Uploaded December 2022 | Updated September 2026, 23 hours ago
Find more Left of Black here: https://fhi.duke.edu/programs/left-black
What does it mean to "become human"? Or to humanize one another instead of racializing one another, which has become so entwined with how we perceive and engage with other people in this American society? In this special holiday episode of Left of Black, host Dr. Mark Anthony Neal is joined by the Duke University Chapel's first Black dean, the preeminent Rev. Dr. Luke A. Powery as he discusses his latest book, "Becoming Human: The Holy Spirit and the Rhetoric of Race," published by Westminster John Knox Press.
Learn more about Dr. Powery here: https://divinity.duke.edu/faculty/luke-powery
Find his new book here: wjkbooks.com/Products/066426722X/becoming-human.aspx
Left of Black is a web series featuring interviews with Black Studies scholars produced by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.
Directed and edited by Eric Barstow.
Camera: Shiraz Ahmed (MFAEDA at Duke); Lukas Sanchez (Duke Class of 2025)
Sound: Yasaman Baghban (MFAEDA at Duke)
Production Assistant: Tessa Delgo (Duke Class of 2023)
Special Thanks to James Todd, Communications Manager at Duke Chapel
@dukeuniversity @DukeChapel @FranklinHumanities @FranklinCenterAtDuke @dukeuniversitysdepartmento2485 #blackstudies #blackscholars
Find more Left of Black here: https://fhi.duke.edu/programs/left-black
What does it mean to "become human"? Or to humanize one another instead of racializing one another, which has become so entwined with how we perceive and engage with other people in this American society? In this special holiday episode of Left of Black, host Dr. Mark Anthony Neal is joined by the Duke University Chapel's first Black dean, the preeminent Rev. Dr. Luke A. Powery as he discusses his latest book, "Becoming Human: The Holy Spirit and the Rhetoric of Race," published by Westminster John Knox Press.
Learn more about Dr. Powery here: https://divinity.duke.edu/faculty/luke-powery
Find his new book here: wjkbooks.com/Products/066426722X/becoming-human.aspx
Left of Black is a web series featuring interviews with Black Studies scholars produced by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University.
Directed and edited by Eric Barstow.
Camera: Shiraz Ahmed (MFAEDA at Duke); Lukas Sanchez (Duke Class of 2025)
Sound: Yasaman Baghban (MFAEDA at Duke)
Production Assistant: Tessa Delgo (Duke Class of 2023)
Special Thanks to James Todd, Communications Manager at Duke Chapel
@dukeuniversity @DukeChapel @FranklinHumanities @FranklinCenterAtDuke @dukeuniversitysdepartmento2485 #blackstudies #blackscholars










![Bayo Akomolafe | Becoming-black: On White Syncopation at the End of the World
Learn more at https://fhi.duke.edu/programs/entanglement-project
ABOUT THE LECTURE: The Yorubas have a proverb: In order to find your way, you must lose it. In this talk, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe draws from the transatlantic excursions of the Yoruba deities known as orishas and the concept of ase to reframe blackness as a more-than-human, counterhegemonic flow of indeterminacy that maddens the imperial individual and teases apart the project of stability from an external within. This coming-apart is white syncopation, also known as becoming-black. Not a becoming Black, but a becoming black. A becoming-monster. A losing ones way. A veering off-course. A becoming-imperceptible....[which] is not necessarily about building new institutions, winning legislative victories, receiving reparations, or gaining greater representation and visibility. Akomolafe suggests that this becoming-black is the condition for the emergence of an autistic politics that cradles the minor gesture (Erin Manning) as a response to contemporary crises.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Bayo Akomolafe, Ph.D., is a widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, /These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanitys Search for Home/ and /We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak/. He is the Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the postactivist course/festival/event, We Will Dance with Mountains. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia). In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of UC Berkeleys Othering and Belonging Institute. He has also been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023). He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), among other recognitions.
On the Entanglement Project at Duke-FHI: Climate catastrophe cannot be thought outside of the context of empire and the forms of racialization central to global capitalism, including the degradation of peoples, ecosystems and lands facilitated by states in the global North. Threats to the very existence of the planet and all its inhabitants result from this genocidal global development project, yet the effects are being borne more grotesquely by those who live in the global South. Environmental justice efforts that overlook the longue durée trajectory of the historical operations of capitalism, and the raciality that affixes a disproportionate burden onto ex-colonized areas of the planet and its inhabitants, fall short of pointing us in a direction of systemic and just change.
The Climate Change, Decolonization and Global Blackness Lab seeks to explore the linkages among three pivotal and simultaneously occurring catastrophes—criminality, displacement, pandemics—toward developing a set of principles regarding decolonization as an ethical approach to climate change. @dukeuniversity @FranklinHumanities Bayo Akomolafe | Becoming-black: On White Syncopation at the End of the World](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dca_1WDxVoY/mqdefault.jpg)