These Wilds Beyond Our Fences

by Bayo Akomolafe

  3Rebekah Sheldon, “Form/Matter/Chora: Object Oriented Ontology and Feminist New Materialism,” in Richard Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 195..

  Letter 3

  1Anuradha Mascarenhas, “Sex Determination: An Old Law, a New Debate,” The Indian Express, February 4, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/y8ph7hg5..

  2Susan Hekman, The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010)..

  3Casalini, “Materialist Bent,” 137–38..

  4Ibid., 142..

  5Samantha Frost, “The Implications of the New Materialisms for Feminist Epistemology,” in Heidi E. Grasswick, Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge (New York: Springer, 2011), 69–84..

  6Ibid..

  7Fien Adriaens, “Post Feminism in Popular Culture: A Potential for Critical Resistance?” Politics and Culture 4 (2009), http://tinyurl.com/y947tgr3..

  8Perhaps the fluidity of parkour—the free-running discipline that conditions the human agent to be able to skirt and traverse boundaries and obstacles—could serve as a figure for postmodernism in its rejection of rejection..

  9Adriaens, “Post Feminism.”.

  10Jodi Dean writes of communicative capitalism in her essay “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics” (Cultural Politics 1:1 [2005], 51), describing our postmodern conditions of fetishized rapidity and the expense of political groundings: “The fantasy of abundance leads to a shift in the basic unit of communication from the message to the contribution. The fantasy of activity or participation is materialized through technology fetishism. The fantasy of wholeness relies on and produces a global both imaginary and Real.”.

  11Hekman, Material of Knowledge, 3..

  12Iris van der Tuin, “New Feminist Materialisms,” Women’s Studies International Forum 34 (2011), 273..

  13Naturecultures is Donna Haraway’s neologism to show that nature is not a thing apart from culture, but already impacted by and impactful on culture.

  14Once someone asked me if I believed in God and if I had proof—unshakable proof—that could refute His existence. I told him that I didn’t believe in “belief,” or rather “belief as arrival,” and that I wasn’t sure how to characterize my relationship with the notion or concept of God anymore … or if there was even the possibility of naming that relationship. I told him that I do not have a watertight argument to back up my “status,” but that whatever “I” was, was inexhaustible. Like Graham Harman notes, it’s not the case that conceptual shifts occur because a profound argument has been provided; people move on because the problem or the question ceases to be interesting any longer. The question—“Does God exist?” or even “Which God exists?”—is in that sense uninteresting to me. It just doesn’t have that much of a hold on me any longer, any more than the notion of origins still grips a quantum physicist who understands that time isn’t linear … stretching from some distant beginning to an unheralded future. On the other hand, embodiment frightens me. Seeing how things assume different shapes, seeing how things differ from other things—that’s very interesting to me. The old “pagans” who loved chemistry and dabbled in mixtures and perverse things—that’s a form of spirituality that seems more at home with my explorations. Having said that, I do not presume that focusing on emergence or materialism represents some evolutionary turn—and that we must leave the question of deities behind. They are not suddenly fossils left in the wake of our theoretical sophistications. The question of god or God or goddesses is part of our emergence, and will always—I suspect—play some role or the other in what our species strives to grasp. Our beliefs will, however, always be provisional; we will never arrive. And that’s maybe a good thing. Likewise, new materialisms are not accusatory successors of the previous..

  15Frost, “Implications,” 74..

  16Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28:3 (2003), 801.

  17Casalini, “Materialist Bent,” 138–39..

  18Ibid., 138..

  19Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 4–5..

  20I like this word transpose, meaning “to switch places,” “to shift location.” To exchange, but in a sense that is secretory and orgasmic and boundary-corroding. Those fearful that the idea of a “material turn” might reaffirm the dualism and representationalism inherent in “successor epistemologies” could perhaps think of a material transposition, where the implication is not of succession and tyranny over the “previous” but of dynamic movement and hyphenated encounters..

  21Karen Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,” Derrida Today 3:2 (2010), 255. doi:10.3366/E175485001000813..

  22Ibid., 256–57..

  23X. Y. Zou, Lei J. Wang, and Leonard Mandel, “Induced Coherence and Indistinguishability in Optical Interference,” Physical Review Letters 67:3 (1991), 318–21..

  24Mike May, “The Reality of Watching,” American Scientist 86:4 (July–August 1998)..

  25Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway..

  26There’s a good story about Craig Lewis by Carrie Feibel, “Heart with No Beat Offers Hope of New Lease on Life,” NPR, June 13, 2011, http://tinyurl.com/6hyjrox..

  27Frost, “Implications,” 70..

  28Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,” E-flux 75 (September 2016), http://tinyurl.com/ycrw63wf..

  29Brian Onishi, “Terror and Terroir: Porous Bodies and Environmental Dangers,” Trespassing Journal 6 (Winter 2017), http://trespassingjournal.com/?page_id=1022..

  30Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.

  31Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,” in Renée R. Curry and Terry L. Allison, eds., States of Rage: Emotional Eruption, Violence, and Social Change (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 199..

  Letter 4

  1Andrew Walker, “The White Priestess of ‘Black Magic,’” BBC News, September 10, 2008, http://tinyurl.com/58bhg8..

  2Ankita Dwivedi Johri, “Africans attacked in Delhi: Tracing the Faultlines of Open Racism and Distrust,” The Indian Express, June 14, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/htxlq42..

  3Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968)..

  4Leo Igwe, “The Osu Caste System,” Mukto-mona, http://tinyurl.com/k3kq7a9..

  5Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987), 121..

  6Igwe Alupuoaku, “Osu Caste System in Alaigbo,” Osondu Newsletter 4, http://tinyurl.com/l3c8vaa..

  7Ibid..

  8James W. Perkinson, Shamanism, Racism, and Hip Hop Culture: Essays on White Supremacy and Black Subversion (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3..

  9By the way, if you ask me right now what purposes these hushes serve, I still cannot tell you with any confidence. I suspect, however, that I have perhaps been thinking of the hushes as “individuals” with cosmic secrets about my own questions, the answers to which they can unilaterally whisper in my ear if only I lean closer. In short, I reckon I have been thinking about them in the wrong way. I remember taking the hush that Karen Barad gave me—you remember, the one that looked like a fossil or stone—sitting with it for days, holding it close to my ears, putting it under my pillow (with the hope that it might visit me in my dreams), and even trying to pry it open. In that way, I depended on the kind of reductionisms that would make one open up a bird to discover what makes it sing sweetly. Perhaps, in the same way the song of a tree is the wind passing through it—sonifying its thick bough, the birds that inhabit its branches in specific configurations, and the raindrops that tap-tap-tap on its leaves, the hush’s wisdom is not an essence but a community, an assemblage of moments that brings me to the edge of what I know. An
invitation to the troubling queerness that is (at work in) the universe. I had been looking at the hush alone—wondering about it—instead of considering the place itself, the dance of the wind around it, the curiosity of a stranger observing my approach to the hush, or the tears in the eyes of the one giving it..

  10Ben Mathis-Lilley, “The Short but Intriguing History of White Americans pretending to be Black,” The Slatest, June 12, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/pvuhrxs..

  11Ijeoma Oluo, “The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black,” The Stranger, April 19, 2017, http://tinyurl.com/kfslals..

  12Ibid..

  13Jerry Rosiek, “Critical Race Theory, Agential Realism, and the Evidence of Experience: A Methodological and Theoretical Preface,” in Jerry Rosiek and Kathy Kinslow, Resegregation as Curriculum: The Meaning of the New Segregation in U.S. Public Schools (New York: Routledge, 2016)..

  14There’s a video of the talk here: Bayo Akomolafe, “How I Am Unlearning My Whiteness,” Santa Rosa, CA, May 11, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvqrI6MhI_Q. I have not watched it. I cannot stand the nasality of my own voice..

  15Madison Gray, “Philip Emeagwali: A Calculating Move,” Time, January 12, 2007, http://tinyurl.com/y8uerurn..

  16NWA, “Fuck tha Police,” Straight Outta Compton, 1988..

  17Perkinson, Shamanism, 4–5..

  18A. Roulin, “Melanin-Based Colour Polymorphism Responding to Climate Change,” Global Change Biology 20:11 (November 2014), 3344–50. doi:10.1111/gcb.12594..

  19Which is not to say that we can change the past, go back in time and correct it, or simply come up with new interpretations of happenings, as if the world were simply a product of our meaning-making ventures. Immersed in a world that is constantly becoming, the past is always yet to come, differentially sedimented via intra-actions. Does this do away with trauma? Does this efface the marks on our bodies? We cannot turn back the hands of time simply because time is not even an external parameter that is universally apportioned in terms of a past, present, and future. Instead the past is constantly “resynchronized” within ongoing practices. The marks don’t disappear, but “new” ones can be formed in discontinuous entangling loops that challenge the smooth flow of a history without breaks.

  20Many thanks to Isoke Femi, an African American woman I met while visiting Sonoma County in 2017. Isoke brought up the question of call-response patterns in African dialogic encounters, inspiring me to come to terms with an idea that had lingered at the tip of my tongue for so long, hardly ever finding expression—which all gives honor to the idea that we often meet ourselves for the first time in the eyes of strangers..

  21This probably explains why I have almost always left a speaking engagement, where the audience was largely Indian, feeling like I didn’t communicate at all. There is something of a relative muteness, perhaps a deferential silence or blankness, that clouds the face of the crowd … which is suddenly lifted as soon as I finish speaking..

  22Aló is a Yoruba word for “story” and is often used in a call-response fashion in storytelling encounters to begin the story to be told..

  23Asar Imhotep, “Understanding Asé and Its Relation with Èsù among the Yoruba and the Ase.t in Ancient Egypt,” January 4, 2012, http://tinyurl.com/ybruv33m..

  24Imhotep, “Understanding Asé.”.

  25Funso Aiyejina, “Èsù Elegbara: A Source of an Alter/Native Theory of African Literature and Criticism,” lecture at the Centre for Black Art and African Cultures, Lagos, 2010, http://tinyurl.com/y95ajurr..

  26Ibid..

  27Imhotep, “Understanding Asé.”

  28Karen Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart,” Parallax 20:3 (2014), 168. doi:10.1080/13534645.2014.927623..

  29Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference.” Feminism and the Critique of Colonial Discourse. Inscriptions 3–4. Center for Cultural Studies, University of Santa Cruz, 1988..

  30Barad, “Diffracting diffraction,” 170..

  31Haraway, Simians..

  32Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999)..

  33Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28:3 (2003), 801–31. doi:10.1086/345321..

  34Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, “Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers: Interview with Karen Barad,” in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012). doi:10.3998/ohp.11515701.001.001..

  35Ibid..

  36Ibid..

  37Isoke Ndeya Femi used the phrase “affective muscle” when we had breakfast at Professor Elenita Strobel’s home in Sonoma County, California, May 13, 2017..

  38Isoke Femi, in her sixties when I met her in May 2017, told me of a day she was at a carnival, feeling free-spirited and generous to the point of calling white people her sisters and brothers. Her day was quickly ruined when she saw an offensive statuesque figure caricaturizing black people with protruding lips and wide open eyes. In her words, she felt an uncontrollable rage and needed a place to hold it. She quickly sought out her one of her “white allies,” to whom she screamed the words “I hate white people!” while the friend sat there and received these difficult expressions of intergenerational hurt. “What would you like me to do?” her friend responded, when she was done belching her tearful rage. “It takes a lot to do that kind of work,” Isoke Femi would later tell me. “One needs affective muscles.” When Isoke told me her remarkable story, I felt it served as a noteworthy example of how nontarget populations can meet oppressed others halfway … allowing for a healing that is otherwise truncated when we essentialized negative feelings and ascribe labels as a result..

  39Elizabeth Grosz, “The Future of Feminist Theory: Dreams for New Knowledges,” Revista Eco-Pós 13:3 (2010), 52..

  Letter 5

  1Augustine Nwoye, “Memory Healing Processes and Community Intervention in Grief Work in Africa,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy 26:3 (2005), 149–50. doi:10.1002/j.1467-8438.2005.tb00662.x..

  2It would be easy here to create a binary by suggesting that modernity is “wrong” and that we must return to “the immediacy of the world at large”—as if the latter were a pristine order of things awaiting occupation. That is not what I mean by making this distinction between modernity and other possible political imaginaries. Modernity itself is not totalizing or complete or monumental; neither are indigenous pasts or future pure and without shadows. As Karen Barad says, “There is no absolute boundary between here-now and there-then” (“Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart,” Parallax 20:3 [2014], 168–87, doi:10.1080/13534645.2014.927623)..

  3Karen Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction.”.

  4Ibid..

  5Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987)..

  6C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 345..

  7Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction.”.

  8Stanton Marlan and David H. Rosen, The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2015), 16.

  9Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (New York: Bantam, 2007)..

  10Alethea, I thought to mention that it is very easy to fall into the trap of seeking to naturalize African and indigenous practices as some kind of default ontology we should all adopt, while denaturalizing the West as “old” and needing transformation. But none is truer than the other. Even modernity is not some backward notion we must leave behind in order to find the new ahead of us. I wouldn’t want to create some kind of “successor regime” dynamic here. Each performs the world d
ifferently, but are themselves subject to revision. For instance, African cosmologies in their current iteration think of the dead as disembodied spirits in ancestral realms, which shares a humanistic distinction with Judeo-Christian thought. I think more in terms of dust and nonhumans around us. Our souls are locked up in the ordinary things that condition us. While I am enabled to think that way, agential realism becomes a strategy for me to revisit and return to the so-called “old.”.

  11Nwoye, “Memory Healing Processes,” 147..

  Letter 6

  1Rahul Kalvapalié, “Arizona Woman Finds Note from ‘Chinese Prisoner’ in Walmart Purse,” Global News, May 6, 2017, http://tinyurl.com/loaqddk..

  2Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in Robert Silverberg, ed. New Dimensions 3 (New York: Nelson Doubleday, 1973)..

  3Ibid..

  4Ibid..

  5A few kilometers north of where your grandfather is born, in northern Nigeria, the Kanuris are known for the long tribal marks they make on their faces. It is also a familiar though fading tradition in Yorubaland for people to mark their bodies in rituals of scarification. These changing bodies are instigated by particular ethical imaginaries (sorry if that sounds like gibberish. Let me try again). What I mean to say is that some imperatives are acted out and materialized in form of the bodies we take on—and these imperatives are the contributions of place, of history, of story, concepts of beauty, animal others, time, imagination, and hope. Particular Yoruba tribal-marked bodies came to be that way as a response to the transatlantic slave trade; it was a way to identify kith and kin..

  6Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987), 151..

  7Remember that “thought” is transcorporeal—which basically means it jumps from bodies to bodies, or melts through. It is not a human attribute. If we were to follow the performative traces of thinking in its ongoing flow, we might notice how thinking decenters the human figure. Some thinking is possible while others are impossible—due to specific intra-active configuration of bodies. This is why I say how to think of some phenomena may not be available yet..