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Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World: The Alchemy Lecture 2023 Audiobook
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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.
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About the Authors
Saidiya Hartman is the author of several books, including Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which won the 2019 National Book Critics’ Circle Award and was longlisted for the PEN/Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and has been a Cullman Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. She is a professor at Columbia University.
Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of several books, including Liliana’s Invincible Summer, winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Memoir. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. She is the M. D. Anderson Distinguished Professor in Hispanic Studies and director of the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.
About Christina Sharpe
Christina Sharpe is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—named by the London Guardian as one of the best books of 2016—and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. She is the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto.