It’s My Book Publication Day!

Behind the Book: What is Undisciplined All About?

I’m marking a lot of milestones in my life right now; I have just moved to the other side of the world and decided to settle in Bali, I am on the precipice of submitting my PhD and completing 10 years of higher education, and the publication of my first book is upon us today. I am sitting with the complexity, with the highs and lows of the journey to this point in my life. With so many endings and releases, it is no wonder I am feeling in such a reflective space, here I will share some of those reflections with you.

Firstly, a thank you is in order. Thank you to all of you for supporting e in whatever form you have up to this point. If you are subscribed to or reading this newsletter, I assume that you have supported my work in some way that I have felt and am still feeling. Whether it has been a like or a comment on a post, coming to an event, sending an encouraging email, supporting the Free Black University – whatever it has been – I deeply thank you.

The book is written almost as a love letter, well maybe if the language of love you speak is introspective philosophy, it is certainly mine. It is an offering to the communities that I have served, and that in turn have deeply served me. In this way, the book is an invitation to all that read to first approach themselves with love, care, and compassion. Equally, to meet the work that they do with this same approach. There is nothing meaningful that we can do in the world if it does not come from a space of deep love and respect for ourselves first and foremost.

Many of you know me from my activism, and this book is in part a product of that journey, yet at the same time it is a rejection of that process. It is a rejection that anyone should suffer in the name of ‘liberation’, the ends do not justify the means when it comes to the wellness of marginalised people. So how do we get free without ‘the struggle’? Undisciplined makes the case that it is through the vehicle of the imagination, that the imagination is the most powerful and crucial tool that we have at our disposal. That when we can imagine both ourselves and the world differently, we have access to limitless potential of possibility and transformation.

So, what even is the imagination? I make the case in this work that the imagination has its foundation in the spiritual. That when we speak of imagining liberated futures, we are accessing spiritual planes of possibility. To believe the world can be entirely different to what it is today, to me, is a spiritual proposition, it is otherworldly, it is erotic in the sense Audre Lorde spoke of it, something that arises from a “spiritual plane”.

I also suggest that decoloniality must hold credence for the spiritual, because prior to colonisation the spiritual and knowledge were inseparable. I believe this oversight of the spiritual in decolonial literature and thought, as well as in activist spaces is precluding us from connecting with the truth of liberation. From moving more easefully and wholly towards her.

The site of contestation the book explores is the university, it functions as both a guidebook to how one can navigate the academy, and deep philosophical inquiry in to how the formations of the Western academy have taken shape and the ways that this power and dominance can be interrupted.

Above all, I hope that this book offers even just one person, some salve from the harms of the Western academy.

I find academic work most healing when it is able to offer words to power, to systems, and to practices that I witness but do not have the language yet to articulate, that experience can feel very lonely. In this work, I hope that I can make some of you feel less alone and offer a new set of tools and language to reconsider the academy, and to imagine the world differently. My prayer is that some of you may find some healing through the words I have written, just as I did in the process of crafting the words on each page.

I will follow this newsletter with a sneak peak of the work, as a thank you to you all for supporting my work and being subscribed to this newsletter I will share the final chapter here – so keep an eye on your inboxes!

With love,

Melz

You can purchase the book here.

The book will also be available in the US and Australia in the coming months.