Stefano Harney and Fred Moten: April 6, 2022

Starting with the overarching title to their four successive lectures,"Felicity Street," and a dedication to their friend, scholar and musician Fumi Okiji, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten present their lecture "Involvement and Betrayal." Harney briefly interrupts to tell the story of how they lost (then reclaimed) their bags on arriving in the Bay Area. Supplying and practicing an expansive sense of the term "lecture," their talk moves to draw primarily on figures involved in the Guyanese liberation struggle of 1953 and thereafter. These include poet Martin Carter, political organizers and writers Andaiye and Walter Rodney, and novelist George Lamming. Citing Sylvia Wynter's challenge to the notion of the human, Moten asks "how do you reclaim the status of the human, when that notion of the human has been predicated on the ownership of land, the standing of one's ground, the ownership of things?" Rather, through involvement, and by finding and using (in Ivan Illich's term) "convivial tools," Andaiye, along with her friends, can be seen as coming up with ways of thinking and practicing sociality, outside liberal humanist traps of self-reliance and sovereignty. Harney, indicating that they are drawing on the black radical tradition, says that they are "trying to imagine an involvement in living that is not based on shares, but on being shared." Throughout their talk, Harney and Moten encourage and respond to questions from their audience that arise in the course of the lecture.