Dancing with the Water Spirit: Blackness as Decolonial Undoing of the Anthropos
A session with Bayo Akomolafe (Chief Curator of The Emergence Network, Speaker, Author, and Yoruba Poet)
About this Session
In this talk, inspired by the Igbo Landing event of 1803 — when 75 enslaved bodies stolen across the Atlantic from present-day Nigeria arrived at the borders of the state of Georgia and resisted their captors by marching right back into the waters — Bayo Akomolafe weaves an aesthetic of fugitive freedom and magic fit for a pandemic-inflected crisis-ridden Anthropocene. Referring to magic as the 'embarrassing excessiveness of the profane and the ordinary,’ Akomolafe hints at an intelligent and animated more-than-human world and invites a global marronage away from the shrunken spaces of modernity and its politics — now overwhelmed by the extent of its indebtedness to the material world.