Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation

The exciting first annual Alchemy Lecture pulls four thinkers into vibrant conversation on a topic of urgent relevance: humans and borders. Unexpected, revelatory, mind-changing alchemy. With an introduction by Christina Sharpe.

In this groundbreaking inaugural Alchemy Lecture, four vital contemporary thinkers from different disciplines and geographies come together around the theme of Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation.
    This year's alchemists are a philosopher, an architect, a poet, and a cultural theorist—each deep and agile thinkers, on the cutting edge of contemporary thought. In their beautiful, insightful, passionate essays they think about the times we live in, the legacies of anti-colonial struggle, the future of the planet, and the textures of Black and Indigenous life. Braided together in this book, the essays speak to each other in multiple ways, creating something more, something deeper: a startling, revealing vision of the world as it is, and as it could be.
    Accompanied each year by a live on-stage event in partnership with York University, the Alchemy Lecture revolutionizes the form through the transformative interplay of ideas among the alchemists.

The Alchemy Lecture is a partnership between York University and Knopf Canada, organized by Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at York, CHRISTINA SHARPE. She is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being; Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects; and Ordinary Notes (Knopf Canada, April 2023).

DELE ADEYEMO (UK) is an architect, creative director, and urban theorist. He has taught at the Royal College of Art and is the recipient of the Journal of Architectural Educators' Inaugural Fellowship, the Canadian Centre for Architecture's Andrew Mellon Fellowship, and Het Nieuwe Instituut’s Research Fellowship. NATALIE DIAZ (US/Mojave/Akimel O’otham) was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California and is an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. She is the author of When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of the American Book Award, and Postcolonial Love Poem, which won a Pulitzer Prize. NADIA YALA KISUKIDI (France) is Associate Professor in philosophy at Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University. She specializes in French and Africana philosophy. She has also written a novel, La Dissociation. RINALDO WALCOTT (Canada) is Professor and Chair of Africana and American Studies at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of On Property and The Long Emancipation: Moving Toward Black Freedom.