Articles

“…I don’t want to advocate purity, or the tyranny of re-wilding, as if we could. But I do want us to account for our relationship with nature. How are our ‘performances of nature’ as you said, hurting other beings? Given the premises of co-emergence, relationality, interbeing, what kind of response can be formed? What does this knowledge ask of us? If we are not to be dichotomous about good and bad, what is the alternative that won’t lead us into a moral relativism that accepts the harm being done as something blameless, unaccountable or even acceptable? And what response would promote accountability without purity, without moral righteousness and without some reified goodness? What process can get us engaged in a relationship with responsibility in a world so ‘queer’ and ‘preposterous’ as this?”

I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to be here today – and thankful to all the persons who made this happen. I am particularly thankful that such a place like this exists. It must be wonderful to devote one’s energies to a cause one believes in, and be supported in one’s journeys of expression.

A serious response to President Donald Trump’s ‘shithole’ remarks about African immigrants [Warning: There are some big words here. Not the best words like yours, but big words nonetheless]

What is that thin place that exists between words? Rumours of which are heard in a long-drawn sigh? That’s where I want to live. That’s my home.

M. C. Escher once said that, “Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.”

Commencement Keynote Address to Pacifica Graduate Institute, Class of 2021

One of the stickiest misconceptions endemic to the modern condition is the notion of the watchmaker; it is the idea that we are more or less rational decision-makers – and that though this steady stream of cold logic and precise selfhood is often interrupted by the eddies of irrational emotive states (much like the intricate mechanism of a wristwatch often goes wrong and needs tinkering), ‘proper’ human experience is fundamentally rational, calculated and ‘internally’ regulated.

Here's a short story that echoes our contemporary quests for solutions, for final grounds, and uncontested spaces. It's a parable on activism, on meeting shadows, on the queerness of the universe, and the irony of being alive.

It was something I heard one dissident professor say when I was an undergraduate studying psychology in a Nigerian university. He didn’t quite say it; he whispered it.

Tonight, I hold your little head against my flat chest. I am dancing with you as your dangling feet rub against my belly – the place where well-developed abdominal muscles should be, but isn’t.

Dedicated to those who are putting their bodies on the line to protect the voiceless, the invisible and the occluded – and to my ‘father-uncle’, Engineer Tokunbo Obayan, who passed away a few days ago.

As if in jest of the overwrought standards of ‘debating’ we were subjected to as school-going kids, whereby we would be made to curtsy before an animated audience of wide-eyed parents at end-of-year school events – telling them why teachers were ‘better’ than farmers (or vice versa), my friends and I often came up with our own equally silly corollaries.

There is a swirling, polyvocal community of celebration and voices around us.

In this (very, very) long essay, Bayo Akomolafe investigates the work and contributions of “postactivism” in our unique times by thinking about the nature of science and its products, what we call climate change, the myriad organizations we invent to frame the phenomenon, and the bricolage of capacities and response-abilities that emerges from realizing that climate collapse is not a problem to be solved, but a barely-heard invitation to die well and fail creatively.

How are we collectively improvising a ‘new story’ about learning? (This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge on July 2016, available online: ‘Education, Learning and the Transformation of Development‘)

Sanctuary as Spiritual Companionship in a Time of Hopelessness and Climate Chaos‍ – for Spiritual Directors International (SDI). In this multi-form essay, Bayo Akomolafe weaves together a different understanding of spirituality and the sacred, one he suspects is vital if we are to collectively meet the challenges posed by the Anthropocene. Thinking through the ethics of the ‘relocated god of the Anthropocene’ compels us to reframe our relationships with the planet, and invites another sense of what the familiar practice of spiritual companionship could be about. Bayo’s thesis of the ‘sanctuary’ situates an interdisciplinary, decolonial gesture towards repositioning ourselves in a milieu of collapse. In the first part of the essay, Akomolafe sets the stage with an analysis of negative theology, the mystical traditions of apophasis, and how these reconfigure climate science and the Anthropocene. In the second part, Akomolafe dives into the implications of this treatment of the “world as imbued with god” for spiritual companionship and submits a manuduction in form of a strategy for ‘sanctuary’.

“How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” – Niels Bohr

When famed New Zealander psychologist, Dr Paul Spong, was first invited by the University of British Columbia to study the sensory apparatus of killer whales at the Vancouver Aquarium, he no doubt thought his time with the cetaceans would be like his other experiments in the laboratory.

The ocean never reaches the shore. There is no simple arrival here; that’s an inadequate portrayal of what is happening. Instead, the ocean enacts the shore. It happens the other way around too – in one single move. The shore performs the ocean. By acting as cleaning agent, the shore characterizes the ocean; and by the mereness of its complexity, the ocean creates shorelines. The heavens we seek are secreted by our own longings and performative quests for a final, static home. We want to get ‘there’ – whether ‘there’ is a beautiful techno-utopic world, or a more just arrangement that works for the many and not just the few. But there is no ‘there’; there is only a yearning, an aching, a struggle for ‘there’ – and in the struggle, we change.

One of the most persistent triumphs of our modern way of life is the fostered impression that there is really no other successful way to thrive, and that our proud skyscrapers, impersonal healthcare systems, bland paved roads, lonely office cubicles, glitzy shopping malls, genetically modified foods, heavily standardized school tests, arbitrary taxes, and electrified state borders truly represent an advanced way to organize our experiences – an inevitably superior model of being.

A letter to my son about the Libyan Slave Markets

The reader should be aware that this is not your typical review. As a world-weary academic, disillusioned by the failed promises of the ivory tower and its pretensions to inevitability, I think I know full well how reviews ought to proceed. Little wonder Steve Wasserman wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, “The pabulum that passes for most reviews is an insult to the intelligence of most readers.” Cast in the wild winds of my subjective climate, without the pillars of convention to anchor me to the ‘proper,’ I attempt a thematic, deeply personal and experiential survey of Charles’ story.

Something spectacular happened on the 28th day of May twenty sixteen – a breach in the order of things. A bleeding rift in the sky.

An Open Letter to CONCORD-DEEEP, CIVICUS, GCAP, Civic Society Organizations and Activists Working for a ‘Better’ World. This article is co-authored by Bayo Akomolafe and Marta Benavides. With deep gratitude for the stories of transformation now emerging across the planet, and for the renewed hope we share for a different kind of world, we greet you from our hearts.

What shines brighter than a star? A failed one.

Pokémon Go is not just a game; it’s a vote of no confidence on reality.

We’ve gotten so used to the convenient, routine, knee-jerk answers provided for us that we no longer remember the questions that once bore them.

Intra-thinking and the material immanence of intuition; World Goodwill Seminar, London, ‘From Intellect to Intuition’

Did you see those beautiful membranous symphonies in their yawning? In their curling inflections? Did you feel the ancient and abiding yearning in their exuberant display of colours and patterns?

The fire hissed softly as another piece of coal collapsed into white ash, overcome by the steadying flames. Still African to my bones, and quite used to warmer climates, I was grateful for the heat the juvenile bonfire emitted. But even its heat was no match for the wintry sternness and eeriness of the ‘Wodge’, Schumacher’s Forest School site in Northwoods, Dartington. Except for the amber glow that danced uneasily across the faces of the cohorts in the circle, the whole place was dark and silent, with only tall proud trees and the bits of sky that fell through their interconnecting branches that bore witness to this hushed ring of seekers.

Perhaps there are few who haven’t heard about Plato or his famous allegory of the cave. The influential 5th century Greek philosopher – whose commitments to strengthening the nascent intellectual traditions of philosophy as a systematic means to enlightenment – had a famous distrust of human perception.

We invented the modern ethics of philanthropy and poverty eradication to escape the need to change a money system that is fueled by the very existence of poverty and scarcity.

Keynote Speech, 'Seeking Connections Across Generations' for Spiritual Directors International at the Seattle Marriott Bellevue

A while ago, I realized with some surprise that I never experienced the anger, rebelliousness and adolescent angst that characterize teenage years; I was the perfect traditionalist – the clean-cut kid with the shy tee-shirt, two books in hand, and a stuttered prayer on my lips when I had the unfortunate occasion of running into a horde of girls.

Let me tell you a story about how the world began. I promise you the story is not completely false.

“It’s really easy”, the diminutive pastor’s wife said to me, her hands folded into a prayerful clump of subdued exasperation.

A Rebel reflects on Otherness and the Meaning of Mandela

For as long as I can remember, I have always been white. Like you. I just didn’t know it.

Bayo Akomolafe of Nigeria delivered this talk at the 2013 Economics of Happiness Conference on March 16th in Byron Bay, NSW, Australia. In it, he discusses the use of trans-local networks created via social media and other initiatives as one possible way to create a trans-local movement which can help to shift the paradigm. Originally posted on postgrowth.org

I am not American, but I am a parent. However I don’t need to be an American or even a parent to know the unbearably acrid taste of a mother’s sorrow, of a parent’s loss, of a partner’s feeling of emptiness after a loved one is snatched away too soon.

Revisiting health as entanglement with the nonhuman world

The Liminality of Justice and Reconciliation in Canada

Around the world, going to schooling is such a normal part of growing up today that to question its legitimacy, to even hesitate a bit, is to attract blank stares and harsh criticism.

Yesterday, holed up in a stubborn chair somewhere in the reception of this hotel, I was casting about for an appropriate title for my speech. I knew what I thought I’d like to say, what I’d like to conduce to today’s rather unwieldy discourse on global transformation, but I wasn’t comfortable with the ways my mind sought to frame it.

Come Alethea,[i] let me tell you a story about monsters! Not just the ones that hide under the bed, but the ones that inhabit the familiar. I’m pretty sure that by the time I’m through, you’d see why Dada believes that we need to befriend the monstrous in response to the challenges of our times.

Let us acknowledge these difficult feelings of loss, these terrifying thoughts that are suddenly very alive in the air today. It is as if Pandora’s Box has not only been emptied out into the world, but that it has been mass-produced and spread out to the corners of all lands. Hope now seems in short supply. We are undone.

Re-visioning the commons as ‘commoning’ in a more-than-human world [1] – Speech delivered at the Peer Value Conference in Amsterdam

In many non-western indigenous settings, the shaman’s home sits at the edge of all things, just on the periphery of the village – in the shushed distance. Children pick up their paces when they come close, and their parents scold them rudely if they look too long.

Keynote Speech at North American Permaculture Convergence in Hopland, California

Leading is not about taking unilateral action – leading is not even about being the first, or being certain, or being influential, or being knowledgeable.

I had a fascinating time swimming in the waters I am used to: discussing quantum physics (the which-slit experiment and the nature of light) and the concept of indeterminacy by Bohr, stitching together a narrative about the inadequacy of neoliberal capitalism, connecting those ideas with Dama gift culture practices from Mali, and demonstrating that the world is alive and agentic and promiscuous – far from being the dead, passive realm of resources our sciences make it out to be.

This past year, on an October afternoon, we carefully secured the last piece of luggage to our truck, said a half-smiling, teary-eyed goodbye to our house, and drove away from our University home.

My fascination with American politics continues.

In the beginning, he somewhat leaps at you – seemingly out of nowhere. With a distant knock on your door, he interrupts your playful questions, your guileless grazing, and seamless gaze. Innocent and welcoming, you open the door – asking him to join your festival of questions within. He will.

The screen froze as yet another announcement crept into the cabin from the overhead speakers and through my headphones. I swore beneath my breath.

I recently exercised my reality-alchemist prowess by creating a phrase to describe a concept I have longed mused upon. I am not sure it ‘explains’ anything – but it does give a picture about we valorize the ‘real’ and fail to heed alternatives to our versions of reality. Let me proudly introduce you to the ‘cinema-house effect’; but, before I let you in on what it means in my flippant lexicon of mad metaphors, I shall provide some context.

In the part of the world where I grew up, we regularly made appointments to meet with God once every week. We opened his vast chambers on Sundays, and into those celebrated walls we flocked like black sheep longing to be shorn of our excess wool.

When I turned 18, I was serenaded with little wrapped boxes of surprises, birthday cards and the one artifact that was existentially crucial to the celebratory proceedings: cake. I had lost my father three years earlier, so he wasn’t around to usher me to the vaunted gates of adulthood, to see me take my first manly steps into the heart of things.

Silhouetted by an iridescent blur of running children, dancing draperies, and rhythmic conversations, my wife Ej and I inched our way toward an old man sitting quietly by an anonymous stack of coloured papers and abandoned sandals.

What am I talking about when I talk about "postactivism"?

"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers..."

Not the head. Not even the heart. But the head wobble.

Resistance in an entangled and entangling world means that victory often reinscribes what we hope to escape.

Sometimes the image - the stories we tell about the world - become our prison.

The very act of choosing is the creation of both the options and the chooser.

If the 'Anthropos' - the colonial world-making machine implicated in the production and flattening of ecologies - is a cartographic project, then losing one's way is a breakthrough.

If the 'Anthropos' - the colonial world-making machine implicated in the production and flattening of ecologies - is a cartographic project, then losing one's way is a breakthrough.

The public is an apparatus that measures out the "individual" by collapsing "its" wave-like indeterminacy to the locateability of the citizen. And that's when things get sticky.

"Get up from the couch."

The recent elections in Nigeria, conducted over anxious weeks of pain and chaos, suggest that one doesn't need complicated plots and technologies to rig an election. All you need is a people thoroughly jaded - and white paint. Lots of it.

Is there an anthropocentricity at work in the emphatic attribution of artificiality to new AI phenomena?

Courage is a disability.

Could "Barbenheimer" - the cultural phenomenon celebrating two cinematic moments that could not be any different - be more theoretically significant than its flat virality notices?

Is it possible that we are trapped within an anthropocentrism that can no longer shoulder the explanatory burden of an animist world increasingly out of reach?

Could happily-ever-afters be getting in the way of something more exquisite than a good ending?

"Where do you stand?"

To be correct is to lose the plot.

Violence is not merely a thing that happens; it is a politics within which we come to make sense of the thing that happens.

Perhaps nihilism is a strange sort of caring.

At the shorelines of a waning year, Bayo Akomolafe 'makes' a prophecy that alchemizes the troubles of our modern moments and the upheavals of cracks into a sermon for more promising futures.

...once in a while, the shockwaves of syncopation travel through the city, upsetting the neat order of the senses, upturning the aesthetics of the polite.

This is not a review of the Apple Vision Pro. I don't do reviews that well.

The citizen is under siege. Changes are shifting outside the words.

What addressing philanthropy’s colonial legacies asks of this moment

Kyah is teaching me to look again.

Doors behave.