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Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation
The first annual Alchemy Lecture brings four deep and agile writers from different geographies and disciplines into vibrant conversation on a topic of urgent humans and borders. Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation captures and expands those conversations in insightful, passionate ways. Architect, artist, and urban theorist Dele Adeyemo (UK/Nigeria) calls attention to the complexity of Black infrastructures, questioning how “the environments that surround us condition the possibility of our being.” Poet Natalie Diaz (US/Mojave/Akimel O’otham) “Like story, migration is the sensual movement of knowledge,” and asks, “What is the language we need to live right now?” Philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi (France) suggests there is no diasporic life “without the dynamics of fabulation, where we pass down, from generation to generation, the stories of our ancestors who walked barefoot for many months.” And cultural theorist Rinaldo Walcott (Canada) asks us to consider inheritances beyond white supremacist “What might it mean to live a life, if we can’t risk desiring and working towards utopia?” As each Alchemist considers the legacies of anticolonial struggle, the future of the planet, and the textures of Black and Indigenous life, their essays speak to each other in multiple ways, creating something startling and a vision of the world as it is, and as it could be.
- GenresNonfiction
160 pages, Hardcover
Published February 6, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 22, 2024
“Invention, then, is our inheritance too.”
August 6, 2026
This inaugural volume of Christina Sharpe’s “Alchemy Lectures” contains essays by Dele Adeyemo (UK/Nigeria), Natalie Diaz (US/Mojave), Nadia Yala Kisukidi (France), and Rinaldo Walcott (Canada).
The first two essays immediately engage in creative dialogue with each other. They both ask: What is the relation between a people and the land? Adeyemo traces how, in Nigeria — but not only in Nigeria — a people became separated from the land because of the slave trade, because of colonial rule, and more generally because of resource extraction. Reconnecting to the land is possible; for Adeyemo, this means journeying from England to his ancestral home near Lagos. There he reaffirms his cultural heritage (Yoruba) and forges new bonds of friendship and community. Diaz, in contrast, proposes a different relation between land and people. “We are the flesh-manifestations of land’s and water’s dreams”, she writes in her essay on Mojave myth. Reparative work is not needed because, in Diaz’s vision, the connection between people and land has never been broken.
I wondered at first if the difference between Adeyemo and Diaz could be explained away by their different relations to emigration; but both view migration less as dispersal and exile, and more as a “sensual movement of knowledge” (Diaz), and as the catalyst “to imagine other worlds” (Adeyemo). No, the difference seems to be about whether — to use language neither uses — we are living “after the Fall” (Adeyemo calls it “after the undoing”) or whether we are still “in the Garden”. And if we ARE still living “in the Garden”, then what kind of politics, what kind of ethics, does this perforce?
(The other two papers propose further possibilities: for Kisukidi, water — the Middle Passage — erases all connections to [home]land, giving genesis to an entirely new, creolized people; and for Walcott, walking represents both the means for migration, and constitutes a state of being in its own right: we are a people-in-motion who move across the land, more than originate from it or return to it.)
A great book is one that fills the reader’s head with as many questions — or more! — than it answers. This first volume of the “Alchemy Lectures” is precisely that kind of stimulating read.
The first two essays immediately engage in creative dialogue with each other. They both ask: What is the relation between a people and the land? Adeyemo traces how, in Nigeria — but not only in Nigeria — a people became separated from the land because of the slave trade, because of colonial rule, and more generally because of resource extraction. Reconnecting to the land is possible; for Adeyemo, this means journeying from England to his ancestral home near Lagos. There he reaffirms his cultural heritage (Yoruba) and forges new bonds of friendship and community. Diaz, in contrast, proposes a different relation between land and people. “We are the flesh-manifestations of land’s and water’s dreams”, she writes in her essay on Mojave myth. Reparative work is not needed because, in Diaz’s vision, the connection between people and land has never been broken.
I wondered at first if the difference between Adeyemo and Diaz could be explained away by their different relations to emigration; but both view migration less as dispersal and exile, and more as a “sensual movement of knowledge” (Diaz), and as the catalyst “to imagine other worlds” (Adeyemo). No, the difference seems to be about whether — to use language neither uses — we are living “after the Fall” (Adeyemo calls it “after the undoing”) or whether we are still “in the Garden”. And if we ARE still living “in the Garden”, then what kind of politics, what kind of ethics, does this perforce?
(The other two papers propose further possibilities: for Kisukidi, water — the Middle Passage — erases all connections to [home]land, giving genesis to an entirely new, creolized people; and for Walcott, walking represents both the means for migration, and constitutes a state of being in its own right: we are a people-in-motion who move across the land, more than originate from it or return to it.)
A great book is one that fills the reader’s head with as many questions — or more! — than it answers. This first volume of the “Alchemy Lectures” is precisely that kind of stimulating read.
December 15, 2024
picked this up because Christina Sharpe wrote the introduction, and was rewarded with 4 fascinating imaginative works that act on the real, ply its assuredness apart, leave us with the beating interior of human relation.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews