Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader

Edited by Eden Pearlstein

posthumanist polymath and “trans-public” intellectual, Báyò Akómoláfé has produced a vast body of work that presents a startling picture of the world in perpetual process and radical relation. Through an ever-growing archive of books, articles, interviews, social media posts, workshops, and rituals, Akómoláfé seeks to interrogate the fundamental assumptions and epistemological gaps in our current culture in crisis.

Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader presents a poetically arranged selection of Akómoláfé’s short-form writings, which draw inspiration from Édouard Glissant; Gilles Deleuze; Gregory Bateson; Octavia Butler; Fernand Deligny; Chinua Achebe; the adventures of Esu, the Yoruba monster-trickster and crossroads figure; and more. A tightly curated composition of aphorisms, anti-epiphanies, prose poems, and philosophical fragments, Selah invites readers into the thicket of Akómoláfé’s thought, weaving together threads of his most critically creative concepts—such as ontofugitivity, ecocognitive assemblage theory, parapolitics, and postactivism. Taking its title from an enigmatic Hebrew word that appears throughout the Book of Psalms—one that suggests a moment of ecstatic exclamation or musical notation—Selah is a book that can be read in an hour or studied for years, kept by your bedside or passed among friends like an open secret. For those already swimming in the depths of Akómoláfé’s language, as well as those encountering his dynamic body of work for the first time, Selah offers an accessible and ecstatic entry into a visionary thinker’s signature thought and poetics.

The book is edited by Eden Pearlstein, cofounder of Ayin.

Paperback book
122 pages