Political Science Colonialism & Post-colonialism
Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation
2022
- Publisher
- Knopf Canada
- Initial publish date
- Oct 2023
- Category
- Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Black Studies (Global), Indigenous Studies
-
Hardback
- ISBN
- 9781039009110
- Publish Date
- Oct 2023
- List Price
- $34.00
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Where to buy it
Description
Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas.
In November 2022, the first annual Alchemy Lecture took place at York University in Toronto, bringing four deep and agile writers from different geographies and disciplines into vibrant conversation on a topic of urgent relevance: humans and borders. Now, in these pages, that conversation is captured and expanded 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) writes: “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 logics: “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 anti-colonial 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 revelatory: a vision of the world as it is, and as it could be.
About the authors
Natalie Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, Mojave American poet, essayist, and linguist. She is the author of When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012) and Postcolonial Love Poem (2020).
Nadia Yala Kisukidi's profile page
Rinaldo Walcott is an associate professor at OISE, University of Toronto. His research and teaching is in the area of black diaspora cultural studies with an emphasis on queer sexualities, masculinity and cultural politics. He is the author of Black Like Who (1997); he edited Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (2000); and the co-editor Counselling Across and Beyond Cultures (2010).
