Minna Salami: Mindful of the time, and maybe in that vein, I’d like to kick us off by asking you, Bayo, if you could share about your work and thinking around post-activism and parapolitics. That way we can get a sense of some of the key things you've been working on, and maybe connect it to the themes we are exploring here tonight—or today—of power and rivers, if that resonates.
Bayo Akomolafe: Thank you, sis. Well, the context for our conversation today is not some abstract, highfalutin philosophical treatise. It’s situated in a time when people are suffering—when we’re asking questions about what it means to be human right now. As I’ve described it recently, the orange clouds of fascism are drifting across our landscapes. It seems that just to speak, to breathe in these times, we need to think about how we think. We need to reexamine the assumptions that undergird the concepts we promote and use. And I think that’s why Minna and I are here to have this conversation.
The concept of post-activism emerges from a long, multi-year wrestling with the notion of agency. I could easily say that post-activism is the eruption of agency—but I want to situate it in a way that lands in your body, too, with a very short story.
I promise I won’t go the long Yoruba route. Just a tiny story. I land in Brazil. I’ve told this story before—I’m walking up to immigration. I’m bored, so I’m on my phone for a while, sending word home that I’ve landed safely in São Paulo. Then I put my phone away and start to notice people.
Out of nowhere, this woman comes cutting through the queue ropes. I tense up. My body automatically squares up, not by choice. I notice a German guy nearby watching Netflix on his tablet. He also squares up. We look at each other—almost as if saying, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Like we’re ready to defend the integrity of the line.
Then the woman reaches us and says, “I’m so sorry, but my son is just down the line, and I need to catch up with him.” Instantly I relax. Of course, I say, go ahead.
But in that moment—when she cut across—I realized I was no longer my own, and I never had been. I was part of this larger organism, a snaking line that behaves like a living entity. I was like a white blood cell trying to defend its integrity.
That realization hit me: if I zoomed out—not just from the line or the airport, but from society—I’d see that we are all part of larger territorial organisms. The myth that we are singular, individually agential beings is disrupted by a post-humanist perspective. Post-activism comes from this post-humanist desire to resituate agency—not in the modernist, isolated, Cartesian self—but in a larger, ecological, diasporic, shared body. It’s not just about resituating agency, but noticing it for the first time. Sometimes our actions, even our good intentions, reinforce the very frameworks we’re trying to escape.
Post-activism is the eruption that allows new forms of agency to take root. That’s my soft landing. I try to avoid defining it, but it’s a deterritorialization of the individual who claims agency—and a noticing of a broad, multi-species arrangement in which agency is shared, diffracted, and dispersed.
Minna Salami: Hmm. That’s really landing with me right now. My synapses are firing—many trains of thought happening. First, just how much what you're saying resonates. Your airport story reminded me of an incident I’ll briefly share—being caught in a stampede years ago at the Wireless Festival in London.
I was trying to move between stages and suddenly realized I was no longer controlling my body. I had become part of a larger body of festival-goers. Eventually I ended up at the very front of the gate just as it collapsed, and all these bodies fell on top of me. It was a near-death experience—not pleasant—but deeply revealing.
It completely stripped away the sense of “I am me, I can do what I want.” And there’s something very true, even symbolic, in what you said—about how power works, and how activism historically seeks to transform it.
So my follow-up question to you is: what kind of register might this attempt to transform power relations take, if we’re no longer thinking in terms of individual agents acting together, but in a post-activist spirit?
Bayo Akomolafe: Yes, sister, I hear you. About registers—let me build on what I shared. The invitation of post-activism is to notice. To notice that agency or action—especially countercultural or resistant action—can very often become part of the colonial framework itself.
In an entangled, biopolitical, infrapolitical world, where boundaries are always shifting, you can resist something and still be entangled with it. Resistance can actually reinforce the logic of the very arrangement it opposes.
If I were some sci-fi reptilian overlord—sorry, it's late and my brain is misfiring—I’d keep the population docile by inviting protest, by making myself available for critique. From African perspectives, we’ve learned the hard way that victory is risky. Sometimes, if your goal is to win, you’ve already lost the plot.
Post-activism reframes that: maybe the goal isn’t to win, but to render winning incoherent. Not to play the game better, but to ask whether the game itself needs to be abandoned. Parapolitics is the carnivalesque field that arises after this noticing. It invites us to improvise fiercely in the wake of that eruption. It touches on how we know, how we feel, how we think. It's onto-epistemological, moral, ethical, and aesthetic.
Which brings me to a question for you, sister: you write about sensuous knowledge, black feminism, and riverine ways of being. How do these ideas meet for you in that carnivalesque terrain?
Minna Salami: I’ll come back later to talk about this term I coined—exusions—which came through my work on Sensuous Knowledge and speaks specifically to power and rivers. But first, I want to respond briefly to what you said about resistance and activism. Even in my own field—feminism—and in so much feminist activism today, I notice this deep desire to produce something palatable, something full of certainty.
And I just can’t do dogma. I can’t do what becomes plastic, rigid ideological thinking. It doesn’t sit right with me—and I think that has really permeated a lot of activism today. I don’t say that with disdain. Activists are people with the best intentions—and in some ways, you and I could even be considered activists. But I believe we urgently need to rethink activism.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yes. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that plasticity you mentioned—which, if I heard you right, points to a kind of theatrical or performative proximity to power, as it’s currently configured in our social world. You also used the word dogma—a kind of ideologically certified discipline. Could you give an example? What are you seeing that feels trapped within itself? And how does that relate to the exusions you mentioned?
Minna Salami: Thank you. Maybe I’ll begin by saying that the kind of feminist work I’m drawn to—and that I try to create—is about probing, searching, disturbing. It engages deeply with uncertainty, unknowability, and mystery. It acknowledges that these are core to our ontological reality.
But what I often see in public discourse today—especially in activist and feminist spaces, influenced by social media and digital polarization—is something else entirely. So many of these spaces have been shaped by what I call patriarchal knowledge: a knowledge system that demands certainty, quantification, linearity—a kind of robotic mode of thinking. And precisely as you said earlier, when we resist using the same tools as the systems we're opposing, we end up reinforcing their logic. So much of feminist work today is resisting patriarchy by using patriarchal methods. It leans on rigid certainties, rulebooks, and ideological positions that, over time, lose their depth and searching nature. That’s what I meant by plasticity. When knowledge becomes rigid and performative, it loses meaning. We must protect our movements from becoming plastic—something that looks like it's full of life, but isn’t.
Bayo Akomolafe: That resonates. You can be passionately against something—anti-this, anti-that—and still be fully embedded within the logic of what you’re opposing. You could be anti-racist and still participate in sustaining whiteness as the dominant shape of experience. In fact, I’d argue that whiteness produces anti-whiteness. It invites it, even. It says: “Come and oppose me. Critique me. Tear me down.” What it doesn’t want is for you to notice that it’s incomplete.
Coloniality works by projecting totality—by appearing whole and permanent. What it hides is its own instability, its edges, its breathability. So when we lean too hard against the wall of power, we risk becoming shaped by it.
Minna: Yes, that reminds me of something in your beautiful book—I forget the exact title—but you write about DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion. Today, even those initiatives can seem radical. But as you point out, DEI often becomes an example of whiteness doing anti-whiteness—because many DEI programs are funded and supported by institutions that uphold whiteness.
Bayo Akomolafe: Exactly. That’s how power operates—through disappearance and proliferation. Even in spaces of supposed resistance. It’s like with anarchy. You might say, “Let’s burn it down, blow the pipeline, storm the Bastille.” But you could remove the king and still preserve the throne. That’s what happens when we re-create the conditions for dominant logic to thrive—just in different clothing.
That’s why I talk about cracks. It’s my metaphor for ruptures—moments of real departure from the logics that entrap us in repetitive patterns of meaning. Cracks are invitations to notice power differently.
So perhaps we can see power not as something owned by someone or an institution, but as something incomplete, provisional, always on the move. If the Anthropocene teaches us anything, it’s that power is not scarce—it’s migratory. It flows.
Minna: Yes. That brings me back to exusions. When I was writing Sensuous Knowledge, I was already deeply engaged with the question of power. But at the same time, I was traveling a lot and spending time by rivers—which is something I always do. I'm a water person. Wherever I go, I immediately look for the nearest river or body of water. And one day, while sitting by a river, this question arose in me: What can rivers teach us about power?
Around that time, I also came across the ancient Greek word for power: exousia. And somehow, as I continued listening to rivers—letting them respond to my question in their own way—this word blended with what I was sensing. That’s how the term exusions came to me: a way to reimagine and reshape our understanding of power. Rivers showed me that power is not static or singular. It flows. It moves. It gathers. It migrates. A river might start as a single droplet in the mountains. Then it joins other droplets—streams, tributaries—and together they form an immense force, moving toward the ocean.
Even when obstructed by dams, pollution, politics, and war, rivers find their way. They go above, below, around. They persist. They join forces. And they get to the ocean. And yes, scientifically, that’s gravity. But to me, power is to humans what gravity is to rivers. It’s that innate, natural force of becoming.
This makes me think of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—his idea that a musician must make music, that we are compelled to become who we are. I find that useful. Power is like the will toward self-actualization—toward individuation. And there’s something else I noticed. When a river reaches the ocean, it doesn’t just dissolve. If you look at aerial photos, it branches out into these beautiful patterns. The water that once converged begins to individuate again.
That’s when I began to think of this as the grammar of power. This branching pattern—this dendritic logic—is visible everywhere: in nature, in rivers, in lightning, in our bodies. It’s as though everything alive shares this same pattern—the same desire to live, to become, to actualize.
Bayo Akomolafe: I love that. I feel a deep resonance with what you're saying—especially when I speak about panraic, which is my word for “everything flowing.” It's spelled P-A-N-R-A-E-I-C.
Like you, I find that sometimes the language doesn’t yet exist for what we’re trying to express—so we invent it. Panraic describes systems of flow, unbounded by endorheic (inward) or exorheic (outward) definitions. It says: everything flows. It resists stability. It resists fixity.
What you’re describing is so aligned with that—your sense of power that starts not from a fixed point, but from the wandering water drop, the meandering path, the subtle gatherings that become a river. You’re showing how power doesn’t reside in emblems, but in movements, in migratory relations.
So yes—perhaps we’ve rudely called this thing “power,” when it’s actually a choreography of becoming.
Minna: I’ll come back later to talk about this term I coined—exusions—which came through my work on Sensuous Knowledge and speaks specifically to power and rivers. But first, I want to respond briefly to what you said about resistance and activism.
Even in my own field—feminism—and in so much feminist activism today, I notice this deep desire to produce something palatable, something full of certainty.
And I just can’t do dogma. I can’t do what becomes plastic, rigid ideological thinking. It doesn’t sit right with me—and I think that has really permeated a lot of activism today. I don’t say that with disdain. Activists are people with the best intentions—and in some ways, you and I could even be considered activists. But I believe we urgently need to rethink activism.
Bayo Akomolafe: Yes. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that plasticity you mentioned—which, if I heard you right, points to a kind of theatrical or performative proximity to power, as it’s currently configured in our social world. You also used the word dogma—a kind of ideologically certified discipline. Could you give an example? What are you seeing that feels trapped within itself? And how does that relate to the exusions you mentioned?
Minna: Thank you. Maybe I’ll begin by saying that the kind of feminist work I’m drawn to—and that I try to create—is about probing, searching, disturbing. It engages deeply with uncertainty, unknowability, and mystery. It acknowledges that these are core to our ontological reality.
But what I often see in public discourse today—especially in activist and feminist spaces, influenced by social media and digital polarization—is something else entirely. So many of these spaces have been shaped by what I call patriarchal knowledge: a knowledge system that demands certainty, quantification, linearity—a kind of robotic mode of thinking. And precisely as you said earlier, when we resist using the same tools as the systems we're opposing, we end up reinforcing their logic. So much of feminist work today is resisting patriarchy by using patriarchal methods. It leans on rigid certainties, rulebooks, and ideological positions that, over time, lose their depth and searching nature. That’s what I meant by plasticity. When knowledge becomes rigid and performative, it loses meaning. We must protect our movements from becoming plastic—something that looks like it's full of life, but isn’t.
Bayo Akomolafe: That resonates. You can be passionately against something—anti-this, anti-that—and still be fully embedded within the logic of what you’re opposing. You could be anti-racist and still participate in sustaining whiteness as the dominant shape of experience. In fact, I’d argue that whiteness produces anti-whiteness. It invites it, even. It says: “Come and oppose me. Critique me. Tear me down.” What it doesn’t want is for you to notice that it’s incomplete.
Coloniality works by projecting totality—by appearing whole and permanent. What it hides is its own instability, its edges, its breathability. So when we lean too hard against the wall of power, we risk becoming shaped by it.
Minna: Yes, that reminds me of something in your beautiful book—I forget the exact title—but you write about DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion. Today, even those initiatives can seem radical. But as you point out, DEI often becomes an example of whiteness doing anti-whiteness—because many DEI programs are funded and supported by institutions that uphold whiteness.
Bayo Akomolafe: Exactly. That’s how power operates—through disappearance and proliferation. Even in spaces of supposed resistance. It’s like with anarchy. You might say, “Let’s burn it down, blow the pipeline, storm the Bastille.” But you could remove the king and still preserve the throne. That’s what happens when we re-create the conditions for dominant logic to thrive—just in different clothing.
That’s why I talk about cracks. It’s my metaphor for ruptures—moments of real departure from the logics that entrap us in repetitive patterns of meaning. Cracks are invitations to notice power differently.
So perhaps we can see power not as something owned by someone or an institution, but as something incomplete, provisional, always on the move. If the Anthropocene teaches us anything, it’s that power is not scarce—it’s migratory. It flows.
Minna Salami: Yes. That brings me back to exusions. When I was writing Sensuous Knowledge, I was already deeply engaged with the question of power. But at the same time, I was traveling a lot and spending time by rivers—which is something I always do. I'm a water person. Wherever I go, I immediately look for the nearest river or body of water. And one day, while sitting by a river, this question arose in me: What can rivers teach us about power?
Around that time, I also came across the ancient Greek word for power: exousia. And somehow, as I continued listening to rivers—letting them respond to my question in their own way—this word blended with what I was sensing. That’s how the term exusions came to me: a way to reimagine and reshape our understanding of power. Rivers showed me that power is not static or singular. It flows. It moves. It gathers. It migrates. A river might start as a single droplet in the mountains. Then it joins other droplets—streams, tributaries—and together they form an immense force, moving toward the ocean.
Even when obstructed by dams, pollution, politics, and war, rivers find their way. They go above, below, around. They persist. They join forces. And they get to the ocean. And yes, scientifically, that’s gravity. But to me, power is to humans what gravity is to rivers. It’s that innate, natural force of becoming.
This makes me think of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—his idea that a musician must make music, that we are compelled to become who we are. I find that useful. Power is like the will toward self-actualization—toward individuation.
And there’s something else I noticed. When a river reaches the ocean, it doesn’t just dissolve. If you look at aerial photos, it branches out into these beautiful patterns. The water that once converged begins to individuate again.
That’s when I began to think of this as the grammar of power. This branching pattern—this dendritic logic—is visible everywhere: in nature, in rivers, in lightning, in our bodies. It’s as though everything alive shares this same pattern—the same desire to live, to become, to actualize.
Bayo Akomolafe: I love that. I feel a deep resonance with what you're saying—especially when I speak about panraic, which is my word for “everything flowing.” It's spelled P-A-N-R-A-E-I-C.
Like you, I find that sometimes the language doesn’t yet exist for what we’re trying to express—so we invent it. Panraic describes systems of flow, unbounded by endorheic (inward) or exorheic (outward) definitions. It says: everything flows. It resists stability. It resists fixity.
What you’re describing is so aligned with that—your sense of power that starts not from a fixed point, but from the wandering water drop, the meandering path, the subtle gatherings that become a river. You’re showing how power doesn’t reside in emblems, but in movements, in migratory relations.
So yes—perhaps we’ve rudely called this thing “power,” when it’s actually a choreography of becoming.
Bayo Akomolafe: And we cannot stabilize it in any final way. If you stabilize it, then you’re thinking through the lenses of coloniality—because coloniality is the effort to stabilize power and to enlist bodies to perform power as if it were stabilized, right? And we all stabilize power—even through resistance. We stabilize power.
It’s like—I remember—there was this strange, very strange series called The OA on Netflix. Did you watch it? No? None of you? Oh—Aaron watched it. The OA, yes. In there, there’s this scene, sister, where they were in a cell. And of course, when you're in a jail cell, the thing is to try to get out of the jail cell.
But then—I don’t want to spoil it, because I know some of our siblings here come from regions where spoilers are a huge sin. So I won’t spoil it. But the thing was, you have to dance this choreography. This choreographed practice is a crack. And to perform it as a ritual is to leave the circumstances of coloniality.
So everyone else was basically trying to get out of the jail cell. But a faction—if I remember correctly—of the prisoners knew that if you try to escape the jail cell, you’re committing yourself to the geometry of that jail cell. Because even escape—from penury, from poverty, from incarceration—is still a commitment to incarceration, ironically.
So the invitation then is: what is liquid about solidity? What is flowing even about fascism? How does fascism leak? How does it spill? How does it slip past its own algorithms? We could ask the same about money, about power. How does money betray its own algorithms? How does light fail to commit itself to illumination? The rivers speak to me of leakages—of a world that is constantly leaking, that cannot be held bound by any one ideology or faith or claim to power.
And I would suggest then, quite conspiratorially, that getting out of the house is not just making for the exit. Because the exit is already anticipated. The exit is part of the blueprint. I would be suspicious of an exit in the master’s house. Because then it would be permission for the master’s house to continue.
The house is not just a solid thing isolated in space-time—the house is a practice. And a practice is always flowing. This is the invitation: a cultivation of our sensitivities not to see things as these independent, structured-like things.
We’re post-structuralist here, I presume. All of us. We’re doing post-structuralist philosophical work. Because a house is not just the house. The house is the materials that made the house. The house is the geophilosophical and geosomatic and geophysical space that made the house possible. The house is the weather. So the house is all these ecologies of practice.
So leaving the house becomes really a matter of not just leaving a solid object, but finding how those interactions create modules—spaces unanticipated by the system that claims to own them. That’s why I speak about cracks, sister.
I feel that every body—all bodies, rather—are flowing failures to form. Bodies are failures to fully form. That is—bodies are never fully finished. The idea that they are finished, complete—that’s the master’s thesis. The reverse thesis is that bodies are constantly spilling. Even when we don’t think they are.
Minna: Precisely. Yes. I think this—this language of rivers—it lends itself... I mean, we could call it maybe riverine language. It really speaks to—that’s what I was trying to conjure, with the way rivers move beyond obstacles.
Of course, many rivers have died, sadly, and many more are suffering—and rivers do get ill. But in some way, they also laugh at this human attempt to harness their power—which, of course, we’ve done. And now we instead destroy them. But they laugh at that too—through the massive floodings rivers produce, through the way they ultimately reach their destinations, no matter what obstacles we place in their way.
What you’re saying about slippages and cracks—the presence of the trickster, even within fascism and capitalism and finance—it makes me think about how we, because we’re not separate from nature, and because all our constructs are part of nature...
And so these are all mirrorings of what’s happening elsewhere. And this is not an answer that should produce lucidity—it’s something to dance with, and to play with. There’s a sense in which we can understand these phenomena better if we understand ourselves as part of nature. And if we see that everything happening with the climate emergency is reflected back in our constructs—in our bodies.
The reason that so many more people are suffering from anxiety, say, or nightmares—it’s in indirect relationship to what’s happening in other parts of nature. Polarization is happening because we’re creating all of these barriers and divides in the natural world—we’re exploiting it as if it were a warehouse.
So, I think that’s the territory where we might—in an embodied way—feel the cracks. Feel the thing that is not the prison.
You know Audre Lorde’s famous line: “The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house.” I now see so clearly that what we’re being urged to do, in that paradoxical statement, is to build another house—or another kind of edifice, whatever it may be. But the way that activists and others have responded to Lorde’s statement is often by asking: “Well, what tools will dismantle the master’s house? Which ones are the master’s tools?” But that’s not the point. The master’s house will always be the master’s house—no matter what tools we use. We need to get out of that house and do something else. Minna: They form an immense force, moving toward the ocean. Even when obstructed by dams, pollution, politics, and war, rivers find their way. They go above, below, around. They persist. They join forces. And they get to the ocean.
And yes, scientifically, that’s gravity. But to me, power is to humans what gravity is to rivers. It’s that innate, natural force of becoming.
This makes me think of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—his idea that a musician must make music, that we are compelled to become who we are. I find that useful. Power is like the will toward self-actualization—toward individuation.
And there’s something else I noticed. When a river reaches the ocean, it doesn’t just dissolve. If you look at aerial photos, it branches out into these beautiful patterns. The water that once converged begins to individuate again.
That’s when I began to think of this as the grammar of power. This branching pattern—this dendritic logic—is visible everywhere: in nature, in rivers, in lightning, in our bodies. It’s as though everything alive shares this same pattern—the same desire to live, to become, to actualize.
Bayo Akomolafe: I love that. I feel a deep resonance with what you're saying—especially when I speak about panraic, which is my word for “everything flowing.” It's spelled P-A-N-R-A-E-I-C.
Like you, I find that sometimes the language doesn’t yet exist for what we’re trying to express—so we invent it. Panraic describes systems of flow, unbounded by endorheic (inward) or exorheic (outward) definitions. It says: everything flows. It resists stability. It resists fixity.
What you’re describing is so aligned with that—your sense of power that starts not from a fixed point, but from the wandering water drop, the meandering path, the subtle gatherings that become a river. You’re showing how power doesn’t reside in emblems, but in movements, in migratory relations.
So yes—perhaps we’ve rudely called this thing “power,” when it’s actually a choreography of becoming.
