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Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas.The third annual Alchemy Lecture took place in the fall of 2024 at York University, to a sold-out in-person audience and hundreds of online viewers tuning in from multiple continents. Gathered by Dr. Christina Sharpe, these Alchemists—four thinkers and practitioners who work across a range of disciplines and geographies—shared their ideas of city life, its structures and architectures, and how radically different these can and should be organized to support community needs. Their urgent, poignant, and inventive lectures have been captured and expanded in these pages.
Princeton assistant professor of architecture V. Mitch McEwen borrows the language of the swamp to suggest a city modeled on buoyancy: “Let’s dream a physics—which is to say a calculability or maybe a comprehension towards calculability—that considers floating as something other than displacement.” Iranian-American writer and professor Laleh Khalili dreams a city of radical kinship, in which even strangers have the means and desire to share a table; she suggests that “[h]ospitality does not presume pre-existing bonds. It is about creating the bond through the rituals of reciprocal giving.” In the Bantu/Kongo tradition, Brazilian architect and professor Gabriela Leandro Pereira points to dreams as the site from which all Black emancipation begins: “Building and ruining, refusing and dissembling, cultivating and creating. What cities emerge from dreams that find their foundation in these gestures?” And Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson examines how collectives form at the thresholds between things; “this city of my dreaming is one that relentlessly chooses life, Black life, Palestinian life, Indigenous life, the life of the watered, aired and landed, the life of snow crystals, over and over again, across every scale, temporality and spatiality. Relentlessly.”
Conveyed here are clarion calls for new conceptions of the city. The four Alchemists in
The City of Our Dreaming imagine the architectures and infrastructures that make possible, inevitable, and irresistible gestures of freedom, modes of sustenance, and the necessity and pleasure of breaking bread, together.
About the author
The Alchemy Lecture is a partnership between York University and Knopf Canada, organized by Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York,
CHRISTINA SHARPE. She is the author of
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being;
Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects; and
Ordinary Notes.
LALEH KHALILI is the Al Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. She has written or edited seven books, including
Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration.
V. MITCH MCEWEN leads Harlem-based Atelier Office and teaches on the faculty at Princeton University's School of Architecture. She is one of ten co-founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective, and her design work has been commissioned by MoMA and the Venice Architecture Biennale US Pavilion.
GABRIELA LEANDRO PEREIRA is a professor at the Faculty of Architecture at the Federal University of Bahia. She is a member of the Lugar Comum Research Group and coordinator of the Corpo, Discurso e Território Study Group.
LEANNE BETASAMOSAKE SIMPSON is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and musician. She is the author of eight previous books, including the forthcoming
Theory of Water: Nishnaabeg Maps to the Times Ahead (2025). Her last album,
Theory of Ice, was shortlisted for a Polaris Prize.
