Bayo Akomolafe | Becoming-black: On White Syncopation at the End of the World

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ABOUT THE LECTURE: The Yorubas have a proverb: "In order to find your way, you must lose it." In this talk, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe draws from the transatlantic excursions of the Yoruba deities known as orishas and the concept of 'ase' to reframe blackness as a more-than-human, counterhegemonic flow of indeterminacy that "maddens the imperial individual" and teases apart the project of stability from an "external within." This coming-apart is white syncopation, also known as becoming-black. "Not a becoming 'Black', but a becoming 'black'. A becoming-monster. A losing one's way. A veering off-course. A becoming-imperceptible....[which] is not necessarily about building new institutions, winning legislative victories, receiving reparations, or gaining greater representation and visibility." Akomolafe suggests that this becoming-black is the condition for the emergence of an autistic politics that cradles 'the minor gesture' (Erin Manning) as a response to contemporary crises.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Bayo Akomolafe, Ph.D., is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, /These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home/ and /We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak/. He is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the postactivist course/festival/event, 'We Will Dance with Mountains'. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia). In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute. He has also been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023). He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), among other recognitions.
On the Entanglement Project at Duke-FHI: Climate catastrophe cannot be thought outside of the context of empire and the forms of racialization central to global capitalism, including the degradation of peoples, ecosystems and lands facilitated by states in the global North. Threats to the very existence of the planet and all its inhabitants result from this genocidal global development project, yet the effects are being borne more grotesquely by those who live in the global South. Environmental justice efforts that overlook the longue durée trajectory of the historical operations of capitalism, and the raciality that affixes a disproportionate burden onto ex-colonized areas of the planet and its inhabitants, fall short of pointing us in a direction of systemic and just change.
The Climate Change, Decolonization and Global Blackness Lab seeks to explore the linkages among three pivotal and simultaneously occurring catastrophes-criminality, displacement, pandemics-toward developing a set of principles regarding decolonization as an ethical approach to climate change. ‪@dukeuniversity‬ ‪@FranklinHumanities‬