Bayo Akomolafe | "May We Live in Interesting Times"

A Parable for Endings (and the Beginnings We Don’t Know Yet)

Featuring Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, W.E.B. Du Bois Scholar in Residence at the Schumacher Center (2024). This lecture took place at Saint James Place in Great Barrington, MA on Saturday, July 6.

About the Lecture:

Left or Right? Blue or Red? This or That?

One of the stickiest assumptions about being a modern self is that “we” always have a choice. It’s our inalienable right to choose, we hear. But what happens when choice starts misbehaving? What is choice good for when it no longer plays a differentiating function?

In 2024, half of the planet’s human citizen-subjects will be heading to the polling booths to make their choices known. However, something about the reported intensification of distrust in democratic institutions, the oversimplification of politics into “us” versus “them” (bolstered by social media), the unmatchable forces of the posthuman disruption and climate collapse, as well as what Rana Dasgupta calls the “decline of the nation-state”, makes this go-around particularly interesting.

There is a growing sense that choice isn’t enough, that politics-so-called is critically incapable of responding to the nuances and openings of these times, and that even social justice movements and their philanthropic ecologies – dedicated as they are to “impact” – obscure the transformative potentials electrifying the air.

In this public lecture, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe offers the parable of the Behemoth – a strange motif that warps choice and subjects it to forces beyond human agency. In a seminal year of wars and losses and apartheidic endings, when going left doesn’t feel that much different from going right, when justice feels inadequate to the rising tensions of the hour, where larger algorithms are in play, Dr. Akomolafe senses that a different, supplementary politics is needed, a different performance of power. Something stranger than hope, than clarity, than knowing what to do. And something that brings us to the feet of ‘the monstrous.’


About the Speaker:

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia).

In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He is also the inaugural Special Fellow of the Schumacher Centre for New Economics, the Inaugural Scholar-in-Residence for the Aspen Institute, and an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. He has been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023).

He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has been Commencement Speaker in two universities convocation events. He is also the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022. In 2023, Dr. Akomolafe was awarded the Key to the City of Portland in Maine, USA.