Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World by Phoebe Bosewell, Saidiya Hartman, Janaína Oliveira, Joseph M. Pierce, and Cristina Rivera Garza, with an introduction by Christina Sharpe

Since 2022, the inimitable Christina Sharpe – the brilliant Canadian writer and professor behind Ordinary Notes and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being – has spearheaded and moderated the annual Alchemy Lecture. Hosted at York University, the free, public events gather writers, artists, and thinkers from various disciplines and geographies to discuss the most pressing issues of our time. The insights shared at the live and streamed events are later transcribed and expanded in artful books published by Alchemy, a Knopf Canada publishing program, in collaboration with York University. Anchored by Sharpe’s incisive introduction, the series’ most recent release, Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World, speaks to the tribulations of the 2020s, presenting five luminous takes on a central and crucial question: how do we achieve a beautiful world?

How do we achieve a beautiful world?

For the book’s authors, the beautiful world is one that radically reimagines the systems and institutions governing our local and global world. Such a world actively dismantles the kind of blatantly racist thinking that would lead artist Phoebe Boswell’s work to be relegated to the annex – the afterthought, the subordinately attached room– of a virtually constructed gallery. It is a world where Black women like writer and professor Saidiya Hartman’s character Jane Crow need not “ventriloquiz[e] the language of state and empire,” need not call for their own “quiet extinction” to access a misleading sense of power and success.

The beautiful world, our authors argue, is rooted in an ethics and mode of reflection that curator and professor Janaína Oliveira calls “curation as care”; an ethos primarily applied to reflections on films that may meaningfully shift how we consider each other and ourselves. As writer and professor Joseph M. Pierce articulates, the beautiful world is also one where decolonization becomes tangible, where the guiding force of decisions is “no longer capital but relations,” no longer profits but community.

As writer and professor Joseph M. Pierce articulates, the beautiful world is also one where decolonization becomes tangible, where the guiding force of decisions is “no longer capital but relations,” no longer profits but community.

In each chapter, the authors consider the speculative: the possibilities that emerge when thinking beyond our current boundaries and limitations. The necessity of reimagining our world, of rethinking how we conceive of it, is made most explicit by writer Cristina Rivera Garza’s final piece. Here, the subjunctive – a grammatical mood expressing what is possible, imagined, or wished – is leveraged as a tool that threatens and questions the boundaries of colonial and predominantly anglophone modes of thinking. The final essay reiterates the great power and purpose of casting ourselves in the most luminous and expansive what-ifs.

Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World is one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve reviewed this year. It is one of the few titles published by Alchemy by Knopf Canada, the publishing program led by acclaimed poet, novelist, and essayist Dionne Brand. The tangible care that went into the book’s publication is nothing less than what you would expect from a team headed by Brand. Indeed, the essays in this book would sit comfortably alongside the author and editor’s own.

Distributed under the umbrella of one of Canada’s largest trade publishing houses, Penguin Random House, the Alchemy Lecture book series is a brilliant example of a project that makes the inner workings of the university humanities available to wider and more diverse publics. Yet the project’s status as a simultaneously academic and non-academic venture is left unclear for readers who may discover the book on its own. Although Christina Sharpe provides a breathtaking introduction that unmistakably asserts the power and purpose of gathering, speaking, and writing on the topics that most impact our world, the book’s package –notably its blurb and its covers – neglects to position the Alchemy Lecture as the kind of groundbreaking project that both mobilizes the partnership of a major university and reaches out to wider audiences.

As I eagerly await the details of the next Lecture, and the series’ next book, it is my hope that future editions might more explicitly define the Alchemy Lecture’s rich, hybrid tradition, exposing new audiences to the luminous and expansive possibilities being discussed in and around our universities.

As it stands, the uncontextualized York University Liberal Arts and Professional Studies logo inside the back dust jacket only hints at the expansive collaboration taking place between the university, its community, and Alchemy. Although the work of demonstrating the value and importance of university humanities programs should not rest on this or any single project, further clarity around York’s involvement in the series is a salient opportunity to demonstrate the value and beauty of the kind of work being done with and within humanities programs, programs that, as scholars and journalists have long been reporting, are not only being defunded but devalued by the publics they depend on. As I eagerly await the details of the next Lecture, and the series’ next book, it is my hope that future editions might more explicitly define the Alchemy Lecture’s rich, hybrid tradition, exposing new audiences to the luminous and expansive possibilities being discussed in and around our universities.

Christina Sharpe is a writer, Professor, and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. She is also a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg and a Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at the Arizona State University. She is the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016)—named by the Guardian and the Walrus as one of the best books of 2016 and a nonfiction finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award—and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010), as well as Ordinary Notes (Knopf Canada, 2023).

Phoebe Boswell’s paintings, drawings, installations, and film & video works have been exhibited at galleries including Gagosian, Cristea Roberts Gallery, Dulwich Picture Gallery and Kettles Yard, and held in collections widely, including The British Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, RISD, the British Film Institute’s National Archive and the UK Government Art Collection. She was the Bridget Riley Drawing Fellow at the British School of Rome in 2019, received the Lumière Award from the Royal Photographic Society in 2021, the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2019, and the Future Generation Art Prize’s Special Prize in 2017. Boswell was Whitechapel Gallery’s 2022 writer in residence and has presented her writing at institutions including Tate Britain, Victoria & Albert Museum, The Ford Foundation, and Loophole of Retreat Venice. She has had institutional solos at Autograph ABP, New Art Exchange and the Goteborg Konsthall, and participated in the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement (Switzerland), Prospect New Orleans, and the Lyon Biennale. Boswell was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and lives and works in London.

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother, Scenes of Subjection. She has been a MacArthur Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, Cullman Fellow, and Fulbright Scholar. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.

Janaína Oliveira is a film programmer and scholar. She has a PhD in history and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Howard University. She is the head programmer of the Zózimo Bulbul Black Film Festival. In 2019 she programmed the “Soul in the Eye: Zózimo Bulbul’s Legacy and the Contemporary Emergence of Black Brazilian Cinema” series at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. She is the founder of the Black Cinema Itinerant Forum and the 2021 Flaherty Film Seminar programmer.

Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on the intersections of kinship, gender, sexuality, and race in Latin America, 19th century literature and culture, queer studies, Indigenous studies, and hemispheric approaches to citizenship and belonging. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published recently in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, and has also been featured in Indian Country Today. Along with SJ Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent) he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome, The Iliac Crest, among many other books. Her memoir, Liliana’s Invincible Summer, won the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize, Rivera Garza is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and director of the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.

Publisher: Knopf Canada (September 17, 2024)
Hardcover 5″ x 8″ | 176 pages
ISBN: 9781039055971

Catherine Marcotte

Catherine Marcotte holds a Master of Arts in English Literature and Language from Queen’s University. She is a contributor at the Miramichi Reader where she writes about Canadian literature and publishing. Her essays, translations, and editorial work have been published in local and academic venues.