Join us at Public Trust for “What Does it Mean to Live Exorbitantly?,” a public conversation on Thursday, April 23, 2026 from 5-6:30pm featuring scholars Deborah A. Thomas and Jasmine E. Johnson. Centering on Thomas’s new book, Exorbitance: A Speculative Ethnography of Inheritance, the discussion will explore the relationships between embodiment and sovereignty and raise questions about modes of world-building that are exorbitant to classic political frames. Presented in partnership with the Public Trust and the Black Performance Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.

Exorbitance builds on Thomas’s earlier interrogations of sovereignty to ask questions about the interplay between the feeling of bodily freedom and the intensities of political sovereignty. The book asks what sovereignty might look like, and feel like, if we approached it not exclusively in terms of its foundational violences (conquest, imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalist extraction, and so on) but through the embodied forms of autonomy and relation we create in the realm of everyday life. Throughout the book, and drawing from a range of archives, Thomas argues that we are heir not only to colonial logics, but also to the means to refuse or retool them, and that both of these inheritances are inscribed in and on the body.

The discussion between Thomas and Johnson will focus on repair, love, and accountability, and will engage the following questions: How might enactments of exorbitance drive us toward practice-based and durational articulations of self-determination that are processual, performative, and grounded in the everyday intimacies of living together? What kinds of attunement would we need to meaningfully pursue questions about what we inherit, and about how what we inherit can generate new ways of creating community? What might a more radically humanist anthropology look like?


Image: Leniqueca A. Welcome, "Unbounded," Cover Collage for Exorbitance, 2025