Earth Talk: The Gods of the Discarded with Bayo Akomolafe

As the coronavirus pandemic opens us up to the impossible, an insurgency of the erstwhile invisible is unsettling the paradigms of whiteness that offered stability and progress. Progress is halted, at least temporarily. Where do we go from here?

In this conversation with Andy Letcher, Bayo Akomolafe suggests we need new gods. He points out that the God of the Cotton Plantation is woefully undone and incompetent in the face of the many upheavals we are with-nessing. All He can promise is justice in the long run. But ‘justice in the long run’ is the name of our shackles. And ‘justice now’ – the balm on our ankles to make the shackles less angry – isn’t more appealing. What we need is a wild dispersal, a theology of the discarded. A fugitive arrangement.

We need to make like thieves and steal away in the dead of night to where Bacchus and Pan and Esu dance with moss-covered stones, drawing their wine from the genius of cryptogamic civilizations and their phosphorus poetry.

About the speakers
A lecturer, speaker, and proud diaper-changer, Bayo Akomolafe curates an earth-wide project for the re-calibration of our ability to respond to civilizational crisis – a project framed within a feminist ethos and inspired by indigenous cosmologies. He considers this a shared art – exploring the edges of the intelligible, dancing with posthumanist ideas, dabbling in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the liberating sermon of an ecofeminism text, and talking with others about how to host a festival of radical silence on a street in London – and part of his inner struggle to regain a sense of rootedness to his community.
bayoakomolafe.net

After a brief spell studying physics and astronomy, Andy Letcher completed a degree in Ecology at Sheffield University, then a doctorate in Ecology at Oxford. It was as an eco-activist in the 1990s that he was invited to do a second PhD in the Study of Religion at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. He is especially interested in the tangled and sometimes tortuous relationship between science and spirituality, and in so-called dark green religion. He has written papers on: the distribution of mammals across continents; fairies; mysticism; and psychedelic spirituality. He is the author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom.

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