The Surrounds

“AbdouMaliq Simone is like Lawrence ‘Butch’ Morris. His lectures, his rehearsals, are conductions that sound and show the inseparability of the theory and history of radical practice. What he gathers of the surrounds, in The Surrounds, is the generative disruption, the general strike, that persists under the duress and in the toxic radiation of the city. People live a kind of radiance in terror and deprivation whose ubiquity makes it seem unlikely. Simone insists on every aspect of such presence, teaching us how to learn from it, and with it, so that we, too, might practice it, (every)where it’s at.” - Fred Moten, author of Black and Blur

“The Surrounds is a special example of a very refined voice, a voice that travels, returns, meanders, and cycles among encounters with places, friends, and thinkers as one would travel through the spaces of a city. With poetic economy, AbdouMaliq Simone tells a cautionary tale for those who put their faith solely in data, master plans, and standards. His sophisticated story is at once explicit and indeterminate. You can learn about the city’s solids and beings, but you cannot know how they will collide.” - Keller Easterling, author of Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World

"The Surrounds is a continuation of Simone’s epic, yet also understated project of re-configuring urban studies from the perspectives and experiences of the multitude who reside or pass through some of the largest yet most understudied cities on the planet. Simone’s willingness to learn from those who are afforded little respite from the relentless requirement for innovation, reinvention and mental and physical agility in order to survive never falters; people who, Simone recognizes more than most, are central to understanding urbanization in the twenty first century." - Gareth Millington, Ethnic and Racial Studies