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The Alchemy Lecture

The Alchemy Lecture is a multi-vocal model that brings together a constellation of thinkers and practitioners from different disciplines and geographies annually to think together and in public on the most pressing issues of our times.

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The City of Our Dreaming

picture of Vari Hall during after hours

Date: October 30, 2024

Four Alchemists. One Lecture.
A Constellation of Ideas.

TBD

Moderator: Christina Sharpe

Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. Sharpe is the author of Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (2010), In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), and Ordinary Notes (2023)—winner of the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction and the Hodler Prize, and finalist for The National Book Award in Nonfiction, The National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Current Interest Book Award, and the James Tait Black Prize in Biography. In April 2024, she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction and was named a Guggenheim Fellow. In May she received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for the Sciences and Humanities. Sharpe is currently working on What Could a Vessel Be? (FSG/Knopf, Canada 2025) and Black. Still. Life. (Duke 2027). Her writing has appeared in many artist catalogues and journals including Frieze, Paris Review, Harpers, BOMB Magazine, and The Funambulist.

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Speakers

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Gabriela Leandro Pereira

V. Mitch McEwen

Laleh Khalili

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson profile photo

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician.  She is the author of eight previous books, including the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies, short listed for the Dublin Literary prize and the Governor General’s award for fiction. Leanne’s last album, Theory of Ice, released by You’ve Changed Records was released in 2021 and short-listed for the Polaris Prize and she was the 2021 winner of the Prism Prize’s Willie Dunn Award. Her latest project Theory of Water: Nishnaabeg Maps to the Times Ahead will be published by Dionne Brand’s Alchemy imprint at Knopf Canada and Haymarket books in the US in the spring of 2025. Leanne is a member of Alderville First Nation.

Gchi Engiikaaying or Tkaranto has been a gathering place for many different nations-not-nation-states, and many different forms of life for millennials, and this is not a history lesson. Together, we’ll think about our collective formations across scales, from Nishnaabeg presence to student encampments to the water that makes up our tears and sweat. Diving  into Nishnaabeg ways of growing new worlds by listening to and enacting our imperfected dreams, this set of stories is designed in expansiveness and refuge, instigated by water as a provocateur and towards a chasmic anti-colonial transmutation.  

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Gabriela Leandro Pereira

Gabriela Leandro Pereira is a professor and researcher at the Faculty of Architecture and the Postgraduate Program in Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Bahia. She is a member of the Lugar Comum Research Group and coordinator of the Corpo, Discurso e Território Study Group. She is co-author of the multimedia essay "Ruins of the South Atlantic", published by Ellipses Journal (2023, South Africa). In 2024 she was co-curator of the Open Study "Architectures of Revolt" (Goethe Institut - Salvador) with the South African resident architect Huda Tayob. She currently coordinates the project "The fabulous inventory of the Material History of Cities" and "Transatlantic Shares", at the Federal University of Bahia. And she is an Advisor to Casa Sueli Carneiro, an organization in memory of black women's activism based in São Paulo.

“(...) the black man cannot be free until he does not forget the captivity, until he forgets in gesture that he is no longer a captive” (Beatriz Nascimento)

By taking this phrase from Brazilian historian Beatriz Nascimento as a starting point, I propose a conversation that is based on three dreams-projects of freedom in the city, built by black people since Brazil, formulated in different places and times.

The first of them is inspired by the dreams of emancipation created in whispers by the enslaved builders of the Church of São José do Queimado, in the 19th century, in the state of Espírito Santo. Contrary to the current perspective of the colonial city's constructive history as told by the colonizers, the builders bring us a subtext-message-secret that survives in the ruins that witnessed the insurrection of those who managed projects of freedom : the ruin of the world built by racial capitalism.

The second is inspired by the ability to reposition the value, meaning and significance of the built space in the face of the sagacity of not allowing oneself to be captured by the images of control emanating from it in order to dream of freedom in the city. This gesture of de-capture is an unsubmissive practice/ritual that has been taken care of by the black women of the Irmandade da Boa Morte, from Cachoeira in Bahia, who recall and recreate, in the body and on the street - not in the buildings - and in the collective - no individually -, the plans for freedom and the future forged to free mainly black women during the slavery period.

The third gesture is inspired by the desire for the world created by Dona Antônia, in the Railway Suburb of Salvador, who from a house built on the edge of the tidal waters, generated unimaginable spaces on the “lajes” and in the surrounding areas, making sure that life thrived and continued to be dreamed of by those who were not destined to survive. “My mother’s door was a pier.” With this dreamlike phrase, Vilma Santos, her daughter, one of the creators and managers of Espaço Cultural Acervo da Laje, offers us a kind of password that introduces us to this space that refuses, every day, to perform the death and violence rates that plague black youth in a country that kills 1 young black man every 23 minutes. She shelters us in the dreams of/with her mother and in the constructive gesture that makes her existence possible.

Building and ruining, refusing and dissembling, cultivating and creating. What cities emerge from dreams that find their foundation in these gestures?

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V. Mitch McEwen

V. Mitch McEwen leads Harlem-based Atelier Office and teaches on the faculty at Princeton University's School of Architecture. At Princeton she directs the architecture and technology research group Black Box, exploring biomaterials and algorithmic processes in design and construction. She is one of ten co-founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective. McEwen’s design work has been commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Architecture Biennale US Pavilion, as well as awarded grants from the Graham Foundation, Knight Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts.

What if marronage constituted a form of spatial and scientific exploration as rigorous as outer space? What if marronage technically is/was/will be outer space? Its physics would not be defined by the rocket thrust required to exceed the earth’s planetary atmosphere and gravitational pull. Instead its physics and engineering would marinate/marronate in the buoyancy required to collectively inhabit the wet-but-not-fluid spaces beyond the terms of fixed land, cash commodities, private property and (post) colonial hegemony. A space outer of whiteness, a swampy chunky space feeling itself float.

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Laleh Khalili

Laleh Khalili is the Al Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. She has written or edited seven books, including Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (2007), Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (2020), The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (2024) and Extractive Capitalism (forthcoming 2025). She loves to cook for those she loves.

They can call coriander contraband. They can count calories. Or fill the wells, torch the crops, raze the farms, and salt the earth. Their defoliants can ruin forests and crawl under the skin of our children for generations to come. They can trademark our thyme, our rice, our roots. They can deny us food, and through food survival, community and memory. But in the city of my dreaming, we all break bread together. Commensality, necessarily, means that we must abolish militaries that chase us around tiny territories with behemoth bombs; whose soldier automatons famish us by destroying our land, the people who reap it, and the children the harvests nourish. Breaking bread together demands of us to obliterate the inequalities that make one table groan under unimaginable feasts in one part of the world while the starved forage in famine. We hold festivals of xenia and we invite the guests who arrive by boat and on foot, and usher the masters out. We drink our morning coffee together, and we save toom for everyone at “the rendezvous of victory.”

Our Partners

Alchemy Logo by Knopf Canada

Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities
York Research Chair in Linguistic Diversity & Community Vitality
The School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph
Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies
The Carl V Granger Chair in Africana and American Studies, University at Buffalo
Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, Arizona State University
Department of English, University of Toronto
Jean Augustine Chair in Education, Community and Diaspora
Department of English
Department of Humanities
Black Canadian Studies
Social and Political Thought
Humanities, Faculty of Graduate Studies
The Office of the President
The Office of the Dean, LA&PS

Past Events

November 2, 2023

The Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities, the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, and York University were proud to be hosting the Second Annual Alchemy Lecture.

The lecture was delivered by five renowned alchemists: Joseph M. Pierce, Phoebe Boswell, Cristina Rivera Garza, Saidiya Hartman and Janaína Oliveira.

Watch for the book edition of The Alchemy Lecture, to be published in October 2024.

November 10, 2022

The lecture was delivered by four renowned alchemists: Dele Adeyemo (UK) architect, creative director, and urban theorist; Natalie Diaz (US/Mojave/Akimel O’otham) poet, MacArthur Foundation Fellow and Founding Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, Arizona State University; Nadia Yala Kisukidi (France) Associate Professor in philosophy, Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis University; and Rinaldo Walcott (Canada) Writer, and Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto.

Watch for the book edition of The Alchemy Lecture, published in October 2023.