“Báyò Akómoláfé is a philosopher who is pushing us to think outside of every narrative we take for granted. In this text, he guides us to reconsider how we relate to the world—and to internalize the fact that earth and all of nature are alive, relating to us. Selah is an ancient Indigenous orientation, poured through Báyò’s trickster poetry to make for a fresh agitation.”
—adrienne maree brown, author of Pleasure Activism and Loving Corrections
Báyò Akómoláfé, our W.E.B. Du Bois Scholar-in-Residence, has published a new book through Ayin Press, Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader. Limited copies of the book will be available for purchase at Bayo and Nora Bateson’s event in Great Barrington, MA next weekend.
About Selah:
Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader presents a poetically arranged selection of Akómoláfé’s short-form writings, which draw inspiration from Édouard Glissant; Gilles Deleuze; Gregory Bateson; Octavia Butler; Fernand Deligny; Chinua Achebe; the adventures of Esu, the Yoruba monster-trickster and crossroads figure; and more. A tightly curated composition of aphorisms, anti-epiphanies, prose poems, and philosophical fragments, Selah invites readers into the thicket of Akómoláfé’s thought, weaving together threads of his most critically creative concepts—such as ontofugitivity, ecocognitive assemblage theory, parapolitics, and postactivism. Taking its title from an enigmatic Hebrew word that appears throughout the Book of Psalms—one that suggests a moment of ecstatic exclamation or musical notation—Selah is a book that can be read in an hour or studied for years, kept by your bedside or passed among friends like an open secret. For those already swimming in the depths of Akómoláfé’s language, as well as those encountering his dynamic body of work for the first time, Selah offers an accessible and ecstatic entry into a visionary thinker’s signature thought and poetics.
About the event:
Unnamed gathers two thinkers – Nora Bateson and Bayo Akomolafe – to sit at the edge. They gather not to explain. They gather not to solve. They gather to notice what trembles just before language coheres, and to ask: what forms of aliveness are stirring outside the logics of healing, justice, and progress?
The event will take place at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, MA on March 7th at 3PM. Tickets are sliding scale, $10-$100. Registration is for in-person attendance only, and a recording of the conversation will be available to all members of our eNewsletter shortly following the event.
We hope to see you in Great Barrington on March 7th for this special convergence of thought leaders.
Warm Wishes,
Staff of the Schumacher Center