UNSETTLED by Erin Manning - Book Launch
Schedule
Thu Feb 19 2026 at 06:00 pm to 09:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
#204-170 Jean Talon O., Atlas Building, Little Italy, Montreal, QC, Canada, Quebec H2R 2X4 | Mount Royal, QC
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BOOK LAUNCH“Unsettled”
by Erin Manning
(Minor Compositions, 2026)
Please join us for an evening with philosopher, artist, and cultural theorist Erin Manning as she introduces her new book "Unsettled."
Followed by a conversation with Brian Massumi that explores the book’s themes and the broader questions of movement, relation, and contemporary thought that runs through their work.
Hosted by writer and editor, Michael Nardone.
Doors: 6:00pm
Conversation: 7:00pm
FREE ENTRY
CASH BAR
UNSETTLED
Erin Manning
Explores what it means to be claimed, not just by blood, but by history, land, and the fragile web of human connection.
To belong is never a simple matter. For Erin Manning, ancestry has always been more of an entanglement than a strict lineage: a collection of stories, fabulations, and echoes of the past. Unsettled is a deeply personal and philosophical exploration of ancestry, identity, and belonging, particularly within the context of Québec’s settler-colonial history and its complex relationship with Indigeneity.
Here Manning describes her relationship with a close friend, R., who has lived a life shaped by poverty, subsistence farming, and a profound connection with the land. When R.’s mother bequeaths him their family land, he is left to navigate the tensions of inheritance, loss, and belonging. In an attempt to connect to R.’s Indigenous background, Manning offers to trace his genealogy. Soon, questions of what it means to “bestow” Indigeneity from an ancestral perspective begin to loom. Manning explores and critiques the practice of usurping Indigeneity in Québec, where claims of Métis ancestry are often leveraged for social or political gain, ultimately reinforcing whiteness and colonial structures rather than dismantling them. Through the lens of personal relationships, historical analysis, and philosophical inquiry, Unsettled challenges conventional notions of ancestry, property, and identity, while advocating for relational belonging over bloodline essentialism.
“We humans need guiding narratives to name the world we want to become. Making a different world requires different stories. Erin Manning’s Unsettled steps beyond insatiable settler mythologies of self-making, beyond shame for their collective entitlement, and into the literal in-the-dirt work of uprooting white possessiveness.”
– Kim TallBear, Professor of Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society at the University of Alberta
“Unsettled is a courageous and consequential work that will productively incite some readers and inspire others. It leans into openings, agonies and engagements with identity fabulation, affording textual time and space to marginalized rural white people and the pretendian phenomenon alike. Manning has written an incisive, layered and extraordinary work demanded by some of the most complex ethical dilemmas, circulating in the back waters and elite spaces, that can be found in the sociality of our times. Some will find the pages useful to rip out and position under kindling as fire-starter. It will likely start other kinds of fires as well…”
– Peter Kulchyski, Professor of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba
Copies of “Unsettled” in both English and French will be available for purchase at the event.
ERIN MANNING studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture (2016) and For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020). 3e is the direction her current artistic research takes – an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual. An iteration of 3e is a land-based project north of Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is crafted in a more-than human encounter with worlds in the making.
BRIAN MASSUMI is the author of numerous works across philosophy, political theory, and art theory. His publications include The Personality of Power: A Theory of Fascism for Anti-Fascist Life (2025), 99 Theses for the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (2018), and Couplets: Travels in Speculative Pragmatism (2021). With Erin Manning and 3Ecologies Project, he participates in the collective exploration of new ways of bringing philosophical and artistic practices into collaborative interaction.
MICHAEL NARDONE is a writer and editor based in Montréal. His recent books include Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Border Tuner | Sintonizador Fronterizo (Inventory Press, 2026), Convivialities: Dialogues on Poetics (Talonbooks, 2025), and Aural Poetics (OEI Editör, 2023). With Nathan Brown, he edits the Documents on Expanded Poetics book series published by Invisible Books. His essays, dialogues, and editorial projects are collected at http://soundobject.net.
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ACCESSIBILITY:
Rocket Science Room is on the second floor. There is a single flight of stairs off the main entrance with no wheelchair access, however there is a functioning elevator on the main floor. If you require assistance of any kind, please let us know! We'd be happy to accommodate any of your needs to the best of our ability.
Rocket Science Room est au deuxième étage. Il y a un seul escalier à l'entrée principale sans accès en fauteuil roulant, mais il y a un ascenseur qui fonctionne au rez-de-chaussée. Si vous avez besoin d'une assistance quelconque, faites-le nous savoir! Nous serons heureux de répondre à tous vos besoins au mieux de nos capacités.
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Where is it happening?
#204-170 Jean Talon O., Atlas Building, Little Italy, Montreal, QC, Canada, Quebec H2R 2X4, 170 Rue Jean-Talon O, Montréal, QC H2R 2X4, Canada, Mount RoyalEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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