Creativity as alchemy for the world

I found myself unable to paint for weeks this winter, haunted by a question as I watched federal agents terrorize migrant families across the United States: What good is art in a time like this? In Five Manifestos for the Beautiful World, I found a resounding response. This collection of essays, which were delivered as lectures in 2023 at the second annual Alchemy Lecture at York University in Toronto, urges readers to engage in alchemy, a creativity akin to magic that imagines our world beyond its current situation of empire. At the same time, the authors remind us that alchemy does not come easily. Undoing oppressive realities requires all of our collective energy, power, and imagination.

This commitment to collaboration is built into the Alchemy Lecture—a celebratory event that gathers speakers from various disciplines to address a common theme—and is mirrored in the structure of the book. Five voices, each in a different register, resound together to proclaim a new reality.

The book begins with Joseph M. Pierce’s “A Manifesto for Speculative Relations.” Pierce, a member of the Cherokee Nation and professor of Hispanic languages and literature at Stony Brook University, proposes the return of Indigenous land by way of “speculative relations”: storytelling grounded in the ethical engagement of land, humans, and other-than-human beings. Language “stories” us into the future, explains Pierce, so we begin our work by metaphor. But we do not end there. For “land back” to become a material reality, both land and humans must be given back to themselves through right relationality. This return restores us to our very existence, as “there can be no life without relation.”