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The paper aims to contribute to the advancement of the theoretical and conceptual development of the field of media and literary studies, as well as to address the gaps, limitations or controversies in the existing literature. The paper also explores how news genre and fiction format affect the level and quality of interaction between the writers and readers of news stories, as well as the impact and influence of news stories on the Nigerian society. The paper uses a qualitative content analysis to analyse the news articles and fiction books that are selected for this study, according to the criteria of news genres, fiction formats and interaction. The paper finds that the hybrid fiction format is the most consistent and popular among the news genres, as it combines and blends elements from different fiction formats. The paper also finds that the investigative news genre is the most engaging and appealing among the news genres, as it provides in-depth, original and exposé reports of hidden or controversial matters. The paper argues that news stories and journalism genres are not neutral or objective, but rather social and rhetorical constructs that shape and are shaped by the communicative practices and purposes of discourse communities. The paper concludes that news stories and journalism genres are dynamic and evolving, as they respond to the changing social, political and technological contexts. The paper also discusses the implications, limitations and contributions of the research for the field of genre and media studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to contribute to the advancement of the theoretical and conceptual development of the field of media and literary studies, as well as to address the gaps, limitations or controversies in the existing literature. The paper also explores how news genre and fiction format affect the level and quality of interaction between the writers and readers of news stories, as well as the impact and influence of news stories on the Nigerian society. The paper uses a qualitative content analysis to analyse the news articles and fiction books that are selected for this study, according to the criteria of news genres, fiction formats and interaction. The paper finds that the hybrid fiction format is the most consistent and popular among the news genres, as it combines and blends elements from different fiction formats. The paper also finds that the investigative news genre is the most engaging and appealing among the news genres, as it provides in-depth, original and exposé reports of hidden or controversial matters. The paper argues that news stories and journalism genres are not neutral or objective, but rather social and rhetorical constructs that shape and are shaped by the communicative practices and purposes of discourse communities. The paper concludes that news stories and journalism genres are dynamic and evolving, as they respond to the changing social, political and technological contexts. The paper also discusses the implications, limitations and contributions of the research for the field of genre and media studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aims to explore how Black homeschooling organizations based in the United States with a public web presence in 2023–2024 characterize their missions and what these mission statements can tell us both about the growing homeschooling movement among Black parents, as well as its potential implications for education as a means of individual and collective uplift and positive social change. Design/methodology/approach: This paper used critical constructivist grounded theory (Levitt, 2021) and emergent coding to analyze the mission statements and organizational descriptions of all 19 U.S.-based Black homeschooling organizations with a public facing web presence identified via Google search in 2023 and 2024. Findings: Utilizing Afrofuturism as our theoretical framework, themes such as Black self-determination, community, support, and resources, and safety and empowerment emerged. Black homeschooling organizations offer families a safe and informative community as they seek agency, autonomy and brighter futures for their children than may be on offer in traditional schools. Originality/value: Our research fills an empirical gap in the literature on Black homeschooling by examining an existing but, so far as this paper could determine, unstudied population of U.S.-based Black homeschooling organizations. Our research also contributes by applying Afrofuturism and fugitive pedagogy as novel theoretical frameworks to better understand the move toward homeschooling by increasing numbers of Black parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the idea of citizenship as represented through Parliament-Funkadelic's trademark Afrofuturistic take on funk music. Afrofuturism connects and reimagines the past, present, and future of the Black diaspora, often from an African American perspective. As a product of Black culture, born out of a response to the turbulent circumstances of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, funk proves a powerful lens for discussing citizenship. The purpose of this paper is to present funk as an affective mnemonic device that carries social and historical knowledge, crucial to the formation of national identities. To illustrate this, Parliament-Funkadelic's Afrofuturistic journey towards the liberation of the Black body and its communal agency is discussed. I highlight the band's emphasis on sourcing freedom in the innate drives of the body, and thus bringing about a sort of collective intimacy which fosters the creation of new identities, united in movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African American learners deserve liberating learning experiences, yet rarely receive them. We argue that the framework of Afrofuturism is a productive strategy for reconceptualizing the work of mathematics teaching as liberating and empowering for African American learners and the Rights of the Learner Framework offers useful tools to enable teachers to use the power of teaching to advance justice and the improved lived experiences advocated by Afrofuturism theories. These frameworks support teachers with creating learning environments that enable Black children to thrive in mathematics classrooms, not just survive. Bridging these 2 theories, RoTL and Afrofuturism helped reimagine what mathematics classrooms look like as spaces where Black learners can dream, imagine, and leverage their cultural assets for learning and doing mathematics, individually and collectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether in terrestrial or aquatic habitats, the material qualities of water make it an exquisite and drastic connector. Water is in relation and creates relation, rendering the planetary water cycle inescapable when being on earth. Accordingly, human-water relations are both, a matter of more-than-human kinship relations and of transcultural connections. This paper analyses Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon (2014), a novel presenting an imagination that puts absolute attention on more-than-human entanglements and emphasises water as a crucial agent of such entanglements. As an angry swordfish stabs a hole into an oil hose, aliens land in the waters of Lagos, and human characters transform into mermaids, Lagoon deals with concepts such as petroculture and planetary health and suggests an organic chaos of relationality as a relief to an artificial order of separation. Lagos, notorious in fiction and reality alike, transcends the role of mere setting in Lagoon , and instead appears as a huge being, formed by the intra-actions of its inhabitants. While emphasising the local, the diversity of its perspectives and the strong focus on relationality give Lagoon a planetary sense, but with a decidedly African twist. As part of Okorafor's Africanfuturist vision, it is Lagos, Nigeria where the future emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital technology sector promotes digitalisation as a greener way to engage in capitalist processes that ensure economic progress. This narrative is misleading as components of the digital sector, such as digital devices, data centres, but also the Internet, are not in fact immaterial but require large amounts of natural resources and often even human labour for their construction and powering. These extractivist practices are based on colonial views and mechanisms, which persist into today. The Afrofuturist movie Neptune Frost (2021) addresses this topic by telling the story of a group of coltan miners in Burundi. Additionally, the movie engages with yet another form of extractivism, namely the exploitation of personal data, which economists also treat as a natural resource. This paper thus examines these various forms of extractivism as they are portrayed in Neptune Frost , including the depicted ways of resisting them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The radical imagination entails stepping outside the confines of the now and into the expansiveness of what could be. It has been described as the ability to dream of possible futures and bring these possibilities back to the present to drive social transformation. This perspective paper seeks to provide an overview of the radical imagination and its intersections with Afrofuturism, a framework and artistic epistemology that expresses the Black cultural experience through a space of hope where Blackness is integral. In this paper, I propose three processes that comprise the radical imagination: (1) imagining alternative Black futures, (2) radical hope, and (3) collective courage. I consider the neural networks that underlie each process and consider how the Black radical imagination is a portal through which aging Black adults experience hope and envision futures that drive social change. I conclude with considerations of what brain health and healing justice looks like for aging Black Americans-- specifically, how invocation of the Black radical imagination may have positive brain health effects for a demographic group at increased risk for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed individual and institutional anxieties about the apocalypse. Pastors and activists alike turned to the depiction of the apocalypse in popular media to describe the urgency of decisive action. Implicitly, these depictions offer a curious method for engaging and imagining children. Assata Shakur writes compelling poetry in her autobiography about her hopes for the world. In one poem, entitled For My Daughter Kakuya, I argue that Shakur engages in Afrofuturist speculative fiction as she envisions a future world for her daughter. This paper explores how writers living through these times themselves imagine Black children at the end of the world. What would happen if we took seriously the notion that the "end of the world" is always at hand for Black people? This article explores the stomach-turning warning that Jesus offers in Mark 13:14–19 regarding those who are "pregnant and nursing in those days". Using a reproductive justice lens, this paper explores the eternal challenge of imagining and stewarding a future in which Black children are safe and thriving. It also explores the limits and possibilities of partnering with radical Black faith traditions to this end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales y Artes Escénicas is the property of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Afrofuturism (an artistic perspective in which Black voices tell alternative narratives of culture, technology, and the future) and the Dark Fantastic (interrupting negative depictions of Black people through emancipatory interpretations of art) are two interrelated concepts used by Black artists in the Atlantic World to counter negative images and emphasize a story from a Black perspective. Likewise, these concepts have been used to recreate and re-narrate history with an eye towards subverting white supremacist historical narratives. By using Afrofuturism and the Dark Fantastic as lenses through which texts by authors from the African Diaspora in the Atlantic World are examined, an alternative narrative of Black histories and futures concerned with revolution, liberation, and justice can be seen. The two texts that are the subject of this research include José Antonio Aponte's descriptions of his book of paintings under interrogation in 1812–1813, and Martin Delany's novel Blake; or the Huts of America (1859–1862), providing images of enslavement that run counter to a white supremacist telling of history. They both imagine alternative pasts and futures for Africa and the Afro-Diaspora involving revolution and magic. These works, though produced at different times and locations in the nineteenth century, offer new ways in which to discuss liberation and freedom in the context of the artistic production of the Atlantic World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers South geographies as real-world activations of "Wakanda" zones, zones at the edges of Empire. It offers Southern black expressive cultures (specifically, the Global South nation of Trinidad) as Afrofurtural in their capacities for articulating new calibrations of black freedom (in relation to real-world enduring structures of black capture). This paper focuses specifically on the invention of the steelpan in the Afro-Trinidadian village of Laventille, showing that the geography conditioning the instrument's production is Wakanda-like. As such, it reads, in the technological invention of the steelpan, an Afrofutural articulation of a black freedom. Unlike the black freedom central to the cinematic rendition of Wakanda, the black freedom of Laventille's steelpan world is not completely disentangled from global systems of anti-black violence. However, steelpan's expressive culture does establish, in the present, a futural gesture of what it means for black living to overflow such global systems of black death-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HBO's Lovecraft Country is a model resource for developing speculative civic literacies, which are forms of meaning making aimed at helping students conceive of a more equitable democratic society. Speculative civic literacies and Lovecraft Country both center the tension between Afrofuturism and Afropessimism in the Afrocentric restorying of historic narratives to more accurately reflect the experiences of a wider range of people. By studying how Lovecraft Country portrays historic events, in particular the violent enforcement of the color line, students can gain an enriched understanding of how colonial knowledge production and necropower shapes their world. By engaging with subversive art, students learn to openly question dominant assumptions, including the sacred liberal assumption that democratic reform is sufficient to achieve genuine equity as a society. Finally, seeing how Lovecraft Country restories events with empowered Black protagonists, students can learn to engage in their own restorying, and thereby envision futures of equitable flourishing, while taking seriously the persistent challenges of social death in the present. By honing their narrative tools through engagement with rich speculative fiction, students learn to create spaces where the possible can permeate into our democratic reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the life and works of GrammyAward® winning artist, Lil Nas X, we explore ways a young Black queer musician has enacted emancipatory utopias to disrupt dominant cultural modes of being—offering unapologetic expressions and expansions of race, gender, and sexual identity. In this paper, we draw upon José Esteban Muñoz and Ytasha Womak to consider how utopian thinking through the lenses of queer futurity and Afrofuturism provides a way to dismantle the hegemonic and proleptic trappings of music education and contemplate how music learners and teachers might enact emancipatory utopias relevant to their own historically lived experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the contemporary postmodern era, the boundaries that once rigidly separated well-established genres have become more fluid, resulting in what scholars Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan call 'genre-blurring'. This phenomenon of incorporating elements from diverse genres represents a challenge to dominant ideologies and expands the possibilities within fictional texts. The dystopian fiction written by feminist writers towards the end of the twentieth century and beyond significantly exemplifies this form of hybrid textuality. In doing so, these writers seek to renovate the dystopian genre by making it both formally and politically oppositional. This article aims to explore Midnight Robber (2000), a feminist dystopian novel by Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican–Canadian writer, to illustrate how the author manipulates the generic boundaries of science fiction, fantasy and mythology. By amalgamating Afro-Caribbean religious and cultural beliefs, mythical creatures and traditional knowledge systems with a technologically advanced future world, Hopkinson challenges the essentially White, Eurocentric model of dystopian fiction. The article will also examine how, as an Afrofuturist writer, Hopkinson attempts to challenge and subvert the patriarchal discourse of dystopian fiction, traditionally dominated by White male writers, through a strong Black female character, Tan-Tan, who seeks to resist the patriarchal structures governing her, and finally succeeds in emerging as a female leader figure. For this purpose, Barbara Creed's insights into the monstrous-feminine are explored, introducing novelty into the discourse of feminist dystopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past twenty years, Black Atlantic Afrofuturism has been the dominant theoretical frame for thinking about the significance of Drexciya's aquatically themed techno music and mythology. Yet there have been few analyses of Drexciya from the perspective of ecology, of the ocean as a marine environment. Through a semiotic analysis of Drexciya's 1993 EP Bubble Metropolis, this paper moves the discussion of Drexciya in the direction of ecocriticism and blue cultural studies, or more broadly, the blue humanities, in order to interpret the stories it tells about an imagined ocean. What do these stories mean? Why are these stories important now? Through the production and circulation of oceanic narratives that encourage listeners to imagine, wonder about, and groove to the ocean, Drexciya's music and mythology can be understood as a form of "pre-emptive activism," which designates indirect activist modes that inspire people to care about places, such as an ocean, that they take for granted or ignore. By imagining oceans full of sound, Drexciya fostered a tacit form of marine environmentalism in the 1990s. With oceanic ecosystems on the edge of collapse as a result of the climate emergency, all forms of marine activism, from the direct to the indirect, have gained a new sense of urgency. We need to listen to Drexciya now more than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Canadian Review of American Studies is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper pushes theological engagements with transhumanism to attend to issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation through analysis of three works of speculative fiction – Greg Egan's Diaspora, Octavia E. Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy, and Nnedi Okorafor's Binti trilogy. Where Egan, alongside many transhumanists, imagines a future that is mostly disembodied, Afrofuturist thinkers like Butler and Okorafor successfully integrate speculation about the future of humanity with attention to the social formation of bodies. Butler illuminates how histories of oppression are relevant for bioethical debates around purported human enhancements, while Okorafor draws attention to the social practices and bodily constraints on those practices that enable participation in concrete human communities. In light of their work, the paper suggests that theological debates with transhumanists should move away from the question of the limits of human nature, and toward questions of how bodily practices humanize us and enable fellowship with the human Christ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from Shelley Streeby's definition of "visionary fiction" to describe Indigenous and people of colour futurisms as fiction that "extends beyond cli-fi in its rich and deep connections to social movements and everyday struggles" (Streeby 4-5) and that attempts to decolonise the imagination of climate change, this article will propose an analysis of feminist Afrofuturist climate change fiction. The absence of climate justice from several novels that are considered to be part of the emerging canon of climate fiction, and their one-dimensional representation of gender, race, and the other-than-human (Schneider-Mayerson; Gaard), require alternative ways of responding to the climate change crisis. My analyses seek to demonstrate that feminist Afrofuturist representations of the Anthropocene not only treat climate justice as a central issue, but they also make an insightful critical intervention capable of imagining a rupture from master--and mainstream--narratives of linear progress. This article, in particular, will propose an overview of some contemporary feminist Afrofuturist writers and filmmakers, such as Wanuri Kahiu, Nnedi Okorafor, and N. K. Jemisin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contextualizes growing interest in futurity and minoritarian futures as connected to movements in speculative fiction, particularly Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurism, and the ways in which this genre reimagines both history and futures. These developments are read through two groundbreaking anthologies—Dark Matter, a collection of speculative fiction from the African diaspora, and Walking the Clouds, a collection of Indigenous science fiction—and the social conditions of their publication. Using the work of Walter Benjamin and his writing against the notion of progress in history, the article posits the shared grounds for a philosophy of history that disrupts the singular future of speculation-driven capitalism with alternative forms of speculative imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article expresses the importance and theoretical viability of Black religious communities reflecting on armed struggle as an option in their pursuit of liberation. African Americans have wrestled with various perspectives on what forms of resistance to white supremacy were religiously legitimate and those that were deemed practical. From moral suasion, immigration, a Black separate state, to violent resistance, Black people in the United States have debated these perspectives and have charted paths forward that continue to be accompanied by Black suffering and death at the hands of racists to the present day. While moral suasion has obtained a hegemonic place in mainstream Black political discourse, violent resistance has often been characterized as both religiously illegitimate and impractical. However, by using concepts from Afrofuturism and traditional African religion, the author will present Denmark Vesey as a model for contemporary Black religio-political thought. Using the themes of "past future", time travel, resurrection, reincarnation, trance, and conjure, the author grounds himself in an African-centered epistemology that transcends the limitations of the Eurocentric model limited only to scientific "reality". The author claims that by conjuring Vesey's revolutionary interreligious Pan-African approach, it will provide more options for Black religio-political theory and praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018 the Afrofuturistic film, Black Panther, exposed a hunger for the portrayal of Black people in a positive light. Utilizing critical race theory, the authors conducted a mixed-methods study to explore viewers' experiences with racial microaggressions, their means of coping with racial battle fatigue, and how the film impacted them. Viewers described the film as empowering, which elicited critical consciousness, and expressed an appreciation for the counter-narrative, introducing a "Wakanda effect." Further, social validation and connection, centering, and counter-narratives were key strategies in resisting racial microaggressions. The authors provide a figure that describes the Wakanda effect and end with a discussion of resilience in addressing racial battle fatigue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997) is a contemporary African American novel that has often been interpreted as either utopian, dystopian, or a gothic piece of literature. Scrutinizing the non-linearity of time in Paradise and connecting it to the historical events at the time the novel was written, we wish to highlight Morrison's criticism of Eurocentric utopian traditions. Furthermore, we emphasize Morrison's suggestion of reimagining a reconstructed future through re-examining African American history. By analyzing tropes of metaphorical time travel, parallel universes, and the jump in time integrated with the technology of the 1970s when the events of the novel occurred, we suggest that Paradise can be tackled from an Afrofuturistic lens to visualize a different future. Hence, we argue that Paradise is an Afrofuturistic novel that helps readers envision a new form of Reconstruction through mediating between African American history and technoculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon referred to as "Afro-now-ism" is a response to the popularization of the term "Afrofuturism," coined by diasporic Africans in the United States and largely applied to musical, literary, and artistic practice that "imagines" a future or fantasy space where the Black voice exists outside of Eurocentric, modernist thinking, and creative practices. This article considers Afro-now-ism in relation to Afrikanness and cultural production in design and visual communication and argues for ownership of culturally significant production by continental Afrikans. Because an empirical analysis is insufficient to determine the "essence" or "feel" of artifacts, Hall's "negotiated reading" visual methodology and Pauwels' visual analysis model are used to make the case for design that embodies tradition, culture, history, and appropriation, to express this Afrikanness--the essence of Afro-now-ism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terms Afrofuturism and decolonisation may both occupy prominent positions in the contemporary moment but they are not often projected into the same conceptual space. While the task of decolonising the curricula at South Africa's tertiary institutions looms large in the contemporary moment, for the particular disciplines of art history and visual studies, the task of creating new curricula has often taken on a temporal valence as there is a certain anxiety about making references to historical African culture in the present. Afrofuturism, however, seeks to create fissures in the present moment by using references the past to envision futures that counter a negative historical imaginary. Following an analysis of the art historical curricula at tertiary institutions in South Africa, this paper seeks to discuss the notion of both Afrofuturism and decolonisation as temporal dislocations and discursive disruptions. By looking at the film Black Panther and its numerous references to historical African art and visual culture this paper proposes that the concept of Afrofuturism may provide a method for the study of contemporary art forms through the lens of the historical and as such a potential approach to discursive decolonisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, educational pathways emerge from the nexus of ancient narratives and future possibilities. Such imaginings are as much attributed to the African American intellectual tradition as to contemporary Afrofuturisms, including those born in histories of Blackness. The overlay of what was and what is not yet is significant because it engenders educational potentialities that are central to aesthetics and onto-epistemological wonderings. The author uses seminal dialogues from scholars like Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune and Anna Julia Cooper as a springboard for envisioning Afrofuturisms in which schooling functions to transgress the assemblages of violence and capital of shame that pervade classrooms and corridors contemporary education. Not unlike the call of Sylvia Wynter, Sun Ra, bell hooks, Octavia Butler and other Afrofuturist activists of the feminine, this paper (re)imagines schooling from the roots of its past and the future conditional they portend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the sonic dimension of Afrofuturist artefacts, building on contemporary theory pertaining to the speculative and aesthetic potential of Black Sound. The proposed case study focuses on a key performance held in West Africa by Ghanaian artist and composer Steloolive. The musical act is discussed with regard to the artistic media featured, as well as the strategies employed on stage, adding to the complexity of this contemporary genre. Moreover, special attention is paid to historical and contemporary references, as well as the transposal of sound into matter in the way the artist experiments with sound production and fashion statements. From the artist's choice of attire to stage set-up and, eventually, to soundscape—performances of the kind Steloolive engages in are relevant to the discussion as they contribute to the widening of the Afrofuturist imaginary beyond the material and to the understanding of technological development as encompassing medium and genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sankofa is an Akan principle which philosophizes that in order to move forward and build a future, one must reach into the past to retrieve that which is at risk of being left behind or forgotten. Marvel Cinema's Black Panther which is usually perceived as a speculative, Afrofuturist representation of Black identities has a strong concern with the historical African past. In its construction of the futuristic, high-tech African nation Wakanda, the film brings into play some aspects of erstwhile ancient African cultural practices which faded out, or were disregarded during and after colonialism. In this paper I argue that in its treatment of the futurist African space, Black Panther shows many analogies consistent with the Sankofa theory and also shows a de-colonial agenda. I first elaborate on the Sankofa theory by outlining its history and relevance. Secondly, I examine the treatment of three indigenous practices in the film: Wakandan architecture, Wakandan writing systems and the representation of Wakandan women, as elements Black Panther retrieves from the ancient African past in order to build its futuristic African space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antiblackness, and the dominant stories it produces about Black humanity, creates distorted images of Black humanness that are used to justify violence against Black youth in schools and society. However, Black youth have different stories to tell about their being in the world that stems directly from their lived experiences and are inherently counter to damaged center narratives intertwined with Black suffering. Using the theoretical framing of BlackCrit and theorizations of Afrofuturism, I share two composite Afro-futurist counterstories developed by Black high school students in a summer writing course, which confront antiblackness and disrupt the ways the regime makes educators complicit in seeing Black youth as non-human/superhuman. The research provides insights into Black youth futurity in relation to schooling in an anti-Black world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can black feminist science and Afrofuturism inform the crafting of methods for future research? Can their strategies for visioning alternative worlds help shape a methodological scaffold to guide the doing of empirical speculative research? The article engages with these questions while drawing on the author's experience on a youth futures project. The article identifies the challenges of empirical, speculative projects – the difficulties for participants in breaking away from the dead weight of the present and the difficulties for researchers in engendering research that allows newness – surprising and radical imaginaries of the future – to emerge. By exploring relevant ideas from the worlds of creative Afrofuturism and black feminist science, the article proposes a set of methodological prompts that may help understand and address these challenges. These prompts are also an attempt to construct a distinctive intellectual and ethical compass to guide everyday research practice, and are offered in a spirit of experimentation, to be used, amended, or selectively ignored by fellow speculative researchers. The intention is to support a form of speculative research that does not foreclose on the radical and liberatory possibilities of futurity advanced by black feminist creativity and scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Wangechi Mutu's exhibition "Intertwined" at the New Museum, presenting a comprehensive survey of her artistic practice spanning a quarter-century. Topics include Mutu's exploration of migration, colonialism, globalization, and the duality of destruction and creation, as seen through various mediums such as collages, sculptures, videos, and performances.

This review positions Lauren Williams’ installation ‘Making Room for Abolition’, shown in ‘Monolith’ at Red Bull Arts in Detroit, as a speculative design project that presents a two-fold critique: one directed at US society and the other, at speculative design itself. As a discourse and practice, speculative design offers a model for designing in sociallyoriented, post-capitalist contexts, but it has yet to fully unmoor itself from colonialist ideology. I present common critiques of speculative design—specifically: the lack of attention to race- and class-based struggles, the assumption that time is absolute, and its stance that preferable futures must be plausible—to show how Williams addresses these shortcomings while centering Black experiences and imagination in a dream of abolitionist futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the Hollywood blockbuster film Black Panther and its perception by the professional public, as it represents a certain milestone in the genre of films based on comics also with African American approach. It also deals with the concept of Afrofuturism, which has reappeared in professional articles thanks to this movie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its release, Black Panther (Coogler 2018) has proven to be a phenomenal black cultural text on so many levels. The film has revitalised discourses on Afrofuturism, owing to the fact that the black themes it raises reconfigure representations of black lives and history that have mainly been steeped in normative western categorisations. Black Panther) has also proven to be phenomenal in its representation of black womanhood which, I would like to argue, engenders intimate convergences with the film's Afrofuturistic thrust. In other words, Black Panther's Afrofuturistic re-imagi(ni)ng of black womanhood is Africana womanist-centric. Black women from Africa and the African diaspora are presented as an imagined community - they have a shared history of imperial and patriarchal domination among other forms of othering. Their representation is a return to the source of sorts which recalls African women warriors who have been celebrated in the African past but seem to have lost the significance of their prowess over time but still have prospects in a re-invented Africa. Thus, in this paper I seek to make a theoretical case for Africana womanism in the Afrofuturistic context presented by Black Panther. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CaShawn Thompson's hashtag, #BlackGirlMagic, has transformed into a movement over the past five years. The hashtag focuses on celebrating the beauty, influence, and strength of Black women and girls. However, Thompson's term sits in a space of tension, where contradictory interpretations create boundaries around what Black girl celebration means as well as who gets to celebrate Black girl magic, specifically when it comes to girls without a celebrity status and girls who are considered hood or ratchet. In this paper, the author contends that the tension between respectability and ratchetness must be further explored, as it is an essential component in discussions of Black girl identities. To do this, the Afrofuturist young adult literature of Nnedi Okora for is analyzed using a conceptual framework that highlights the Black Ratchet Imagination and its aversion to respectability politics and the ways in which Afrofuturism challenges notions of respectability in terms of traditional Black literary cultural production. Findings suggest that, although each character, like real Black girls, exhibits traits of respectability, they also depict traits of ratchetness. Thus, the author calls for all literacy stakeholders to dissolve preconceived binaries and conceptualize ratchetness as another celebratory space of agency and Black Girl Magic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black is King is a film that follows the plot of Disney's Lion King through the use of Beyoncé's Lion King: The Gift album that includes 14 songs that represent scenes in the film. This analysis examines the representation, regulation, and identity of the ancestor in Beyoncé's Black is King film through the circuit of culture and Afrofuturism to investigate how the ancestor connects to the past, present, and future Black people, our history, and our liberation. Through a textual analysis, the research conveyed that the ancestor was present within three elements in the film and the music that included: (1) the sun, moon, and stars; (2) water; (3) earth. Ultimately, the analysis provides evidence that Afrofuturism is more than an aesthetic. It is a practical lens of research that discusses empowerment, resistance, communication, and imagination within popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis to interrogate concepts of social justice in relation to the crisis of neo-liberal capitalism by referring to the work of the Situationist International movement, the posthuman philosophy of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well as Afrofuturism. Providing an array of new theoretical responses as well as pedagogical models that directly engage with social justice issues, Deleuze and Guattari offer an immanent model for a politics and pedagogy that is primarily concerned with becoming. I argue that finding new ways of dealing with the notion of change, or in terms of Deleuzoguattarian philosophy, becoming, is critical to making sense of contemporary concerns around issues of decolonisation as well as the move toward progressive transformation in education. This paper argues, furthermore, that addressing issues of social justice requires a type of shizoanalytical approach that is future-orientated and aligned with posthuman and not postmodern concerns. A schizoanalytical approach, as I will argue, intersects not only with critical posthumanism, but also with the new materialist and affective turns in current scholarship, drawing together varied environmental, political, and social concerns that pertain to the practice and scholarship of contemporary pedagogy in South Africa and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The art movement known as Afrofuturism uses various forms of artistic expression to create speculative fictions linking African-Americans' ancestral past with envisioned, utopian futures. In the process, Afrofuturists shift the narratives that influence African-Americans' lives from narratives of oppression to narratives that re-imagine a world in which African diasporic culture is at the center of social life. In previous analyses of the significance of Afrofuturism, however, the voices of actual artists are glaringly absent. Current public uprisings and demands for social reforms provide new opportunities for elevating Afrofuturism's traditional emancipatory themes across digital platforms with a global reach. Using a critical race theoretical lens, this multimodal anthropological study focuses on the voices of contemporary Afrofuturists at the intersection of Afrofuturism, social injustice, and digital technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past is certain, the future an illusion. Contemporary films such as Ivy Maraey: land without evil (Juan Carlos Valdivia 2013), Embrace of the Serpent (Ciro Guerra 2015), The Fever (Maya Da Rin 2020), and Bacurau are border films, from the genre of contact films. They announce how coloniality maintains a grip on frontier territories in the Americas. These films also present particular indigenous visions that challenge western epistemes and confront audiences with particular ways of being in the world, where the modern subject finds its limit. The article introduces a critical perspective on cinema as a colonial tool, producing forms of capture that are part of the modern archive and the notion of linear time. These films also build on cinematic traditions such as tercer cine and afro-futurism, and are strong on concepts such as cosmopolitanism, resistance, and subalternity. They present forms of adaptation, reaction, return, and redemption while maintaining the status of cinema as a capturing device, entertainment, and capital investment (the triad of destruction in modernity/coloniality). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study examines the collective ingenuity of Black young people as they develop speculative activist stances in the context of video games. Drawing on an Afrofuturist perspective, we center hope and possibility by exploring how Black people leverage their histories as a resource in the present to imagine radically new Black Futures in games such as The Sims and Grand Theft Auto V. We offer a framework for how youth develop fugitive and abolitionist imaginaries and practices that remix technology, resistance, and social relations, thereby re-articulating the possibilities of video game play, collaboration, and activism toward consequential forms of learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the twenty-first century, museum learning has shifted with the world's social climate, exploring new approaches to engage the public with collections. This text reframes the museum art educator as an activator and how they can utilize concepts within Afrofuturism to decolonize hegemonic white cultural institutions and Eurocentric epistemes. Taking inspiration from the #MuseumAreNotNeutral movement that started in 2017, the article probes three examples of activities conducted by museum activators through an Afrofuturistic a-r-tography approach. The activities discussed draw from author Octavia Butler's Parable Series and the popular Pan-African philosophical concepts ubuntu (human kindness) and sankofa (relation of time) as learning prompts on exhibition tours at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The analysis and application of an Afrofuturistic a-r-tographic framework will provide insights into the parable of museum learning and the potential future for a museum activator's role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her Afrofuturist novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson unravels the psychological, cultural and historical trauma of the zombie figure. More than simply a supernatural element of the text, the zombie, and more particularly the latent psycho-social trauma it fantastically embodies, forms the very bedrock of the Afrocentric setting in a way that exposes and critiques the continued suffering of African diasporic peoples under racialized economic structures. While the origins of the zombie document Haitian anxieties surrounding slave labor, the zombie's contemporary form, in reflecting middle class preoccupations with global capitalist consumption, highlights the ways in which cultural appropriation of Afrocentric culture helps perpetuate a larger systemic cycle of violence that erases black pasts while collapsing black futures into an uncertain present. This paper will explore the ways that Hopkinson uses her vision of a dystopian Toronto that entraps and vilifies its poor racialized citizens (for the protection of its larger population) to challenge neoliberal global dominance. Through her re-privileging of Afro- Caribbean spiritual systems and knowledge frameworks, Hopkinson suggests that only by challenging and seeking alternatives to the epistemologies inherited by European modernity can we hope to counteract the violence they continuously enact upon global populations and revive hope for the prosperity of black life in the future. However, while her novel implicates cultural appropriation as part of a larger, white supremacist institutional regime, her novel's framing of Afrocentricity on diasporic Indigenous soil highlights further challenges of Afrocentric representation in Afrofuturist literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anticipated by many, and equally a site of contention or reverence, Black Panther and its accompanying original musical score as composed by Ludwig Görranson is rife for analysis and brings to fore the question: in what ways is a Hollywood practice used in a film with seemingly other aesthetic aims? A score which features few disparate and disconnected vague references to an “African sound” for the imagined country of Wakanda is undercut even more so by the insistent use of an otherwise purely western orchestral score. Firstly, through a brief overview of Göransson’s production approaches to the score for Black Panther, and his collaboration with local experts, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of authorship arising from such collaborations between these expert improvising music and film composers who tend to be the sole credited composers. Furthermore, musical representations are complicated by the recurring theme of the “other” according to Classical Hollywood tropes through the integration of occasional African instruments. In section two, brief transcriptions of the music composed for the character Killmonger are provided, in the search for representation devices – how the music works to or fails to establish the character. Also provided are the authors’ personal insights as to whether or not Göransson’s intentions with the music are in fact evident in the film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 2018, South Africa was hit by the Black Panther (Coogler 2018) fever. Multitudes of people thronged movie houses in their cultural regalia. The movie’s release seemed to have signalled a “cultural moment”. Several scholars have engaged with Black Panther’s cultural significance and thematic engagement. However, extant literature has not fully explored and accounted for the movie’s popularity in audiences’ specific socio-historical contexts of consumption. More so, current studies on Black Panther have mostly relied on text-based approaches and paid scant attention to audiences’ contexts and lived experiences. Premised on a cultural studies approach, this reception analysis sought to explore and account for the popularity of Black Panther among Black South African women in Soweto township. The study’s findings show that the popularity of Black Panther among Black South African women in Soweto is attributable to the meanings associated with resistance and pleasure that subaltern audiences negotiate from the movie. Audiences’ situated discourses and the film’s Afrofuturist orientation combine to unravel a “cultural moment” for Black women in Soweto where they can challenge and subvert localised and global forms of oppression that afflict them. The film opens up symbolic space for subaltern Black South African women to recuperate voice and their agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]