute and passive. It is about coming to new senses, and co-generating new practices of place-making in partnership with the more-than-human world. In short, the course is about becoming with-nesses. About what we do when hope gets in the way, when forward movement no longer leads to interesting places, when justice obstructs transformation, and when victory keeps us tethered in carceral dynamics.

Through curated sessions, shared explorations, emergent rituals, lectures, and side events, Into the Cracks! longs to push toward the unthought, the yet-to-be-tried, and the surprising, by exploring new nuances and complexities in the postactivism field summoned by Bayo Akomolafe.

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.

Additionally, the course weaves into the fabric of this iteration a post-nationalist ethos – a studied look at the failure of nation-states and the need for new political units that do not depend on the violence of statehood.

This iteration is about practice and cultivation, about not just talking about making sanctuary, but ‘doing’ it – about materializing a practical and modest politics of mutation, of responding differently, and of new cosmoperceptions.

GUEST TEACHERS
adrienne maree brown
Geci Karuri-Sebina
Joanna Macy
Makshya Tolbert
Vanessa Andreotti

ARTISTS
Ganavya
Ilu Oba
Penelope Baquero

MUSIC
Rajna Swaminathan

CURATOR / PRODUCER
Jiordi Rosales

EDITOR
Evan Tenenbaum

DESIGN / PUBLISHING
Ayana Young
Erica Ekrem
Francesca Glaspell
Julia Jackson

ILLUSTRATION
Jon Marro
Jia Sung

Dr. Bayo Akomolafe – a philosopher, psychologist, professor, and poet. He is a teacher and public intellectual renowned for his unconventional views on global crises, activism, and social change.

Bayo dreams of composing a “weird politics”, a postnationalist emancipatory network of making sanctuary as inquiry, a village of technologies for fugitives.

In 2014, Dr. Akomolafe was invited to be the Special Envoy of the International Alliance for Localization, a project of Ancient Futures (USA). He left his lecturing position in Covenant University, Nigeria to help build this Alliance. Bayo has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, where he taught on his own formulated concepts of ‘transraciality’ and postactivism. He has also taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and the University of Vermont, as an adjunct and associate professor, respectively. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (SAND).

Now living between India and the United States, Bayo is a father of Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi. He is married to EJ, his dear life-partner of Indian descent.

The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Bayo is a widely celebrated international speaker an award-winning 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. He is also the Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network. He is writing his third book about the spirituality and emancipatory lessons of the transatlantic slave journeys, called “The Times are Urgent, Let us Slow Down”.

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) 80-page We Will Dance With Mountains Digital Course Book with emergent curriculum, articles and artwork in PDF format
• Seven (7) Audio files in MP3 format with over five hours of explorative and provocative listening content
• Seven (7) Transcripts of the audio files 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 PDF and MP3 file types.
• The download is 186.1MB in file size

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.

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!)

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.