47. New Course: Afrofuturism

I am writing here because Puff invited me. That is all the introduction you need or get.

I was worried about accepting the invitation. Because I feel like this is a general space for generalists. And I am so not a generalist. I am a specificist (yes, I made up a word). And I'm fairly emotive. And if you are a generalist, do you ever feel? I mean, do you feel a lot about everything? Or nothing about nothing? Or anything about something?

But the stuff I write about tends to be a little heavy. And sometimes you just want to share some popcorn with the people. And sometimes it is too much to tweet. So here I am.

I want to teach a course about afrofuturism.

Required readings would include: Octavia Butler (of course, but not her oft touted novel, Kindred. I want my students to read the entire Xenogensis series. Her critique of slavery and colonialism in this series is actually much more interesting to me than her time travel fable), Beloved (if that isn't afrofuturist, I don't know what is, even if everyone and their mama has read it), "Ibo Landing" from Dark Matter (alongside Daughters of the Dust), Andrea Hairston's Mindscape, Maryse Condé's Segu, Grace Jones, George Clinton and Janelle Monae's three suite symphony The Chase, Archandroid, and X (because by the time I teach this class, she probably will have the last suite out.

Hell, by the time I teach this class, I might have my own afrofuturist novella finally out.

Objective? To see the afro-diasporic past in present afro-diasporic speculations on the future.

I am a historian considerably preoccupied with the present and the past's ramifications on the future. And since I am a historian of slavery, I live in the eighteenth century and see slavery and its structural inequalities everywhere. I see them moving into the future because we are irrevocably caught up in a past we don't understand, but I also know that from the first departure of the first slave ship from the first port on the West African coast on the way to the "New World," we were already imagining new ways of conceiving our existence. Ways that transcended the barracoons and the below-decks and the depths of the ocean between us and home.

That is all. Now dance:

[Edit: I added a number to the title. I felt like I was messing up Puff's master plan. My bad homie.]