Bayo Akomolafe • Writings

Highlights

Nigeria: How to Rig an Election

The recent elections in Nigeria, conducted over anxious weeks of pain and chaos, suggest that one doesn't need complicated plots and technologies to rig an election. All you need is a people thoroughly jaded - and white paint. Lots of it.

February 23, 2023

"Get up from the couch."

February 13, 2023

Becoming airports

The body isn't a natural thing that serves as a substrate for cultural embellishments; the body is unnatural.

February 8, 2023

The public is not a simple location: A confession

The public is an apparatus that measures out the "individual" by collapsing "its" wave-like indeterminacy to the locateability of the citizen. And that's when things get sticky.

Books & Longform

During the initial weeks of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, I feverishly composed an ‘essay’. I intended to be brief, so my essay clocked 22,000 words - perhaps, then, the length of a small book. Refusing to reinscribe our fetishized human centrality in the goings-on around us, ‘I, Coronavirus’ reads as a cross between magical realism, speculative fabulation, Yoruba indigenous wisdoms, biology and neomaterialist feminist philosophy. At its heart is a playful thought experiment: beyond being a pathogen, what if the virus were an immigrant, an alien visitation, an archetypal force we’ve always known but do not know how to recognize?

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Tackling some of the world's most profound questions through the intimate lens of fatherhood, Bayo Akomolafe embarks on a journey of discovery as he maps the contours of the spaces between himself and his three-year-old daughter Alethea.These Wilds Beyond our Fences is a passionate attempt to make sense of our disconnection in a world where it is easy to feel untethered and lost. It is a father's search for meaning, for a place of belonging, and for reassurance that the world will embrace and support our children once we are gone. (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA; 2017)

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“We Will Tell Our Own Story joins a growing number of Afrocentric books that are already revolutionizing the way Africans view themselves and their academies. The creation of a cadre of scholars devoted to truth, rigor, ancestrality, and values is a mark of a mature civilization; these authors are the necessary foundation for further growth.”

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Explore Writings

Poet. Philosopher. Psychologist. Professor. Passionate about the Preposterous.

Astray, Awkwardly: An Autistic Politics (Republished)

Astray, Awkwardly: An Autistic Politics

The Hidden Curriculum of Consent

The Image and its Caricature

Believe All Women! Dispatches from the Frontiers

Say it with a 'head wobble'

Putin, Ukraine, and 1945: The War Never Ended

The invisible constituency of the slave ship

The Gift of Being Mispronounced

Looking-Away-At

What I Mean By Postactivism

Let’s Meet at the Crossroads

It’s time: Let us make sanctuary

I, Coronavirus. Mother. Monster. Activist.

Coming Down to Earth

Grounding VUNJA

The Allegory of the Pit: Or the Irony of Victory

The task is not to abandon identity politics

What climate collapse asks of us

In the morning, you won’t find me here

Coming into the Sanctuary

Let us slow down: Acting in turbulent times

How the Real is more fascinating than we can think

Making Sanctuary: Hope, Companionship, Race and Emergence in the Anthropocene

Grieving is how flowers bloom: an invitation

On thinking out the box

To be a proper self is to be beside oneself

Yesterday, Alethea created the universe

These wilds beyond our fences

The Surprising Nobility of Shit

Shootings in America: A Letter to New Questions

2017: On turning the left cheek and contentment

Humusities: A Short Description

Our shock will not absolve us

I want my skin to breathe

How do we respond to crisis?

Finding the Dark: Decolonizing Darkness

Homo Icarus: The Depreciating Value of Whiteness and the Place of Healing

The edges in the middle: A story about ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’

A Slower Urgency

Entangled with the World

Release the Kraken! Why we need monsters in these times of crises

The ordinary is what the extraordinary wants to become

How my prejudice redeemed me from believing I was essentially good

An Irreverent List of Queer Resolutions for 2017

The Scooby Doo Contingency

On Trump: An Open Letter to the Brokenhearted

The edges in the middle

God was here and I did not know it

A miracle is…

The Burden of the New Story

We stood on the rock

We have met the monster, and it is us.

I am writing a book. I will not be the same.

Pagan insurgencies and Com-post Humusities

Shit matters: Answering the call of compost in these times of exclusions

Alethea’s Lesson: Queer Homecomings and the Quest for Community

Name the Colour, Blind the Eye: Reimagining Education

The Politics of Pokémon Go

Killing Harambe, or how monsters are made

Dear white people

The Turning of the Whales

Leadership as gift

When I told my students to dance naked on a Vancouver street

A plea for magic

Bernie’s insurrection and the question of Hillary’s qualifications

The dot on my forehead: how we understand the crisis is part of the crisis

The politics of the pursuit of happiness

Speaking in tongues (Or why the correct answer is no longer enough to solve our problems)

Meeting the Inappropriate/d

How I’m learning to trust in my failure

Prologue for ‘The Parrot’s Training’ by Manish Jain

The trouble with equality: feminism and the forgotten places of power

To our ‘Dadas’

This revolution will not be schooled

What would a Mountain do? Activism in an Age of Entanglement

They sang with a thousand tongues: The poetry of diversity

The Phantoms of the Maze

The Natural Life Cycle of Faith

Towards a World Citizens’ Movement – Learning from the Grassroots

A Parliament of Things

Do our bodies matter?

In the Thinnest of Places: Initiation as Empowerment for Civil Action

An Oríkì for Our Time: Reflections on Activism, Change and Wonder

The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible – Reviewed

The Times are Urgent: Let’s Slow Down

There are no slums in India

You are not a ‘self’

How I Lost My Way

Turning to the Wilds

Nigeria: The Poison is the Pot

The Cinema House Effect

We Will Tell Our Stories

Those Bonfires of Taboo

Your soul is strange

Your life is an intergenerational project

You do not need fixing

You are wonderful now

You are not normal

You are home already

Yanny vs Laurel

Why we need walls

Where the wild things grow

Where naught is still

When you meet an obstacle…