Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation

The first annual Alchemy Lecture brings four deep and agile writers from different geographies and disciplines into vibrant conversation on a topic of urgent relevance: humans and borders. Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation captures and expands those conversations 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 anticolonial 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.

Dele Adeyemo is an architect, creative director, and urban theorist who teaches at London’s Royal College of Art.

Natalie Diaz is a poet and the author of When My Brother Was an Aztec and Postcolonial Love Poem.

Nadia Yala Kisukidi is Associate Professor in Philosophy at Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University.

Rinaldo Walcott is Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies at the University of Buffalo.

Christina Sharpe is the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University.