“even if I must die I am saying I love you”: A Conversation between Phanuel Antwi and Yiannis Andronikidis about On Cuddling: Loved to Death in the Racial Embrace introduced by Sakiru Adebayo

The interview, borrowing its title “even if I must die I am saying I love you” from a line in one of Phanuel Antwi’s poems, was conducted on the occasion of the experimental lit & performance festival The New Present Tense, held between 22–23 November 2024 at the Feminist Autonomous Centre for research (FAC), in Athens, Greece. During the festival, Phanuel Antwi was invited to read excerpts from On Cuddling. This reading is echoed in the penultimate question of the interview, with the book itself forming the core around which thoughts are shared and from which they extend outwards, to include reflections that exceed its pages. The material gathered here is the result of ongoing conversations, online meetings, and exchanges between Antwi and Andronikidis from the time of the festival to the present. More specifically, the interview turns to the archival im/materialities Antwi engaged in writing the book, while focusing on “cuddling” in its manifold manifestations across private and public spaces-its softness and violences, its speeds, spreads, and tactilities, its cuteness and its intrusions, but also the different ways in which we are all ultimately implicated in the (re)production of the racial embrace.The conversation between Antwi and Andronikidis is introduced and contextualized here by Sakiru Adebayo, whose insightful reflections in “The Racial Embrace and Its Discontents: Notes on Phanuel Antwi’s On Cuddling (Pluto Press, 2023)” meaningfully sets the stage for the dialogue which unfolds.