thinking with: is a series of conversations rooted in study as a collective practice that exceeds institutional forms even as it moves through them. Engaging questions of collapse, abolition, solidarity, and survival, the series foregrounds thinking as something done together, in the midst of constraint and struggle. Conversation here is not a platform for positions, but a practice of holding open ways of instituting otherwise.
Wendell H. Marsh and Dr. Abdourahmane Seck are facilitating the study group Black Kings and Pirates: An Aesthetic Inquiry into Power, Inheritance, and Refusal, a School of Instituting Otherwise × GAEC-AFRICA collaboration starting April 18th 2026.
Meenakshi Thirukode (MT): In this moment of scholasticide where universities, archives, and conditions for study are actively under attack, you’ve written about the “fate of the humanities.” How do you understand the stakes of humanistic inquiry today?
Wendell H. Marsh (WM): The present is paradoxical. We are acutely aware of the university’s complicity in violence, including genocide, and we are watching many universities openly align themselves with some of the worst forces in society. In the United States especially, we are seeing strategies of capitulation that make this difficult to ignore.
A colleague of mine, Sadia Abbas at Rutgers-Newark, recently remarked that we cannot only worry about what the state is doing to the university if we have not fully reckoned with what the university has long been doing to itself. I think that is exactly right. The danger is real, and the prospects for humanistic inquiry do not, at the moment, appear especially promising.
And yet my posture is somewhat counterintuitive. I want to insist on a humanistic perspective precisely here: one that takes the long view, that is historically informed, and that remains committed to ethical reflection. From that perspective, we are reminded that knowledge is always fragile. The institutions that support it are fragile too. But I do not take that fragility to be merely a cause for anxiety. It should deepen our sense of urgency and intensify our commitment to study.
The university has long been complicit in crimes against humanity, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes in quieter structural ways. That is not new. What is new is that, in the present, this complicity is becoming undeniable and unavoidable. For that reason, we should treat this moment as a reminder of the importance of sustaining study beyond the university.
MT: At a time when formal systems of education are collapsing or being called into question, your work with GAEC-Africa proposes “third places” between institutions and communities. What becomes possible in these spaces that cannot happen within the university?
Dr. Abdourahmane Seck (AS): I think the first thing is to speak plainly: trying to move away from the university is already, in one sense, an act of care and self-protection. That may sound selfish, but it is first of all a defensive gesture in the face of a space that is becoming increasingly toxic, increasingly unlivable, a space that provokes in us feelings and sensations that are nearly extreme. To endure, not to be demolished by it, already leads one to seek a step to the side.
But that movement only has meaning if it does not remain a simple reflex of escape. It also has to become a space of reconstruction, a place where one can rethink questions of knowledge, society, transmission, and relation in a different way. That is where these third places become important.
This does not mean we should condemn the university too quickly. In our countries in particular, the university is not nothing. It carries a history. Among our heroes, our mentors, our martyrs, many came from that space and fell within it. So we cannot simply say that nothing happens there. But there remains today an unjustifiable disconnection between what the university claims to be and the kind of function and relation it actually embodies vis-à-vis society.
Third places open something else: the possibility of conversing with communities, of speaking in languages people understand, of trying to make meaning together, of building a shared social horizon. Perhaps it is also because they are microscopic, situated, attentive to everyday life, that they can allow what the university can no longer allow at that scale.
That said, one difficulty remains: wanting not to resemble the university does not guarantee that one will not reproduce some of its forms. Refusal alone is not enough. These spaces have to sustain a daily vigilance: not reproducing what was fled. That is the whole challenge.
WM: RA Judy calls that “minding what you are doing.”
Thinking along those lines takes me back to our 2020 study group, entitled “What is a Study Group?” when we translated The Undercommons into French and worked through it alongside Wolof concepts. One of the key ideas I have held onto from those discussions is that this was where we really began to think seriously about the “third place” or “third space.”
The concept from The Undercommons that most helped me clarify that idea was the notion of the general antagonism. I want to bring that concept into this conversation because, since the pandemic, many people have used “third space” to describe types of social space that are neither private nor commercial per se, though not fully public either. In that usage, the term names a kind of in-between space that sits uneasily alongside more familiar ways of understanding social life.
But when we think about the university in relation to third space, the question becomes more complex. I remember that in our conversations we explored at least two ways of understanding it. In one model, if the first space is the Northern university, then the second space is something like the African university, or the university of the Global South, and the third space is something outside both. In another model, within an African context, the first place is the university, the second is the community, and the third is the space that mediates between them. I remember both of those models being part of our discussions.
What helped clarify the relation between them for me was precisely the idea of the general antagonism: that tension, that force, always present within and between social formations. On the one hand, there is an antagonism between the Northern university and the university of the Global South, and that antagonism is then reproduced in the way the African university, as a colonial institution still, relates to the community that surrounds it. Although the African university is often imagined, desired, or presented as a public institution that supports, uplifts, and enlightens, in practice we can see that it often does not do so.
I remember, too, our reading of Robin D. G. Kelley’s “Black Study, Black Struggle,” which clarified those contradictions and pointed toward the need for other spaces of fugitive study inspired by Moten and Harney. But for us, what became especially clear was that if the general antagonism is replicated across these nested scales, then the purpose of the third space is not simply to exist between institutions. Its function is to intervene.
More specifically, the third space enters into the defense of the community vis-à-vis its antagonistic relationship to the university—an institution that may directly or indirectly exploit the community, mediate its relation to extroversion, or otherwise fail to sustain it on its own terms.
That, for me, was one of the most important lessons from our conversations. It is a concept I think should remain in circulation, and one I hope others will continue to think with.
MT: You describe a shift from a “textual attitude” to more bureaucratic and technocratic forms of knowledge. How do you see this transformation shaping contemporary institutions—and their inability to sustain critical thought or imagination?
WM: In many ways, my book Textual Life is as much about the present as it is about Shaykh Musa Kamara. That is why I call it a parable: a parable of the fate of the humanities amid technological, political, and epistemic change. I am trying to make sense of our own moment through an earlier one.
Kamara was writing in the 1920s and 1930s, during a period when a philological mode of knowing was increasingly giving way to a bureaucratic one based on surveillance. I think that transition prefigures what we are living through now. This is a fundamentally humanistic move: to say that even when the present feels unprecedented, it is not without precedent. The archive can help us think through earlier transformations and, in doing so, remind us of what remains possible. A century after Kamara wrote the first version of Zuhūr al-Basātīn, we are still speaking about him. That matters.
At the same time, I do not want to endow institutions with too much power or preciousness. By their nature, institutions are bureaucratic; by their nature, they constrain imagination and charisma. If critical thought and imagination arise from people, institutions have never really been the ultimate source of them. At best, institutions can host or temporarily support them. They do not generate them.
So if the university no longer serves the function it once claimed to serve, then we must be prepared to take critical thought and imagination elsewhere.
MT: In returning to figures like Shaykh Musa Kamara, whose writing itself became an act of resistance against colonial erasure, what does it mean to live textually today, when the very conditions for reading, writing, and thinking are under threat?
WM: This question is closely related to the earlier one. The fragility of knowledge means that the conditions for reading, writing, and thinking have always been under threat. Historically, when literacy was associated with elite power, the danger was that it would remain confined to a small group and be wielded as an instrument of domination.
So to live textually today is, above all, a matter of commitment. It means returning to the text. One of my favorite etymologies for religion is relegere—to read again, to go over again. Whatever the philological debates around that etymology, I am drawn to the idea of return: the disciplined practice of going back to the source, of reading again, of study as repetition and recommitment.
Living textually is therefore not a withdrawal into fantasy, not a Don Quixote-like confusion of literary imagination with the world. It is, rather, a worldly practice. It is a commitment to study while remaining fully in and of the world. In that sense, I think of it in something like Edward Said’s sense of worldly criticism: textual practice as a way of inhabiting the world more attentively and more responsibly.
MT: GAEC-Africa speaks of building a “African popular university to come” rooted in everyday life and critical thought. How do you imagine learning differently when it begins from community rather than institution?
AS: The phrase “to come” is important. It says something political. Very honestly, the present academic institution is no longer sustainable. It is already beginning to fray, surrounded at once by a history that says no to it, by a society that increasingly refuses it, and by its own internal contradictions.
There is a growing distance between the university and society. That distance shows itself even in the simplest, most everyday judgments. When an ordinary resident says that she sees young Chinese inventing all sorts of things, but has not yet seen a Senegalese university produce even a candle, that cannot simply be dismissed as a naive remark. It is a situated statement. It expresses a very concrete encounter with the object “university,” and that encounter speaks of a distance, an incomprehension, a loss of social consent.
The first protection of the university is not a law. It is the fact that a social world accepts that the university is there, recognizes its importance, protects it because it understands its history and its function. But that social consensus has now been deeply eroded. It scarcely exists anymore.
You can see it at other levels as well. The university no longer truly speaks the language of society. It may insist on speaking French in the classroom, on requiring students to write in French, but the sociolinguistic reality has already overflowed that frame. The space that was supposed to be secondary—the sociabilities, the languages, the popular ways of being—has already entered the primary space, including the classroom itself. The hierarchy that put French first is being reversed.
It is in this context that the idea of a “coming African popular university” makes sense. It does not arrive as a decorative supplement. It comes because the other form is no longer tenable, and because another form is already emerging, whether we like it or not. GAEC-Africa is simply trying to recognize that, to give it form, and to create activities, spaces, and practices that already correspond to this other university that is coming into being.
MT: Abdou, you have developed the idea of memography as both a theory and a practice. How can memory that’s oral, lived and collective, function as a form of knowledge production today?
AS: Memography was born first out of a discomfort. The discomfort of the student, the doctoral researcher I once was, working on questions that concerned my own country, my own society, and yet feeling that I was being asked to adopt a deeply inappropriate posture: to look at my own people almost over their shoulders, from an intrusive distance assigned by the academic exercise itself.
I felt that there was something wrong in that way of producing knowledge. The criteria of certification seemed to require from me a certain relation to my own world: a relation that reduced lives, histories, attachments to something that, in appearance, did not concern me. Very early on, I knew I did not want to play that role, that I did not want to be the anthropologist of my own society in that sense.
From there, something began to germinate, even before it had a name. Very concretely, I tried not to write the way anthropology wrote, not to look the way anthropology looked, not to work from questionnaires or pre-given grids. I tried to work otherwise. I did not yet know how to name it, but it was clear to me that by accepting the game I was also agreeing to reproduce the model of the interpreter, the collector of information, the gatherer of data for an external apparatus whose aim was to turn knowledge into a purely utilitarian operation.
But what I was discovering in encounter was something entirely different. What was being told to me was not of the order of “data.” It was not something one simply takes and carries away in one’s basket. It was something entrusted to me. And what is entrusted cannot be treated like a commodity. It presumes relation, trust, responsibility.
That is where conversation becomes central. In that dynamic, one is no longer extracting; one is entering a common space in which something takes shape through exchange. What emerges there is not the knowledge of an outside observer; it is a shared elaboration, a social and political bond, a “we” in formation.
Memography, in the end, came to name that: a form of writing born of narratives that carry us, connect us, and constitute a common space of historical presence. It opens another relation to knowledge, to time, to memory, to history. It allows us to speak of ourselves, from ourselves, without our lives being reduced to manipulable fragments or reinterpreted from elsewhere by those who presume to hold a monopoly over the narration of the world.
MT: Across your work, Wendell, archives and texts are not static—they are sites of dialogue, interpretation, even spiritual return. How can we think of archives as living practices that sustain relationships across time?
WM: I am not sure I am entirely committed to the language of the archive as a “living practice.” There is something important in that formulation, but I also think it risks obscuring the archive’s relationship to death.
To put it somewhat starkly: the archive is, in a certain sense, a site of death. It gathers what has fallen out of circulation. It preserves what is no longer immediately alive in social use. That is part of what makes the archive a distinctly modern formation. One might think here of Derrida’s Archive Fever, or even of Saidiya Hartman’s remark that history is the way the secular world mourns the dead.
So I do not want to turn the building of archives into a primary vocation in itself, or to become overly invested in collecting for the sake of collecting. We need first to attend to life. The archive should not become a substitute for living relation.
That said, I also want to distinguish between texts and documents. A document may be a text, but it is not necessarily one. When I speak of a text, I mean a form of human intention that exceeds the mere transmission of information. Its formal qualities matter; how it says something is inseparable from what it says. A document, by contrast, may simply relay information.
This distinction matters because archives are often full of documents that have fallen out of circulation. Texts, however, can return us to relation. Kamara’s writings, for example, may sit in an archive, but they still demand interpretation, rereading, encounter. In that sense, the task is less to build the archive than to cultivate the practice of returning to what lies there as a provocation to renewed thought. The living practice is perhaps not the archive itself, but the discipline of returning, reading, and relating across time.
MT: Your projects, Abdou, approach archives not only as repositories, but as living and situated practices—rewriting the history of Saint-Louis through its people, objects, and stories. What does it mean to write history from within rather than from above?
AS: The central question here may first be this: what is knowledge? What do we recognize as knowledge? If we remain within the definition carried by the classical institution and by the global economy of the demand for information on Africa, then yes, one produces an object, a product, something that can be stored, exchanged, sold, made obsolete.
But if we remain within the memographic perspective, then what we have is not first of all a product. What we have is already situated in a history. It is an anchoring, a lived experience, an encounter with life. And that experience can enter into narrative without losing its truth simply because it does not conform to the chronological or technical criteria of a dominant idea of knowledge.
In other words, the shift concerns not only what one recounts, but also the protocols through which one decides: here there is knowledge, there there is none. That is why I often prefer to speak of testimony. The witness speaks from within a conversation, from within a desire for society, from within a struggle to preserve a more balanced being-together.
I am thinking here of certain experiences organized by GAEC-Africa, for example around neighborhood life, food, and ordinary social existence. In very heterogeneous assemblies—with schoolteachers, young people, return migrants, mothers, people of several generations, French speakers and non-French speakers—people testified. And those testimonies already constituted knowledge. They made it possible for new understandings of what we were living through to emerge.
For example, one could clearly connect the feeling that the social environment had deteriorated, and that relations among neighbors had declined, to specific periods marked by structural adjustment policies. But that link really appears only when lived experience, the words of residents, and broader analytical tools are able to enter into conversation.
To write history from within, then, is to refuse the idea that only university-produced knowledge has access to truth. It is to begin from situated experience, testimony, and conversation, and to allow those forms of knowledge to correctly name the forces that structure collective life. the idea of distance maintained by the university, in its way of labeling knowledge, has a meaning and an operational function: to prevent a better articulation between community experience (as recounted in the testimony) and the overall framework that provokes crises in societies (the continuity of extractivist mechanisms and the racialist ideology that underpins them). This is why the question arises: for whom and for what does the Eurocentric university work?
MT: You’ve worked both within academic institutions and through public-facing curatorial projects, Wendell. What possibilities exist for building spaces of study that exceed or escape the constraints of the university?
WM: The most significant curatorial project I have worked on, Powers of the Unseen, was housed in a university-adjacent space: Express Newark. It was institutional, certainly, but it was also oriented toward community in a very serious way. That mattered.
To be frank, that project could not have happened at that scale, or with that level of care, without my relationship to the university. We had international artists, skilled professionals, and substantial institutional resources. One of my co-curators once reminded me that the curator is, etymologically, the caretaker. I learned through that project how much care it actually takes to present works of art responsibly. The university made some of that possible.
At the same time, the project was not simply university-based. It was shaped by Newark itself, by the city’s histories of struggle, and by longstanding community pressure on the university to serve something beyond itself. That pressure is constant, and it has to remain constant.
So I do not want to say the university is useless. I want instead to say that we need a clearer and less enchanted sense of how to relate to it. I take some inspiration here from the Undercommons tradition: to be in the university but not of it. There is a long Black intellectual history of that posture.
And yet there is always a seduction. When there opens any space of maneuver inside the university, the temptation is to go deeper into it. I think we have to resist that. Any margin we gain, any access we secure, should be leveraged to create autonomous spaces of study rather than greater recognition by or reward from the institution. That is the key for me: autonomous spaces of study. That is what interests me most.
MT: You have written about the need to co-create knowledge across different legitimacies and experiences, Abdou. How do you hold these differences – academic, popular, political—together without reproducing hierarchy?
AS: Our spaces are imperially dominated spaces, and therefore fragmented spaces. They have fallen to pieces. And that fragmentation necessarily calls for an effort of re-membering, recomposition, reconnection.
In this state of dispersion, certain resources become fundamental. Teranga, for example—hospitality, not in a merely folkloric sense, but as a social and political form—becomes a central resource. For there is a whole set of mechanisms that sustain dispersion: the monetary economy, political and geopolitical capture, the role of elites as intermediaries, the generalization of forms of dependence and captivity.
We have reached a situation in which everyone can become captive to everyone else. And that makes it necessary to find a way out of the state of permanent war, of capture, of continual disturbance. Recreating hospitality, remaking society, reintroducing sharing and balance—this is not a secondary moral question. It is a necessity.
It is within that framework that the co-creation of knowledge becomes possible. Not as a naive fusion of all voices, but as patient work against the forms of fragmentation that spontaneously reproduce hierarchy. The task is to rebuild conditions in which differences of legitimacy and experience no longer serve to rank some above others, but instead help remake connection, commonality, and collective capacity for thought.
MT: In a time when the conditions for thinking are narrowing, what does it mean to institute otherwise through the humanities? What kinds of intellectual or collective practices still feel possible and necessary?
WM: In Sylvia Wynter’s words, we need to “learn to sit down together and talk a little culture.” And in Walter Rodney’s terms, we need grounding: leaving the university, sitting on an oil drum if necessary, and reasoning with others whose lives are not organized by the professional forms of academic life.
When I speak about the humanities, I am not referring only to the institutional disciplines of humanistic learning. I am speaking more broadly about what R.A. Judy calls the “Black study of life.” That phrase captures something essential for me. The humanities, in this sense, are a live engagement with living—a practice of paying attention to what we are doing and refusing mere convention.
That work has to happen with others. It has to be collective. And it also has to remain self-questioning. It cannot simply reproduce inherited forms under a new name.
Since speaking with you, Meenakshi, I have also been thinking a lot about the word facility. Perhaps instituting otherwise is not always a matter of “institution” in the conventional sense. Perhaps it is a matter of “facilitation.” When I think about spaces like SIO or GAEC-Africa, I think of them as facilities in this deeper sense: not just physical places, but forms and structures of agency that make certain kinds of study, encounter, and relation easier than they would otherwise.
If the humanities are the Black study of life, then what we need are facilities for that study: autonomous zones that make such study possible and, in doing so, make other things possible too.
MT: Abdou, your work places strong emphasis on the in-common, on rebuilding social bonds and shared worlds. In this time of fragmentation and violence, what does it mean to institute otherwise through the everyday practices of community, study, and memory?
AS: Here we need to understand clearly the dialectical relation between a certain idea of knowledge and the kind of world it produces. If we remain trapped within instrumental reason, then we get the world we have today: endless accumulation of power, proliferation of systems of control, massive data collection, expansion of violence, destruction of life in the name of security.
This political economy is suicidal. It claims to protect life, but in reality it produces the conditions of life’s destruction. And it is accompanied by a great lie: the claim that any other path is naive, unrealistic, angelic.
But another path is possible. It has to be saved, however, from two reductions. The first is to reduce it to an abstract, decorative humanism without political force. The second is to make it into a mere supplément d’âme, a tolerated good conscience within the dominant order.
When we speak of concepts such as mbokk, âqh or teranga, we are not speaking only of a moral philosophy. We are also speaking of a social and political philosophy, of a way of thinking about structures of power and the conditions for transforming them. What makes peace possible must be protected. And that requires material conditions, a just distribution of shares, social justice, and more broadly a justice toward the whole of the living world.
There is no peace without justice. There is no peace where one part of the living world is sacrificed. Human societies have always invented forms, moral and political economies, structures of care and protection in order to preserve this. These spaces have not completely disappeared, even in the present globalized world. And it is precisely because they have not disappeared that we are still able to hold on in the face of the violence of the dominant order.
To institute otherwise, then, is to learn to know these spaces better, to name them better, to center them better wherever possible. The task is to move them from the margin into the heart of political and social life. That is where the everyday practices of community, study, and memory become decisive: not as symbolic supplements, but as concrete conditions for another possible world.
MT: As this conversation opens onto shared work beyond the university, what do you hope spaces like the Black Kings and Pirates study group can make possible? What are you most looking forward to? What interests or excites you most about this shared space of study?
WM: I hope it is weird, in the sense that it brings into being something we could not have predicted beforehand. It should not be an exercise in optimization, but a practice of experimentation, relation, and collective study—one in which thought is allowed to move somewhere unexpected.
AS: For me, this connects deeply to the whole conversation we have been having. We are living in a time of deluge, a time when things seem to be falling apart everywhere. Force and violence cannot reproduce themselves indefinitely without eventually turning toward self-destruction, but in the meantime they generate forms of collapse, fear, and dispersion everywhere. In such a moment, it becomes crucial to know how to recognize spaces of refuge.
And those spaces of refuge can take the form of moments like the one we are about to enter together. What interests me in a study group like this is precisely that it brings together experiences that, in many ways, resemble one another across different places, even if they speak in different languages. Each space, each moment, each experience brings something singular. What matters to me is seeing what we will be able to bring together—you, me, and the other members of the group—to this space of conversation and encounter.
It is important to me to see how a shared concern can be articulated from different locations. We may be saying similar things, but we say them from distinct situations, shaped by different histories, urgencies, and responsibilities. What happens to that speech, then, when those different places meet, settle together, and speak from what traverses them in common?
That is what interests me most: that moment when conversation makes us richer through what circulates from one point to another, and when we realize that we are not isolated points in space, but connected ones. There is in that a kind of spectrum, a constellation, that seems to me both intellectually fertile and humanly comforting.