“On World-Making amid Contradiction and Crisis”
on Brooklyn Museum’s website
(originally published as “Contradiction and Crisis: Fractured World-making Across Abyssal Lines, or Becoming Insoverign”
“What began as an attempt to find traces of connection between Africans and Indians, rooted in my father’s childhood observations of African soldiers in Portuguese uniforms reluctantly stationed in Goa, continues to inform my search for these histories. Acknowledging that no history, no narrative, is ever complete, possibilities are glimpsed and grasped, continuously, simultaneously, through the past and the present combined.
We must propel ourselves into these complexities and paradoxes—for what else is solidarity but an intricate mess of possibility? Perhaps, even if under threat of annihilation, it is the insovereign who can show us the way, with the strength of their desire to build worlds and break down others, a desire so strong that no regime may claim it as their own. This is the world of the insovereign, a world still yet for us to build.”