The Alchemy Lecture

I haven’t been able to concentrate except in fits and starts. I try not to doom scroll. I try not to feel. But I scroll and feel and feel and feel.

But it has been a salve to know that tomorrow I’ll be in conversation with Phoebe Boswell, Cristina Rivera Garza, Saidiya Hartman, and Janaína Oliveira, each of whom will be presenting their own manifesto for the beautiful world. Mine is called Manifesto for Speculative Relations, and it is based on my current book project (more news soon). The Alchemy Lecture is organized by Christina Sharpe, in collaboration with Dionne Brand, York University and Knopf Canada. The project “is a multi-vocal model that brings together a constellation of thinkers and practitioners from different disciplines and geographies annually to think together and in public on the most pressing issues of our times.” These are indeed times when we need to think and act and feel together. I cannot say how humbling it is to have even been invited. My text is ready, though I’m not sure I am. At any rate, I’m en route and it will all unfold as it is meant to.

If you want to tune in, register here (it will be streamed).

We were all invited to write an 8,000 word manifesto, and then to share a portion of that at the event tomorrow. I sent in the following abstract, but what I’m going to do is read a portion of the introduction and then the section called “If/Then Statements for a Speculative Future”. The form of the if/then statement, purportedly a logical formula, allows me, I hope, to queerly and Indigenously (Indigiqueerly) inhabit the logics that are themselves foundational to settler colonialism. I want not to argue for our life, but to resonate in good relations.

Seriously, it would be great if you joined in, not just for my work, but that of the other stellar, brilliant, amazing panelists.

J

Abstract: This manifesto neither justifies nor argues for Indigenous life. Rather, it proposes a method of engaging with the restoration of Indigenous forms of relation, which is to say, with the enduring, dynamic praxes of reciprocal engagement with the beings and memories we hold and the worlds we traverse, in pursuit of a possible future in which life (all life) becomes possible. It is a dream for the future in spite of the ongoing brutality of colonial infrastructure, economic extraction, and historical erasure. It is a prayer offered with humility and gratitude to the ancestral relations that open up speculative possibilities for bodies reverberating in good relation. Speculation, thus, becomes part of the affective and epistemological work of a quotidian metaphysics grounded in Indigenous thought. Relationality, in turn, becomes the grounding force, the materialization, of an ethical approach to the past, present, and future that expands beyond the individual, towards another horizon. This is a manifesto for landing, grounding, and relating; for opening the body, in all its forms and transitions, towards an imperative mutuality, toward becoming, toward imbrication.