Afrofuturity, Astro Black Theory, & Speculative World-Building - 2/14/2022

Afrofuturism by Ytasha L. Womack

ISBN: 9781613747964

Publication Date: 2013-10-01

Comprising elements of the avant-garde, science fiction, cutting-edge hip-hop, black comix, and graphic novels, Afrofuturism spans both underground and mainstream pop culture. With a twofold aim to entertain and enlighten, Afrofuturists strive to break down racial, ethnic, and all social limitations to empower and free individuals to be themselves. This book introduces readers to the burgeoning artists creating Afrofuturist works, the history of innovators in the past, and the wide range of subjects they explore. From the sci-fi literature of Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and NK Jemisin to the musical cosmos of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and the Black Eyed Peas' will.i.am, to the visual and multimedia artists inspired by African Dogon myths and Egyptian deities, topics range from the alien experience of blacks in America to the wake up cry that peppers sci-fi literature, sermons, and activism. Interviews with rappers, composers, musicians, singers, authors, comic illustrators, painters, and DJs, as well as Afrofuturist professors, provide a firsthand look at this fascinating movement.

Afrofuturism 2. 0 by Reynaldo Anderson (Editor)

ISBN: 9781498510523

Publication Date: 2017-07-14

Introduction : The rise of Astro-Blackness / Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones -- Part I. Quantum visions of futuristic blackness : Cyborg grammar?: Reading Wangechi Mutu's Non je ne regrette rien through Kindred / Tiffany E. Barber -- Afrofuturism on web 3.0: vernacular cartography and augmented space / Nettrice R. Gaskins -- The real ghosts in the machine: Afrofuturism and the haunting of racial space in I, robot and DETROPIA / Ricardo Guthrie -- Part II. Planetary vibes, digital ciphers, and hip hop sonic remix : The Armageddon effect: Afrofuturism and the chronopolitics of Alien Nation / tobias c. van Veen -- Afrofuturism's musical princess Janelle Monáe: psychedelic soul message music infused with a sci-fi twist / Grace D. Gipson -- Hip hop holograms: Tupac Shakur, technological immortality, and time travel / Ken McLeod -- Part III. Forecasting dark bodies, Africology, and the narrative imagination : Afrofuturism and our old ship of Zion: the Black church in post-modernity / Andrew Rollins -- Playing a minority forecaster in search of Afrofuturism: where am I in this future, Stewart Brand? / Lonny Avi Brooks -- Rewriting the narrative: communicology and the speculative discourse of Afrofuturism / David DeIuliis and Jeff Lohr -- Africana women's science fiction and narrative medicine: difference, ethics, and empathy / Esther Jones -- "To be African is to merge technology and magic": an interview with Nnedi Okorafor / Qiana Whitted.

Octavia's brood : science fiction stories from social justice movements by Walidah Imarisha (Editor), adrienne maree Brown (Editor). Sheree R Thomas (Writer of foreword.)

ISBN: 9781849352109

Publication Date: 2015

"Whenever we envision a world without war, without prisons, without capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought twenty of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. The visionary tales of Octavia's Brood span genres--sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism--but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. The collection is rounded off with essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renee Thomas."--Amazon.com

Black Futures by Kimberly Drew; Jenna Wortham

Call Number: CB235 .B595 2020

ISBN: 9780399181139

Publication Date: 2020-12-01

This book is a collection of work - art, photos, essays, memes, dialogues, recipes, tweets, poetry, and more - that tells the story of the radical, imaginative, bold, and beautiful world that Black artists are producing today. The book presents a succession of brilliant and provocative pieces - from both emerging and renowned creators of all kinds - that generates an entrancing rhythm. Readers will go from conversations with hackers and street artists to memes and Instagram posts, from powerful prose to dazzling paintings and insightful infographics. This is a generational document that captures this fast-moving generation in its own dynamic and expansive language. While shaped in the tradition of other generational statements, from The New Negro to Black Fire to Toni Morrison's landmark The Black Book, this book does not have a retrospective air. It showcases the present, but it points to the future. We live at a time when Black culture - whether it's created by Ava DuVernay or Donald Glover, Kendrick Lamar or Cardi B, meme-makers or YouTubers - is opening our imaginations and offering new paths forward: a multi-voiced, utopian alternative to a world of walls and white nationalism. This book captures this expansive vision and energy and makes it available to any reader, of any color, who wants to explore this exciting cultural moment - and see the next one coming. -- Adapted from publisher's description.

The Black Imagination by Sandra Jackson (Editor); Julie E. Moody-Freeman (Editor)

ISBN: 9781433112416

Publication Date: 2011-04-26

Black Utopia by Alex Zamalin

ISBN: 9780231547253

Publication Date: 2019-09-23

Alex Zamalin offers a groundbreaking examination of African American visions of utopia and their counterutopian counterparts. Considering figures linked to racial separatism, postracialism, anticolonialism, Pan-Africanism, and Afrofuturism, he argues that the black utopian tradition continues to challenge American political thought and culture.

The Blacker the Ink by Frances Gateward (Editor)

ISBN: 9780813572369

Publication Date: 2015-07-16

When many think of comic books the first thing that comes to mind are caped crusaders and spandex-wearing super-heroes. Perhaps, inevitably, these images are of white men (and more rarely, women). It was not until the 1970s that African American superheroes such as Luke Cage, Blade, and others emerged. But as this exciting new collection reveals, these superhero comics are only one small component in a wealth of representations of black characters within comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels over the past century. The Blacker the Ink is the first book to explore not only the diverse range of black characters in comics, but also the multitude of ways that black artists, writers, and publishers have made a mark on the industry. Organized thematically into "panels" in tribute to sequential art published in the funny pages of newspapers, the fifteen original essays take us on a journey that reaches from the African American newspaper comics of the 1930s to the Francophone graphic novels of the 2000s. Even as it demonstrates the wide spectrum of images of African Americans in comics and sequential art, the collection also identifies common character types and themes running through everything from the strip The Boondocks to the graphic novel Nat Turner. Though it does not shy away from examining the legacy of racial stereotypes in comics and racial biases in the industry, The Blacker the Ink also offers inspiring stories of trailblazing African American artists and writers. Whether you are a diehard comic book fan or a casual reader of the funny pages, these essays will give you a new appreciation for how black characters and creators have brought a vibrant splash of color to the world of comics.--Publisher's web site

Race after Technology by Ruha Benjamin

ISBN: 9781509526406

Publication Date: 2019-06-17

"From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce white supremacy and deepen social inequity. Far from a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, Benjamin argues that automation has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the New Jim Code, she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of tool a technology designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice that is part of the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves"-- Provided by publisher

Queer Times, Black Futures by Kara Keeling

ISBN: 9781479841998

Publication Date: 2019

A profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and black freedom. Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra's 1972 film Space is the Place and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar "speculations" of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.-- Provided by publisher

Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination by Kristen Lillvis

ISBN: 9780820351230

Publication Date: 2017-09-01

"[This work] examines the future-oriented visions of black subjectivity in works by contemporary black women writers, filmmakers, and musicians, including Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Julie Dash, and Janelle Monaáe. In this innovative study, Kristen Lillvis supplements historically situated conceptions of blackness with imaginative projections of black futures. This theoretical approach allows her to acknowledge the importance of history without positing a purely historical origin for black identities. The authors considered in this book set their stories in the past yet use their characters, particularly women characters, to show how the potential inherent in the future can inspire black authority and resistance. Lillvis introduces the term 'posthuman blackness' to describe the empowered subjectivities black women and men develop through their simultaneous existence within past, present, and future temporalities. This project draws on posthuman theory - an area of study that examines the disrupted unities between biology and technology, the self and the outer world, and, most important for this project, history and potentiality - in its readings of a variety of imaginative works, including works of historical fiction such as Gayl Jones's Corregidora and Morrison's Beloved. Reading neo-slave narratives through posthuman theory reveals black identity and culture as temporally flexible, based in the potential of what is to come and the history of what has occurred."--Provided by publisher

Black Madness by Therí Alyce Pickens

ISBN: 9781478005506

Publication Date: 2019-06-07

In 'Black Madness :: Mad Blackness' Theri Alyce Pickens rethinks the relationship between Blackness and disability, unsettling the common theorization that they are mutually constitutive. Pickens shows how Black speculative and science fiction authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due craft new worlds that reimagine the intersection of Blackness and madness. These creative writer-theorists formulate new parameters for thinking through Blackness and madness. Pickens considers Butler's 'Fledgling' as an archive of Black madness that demonstrates how race and ability shape subjectivity while constructing the building blocks for antiracist and anti-ableist futures. She examines how Hopkinson's 'Midnight Robber' theorizes mad Blackness and how Due's 'African Immortals' series contest dominant definitions of the human. The theorizations of race and disability that emerge from these works, Pickens demonstrates, challenge the paradigms of subjectivity that white supremacy and ableism enforce, thereby pointing to the potential for new forms of radical politics.

Sun Ra  by John Sinclair (Editor)

ISBN: 9781900486965

Publication Date: 2012-10-23

A collection of interviews and essays on Sun Ra, his contemporaries, his records, his myth and his fan base. Composer, bandleader, pianist and space philosopher, Sun Ra was a unique individual and one of the most colorful and enduring of musical legacies, transcending time, place and culture.

Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies by Erik Steinskog

ISBN: 9783319660417

Publication Date: 2018

This book interrogates the meeting point between Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies. Whereas Afrofuturism is often understood primarily in relation to science fiction and speculative fiction, it can also be examined from a sonic perspective. The sounds of Afrofuturism are deeply embedded in the speculative - demonstrated in mythmaking - in frameworks for songs and compositions, in the personas of the artists, and in how the sounds are produced.

Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hope Wabuke considers the future of Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism.

3rd Stone Journal

Third Stone Journal is devoted to Afrofuturism and other modes of the Black Fantastic. The genesis of its idea was the creation of a platform to demonstrate digital humanities by selecting a subject matter that was apropos to the “discipline.” Third Stone is therefore intended as a starting place for a necessary conversation on literature, art, music, digital content, popular culture, and more that seeks to inject activism by advocating for the removal of obstacles that have habitually stifled and/or silenced people of African descent, their imagination, and things produced as a result.