Writing in a Belittered World

The essays by Avery F. Gordon, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley and Matt Richardson, and Chris Bongie about Colin Dayan’s work and thought, in their differing forms and intent, inspire Dayan to do something like a riff on each, and she attempts to capture the gist of each reaction and elaborate her response as a kind of homage to these readers. In thinking of each section of her response essay as part of a triptych (or trinity, perhaps), mutually overlapping and entangled, Dayan takes the questions and prompts of her interlocutors as a challenge, a call to a practice of spiritual yearning, and a mode of political deliberation. She also writes in homage to Walter Rodney’s sense of what it means to “ground with” her brothers and sisters in these dread times.