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Featured Essay
The Object of Relation
For a thing to be something, it must survive nothingness;otherwise, it is merely posing as something. This is an insight to hold as a torch in hand as we wade through the void of perception. Let us follow, gradually, what it illuminates; what it reveals. Physical reality is often experienced as tactile;all things are measured… Read essay
Latest Essays
Recent writing across philosophy, movement, image, memory and relation.
Current Enquiries
Three lines of thinking that are alive right now.
Enquiry I
Transdisciplinarity and the Ahistorical Figure
On knowledge at the edges of disciplines, and the figure who thinks from outside history.
Enquiry II
Ethics and Aesthetics of Difference
On the ethics of encounter, aesthetic practice and the political life of the image.
Enquiry III
The Ontology of Relational Being
On relation, alterity and the conditions through which difference becomes generative.
Poetry
A fragment from the archive.
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Can One Grasp at a Flowing Water
Can one grasp at a flowing water,
Or seek to bottle the wind?
Let this answer simmer for a while,
until it cracks open a pathless path.
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From the Shelf
What I am reading right now.
On reading Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation
In Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant turns the Caribbean reality of his life into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. We come to see that relation in all its senses—telling, listening, connecting, and the parallel consciousness of self and surroundings—is the key to revolutionising mentalities and reshaping societies. We are not rooted, but ever-changing; we have a right to opacity and to difference, wherever we are. Told in scintillating prose, this unique exploration of language, slavery, and poetic freedom narrates an Antillean identity, but also that of the whole world.
Read my jottingsNotes
Events, lectures, works in progress and notes from the field.
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On reading Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation
Read →: On reading Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of RelationIn Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant turns the Caribbean reality of his life into a complex, energetic vision of a world in transformation. We come…
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Emeka Okereke Awarded France’s Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters: Acceptance Speech
Read →: Emeka Okereke Awarded France’s Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters: Acceptance SpeechOn Saturday, 27th October 2018, Nigerian photographer, filmmaker, writer and visual artist, Emeka Okereke, was conferred France’s prestigious insignia of Chevalier De l’Ordre Des Arts…
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Movement is the Word
Read →: Movement is the WordSometime ago, I came across Mo Ibrahim’s keynote address at the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in Tshwane, South Africa. I listened as he pronounced that…
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Dreams are Alive
Read →: Dreams are AliveFor the past two weeks I have had an impossible itinerary (a word I have used a tad too often lately). I have been criss-crossing…
Borderbeing holds over fifty selected essays by Emeka Okereke, gathered and maintained on the platform since 2008. The visitor is therefore invited to time-travel through the archive, even as the archive continues to evolve.
The Archive
A living, evolving enquiry — 18 years in the making.
Time-travel through the archive.