Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture 2023

Five Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas.

The second annual Alchemy Lecture was presented in November 2023 at York University to a sold out in-person audience and nearly one thousand live online viewers. Moderated by Dr. Christina Sharpe, the Alchemists—agile thinkers and practitioners working across a range of disciplines and geographies—convened to discuss their radical visions of the beautiful world, and the manifestos that may help to guide us there. Their treatises have been captured and luminously expanded in the pages of this book.

Cherokee Nation citizen and professor Joseph M. Pierce asserts that “[f]or this decolonial future to become possible, the guiding force must no longer be capital but relations.” Informed by her practice of “curation as care,” Brazilian film curator Janaína Oliveira evokes music and movement as a means toward this relationality: “it's almost by falling that you live. . . . The beautiful world dances the stumbles. The beautiful world dances dancing.” Kenyan-British visual artist Phoebe Boswell uses the space of a virtual gallery to ask, “If we burn down the institution, what happens next? Do we trust ourselves to know?” and gestures toward the possibility of this “as yet unlived, unexperienced thing.” Professor and MacArthur fellow Saidiya Hartman asks us to consider our capacity to burn, stating that “[P]ragmatism yields a profound tolerance of the unlivable.” And Mexican-American author Cristina Rivera Garza gives us the language of the future in the subjunctive, which “lays the groundwork for the irruption. . . . The subjunctive is the smuggler who crosses the border of the future bearing unknown cargo.”

Each Alchemist is intimately concerned with the shape of this cargo and our ability to bear its weight, together. Through these expansive, transformative essays, new ways of being are threaded and proposed, illuminating our path towards this possible beautiful world.

The Alchemy Lecture is a partnership between York University and Knopf Canada, organized by Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities 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.

PHOEBE BOSWELL's work is held in collections including the British Museum, LACMA, RISD, the BFI’s National Archive and the UK Government Art Collection. She was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School of Rome in 2019, and was Whitechapel Gallery’s 2022 writer-in-residence. SAIDIYA HARTMAN is the author of three books, including Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. A MacArthur Fellow, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar, and is currently a professor at Columbia University. JANAINA OLIVEIRA is a professor at the Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro and is the founder of the Black Cinema Itinerant Forum (FICINE). Oliveira has a PhD. in History and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Center for African Studies at Howard University. JOSEPH M. PIERCE is Associate Professor at Stony Brook University and author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910. He is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. CRISTINA RIVERA GARZA is the award-winning author of six novels, four collections of short stories, five collections of poetry, and four nonfiction books. She is the recipient of a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, and a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critic’s Circle Award for Criticism.