***FREE Public Event*** Postactivism in the Afrocene

“The Afrocene tells a different story, one of irreparable loss and the surprising generativity of desolation. More than sequestering carbon or getting back to normal, more than restoring looted objects from western museums to their former colonies, more than seeking justice, more than apologizing for the last 400 years, the Afrocene invites us to accompany the trickster.”

   – Bayo Akomolafe

But what might this mean – if it means anything at all – and, if it does suggest a practical politics, what might “accompanying the trickster” look like?  

Poet, philosopher, psychologist, and professor, Bayo Akomolafe joins host Helen Nde and the Interintellect community to discuss the Afrocene –  what Bayo describes as the “black poetics of the radical exquisite” which challenge the static hegemony of the Anthropocene as the increasingly dominant way of conceiving our troubling times, as the established framework to imagine how we engage the upheavals of these moments, and as the grounds upon which we might address the irruption of cracks in our geo-socio-political landscapes. 

In this discussion, we will think further about what Bayo means by the “Afrocene”.

We will explore:

• How it draws attention to a “milieu of monsters” proliferating in cracks.
• The kind of politics gestured at in Bayo’s conception of “postactivism” and the practice of “ch(i)asmagraphy”.
• How it privileges other modes of sensing, and invites something else beyond solutionism.
• Why – in these moments of political impasses, technoscientific bottlenecks, and civilizational troubles – it is time to “inhabit the monster”. 

Suggested Reading:

1. We have met the monster, and it is us
2. What I Mean By Postactivism 
3. Pagan insurgencies and Com-post Humusities 
4. The Image and its Caricature 
5. Making Sanctuary: Hope, Companionship, Race and Emergence in the Anthropocene
6. What climate collapse asks of us (Long Read)
7. Black Lives Matter, but to whom? (Long Read)
8. Coming Down to Earth (Long Read)

More of Bayo’s Writing 

Sign up for updates about Bayo’s course “We Will Dance with Mountains (2023)”

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