53. The Little Town in Maine Post

A year ago, I moved to a Little Town in Maine. Like Puff, I'm dissertating which is really just a shorthand way of saying I go wherever someone will pay me to teach/research/write until I get my advisor's stamp of approval and I'm allowed to go find a "real" job (then I'll still have to go wherever someone will pay me to teach/research/write but I'll get better benefits and a bright-eyed research assistant I can unload five plus years of pent up exploitation on. What joy is mine).

My travels led me up to the northeast edge of the country, 3 parts New England and 1 part Canada, where the population of people of color is 2% at best and composed of Rwandan, Somali and Sudanese immigrants, military folk, college students (students not faculty, and with an emphasis on athletes) and a few ancien African-Americans descended from eighteenth-century black New England families or some combination of the above. To put that in better perspective, I know all five adult black women in town and all of us are affiliated with the university.

It starts getting dark at 3 p.m. here in the winter. The town (don't blink, you'll miss it) closes shop at 5 p.m. (the really rowdy ones close at 8). Driving slow is the norm and honking is rude (for a native Chicagoan, this damn near kills me). Walking is big, running is bigger, kayaking in the summer (and snowshowing in the winter) is biggest. Everyone has partners (this a meta term that pretty much signifies long-term sexual relations whether married or otherwise) and kids. And playdates. The public radio station plays classical music 80% of the day and there is no Tell Me More or hip hop & R&B station (utter fail as far as I'm concerned and really? All day? who wants to hear classical ALL day?). Waking up at the butt crack of dawn is not only commendable but expected and if you admit you don't expect to receive the New England Look of Disdain.

I think I kind of love it.

Which is weird. Because I'm pretty much the opposite of everything above. I mean--I'm urban. The hell am I doing on the other side of the world in a little town where I can't even find good leave-in conditioner?

But there is something refreshing and familiar--in a Northside Chicago sense--about the blue collar, laid back townspeople. I won't describe them here because I'd have to think and choose my words and this was supposed to be a quick morning post. I'll just say that I got here and I knew them. They were my Polish-Italian immigrant descended neighbors in Chicago's Lincoln Square, they are my mother's overworked and underpaid co-workers, hell, some of them are my mother with her stubborn and loving belief in equal opportunity. And I appreciate that they don't come laden with the same oppressive baggage that I found in, say, St. Louis or Atlanta or D.C. Oh, they have their own issues, and put some of these folks in those cities for a few years and I'll bet white privilege will have its way with them. But their issues aren't the same. Time, place and historical context has given them a willingness to engage you.

And a willingness to leave you alone to do your own thing since their sense of self doesn't revolve around oppressing you.

So to everyone who ever looked on my move to a small town in the Arctic circle with disbelief--yo, it's cool. Give it a try. Life is grand.

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.]