There’s a feeling in the air. A sense that all is not well. But streaming alongside our discomfort is the hint of an opening: a minor gesture, a trickster adrift, whispering that this is the time to get lost.
2024 is perhaps the most politically charged year in recent history, with more than half of the world’s human population voting in highly-charged national elections. The dramatic upheavals and uncertainties of our times leave us feeling locked in, pinned down in a death spiral: a holding pattern that secretes the very violences from which it purports to protect us.
Where do we go when we leave the voting booths? If speaking truth to power renders us captive to its calculations, what else is there to do? If our activisms, our loud solidarities, and our anti-colonial efforts serve chiefly to reproduce problematic patterns, then what else is to be done, to be said, to be unsaid?
Down By the Riverside: A Town Hall is inspired by a cosmo-vision of power; one not reducible to human agency, electoral politics, techno-bureaucratic resolutions, or activist victories. This event is part of the broader three-day “Vunja! A Gathering of the Seeds.”
As 2024 W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow at the Schumacher Center, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe will convene a gathering led by nine stellar scholar-activists, weaving together perspectives inflected by decolonial, post-humanist, and Black studies, among others.
Orland Bishop, Resmaa Menakem, Victoria Santos, Erin Manning, Saidya Hartman, V (formerly Eve Ensler), Nora Bateson, Tiokasun Ghosthorse, and Sara King will join Bayo in conversation. This confluence will merge in Du Bois’ historic home town of Great Barrington and will be live streamed to audiences around the world. (W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that he was “born by a golden river,” referring to the Housatonic River that runs through the Berkshires.)
Where: Hosted at Saint James Place in Great Barrington; Live stream tickets available below | When: 1:30 – 5:30 PM Eastern
LIVE STREAM LINK: https://www.youtube.com/live/PMOKjXp6Ftk?si=tAp5Nuk-QNjdVIlh
Note: The Town Hall is limited by Saint James’ capacity, and while in person tickets have sold out, there are unlimited sign-ups to the livestream.
Together, this group will join attendees in a process of embodied inquiry: invoking a sense of the political, of an otherwise, of the non-legible. This Town Hall is a walking-by-the-edges, a drifting-along-the-sides. This is about a collective marking of the impoverishment of justice, a shared acknowledgement of the failures of modernity, and a seeking after a milieu beyond critique and contestation to creation and experimentation.
Bayo Akomolafe calls this irruption of the erotic within moral spaces and clearings a ‘becoming-black’: an indwelling-with the excess of the already established, a drifting-away from the surveillance of the useful. It is risking exposure: not a choice per se, but an enablement, a gift of circumstance, always involving ‘the monstrous.’ Becoming black is a choreography of the monstrous. It is not about taking on Black skin; it is not a ‘right’ of ‘Black’ people (even though the material histories, social hierarchies, and situations of some who identify as ‘Black’ might mean certain heritages of posture are easier to access). Instead, it refers to all the ways in which bodies are no longer beholden to the logic of the patterns that hold them, all the forces that spirit us away from the edges.
Come inquire alongside these scholars, elders, and storytellers. We will linger at the edges — at the syncopated shorelines of the riverside — to listen, to feel, and to be moved.
