Engagement with Bayo Akomolafe
Biography
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled ‘trans-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 (along with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye), Bayo Akomolafe is the host teacher at Dancing with Mountains, the educational consultation. He is also the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene that seeks to convene new kinds of responsivities, sensuous solidarities, and experimental practices for a posthumanist parapolitics.
Drawing inspiration from Edouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze, Gregory Bateson, Maurice Blanchot, Octavia Butler, Fernand Deligny, Chinua Achebe, and the still-ongoing adventures of the Yoruba monster-trickster and crossroads figure, Èsù, Bayo seeks to organize an always creolizing planetary, para-political process of the carnivalesque that is alive to minor gestures, open to sensorial mutiny and ontological apostasy, and committed to the formulation of new modes of encountering a more-than-human planet.
For more about Bayo Akomolafe’s work, please visit the following websites:
Engagement with Macalester College
October 2024: Bayo Akomolafe delivered the keynote address titled For Those Spirited Away: Making Sanctuary as A Vocation of Exile in Restless Times at the 31st International Roundtable.
Spring 2025: Two-part virtual lectures & conversations with Bayo Akomolafe, How to cook a brontosaurus: fugitivity, blackness, and agency at the end of the world
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Part II:
2025-2026: Bayo Akomolafe served at the Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies, co-hosted by Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship.
Fall 2025: Bayo Akomolafe was a panelist for the plenary panel of the 32nd International Roundtable.
Spring 2026: Six-part virtual series with Bayo Akomolafe, Ghostlights of the Political: fugitive dispatches from the edges of thought
Part I:
Part II:
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April 2026: Bayo Akomolafe delivered his Hubert Humphrey Distinguished Professorship keynote address, titled What America forgot: a reckoning.