The obsessions of Sam Okoth Opondo are love, family, violence, the sacred, the erotic, memory, and the power of stories. His mode is poetic assemblage. His voice is now a choir, and now ecstatic solo. Diplomatic Para-citations, a living manifesto, a new Poetics of Relation.

Abdourahman Waberi, Assistant Professor of French, George Washington University

Transgressing the laws of genre, Diplomatic Para-citations unveils the forms of knowledge and practice that tie modern diplomacy to colonial cultures, and the painful moral and legal cartographies they entail. Against the reproduction of that order of things, Opondo places in the politics and poetics of amateur diplomacies an unpretentious but promising foundation for a more life-affirming ethics of everyday co-habitation all over the world.

Noé Cornago, Associate Professor of International Relations, University of the Basque Country

A sweeping vision, matched in its seriousness of purpose by its delight in deeply explored details, Diplomatic Para-citations combines political science with literary, cinematic, and philosophical analyses. Opondo’s originality and breadth of expertise make his bold theoretical interventions essential for challenging epistemic violence and for the transdisciplinary understanding, historicization, and problematization of contemporary issues on the continent and the Diaspora.

Nathalie Etoke, Associate Professor of Francophone and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY

Diplomatic Para-citations is a feat of intellectual creativity and humanistic knowledge in a profane, genre-bending form. Opondo’s ‘amateur diplomacy’, along with his ethical stance, centers what is at stake in the most basic of interactions. Moreover, he examines that which is at stake in interactions that are foreclosed or already coded within the epistemic violence of capitalist imperial modernity.

Shiera S. Malik, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of International Studies, DePaul University