Join us for a live conversation with Dr. Wendell H. Marsh, Dr. Abdourahmane Seck, and Meenakshi Thirukode as we continue thinking alongside the study group Black Kings and Pirates: An Aesthetic Inquiry into Power, Inheritance, and Refusal.
Date: May 6th 2026
Where: Substack Live!
Time: 10 AM GMT / 3:30 PM IST
This gathering lingers with the questions that have been unfolding across our sessions. What does it mean to inherit forms of power that arrive already shaped by colonial histories, and how might refusal take form without simply reproducing what it resists? How do the figures of the king and the pirate move through imagination and history, not as opposites, but as tensions that trouble authority, legitimacy, and escape?
Drawing from our recent conversation, we will stay with study as something that happens in relation—through annotation, conversation, and the slow work of thinking together. Rather than aiming for resolution, this is an invitation to remain with the unfinished, to notice how aesthetics can open other ways of sensing and inhabiting these questions.
Whether you have been part of the study group or are arriving here for the first time, you are welcome to join us in this shared space of attention.
Dr. Wendell H. Marsh
Wendell H. Marsh is an Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guérir, Morocco. He researches and teaches at the intersections of African and diasporic intellectual history, comparative literature, religious studies, and the politics of knowledge production. He is the author of Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities, and is from Atlanta in the United States.
Dr. Abdourahmane Seck
Dr. Abdourahmane Seck is a lecturer at Gaston Berger University in Saint‑Louis, Senegal. His research examines the (de)production of social and symbolic bonds in post‑colonial African contexts, with focus on religion, politics, migration, and the continent’s intellectual history. He serves as Coordinator of the Groupe d’Action et d’Étude Critique – Africa (GAEC‑Africa), a decolonial collective founded in 2020 in Saint‑Louis.
Meenakshi Thirukode is a writer and artist exploring the intersecting histories of politics, resistance and visual culture. Her areas of research focus on the role of micro-politics, culture and collectivity within the realm of a techno-capitalist, transient network of individuals and institutions. Her recent projects include Kitchen Table Talks (2023); Disorganizing Metabolisms in collaboration with Food, Art, Research Network (2022); the Here, There and Everywhere conference at MAC Birmingham (2018); and Out of Turn, Being Together Otherwise in collaboration with Asia Art Archive at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa (2018). Her chapter ‘Towards a Public of the Otherwise’ has been published in the Routledge Companion Series for Art in the Public Realm (2020). She was a Reading Resident and a contributor to the seminar US: Shaping Time at Stroom Den Haag, Hague (2022). She is the founder of School of Instituting Otherwise.