Worldmaking Otherwise
Black Women’s Epistemological Marronage in the Americas

Fellow Lecture by

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros
Senior Fellow 2025–2026

Details

Venue & accessibility infos: Meridian Hall, Collegium Helveticum

This event is open to the public, free of charge, and no registration needed.

The lecture is followed by a small reception.

What does it mean to exist and produce knowledge from what Sylvia Wynter calls the “demonic ground”—that space Western humanism has consistently relegated to the unthinkable? This talk examines how Afro-Latin American and Afro-Caribbean women generate radical forms of knowledge that unsettle inherited grammars of race, gender, and what it means to be human, while opening up new possibilities for collective life.

Moving across literature, visual art, and performance, Odette Casamayor-Cisneros will trace in her lecture Black women’s practices of epistemological marronage: deliberate and consequential departures from knowledge systems shaped by coloniality and Eurocentric imaginaries of the human.

At a moment of accelerating planetary crisis and eroding hegemonic geopolitical orders, these practices are more than symbolic resistance. They offer vital intellectual resources—inviting us to rethink the boundaries of the human and to imagine, with greater urgency, what more just and sustainable ways of inhabiting the world might require.

Program