Four Alchemists. One book. A constellation of ideas. The fourth annual ALCHEMY LECTURES features award-winning fiction writers, a lauded scholar, and a prize-winning musician in an astonishing, immsersive investigation of the meaning of sound in this moment in the world's soundtrack.
Sound-at the Interregnum asks: What are the sounds you make? What are the sounds you want to make? What are the sounds you need to make? What are the sounds you need to leave to a world on the cusp of becoming something else?
At the interregnum we meet oligarchs and fascists and manufactured crises of housing, ongoing genocides and displacements, extraordinary renditions, the takeover of universities and a deepening anti-intellectualism, the militarization of public space, the shrinking of the commons, the use of sonic weapons (LRADs-Long Range Acoustic Device), the complicit silences of mainstream media, and the refusal by those who have taken power to make a world in which everyone's needs are met. Their sounds of avarice, capital accumulation, and immiseration do not enter the world uncontested. Sound is also key to life. There are the sounds of protest, of living and witness, of anthems and ululation, of chants and keening, noise of all kinds, blue notes, ghost notes, high notes-which also take us over as vibration, energy, atmosphere, and breath itself.
Alchemists Glen Coulthard (political theorist), Canisia Lubrin (poet), Madeleine Thien (novelist), and Immanuel Wilkins (saxophonist) are acclaimed thinkers, fiction writers, poets, and musicians who in these pages have produced, reproduced, blown out, and made something counter to the sounds of the world at this interregnum--this period of great danger, and also great possibility. 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.
GLEN COULTHARD is Yellowknives Dene, an associate professor in the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program at the University of British Columbia, and the author of Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. He is also a co-founder of Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, operating on his traditional territories in Denendeh (Northwest Territories). CANISIA LUBRIN is an acclaimed poet, editor and fiction writer. Her poetry book The Dyzgraphxst won the Griffin Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award, and her fiction, Code Noir, won the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award. Lubrin is the Poetry Editor at McClelland & Stewart, and coordinator of the University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA. MADELEINE THIEN is the author of a story collection, Simple Recipes, and four novels, including Do Not Say We Have Nothing, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the Folio Prize, and won the Governor-General's Literary Award for Fiction, among other honours. She was a Cullman Fellow at The New York Public Library, and in 2024 received the Engel-Findley Award from the Writers' Trust of Canada. Born in Vancouver, Madeleine lives in Montreal. IMMANUEL WILKINS is a saxophonist, composer, and educator who burst onto the musical scene with his Blue Note debut, Omega, which was named the best jazz release of 2020 by the New York Times. In 2022, Wilkins released his sophomore album on Blue Note, The 7th Hand, which topped numerous year-end lists. In 2024 Wilkins released his third recording to date: Blues Blood, co-produced by Meshell Ndegeocello. It was nominated for best international recording of the year and Williams was named by Jazz News and Jazz Magazine as the best international jazz musician of the year.
