Black Speculative Arts Movement #BSAMfuturismo2017

I want to give a brief heads-up for an Afrofuturist event at the Bronx Museum of the Arts on Saturday, April 22 (tomorrow!). Aqueduct authors Sheree Renee Thomas, Jennifer Marie Brissett, and Kiini Ibura Salaam will all be participating. For the full schedule of the conference, check out the official website: https://www.evensi.us/black-speculative-arts-movement-bsamfuturismo2017-bronx/194016603.

At 12pm a panel titled 25 YEARS OF AFROFUTURISM & BLACK SPECULATIVE THOUGHT, will feature  Dr Reynaldo Anderson, Mark Dery, and Sheree Renée Thomas, moderated by Tiffany Barber. And after lunch, at 2 pm, Sheree Renee Thomas, Jennifer Brissett, Kiini Salaam, and Ibi Zoboi will present BLUE BLACK MAGIC WOMEN.

 I so wish I could attend. If you have a chance, it sounds like a wonderful--dare I say inspiriting-- way to spend the day.

Black to the Future

Notes from Ferguson is the Future Conference at Princeton University Sept. 11-14, 2015

We are all time travelers.The past hasn’t gone anywhere.

America is a haunted house.The future is in every gesture we make.

Science fiction is about figuring out how to be different together.

Ferguson is the Future is/was/will be an on-going moment of magic, community, and brilliance organized by Moya Bailey, Ruha Benjamin, and Ayana Jamieson. These women have serious superpowers. They gathered writers, activists, scholars, musicians, DJs, filmmakers, scientists, and curious folk at Princeton University to activate our blackness, our multi-dimensional, time-traveling blackness. Moya, Ruha, and Ayana called us to celebrate Octavia Butler and the joy of our sci-fi, speculative existence. They also insisted we look for that way out of no way that allows us to survive on-going apocalypse. Moya, Ruha, and Ayana raised money, fed and housed us, and kept us on point as we talked to and with each other. We did not have to provide the context for our being, for our sensibility—it shimmered around us. Everyone agreed—it was a blast, a blessing, a revelation to be activists, artists, and scholars imagining the future we want. Nothing like dreaming and scheming for justice, pleasure, peace, and sustainable abundance.

Before the public conference, writers and activists Steven Barnes, Lisa Bolekaja, Adrienne Maree Brown, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Walidah Imarisha, Nnedi Okorafor, Daniel José Older, Rasheedah Phillips, Sophia Samatar, Nisi Shawl, and me (Andrea Hairston) gathered for an activist/artist retreat. We were joined  by DJ Lynnée Denise, mixed media artist Soraya Jean-Louis McElroy, and musicians Be Steadwell and Taja Lindley & Jessica Valoris of Colored Girls Hustle . (I call out names, because dear reader, you should go look these folks up. Check out their art and brilliance. Buy what they make.)

Our retreat mission was to:

shake each other up

dream freely

explore craft

refuse the way it is as the way it has to be

skip racism and sexism 101

dance to the music

raise critical questions pertaining to afro-futurism

conjure solutions

support and challenge one another

spark new projects and possibilities

explore the impossible

We did all that and more in gatherings facilitated by Adrienne Maree Brown, and also in casual encounters sipping port and brandy in the library of Princeton’s guest house or walking down the avenue.

I rarely write blogs, but Timmi asked me. Writing fast (and doing all that I do) is difficult to impossible. I’m dyslexic. I actually don’t have time to write this blog, but that’s why I am writing it. Fast and furious Andrea, was made possible by Black to the Future Conference magic. Time travelers have all the time in the Universe!  

At our retreat sessions we discussed how some people are waiting for us to fail. Some people are eager to laugh at our writing. In Facebook-land and the Twitterverse there is bullying of “social justice warriors,” of POC and women writers. But we created a manifesto, a declaration of our freedom as artists. We don’t have to be perfect or silent, a million times better or silent, bullet proof or silent. We will live out loud and on line while being black, brown, disabled, queer… We will collaborate for each other’s success. We are poised to boost the signal on everybody’s work. We will be vulnerable and not always know what the hell we are doing. We won’t be realistic, we will try for the impossible.

On Monday, we were joined by scholars, Reynaldo Anderson, Netrice Gaskins, John Jennings, Alondra Nelson, Dorothy Roberts, activists and educators from Ferguson, Johnetta Elzie, Deray McKesson, Brittany Packnett, curators and filmmakers, Erin Christovale, M. Asli Dukan, Amir George, Dennis Leroy Kangalee, for an all-day speculative fiction jam. The weave of voices and disciplines, the polyrhythm of perspectives was astounding. Every day we got smarter, got activated. And Monday, nobody wanted to leave! 

With organizers Moya, Ruha, and Ayana, we created our visionary future, an alternative world in the haunted halls of Princeton University. The time together was heady and full-bodied. We carry new superpowers with us now. Change is upon us.

Chicago and Afrofuturism

D. Denenge Akpem has written an article, “Are you ready to alter your destiny?”: Chicago and Afro-Futurism, Part 1 of 2, posted at Chicago Art Magazine. It begins "This Independence Day, let us consider a different kind of liberation: Afro-Futurism." It offers a definition of Afro-futurism:

Afro-Futurism is rooted in history and African cosmologies, using pieces of the past, technological and analog, to build the future. These works rethink and rework notions of identity; hybridity; the alien and states of alienation; belonging, immigration, migration; and the “vessel” both corporeal and metaphoric, symbolized as a vehicle for liberation. Afro-Futurism asks: what does “Blackness” or “liberation” look like in the future, real or imagined?

And it makes me eager to get my hands on Krista Franklin's SEED (The Book of Eve): The Octavia E. Butler Artist Book. If any of y'all know anything about this book please do speak. It has a 2007 date. 

Recommended Reading--PoC SF Carnival and the SFS Afrofuturism issue

I recommend checking out Painted With A Bitter Brush—People of Color SF Carnival #1, a significant collection of links posted by Willow. She writes, in her prologue:

I am never not black. Ever. Other people see me and react to me and force me to see myself as black first, a woman second, usually an immigrant third and then as a human being. And that's supposing I'm not holding another woman's hand and then a sexuality label gets pushed past my humanity. There are only a few very short options I've found to deal with it - be ashamed and apologetic and try to hide who I am, ie disappear. Or be proud of my heritage as part of the diaspora and look for myself in the world's art, literature and music so I can nod and smile and say 'There I am. I count'.

SF, SciFi & Fantasy are the slice of the world I look at to see myself reflected. It's where I go to feel a part of the myriad ideas about life, love, the future, space, life on other planets, magic and folktales and myth of old. But there's a decided lack of people like me in this slice of the world and that needs to change. I'm hoping this Carnival gives a chance to pull together discussions and experiences so we can work towards change.

I’ve just, by the way, received the new issue of Science Fiction Studies, which is devoted by Afrofuturism. I’ve only read the first couple of pieces, but these have been interesting.

Mark Bould’s introduction, “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF,” not only critiques multiculturalism as “a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’,” but also declares that “It is not the intention of this special issue to incorporate Afrofuturism into sf…In the era of digital sampling—and the shift of emphasis from the diachronic to the synchronic encouraged as much by late capitalism by the linguistic turn—it is easy to lose track of history.” He did not, in other words, perceive his editorial mission as one of putting out an issue that simply adds authors or characters of color to sf criticism and stirring.

Isiah Lavender, III’s’s “Ethnoscapes: Environment and Language in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, and Samuel R.Delany’s Babel-17” introduces the illuminating notion of “ethnoscape.” Here is the author’s abstract: “In this essay, I start from some of the central concerns of Afrofuturism to investigate the ubiquity of race in sf. I map out a novel way to think about the various environment that sf provides as well as a way to think about characterization in sf semblances. I argue that social interactions, technology, and physical surroundings all contribute to the systematic nature of a racialized environment—what I term an ethnoscape. Sf ethnoscapes can both fabricate racial difference and reconceive it. The concept of the ethnoscape helps us unpack the racial or ethnic environments that sf can posit or assume. I explore Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), a marginally sf work, as a fabulist ethnoscape; Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1990) as a counterfactual ethnoscape; and Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 (1966) as a linguistic ethnoscape.” I find that the idea of “ethnoscape” makes particular sense for sf, given that sf functions primarily in the objective than the subjective register. (For more about this characteristic of sf, see the second half of Lance Olsen's interview of me on Now What.)

Essays by Darryl A. Smith and Nabeel Zuberi look equally interesting, and there's a piece on Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber by Jillana Enteen and a review essay by Sherryl Vint on Thomas Foster's The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory.