Critical Black Futures: Speculative Theories and Explorations 9789811578793, 9789811578809

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
1: Introduction
Afrofuturism?
What Are Critical Black Futures?
Chapter Breakdown
Bibliography
2: The Black Futures of W. E. B. Du Bois
References
3: A Black Tetratic Future: Blackness and the Age of Hyper-Exponentiation (Hyper-4)
Tetration? What Is That!?
Tetration as an Era
Tetratic Thinking/Thought
Hyper-4 Technology
Access in the Era of Tetration
Out of Thin Air...
Blackness and The Era of Tetration
Black Religion as Tetratic Formation
Seeds
References
4: Towards an Afrofuturist Feminist Manifesto
The Futurist Manifesto
Mundane Futurism
Burn This Manifesto
Afrofuturist Feminism
References
5: Writings on Dance: Artistic Reframing for Celestial Black Bodies
Signification of Celestial Bodies
Paradoxical Universe
The Mechanization of Dance
Moving from the Past
Technologies, Rehearsal, and Training
Seen and Unseen
Devising and Choreography
Celestial Bodies, Onstage, and Offstage
Space Is the Place
Dancing and Messaging
References
6: A Disruptive Visual Respite: Stacey Robinson
7: Black Radical Nationalist Theory and Afrofuturism 2.0
The Revolutionary Logic of the Black Male
References
8: Afrofuturism and Black Futurism: Some Ontological and Semantic Considerations
Introduction
Afrofuturism’s Conceptual Structure: Formal Relations and Possible Meanings
Toward Mutual Respect and Recognition: Aesthetic Potency and Political Efficacy of Afrofuturism and Black Futurism
Blake, or The Huts of America
The Black Panther
Conclusion
References
9: Super Fluid/Super Black: Translations and Teachings in Transembodied Metaphysics
References
10: Race, Economics, and the Future of Blackness
Introduction
Political Economy, Black Theology, and Womanism
The Black Panther Economic Philosophy
A Liberationist Model of Racial Justice
A Just Global Society: Antiracist Cosmopolitanism
References
11: Newhampton: A Future Forward(ified) Black City in the United States
Tulsa Riots
Wakanda
Perimeter Control
Wakanda Department of Defense
Communication Technologies
Wakanda x Greenwood: Revisited
Newhampton: Futurized North Tulsa Economics Meets Wakandan(esque) Defense Systems
A Note on Tulsa Economics
Newhampton Imagined
Wakandan(esque) Defense Systems
Newhamptonian Perimeter(s)
Central Defense Systems
Communication Protocols
Conclusion
References

Citation preview

Critical Black Futures Speculative Theories and Explorations

Edited by  Philip Butler

Critical Black Futures

Philip Butler Editor

Critical Black Futures Speculative Theories and Explorations

Editor Philip Butler Iliff School of Theology Denver, CO, USA

ISBN 978-981-15-7879-3    ISBN 978-981-15-7880-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Building Black Utopia © Stacey A. Robinson 2015 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Contents

1 Introduction  1 Philip Butler 2 The Black Futures of W. E. B. Du Bois 19 Phillip Luke Sinitiere 3 A Black Tetratic Future: Blackness and the Age of HyperExponentiation (Hyper-4) 37 Philip Butler 4 Towards an Afrofuturist Feminist Manifesto 61 Caitlin O’Neill 5 Writings on Dance: Artistic Reframing for Celestial Black Bodies 93 Raissa Simpson 6 A Disruptive Visual Respite: Stacey Robinson113 Stacey Robinson 7 Black Radical Nationalist Theory and Afrofuturism 2.0119 Reynaldo Anderson and Tommy J. Curry v

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8 Afrofuturism and Black Futurism: Some Ontological and Semantic Considerations139 Damion Kareem Scott 9 Super Fluid/Super Black: Translations and Teachings in Transembodied Metaphysics165 Ni’Ja Whitson 10 Race, Economics, and the Future of Blackness181 Joshua Bartholomew 11 Newhampton: A Future Forward(ified) Black City in the United States207 Philip Butler

Notes on Contributors

Reynaldo  Anderson is Associate Professor of Communications at Harris-Stowe State University. His research focus is in several areas of interest that include urban leadership and organization, intercultural communication, speculative futurism, cultural studies, Africana studies, rhetoric, social media, and the techno-sphere. He coedited Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. Joshua  Bartholomew  teaches religious and theological studies at Iliff School of Theology, is an affiliate professor at Regis University, and is a licensed minister from the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. He is a postdoctoral research fellow at The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. His research deals with the relationship between economic justice and racial equality within the United States, and its transnational range of influence, focusing on the recovery of intellectual resources and economic praxis from the Black Panther Party. Philip Butler  is Assistant Professor of Theology and Black Posthuman Artificial Intelligence Systems at Iliff School of Theology. He is also the founder of the Seekr Project, a distinctly Black conversational artificial intelligence with mental health capacities. His work primarily focuses on the intersection of neuroscience, technology, spirituality, and race. He is the author of Black Transhuman Liberation Theology: Spirituality and Technology. vii

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Tommy J. Curry  is Professor of Philosophy and an American scholar and author. He holds a personal chair in Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh. In 2018, he won an American Book Award for The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. Patrick Earl Hammie  is an American visual artist who examines personal and shared Black experiences and offers stories that expand how we express notions of gender and race today. Hammie works primarily with themes related to cultural identity, social justice, storytelling, and the body in visual culture. His recent awards include the Puffin Foundation Award (2017) and Arnold O.  Beckman Research Award from the University of Illinois (2016). Lauren-Ashley Howard  is an artist from Buffalo, New York. In addition to installation, digital collage, cosplay, and performance work, she is a writer and Afrofuturist storyteller. Howard holds a Juris Doctor from the State University of New York at Buffalo, an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is pursuing an MA in African Studies with a concentration in the Swahili language. Delita Martin  is an artist based in Huffman, Texas. She holds a BFA in Drawing from Texas Southern University and an MFA in printmaking from Purdue University. Formally a member of the fine arts faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Martin is working as a full-­time artist in her studio, Black Box Press. Martin’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Most recently Martin’s work was included in the State of the Arts: Discovering American Art Now. Caitlin  O’Neill  (she/they) is Assistant Director of Brown University’s LGBTQ Center. She holds a PhD in African American Studies from the University of Texas, Austin. O’Neill was also a Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellow in Lesbian Studies at Yale University in 2016. They were also Assistant Director of the Multicultural Resource Center at Oberlin College, where she earned a certificate in Social Justice Mediation. Stacey Robinson  is an Arthur Schomburg fellow and has completed his Masters of Fine Art at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is originally

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from Albany, New York, and graduated from Fayetteville State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree. His art speculates about futures where Black people are free from colonial influences. Tokie  Rome-Taylors  work explores representation through themes of adornment, memory, spirituality, and time. She draws inspiration and influence from an eclectic range of time periods, artists, and cultures. She photographed portraits of Coretta Scott King for the book The Many Faces of Sweet Auburn. Her work has been published in Behind the Shutter Magazine as well as Art-Diction Magazine. Damion Kareem Scott  is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the City College of New York, CUNY, and a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Scott studied philosophy at New  York University and at Birkbeck College, University of London. In addition, he earned a master’s degree in African American Studies from Columbia University. Scott’s research interests converge on Africana Philosophy and AfricanAmerican Political and Artistic History. In Africana Philosophy, Scott is engaged in research in the fields of metaphysics, aesthetics, and the history and geography of ideas. His work in metaphysics engages the ontology of personhood via critical examination of the conceptual logic and phenomenology of subjectivity, race, ethnicity, nationality, post-colonialism, humanism and transhumanism. In aesthetics, he explores the value of art arising out of social and political oppression with particular attention to the pragmatics and aesthetics of Black Futurism, especially in science fictional film and electronic music. Raissa  Simpson  is an African American/Pilipinx choreographer and artistic director of the San Francisco-based PUSH Dance Company. A graduate of SUNY Purchase with an MFA from UC Davis, Simpson has held creative residencies at Dance Initiative Carbondale, Santa Clara University, Bayview Opera House, Sacramento State University, Margaret Jenkins CHIME, African American Theater Alliance (AATAIN!) and CounterPulse. She received a Phyllis C Wattis Foundation grant with Bayview Opera House for her most recent work, The Motley Experiment.

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Notes on Contributors

Phillip Luke Sinitiere  is Professor of History at the College of Biblical Studies and the Scholar in Residence at UMass’s W. E. B. Du Bois Center. A scholar of American religious history and African American studies, his recent books are Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity and Citizen of the World: The Late Career and Legacy of W. E. B. Du Bois. Ni’Ja Whitson  is an award-winning gender-nonconforming/transmogrifying artist, performer, and writer who brings together experimental and African Diasporic practices to highlight themes of gender, sexuality, race, and spirit. Mentioned by the New York Times, Whitson’s recent accolades include the Creative Capital Award, Bessie Award, Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Fellow Candidate, LMCC Process Space Residency, Bogliasco Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist Residency, and being a featured choreographer of the 2018 Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial.

1 Introduction Philip Butler

Welcome. Moving from one place to another without critical reflection can be thought of as haphazard—lacking in earnest. While one can never prepare for all potentialities, the lack of a critical approach does not allow for movement that can be traceable, measurable, or comparable. Journeying without a sense of imagination relegates one to the rudimentary aspects of what has already gone before. While some might say, “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” that is not the case, nor has it been, when thinking about what Black bodies might be doing in the future. So, movement toward future modes of existence without critical reflection might be comparable to flailing about in an endless void without grounding. Some might call that a wish. And without imagination nothing new is made. Imagination invites one into the speculative. Some might say the prophetic. It takes seriously what is currently found and reconfigures it in ways that are perhaps more amenable than their current order. Speculation requires the P. Butler (*) Iliff School of Theology, Denver, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 P. Butler (ed.), Critical Black Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9_1

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ability to hold ideas, and concrete things in tension to see what might be “next.” This extends to Black futures, because any attempt to envision Black futures situates one in spaces that work toward a new reality. Going to a new reality requires grounding. For instance, can you walk here? Do you fly there? Is there a portal with an encrypted biosensor lock? And, what happens when you get there? How are you to be with primary interface of this new reality? Regardless of how one arrives in these new spaces the combination of critical thought and imagination is inescapable. This introductory chapter will connect you to the inspiration of this collection, some of the major discourses that allow this volume to exist, and it will end with a breakdown of each chapter. So, echoing Lonny Avi Brooks (2016), “I [too] share a dream: to ensure that long oppressed racial minority and diverse voices can articulate themselves in the futures imagined in the practices of long-term thinking and in the professional areas of foresight.” As a result, I asked a group of scholars and artists to come together for the express purpose of writing some critical Black futuristic shit. One of the underlying notions of this volume is that Black critical discourse is steeped in the speculative. It might even be argued that Black critical discourse bubbles up from the respective subjectivities that house Black imagination(s) and give rise to the multiple potentialities of Black imagination (Maturana 1988; Wynter 2007; Voss Roberts 2017). Whether via Zora Neale Hurston’s literary awakening, Octavia Butler’s speculative futurist fiction, Aime Cesaire’s anti-/decolonial deconstructionism, or Achille Mbembe’s exploration of the political elements that govern death and dying: Black critical discourse relies heavily on Black speculative imagination(s). In each of the above examples, there exists a beckoning conceptualizing/molding of new worlds through epistemic shifts or upendings that are traced back to the imaginations of these contributors or critical Black futuristic thought—the speculative aspects of this discourse that function as signifiers of the radical imagination. In “Ecologies of the Radical Imagination” (2019), Alex Khasnabish defines the radical imagination as “our capacity to conceive of the world as it might be otherwise.” And in order to do so one is required to conceptualize novel epistemologies, social norms, genders, sexualities, embodiments, etc. The point is that new worlds, where Black futures are intact, accounted for, self-determined, and powerful

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require approaches that are not rooted in the present reality (whatever it may be). So, it is important to be in conversation with Black critical imagination for the express purpose of thinking critically about what the future may hold for Black people. This project relies on the idea that Black futures (that are desirable to Black people) will result from a larger discourse reachable through the engagement of Black imaginations. In effect, it is an attempt to explore the perceived possibilities of what may be in futures where Black people are alive, thrive and in power. This volume seeks to provide an exploration of various futuristic landscapes through the speculative imagination that derives from a range of Black critical perspectives. Mainstream futuristic depictions are fraught with extravagant designer technologies, ecological possibilities, and scientific explorations that often exclude, relegate, or invisibilize Blackness into irrelevance/obscurity or extinction. Contributors to this volume have offered critiques of these futures (both directly and indirectly) by centering Blackness through a combination of Black speculative approaches to the future. One of the driving factors that influenced the formation of this volume was curiosity around what an inclusively Black future might look like—one that welcomes all Black perspectives (i.e. Black male, womanist, queer, afrofuturistic, Afro- Caribbean, etc.) on various subjects regarding the future; metahumanism, transhumanism, posthumanism, Astro-Blackness, or technology—broadly constructed. Our desire was to add to discourses from multiple disciplines: science, economics, law, religion, philosophy, psychology, data science, education, etc., in an effort to project ahead of anything that currently exists (Butler 2018). The goal of this project is to teleport the proverbial needle into futures unexplored and/or under-explored, returning to view the results of its teleportation from the vantage point of the present. Building off of Lonny Avi Brooks’s (2016) aim to restore Afrocentric points of view in the context of futures research, the contributors to this volume are embarking on the adventure/task of engaging in normalizing Black thriving in near and distant time periods. Because, moving the needle forward can no longer be viewed as an acceptable practice. Although, any moving of the needle leaves Black futuristic thinking vulnerable to the whims of present/current theoretical and actual moves toward any different realit(ies). The

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multiple variables that comprise this vulnerability are too wide to project onto any future. Any supposed movement of said theoretical needle could easily be moved backward. Within the employment of this strategy (projecting beyond what is currently available), there is a recognition that moving too far ahead may render our project illegible/incomprehensible to some, maybe even the very audience we have intended. However, this is a welcome problem. Incomprehensibility opens up the possibility for imagination. People need their imaginations when attempting to understand things that are not immediately apparent (as a result of the limitations of language), thus, placing people in the realm of the speculative when embarking on the critical. While on the Afrofuturist Podcast, Ayize Jama-Everett (author of The Liminal Series) discussed the distinctly Black elements of speculative fiction. He mentions that the gross realities depicting rough and granular elements of experience are what make Black science fiction speculative. “It’s a much more accurate form, of what is going on” (Jama-Everett 2017). Enrique Dussel (1985) would argue that those who are on the margins have a much clearer picture of what is going on, hence their accuracy in critiquing it. It is that granular accuracy, that painstaking attention to the gross complexity of reality within Black science fiction that is the very element of its speculative nature. Jama-Everett argues that attention to the disturbing and beautiful aspects of life’s complexity is what differentiates Black speculative fiction from mainstream forms of science fiction. For that reason Black science fiction is never merely science fiction. The questions that led to this volume are: What types of critique are necessary in order to develop worlds of Black political, social and economic power? What is a necessary event, or context, that precipitates Black innovation in the future? How would the world be different, if at all, if Blackness were the dominant force of economic, political and social construction? How might a Black approach to ecology differ or provide new and deeper insight into the search for a sustainable future? What role, if any, does Africa play in this reconstructive global politic? How might Black women lead the way into a more equitable and just future? What does masculinity have to offer to decolonization? What does it mean for Blackness to arm itself, similarly to North Korea in order to achieve a status of political “diplomacy”? What modes of thinking exist,

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or are in need of construction, that will allow for a more thorough and practical means to usurp and therefore subvert current forms of power in the world? Can Blackness attain and assert power separate from colonial means from the past? Before looking at the overview of the chapters in this volume it is important to cover a few topics: the first being the relationship between Afrofuturism and Critical Black Futures.

Afrofuturism? Over the past 30 years scholars have worked to carve out space for the burgeoning field of Afrofuturism. These discussions have ranged from the myriad ways that Afrofuturism has already been in motion throughout history to revolving around the very necessary aspect of how one might define this phenomenon. As such, Afrofuturism has a plethora of definitions. Coined by Mark Dery (1994), Afrofuturism is “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture—and more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.” Dery was attempting to name the way that Black art, literature, style, and existence speak to the realities and counter-societal normativities. Ytasha Womack (2013) extends this definition as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation.” Amalgamatively, Jennings and Anderson (2018) see it as a technocultural perspective and a form of cultural production that originates in the practices of Black urban dwellers in North America after World War II—with “popular examples emerging in the works of Jazz musician Sun Ra and artists of the Black Arts Movement like Ishmael Reed or Amiri Baraka.” More recently, in a panel at Los Angeles’s esteemed Leimert Park, Anderson (2018) defined it as any way you can see yourself in history. Here, he alludes to a vast array of Afrofuturistic representation that does not allow for a solid definition. Realistically, a symbiotic relationship between Critical Black Futures and Afrofuturism boils down to scope. Critical Black Futures becomes a departure from Reynaldo Anderson’s descriptive outline of Afrofuturism’s evolution, in that it goes onto mark a specific space within Black

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futuristic discourse. When talking about the trajectory of Afrofuturism and Afrofuturistic discourse, Anderson chooses an overarching approach, highlighting three distinct phases of Afrofuturism: 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Afrofuturism, otherwise known as 1.0, focused on “twentieth century techno-culture, the digital divide, technology, music and literature in the West” (p. vii). In conversation with works from Sofia Samatar, Anderson describes 2.0 as “the early twenty-first century technogenesis of Black identity reflecting counter histories, hacking and or appropriating the influence of network software, database logic, cultural analytics, deep remixabililty, neurosciences, enhancement and augmentation, gender fluidity, posthuman possibility, the speculative sphere, with transdisciplinary applications [that have] grown into an important Diasporic techno-cultural ‘Pan-African’ movement”(p. x). He goes onto outline the five areas that 2.0 extends to: “metaphysics; aesthetics; theoretical and applied science; social sciences; and programmatic spaces.” For him, 3.0 is the actual speculating AND doing of Afrofuturistic work by Africans on, and native to, the continent. While pan-African in scope, critical Black futures recognizes the inability to speak squarely to a universal phenomenon. While similar phenomena occur simultaneously and from a multitude of vantage points, nothing that is experienced as a result of similar occurrences is the same. This alludes to the ways that various contexts, subjectivities, bodies, and geopolitical regions function as dynamic interdependent systems/universes acting toward their own understanding of the concept—in their own right. Similarly, as Critical Black Futures attempts to speak to Black futures from a US context it cannot do so for all of the US context. Therefore, it would not be problematic to see a Critical Black Oakland Futures, Critical Black DC Futures, or Critical Black Detroit Futures scholarship. In this way, Critical Black Futures overlaps with Afrofuturism and exist simultaneously with it in different spaces. So, much like the regional qualities Anderson describes, Critical Black Futures is fostered by a particular mode of Blackness that is apparent within the United States. Even when frameworks are presented with universal implications there is a recognition that these ideas are predominantly presented from the vantage point of folks exploring Black futures with life experiences in the United States—even if they are not Black

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themselves. So, this becomes an expression of the regional differences present within the 2.0 movement. And thus, its own extension into the specializing AND doing around Blackness in US contexts. Because this hasn’t been fully materialized yet. So, the specifics of this volume might be considered an example of the transnational aspects of Black futuristic discourse. While transnationalism, just as afrofuturism, has multiple definitions of its own it has widely been accepted to encompass the manner in which ideas, peoples, cultures, gender, capital, etc., cross borders (Kasun 2017). So, while Afrofuturism has presented itself as a PanAfrican movement—reaching across borders of shared Blackness via phenotype, physiognomy, and cultural production—both function as entryways into critical Black imagination(s).

What Are Critical Black Futures? Amber Johnson (2020) suggests that one of the definitive aspects of Critical Cultural Studies is the deconstruction of oppression and power. Johnson, a scholar of communications studies specifically highlights the role of rhetoric in this work as not only taking on the liberating work of the body, but of “continu[ing to] critiqu[e] systemically oppressive structures … us[ing] your work to go far beyond the critique … in an effort to (re)build, strategically, our just future” (p. 81). Alex Khasnabish (2019) adds that critical work around radical imagination seeks fundamental change rather than reform. In reference to the critical nature of art, Ciarán Finlayson (2019) highlights how Fumi Okiji merges Adorno’s critical interpretation of art and unfreedom with the Black radical tradition. In “Black Adorno” Finalyson reviews Okiji’s work with this to say in regard to Adorno’s own similarity to Black critical discourse: On a deeper level, those with serious commitments to [B]lack art find something of worth in the utter seriousness of his philosophical revolutionizing of the field of art. For Adorno, as for much [B]lack radical art, there is nothing less at stake in (modern) art than the last available realm of authentic experience and the possibility for freedom in a manifestly unfree world. (Finlayson 2019, 289)

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This is crucial to Critical Black Futures as the speculative rubs up against, gives birth to, is birthed by, and emerges out of the wake of Blackness (Sharpe 2016) as Critical nothingness/everything-ness (possibility) that comes from the Black abyss of being: and the imagination that comes to the surface and overflows into every nook and cranny. Recent moves in critical Black studies have focused on the nuanced approach to Critical Black Futures research and discourse. In Future Movements (2018), editors Tobias van Veen and Reynaldo Anderson argue that political critiques of neoliberal imaginations coupled with Afrofuturistic imagination come together to make what would be considered “countering the neoliberal imaginary and its autodestructive impulses.” This by any means necessary approach is meant to produce counter-narratives through the critical exploration of the shortcomings of neoliberal capitalistic socio-racial hierarchies. Similarly, Roymeico Carter and Leila Villarde (2017) speak of Black critical future discourse as Black futurology in the Critical Black Studies Reader. For them, Black futurology acts as a “bricolage of Blackness, aesthetics and all things future” (58). This combination allows for the tendrils of Black imagination(s) to reach into boundless categories/disciplines of thought. In considering the relation between art and radial imagination, T Eliott “Mansa” Thomas (2018) writes that “The connection between the two is the power of the creator [think artist] to assign value and power to the things that [s]he creates … My interest in power is my response to apathy in the face of oppression. I imagine the studio as a cauldron where meaning is assigned” (p. 13). For Mansa, imagination has its own epistemic consequences wherein reconfiguration of power dynamics results in redistribution of value. So, as a consequence of the speculative aspects of radical imagination new worlds where Black lives matter might grow, but only through a recognition that solutions which are approved by present power structures will only serve to maintain those power structures. In this manner, shifts in epistemic foundations and nodes imbued with systematic meaning result in new technologies whose genealogy leads to (and stems from) critically analyzed/oriented Black future realities. With this in mind, Critical Black Futures might be described as the combination of epistemic reimagining/reframing along with complex

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critical analyses of the realities that Black folks find themselves immersed in. You might liken Critical Black Futures to world building. Peter von Stackelberg and Alex McDowell (2015) define world building as “the creation of imaginary worlds with coherent geographic, social, cultural, and other features” (p. 32). Kerri Ann Kramer (2018) highlights how the details that stem from the meticulous approach to constructing believable and immersive worlds are integral to science fiction. This echoes Jama-Everett’s naming of what makes Black science fiction speculative— the critical aspects that take seriously the granular intricacies of existence. In “If I Built the World, Imagine That” (2018), Matthew Jordan Miller reflects on how world building practices are being used in Black Los Angeles’s Leimert Park Village. He recollects on the ways that both scholars, students and community members worked on teams to imagine four specific modes of Black placemaking for Leimert Park in 2050: Garden Leimert (dense cooperatively owned gardens and STEAM oriented lean ring environments); Free Leimert (a combination of community policing and shared autonomous vehicles); Play Leimert (public instruments playing music from Black music legends throughout history); and Virtual Leimert (augmented and virtual renderings of Leimert Park legends). Here, placemaking was conducted via world building through an Afrofuturistic lens. This becomes important when engaging in space taking and spatial analysis for uplifting and empowering Black bodies (Bates et al. 2018). Similarly, Holbert et al. (2020) argues that Afrofuturism can function as a critical constructionist design framework/methodology. One of their assumptions regarding critical design is that “many of the challenges we face today are unfixable and that the only way to overcome them is by changing our values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors” (Dunne and Raby 2005, 2). While one may assert that Holbert, Dandob, and Correa were less critical about their own use of terms like Afrofuturism or their desire to create culturally relevant materials for Black youth, the centering of Black perspectives at the nexus of critical revaluations and speculative injections become examples that peer into the potential of doing Critical Black Framing by Critical Black Future Theorists. Since critical design delves into alternative modes of existence/being by imaging or thinking of counter/alternative futures focused on questioning “the cultural, social and ethical implications of emerging technologies”

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(Dunne and Raby 2005), it is important to remember that Critical Black Futures is always already working to design new realities by shifting the very elements of our current existential iterations. So, this volume is a combination of conceptual future realities, critical dispositions toward normality, futuristic projections, spatial realities, temporal injections into potentially infinite futures, and notes on gender, sexuality, and masculinity.

Chapter Breakdown In The Black Futures of W. E. B. Du Bois , Phillip Luke Sinitiere begins to think alongside W.  E. B.  Du Bois about the topic of Black futures through a centering of his call for “looking forward into the past” as both an admonition and a methodology. He frames the chapter as an interrogative exercise, inquiring: “How did Du Bois imagine Black futures while remaining rooted in a methodology that privileged documentary research and historical argument?” He argues that Du Bois’s black futures come into clearer focus when the liberal arts/humanities that shaped his historical thought, political commitments, and intellectual reflection are accounted for. This chapter contends that because Du Bois was equipped with a methodology that constantly looked forward into the past, he consistently drew from history to both mobilize new thought and to work for the altering of material conditions that Black people and other nonwhite populations encountered. Du Bois engages in the act of Critical Black futures in the production of knowledge for the purpose of rearranging, recalibrating, and redistributing power and material resources. Du Bois considered Black futures in his journalist writing and wrote science fiction along other creative expressions such as novels and poetry. In this chapter, Sinitiere expands current historiographic work concerning Du Bois’ relationship to Black futures that primarily looks at his science fiction and novels. Further, this chapter uses Du Bois’s published and unpublished writings in each of the aforementioned genres as sites of analysis to understand the unique but interconnected dimensions of his historical method of black futures.

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In A Black Tetratic Future: Blackness and the Age of Hyper-­ Exponentiation (Hyper-4), Philip Butler provides an initial exploration of the era of tetration through an imagination of its relationship to Black people. Simply put, the chapter posits the era of tetration as the era expected to follow the age of exponentiation. Butler describes this era, which admittedly may not arrive until the near-distant future, as the convergence of tetratic thinking and tetratic technology. To arrive at this speculative futuristic time period, Butler begins by exploring and defining tetration via its mathematical framing. The chapter then outlines the parameters for tetratic thinking along with tetratic technology. From there it imagines the convergence of the two within the bounds of materiality as being composed of collisions/events that occur at the speeds of the imaginable/imagination. Further, this chapter seeks to situate itself within Black futurist frameworks, speculating beyond current notions of mainstream futuristic realities. Towards an Afrofuturistic Feminist Manifesto by Caitlin O’Neill explores the ways in which engaging black future texts is not only significant work but entirely necessary to the survival of African descended people and the ability of black women and girls to thrive in the twenty-­ first century and beyond. In this chapter, O’Neill explores creative, affirmative answers to Mark Dery’s question: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” This chapter attempts to highlight the long history of work that black women have always contributed to the tradition of Black speculative fiction. It also works to establish the beginnings of an Afrofuturistic Feminist genealogy by investigating works from Octavia Butler to Janelle Monáe and privileging the speculative fiction, fantasy, and other creative production of Black women over historically recognized futuristic texts by male figures like F. T. Marinetti’s “The Foundations and Manifesto of Futurism” or W. E. B. DuBois’s short story “The Comet.” Imagining possible futures is central to the work that Black women do every day when manifesting spaces where Black women’s bodies are respected and safe from emotional, physical, and sexual violence and cooptation. The work is by no means easy—and for many Black women—imagining alternative presents and futures does not always mean imagining utopias free

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from racism, sexism, and queerphobia but rather imagining and making more tangible, creative, and resistive strategies for survival. Writings on Dance: Artistic Reframing for Celestial Black Bodies by Raissa Simpson posits that Black bodies are in crisis in modern-day San Francisco. Highlighting the dwindling population of African-­ Americans, who make up 3–6% of among 800,000 residents, Simpson focuses on how what has traditionally been understood as redlining is affecting Black dancers. Due to the San Francisco tech boom, she shifts from redlining to codelining as the phenomena responsible for limiting the ability of Black dancers to live and afford housing in the City. Here in this uncharted terrain of gentrification a new type of modern-day colonization is explored for the coding tech industry and age old phenomenon of redlining. Codelining, coding plus redlining, is a multiyear work exploring access, hope, and the digital divide. The uses of new media technology such as motion capturing, sensory motion, and projection mapping to show housing disparities between tech industry and African-­ American communities are key examples of this reality that Simpson engages in this chapter. A Disruptive Visual Respite provides an escape from the limitations of theory and speculation into the amazing speculative pieces of Stacey Robinson and John Jennings as Black Kirby, Delita Martin, Lauren-­ Ashley Howard, Tokie Rome-Taylor, and Patrick Earl Hammiehe. Black Kirby offers Bauhop, a multi-modal practice that overlaps hip-hop the five senses and sacred geometry. Delita Martin presents Veilscape, a space between the physical and spiritual realms. Lauren-Ashley Howard provides a piece entitled Speculative Afrotheism that is a distillation of Afrofuturism’s spiritual component into an exploration of Afrotheistic belief. Tokie Rome-Taylor’s Creolization presents a look into the hybridization of African cultural traditions and those of the new world as a means of survival, subversion and rebellion, and Patrick Earl Hammie’s Oedipus considers the prenatal prophecies carried by Black people into a tethering of life and love lost with manifestations that overcome the odds. Black Radical Nationalist Theory and Afrofuturism 2.0, authored by Reynaldo Anderson and Tommy Curry, explores Black power, Black masculinity, revolutionary identity and eschatology as apocalyptic existentialism. In doing so, both Anderson and Curry explore Black masculinity in

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conjunction with its revolutionary potential. Their discourse on masculinity peers into  Black maleness  in relation to the existential modes of perception that beset Black male revolutionaries on potential paths to violent revolution. This chapter investigates the potential dialectical materialism present in Black militant science fiction and  analyzes the eschatological conundrum of Black male revolutionaries. In Afrofuturism and Black Futurism: Some Ontological and Semantic Considerations, Damion Kareem Scott presents what he argues is a differentiation, if not a complete disjunction, between Afrofuturism and Black Futurism within the larger category of thought on speculative futuricity. This delineation of Afrofuturism and Black Futurism is useful when thinking through the potential political efficacy and aesthetic potency of an Afrofuturism that meaningfully refers to actual historical and socioeconomic situations of African and New World Africana Diasporic peoples as a way to raise questions not simply of power imbalances and epistemic injustice themselves but of the efficacy of modes of resistance to such power imbalances and the potential for change those modes of resistance might have, do have, and will perhaps have. It is an attempt to clarify ontological and semantic concepts within Afrofuturism that present a vague, confused and often uncritical conflation with Black Futurism, revealing contingencies as well as shortcomings of versions of Futurisms that reify simplistic color-based racial categories that covertly normalize racial conceptualizations in lieu of historically determined cultural and ethnic conceptualizations. In Super Fluid/Super Black: Translations and Teachings in Transembodied Metaphysics, Ni’Ja Whitson turns a piece that was originally commissioned as a keynote lecture for the 2020 Collegium for the African Diaspora Dance (CAAD) conference, Fluid Black: Dance Back. This chapter is a hybrid text that centralizes Black Transgender and Nonbinary experiences in a conversation of futurity in African Diasporic spirituality, dance traditions, and performativities. Furthermore, Super Fluid/Super Black interrogates beingness through an exploration of astrophysics and global attempts at Black erasure to uncover new strategies of collectivizing under physical, metaphysical, and cosmic bodies that dismantle cisheteronormativity at their core.

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In the penultimate  chapter, Race, Economics, and the Future of Blackness, Joshua Bartholomew begins the work of developing a constructive, liberationist ethic of counter-capitalist resistance. As a necessary and basic strategy in the process of imagining a just, global society acknowledges the work of liberationist scholars who historically have critiqued normative Eurocentric models of economics. And while providing a critique of capitalism’s ability to improve the lives and conditions of all people, Bartholomew also recognizes that these scholars have not developed a socioeconomic model of praxis that would be an alternative to capitalism. Keeping in mind that black liberationist ethics remains a radical response from many Black Christians to mainstream versions of white religious history, Bartholomew then critiques the racial politics of liberation. He contends that a fully established economic model of social justice that prioritizes a future of political self-determination for black people and for all people around the world does not exist. Since Black Theology understands itself as being rooted in the Blackness of the US Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, this chapter explores the Black Panther Party—being the most revolutionary example of racial politics for black liberation during and after the Black Power movement—as a necessary model of economic and political praxis. In doing so, this addition to the volume sees the Black Panther Party’s economic as intuitively informative for the construction of liberationist models of economic ethics. The final chapter, Newhampton: A Future Forward(ified) Black City in the US juxtaposes the grave lessons of the Greenwood community in North Tulsa with the fictional techno-futuristic landscape of Wakanda. As a bustling Black community, Greenwood drew the ire surrounding white communities. This chapter analyzes the limitations of the Greenwood community to defend itself against the convergence of whiteness beset upon it. This analysis of “Black Wall Street” is compared to the futurist isolationist technologies of Wakanda that infuse Bantu philosophy/spirituality into their technological constructionist practices. From these ruminations emerge Newhampton. Newhampton is a Black future city in the US that learns from the Tulsa massacre, and draws from the wisdom of Wakanda. It is a city that exists between the two, as a vibrant, protected, isolated, and futuristic city that leads the future it belongs to.

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The rest of the world follows Newhampton’s lead, and Newhampton is well prepared for whatever may come to its doorstep. With that I send you into this text. This rare combination of poems, geographical interpretations, critical imaginaries, gender manifestos, futuristic era predictions, economic forays, and critical contextual analysis will give you entrance into new dimensions. Together these chapters become a volume (with wide-reaching implications) that is bent toward the ever-winding Blackness of criticality while looking into the almost but not yet of what might be speculated. At the time of this volume we are in the midst of the twelfth month of 2020. The current (third wave) of COVID-19 began to sweep throughout the US before Thanksgiving. The United States has reached over 300,000 covid related deaths due to the present administration’s utter negligence and disregard for life. Black, Brown and Native people continue to die of covid at disproportionately high rates. Stay at home orders from various cities and states have been in place (in one sense or another) since March. American billionaires have more than tripled their wealth, while lay-offs and evictions continue to rise (effecting millions). Masks seem to be the new normal, initiating some sort of cyberpunk realism, and gun sales have reached a record 36 million so far this year (FBI 2020). Joe Biden is the President-Elect. Kamala Harris, a Black woman, is in the White House. But we know that without pressured accountability it doesn’t mean a damn thing beyond notches in America’s belt of diversity. Because the galvanized racist contingent remains 70+ million strong. And at the same time, many white liberals are relieved to return to the sublte racism of old. We have not forgotten that we were witnesses to the Blood Stained Summer of 2020 following the unrest that resulted from the more well-­ known murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, combined with the tension accumulated from the lesser  known/under-­ acknowledged murders of invisiblized Black bodies collectively/historically, such as Nina Pop (a Black transwoman) and Tony McDade (a Black transman) who were both murdered in May 2020. This year we saw a Black man refuse to present evidence that would indict the murderers of Breonna Taylor, citing only damage done to her neighbor’s house as a punishable offense. And now, even in December, state sanctioned violence

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continues to manifest itself around us; with the recent murder of Casey Goodson and death penalty execution of Brandon Brenard. In 2020 we witnessed protests, riots, revolts, and demonstrations that spread worldwide and subsequently dwindled. Some might suggest that we saw flickers of a spirit of revolt, characterized by the embodiment of nonconformity, rebellion to indoctrination of docility in all forms, and the insistence of absolute justice (Butler 2019). Still, the self-proclaimed pinnacle of the first world is burning: literally and figuratively. At this moment we are suffering. This present reality is not the one we want for ourselves. Or, for our future generations. So, we speculate with a critical eye. Of Black futures yet to come.

Bibliography Anderson, R. (2018). Afrogeek: Black Speculative Arts Movement. Leimert Park Artwalk. Anderson, R., & Jones, C. (2015). Introduction: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. Lexington Books. Bates, L. K., Towne, S. A., Jordan, C. P., Lelliott, K. L., Bates, L. K., Towne, S.  A., et  al. (2018). Race and Spatial Imaginary: Planning Otherwise/ Introduction: What Shakes Loose When We Imagine Otherwise/She Made the Vision True: A Journey Toward Recognition and Belonging/Isha Black or Isha White? Racial Identity and Spatial Development in Warren County, NC/Colonial City Design Lives Here: Questioning Planning Education’s Dominant Imaginaries/Say Its Name–Planning Is the White Spatial Imaginary, or Reading McKittrick and Woods as Planning Text/Wakanda! Take the Wheel! Visions of a Black Green City/If …. Planning Theory & Practice, 19(2), 254–288. Brooks, L. A. (2016). Playing a Minority Forecaster in Search of Afrofuturism: Where Am I in This Future, Stewart Brand? In R. Anderson & C. E. Jones (Eds.), Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (pp. 149–166). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Butler, P. (2018). Making Enhancement Equitable: A Racial Analysis of the Term “Human Animal” and the Inclusion of Black Bodies in Human Enhancement. Journal of Posthuman Studies, 2(1), 106–121. Butler, P. (2019). Black Transhuman Liberation Theology. New York: Bloomsbury

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Dery, M. (1994). Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (pp. 179–222). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2005). Towards a Critical Design. Retrieved May 1, 2020, from https://bit.ly/2M0jgMk. Dussel, E. (1985). Philosophy of Liberation, Trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Finlayson, C. (2019). Black Adorno. Papers on Language and Literature, 55(3), 288–300. Holbert, N., Dando, M., & Correa, I. (2020). Afrofuturism as Critical Constructionist Design: Building Futures from the Past and Present. Learning, Media and Technology, 1–17. Holmes, C. (2020). Afrofuturist Responses to State Violence. Brief Encounters, 4(1). 10.24134/be.v4i1.169 Jama-Everett, A. (2017). The Afrofuturist Podcast. Apple Podcasts. Jennings, J., & Anderson, R. (Eds.). (2018). Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent. San Francisco: Cedar Grove Publishing. Johnson, A. (2020). Radical Imagination via Play: The Future of Critical Cultural Studies Research. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 17(1), 81–87. Kasun, G.  S. (2017). Transnationalism: Competing Definitions, Individual Agency in an Age of Globalization, and Research Trends. In R.  Brock, D. Nix-Stevenson, & P. C. Miller (Eds.), The Critical Black Studies Reader (pp. 23–32). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Khasnabish, A. (2019). Ecologies of the Radical Imagination. Information, Communication & Society, 1–10. Kramer, K. A. (2018). Establishing a Future by Creating in the Present: Reading Resistance in the Literature of Indigenous Futurisms. Master's Thesis. University of St. Thomas, Minnesota. Maturana, H. R. (1988). Reality: The Search for Objectivity or the Quest for a Compelling Argument. The Irish Journal of Psychology, 9(1), 25–82. Miller, M. J. (2018). If I Built the World, Imagine That: Reflecting on World Building Practices in Black Los Angeles. Planning Theory & Practice. Vol. 19(2). 276-280. NICS Firearm Checks: Month/Year (2020). Statistics representing the number of firearms background checks initiated through the NICS from November 1998 to November 30, 2020. FBI.GOV. https://bit.ly/37ZnwpI. Roberts, M. V. (2017). Body Parts: A Theological Anthropology. Fortress Press.

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Roymeico, C., & Villarde, L. E. (2017). Black Aesthetics, Fiction, and Future: Discontent While Viewing the Disinterest. In Critical Black Studies Reader. Peter Lang. Sharpe, Christina. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham. Duke University Press. Thomas, T. (2018). On Memory and the Radical Black Imagination. Master of Fine Arts. CUNY Hunter College. van Veen, T. C., & Anderson, R. (2018). Future Movements: Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures—An Introduction. TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 5–21. von Stackelberg, P., & McDowell, A. (2015). What in the World? Storyworlds, Science Fiction, and Futures Studies. Journal of Futures Studies, 20(2), 25–46. Womack, Y. (2013). Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago Review Press. Wynter, S. (2007). Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto. Unpublished Essay.

2 The Black Futures of W. E. B. Du Bois Phillip Luke Sinitiere

“Nothing gives one greater courage than looking forward into the past,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois in a 1946 Chicago Defender column. “That is, carefully examining the present and then comparing it with what actually happened in years gone by.” Referencing the nineteenth century publication of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography to think about the status of African Americans during the mid-twentieth century in light of the political, educational, and economic advancement since the Civil War’s end, Du Bois pivoted forward to ask what America’s cultural landscape might look like a century later. “I trust in 2045,” he commented, that Black American culture would reflect “a group effort in art and literature, in education and social cooperation.” Such collective cultural action, Du Bois imagined, might be “rich enough to teach the third millennium the beginning of real and universal civilization … and to make [people]

P. L. Sinitiere (*) College of Biblical Studies, Houston, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 P. Butler (ed.), Critical Black Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9_2

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proud that they shared the cultural heritage which gave birth to such movement” (Du Bois 1986). This newspaper column reveals that in 1946, Du Bois was grasping for Black freedom’s future in light of global Black history. Recent international developments had fostered his thinking along these lines. World War II ended in August 1945. Two months later delegates in San Francisco founded the United Nations, a meeting at which Du Bois demanded attendees address post-colonial matters in Africa and Asia. That same year, he published Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace and, in Manchester, England, participated in the Fifth Pan African Congress. In 1946, he wrote part of what would later become in 1947 An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress. In 1947, Du Bois also published The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History. These contextual factors shed light on how Du Bois’s Chicago Defender column featured important aspects of his intellectual outlook as a scholar of history and culture. He marked the contemporary moment of 1945 to imaginatively posit cultural possibilities in the twenty-first century. In other words, Du Bois was thinking about Black futures. This chapter seeks to theorize with Du Bois on the topic of Black futures by centering his call for looking forward into the past as both an admonition and a methodology. Interrogatively, the chapter inquires: How did Du Bois imagine Black futures while remaining rooted in a methodology that privileged documentary research and historical argument? It argues that Du Bois’s Black futures come into clearer focus when we account for the humanities and liberal arts threads that shaped his historical thought and intellectual reflection. His writings coupled historical analysis with poetic exposition; he presented academic arguments alongside of literary elucidation. This chapter contends that because Du Bois’s methodology constantly looked forward into the past, he consistently drew on history to both mobilize new thought and to work for the alteration of material conditions of Black people and other non-white populations. Du Bois’s Black futures, therefore, resulted in the production of knowledge for the purpose of rearranging, recalibrating, and redistributing power and material resources.

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While Du Bois did not deploy the language of Black futures that rings rhetorically familiar in contemporary academic discourse, the concept inhered conceptually and methodologically across his books, essays, and creative publications. Furthermore, the ways in which he deployed, critiqued, and reworked the concept of propaganda disclose an additional dimension of his attempt to look forward into the past. This chapter offers sketches and observations to pin expressions of Black futures across the wide expanse of Du Bois’s intellectual landscape. It is both a documentary effort, and a call for additional investigation and further analysis. In what follows, I address terminological and conceptual aspects of Black futures followed by historiographically discussing this chapter’s relation to current scholarship on Du Bois and Black futures. I then explain where in Du Bois’s intellectual history his methodology of looking forward into the past connects to Black futures. In this essay, the phrase Black futures refers to intellectual production mobilized for the purpose of instigating radical social, cultural, and/or political change. In this rendering, such production glances historically backward and forward to assess what Saidiya Hartman terms “slavery’s afterlife.” Furthermore, charting the effects of slavery’s afterlife is an act of refusal— what Christina Sharpe calls “living in the wake”—that fosters efforts toward societal repair by using intellectual and cultural tools for the recognition of Black people as human beings. However, by social change and societal repair I am not referring merely to the politics of recognition. Rather, I mean to emphasize reparative shifts, changes, and adjustments in social, cultural, and economic power—in other words an adjustment in material relations— made possible by freedom’s imaginative intervention through the production of intellectual resources and creative expressions. This is something akin to what Robin D. G. Kelley fashions as “freedom dreams.” Naming slavery’s afterlife and attempting to foster wake work are the kind of reparative interventions with which Black futures, at least in part, are most critically concerned. The rich theoretical perspectives of the Black radical tradition that insist on making room for imagination’s role in subversive forms of creativity offer a vantage point from which to consider Du Bois’s notion of looking forward into the past as both an admonition and as a methodology (Hartman 1997, 2008; Kelley 2002; Sharpe 2016; Johnson and Lubin 2017).

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There’s a sense in which Du Bois’s entire career concerned itself with Black futures and/or slavery’s afterlife, especially if we think about his first scholarly book, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896). Alongside of this publication, to name only a few examples, we can think of Darkwater’s (1920) analysis of race, imperialism, and World War I in reference to people of color’s future prospects; Black Reconstruction’s (1935) consideration during the New Deal era of the Civil War and slavery’s longer term consequences coupled with a reinvigorated racialized capitalist exploitation during Jim Crow; and the aforementioned studies of Africa, colonialism, and post-colonial possibility published immediately after World War II. Notably, across the span of his 80-year public career—and in response to national and international conditions—Du Bois proposed a variety of solutions to the material, social, and economic antagonisms that shaped life in Black futures. His proposals ranged from a belief in progressive reform to achieve racial justice on one hand to radical socialist and communist equality to effect economic democracy on the other hand.1 If Du Bois’s work concerned itself with slavery’s ­afterlife and living in the wake, then by definition Black futures informed his intellectual and creative horizons as well. Current scholarship on Du Bois and Black futures includes connections to science fiction and Afrofuturism coupled with literary and cultural aspects of his analysis of race, class, and the color line. Collectively, this work demonstrates how his historical and literary imaginations simultaneously chronicled the past, assessed the present, and speculated on possibilities that envisioned Black vitality oriented toward the future. Literary scholars Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert call Du Bois’s mode of reimagining impending social, political, and cultural experience for Black people “a creative mode ready to be used in the present” (Du Bois 2015).2  Bill Mullen and Shawn Leigh Alexander’s recent biographies reflect dimensions of these activist and intellectual arcs. See Alexander, S.L. (2015).  W.  E. B.  Du Bois: American Intellectual and Activist. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, and Mullen, B.  V. (2016).  W.  E. B.  Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line. Chicago: Pluto Press. Also vital to this line of Du Bois’s thought is Burden-Stelly, C. and Horne, G. (2019) W. E. B. Du Bois: A Life in American History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. 2  Du Bois, W. E. B. (2015) “The Princess Steel,” Introduction by Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert, PMLA 130(3): 819–829. See also Du Bois, W.  E. B. (2016) “A.D. 2150,” Introduction by Nagueyalti Warren, African American Review 49(1) Spring: 53–57; McInnis, J. C. (2016). ““Behold 1

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As a social scientist in possession of literary flair, there is a historical shape that inhabits Du Bois’s writings, including his creative expressions. Yet as a sociologist, he’s highly concerned to let historical narration through what sociologist Aldon Morris called a “multimethod approach” grapple with and attempt to understand present realities, especially as they relate to race and freedom. In turn, his contemporary reflections sometimes consider possibility from the present’s horizon, in other words, Black futures (Morris 2015).3 The contextual points of connection within and across Du Bois’s scholarly imagination are central to what cultural studies philosopher Nahum Dimitri Chandler calls “historicity.” By historicity, he means the historical context or historical setting in which Du Bois composed particular texts. Chandler’s deployment of historicity, in a more thoroughgoing philosophical sense, also seeks to address the interior meaning of Du Bois’s texts themselves; in other words the intentions within and behind the texts: how does their publication announce the context in which they were composed while simultaneously calling upon a collective political imagination to foster thought about remaking the world now? Chandler’s sense of historicity therefore calls attention to the historical and material conditions in which Du Bois formulated his thinking about the world— what he terms Du Bois’s “itinerary”—while asking questions about what those texts meant in Du Bois’s lifetime and their possibility of meaning today. But this is not a call for presentist readings of Du Bois or a simplistic, moralistic application of his ideas for the current day. Rather, Chandler intends to mark how a sense of possibility, how a pathway of Black futures, resides in Du Bois’s texts specifically and within his historical imagination more generally. The historicity resulting from Chandler’s the Land”: W. E. B. Du Bois, Cotton Futures, and the Afterlife of the Plantation in the US South,” The Global South 10(2) (Fall 2016): 70–98; Ilia, A. (2016) “W. E. B. Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: ‘The Comet,’” Il Tomoleo (December): 173–186; Battle- Baptiste, W. and Rusert, W. (eds.). (2018). W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press. 3  Morris, A. (2015). The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology Berkeley: University of California Press. 37–38, 61–62. Morris further observes that “Du Bois was an astute analyst of the casual forces inhering in social conditions. His expertise included historical, statistical, and comparative analyses, enabling him to unveil the vexing effects of social conditions.” See Morris, A. (1990). “American Negro at Paris, 1900,” in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits, 32.

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analysis examines modernity’s larger problem: the sadistic and systemic forms and practices of racial exclusion upon which its entire edifice was constructed. Attending to the historical and material conditions that birthed modernity and the problems of racialized capital spotlights the factors that indelibly shaped both Du Bois’s life and his intellectual itinerary.4 For Du Bois, history never foreclosed possibility. It documented lives and events that glanced backward and forward simultaneously. Yet, in the composition of historical narrative he always looked for, observed, and found a sense of possibility—through the attainment of new knowledge, the recalibration of thought to imagine otherwise, and by inscribing new forms of individual and collective democratic practice in ordinary, everyday life. In an attempt to think as capaciously as possible about Black futures, the balance of this chapter examines spaces across Du Bois’s intellectual landscape over time where we find examples of his methodology of looking forward into the past. The first location I want to address with respect to Du Bois’s Black futures is strikingly obvious, yet surprisingly overlooked: his practice of self-documentation, which is to say the practicing of archiving his life’s work under the assumption that scholars and interested persons would eventually study it. Items located in the two main repositories of his papers, Fisk University and UMass Amherst show that Du Bois began collecting artifacts in his late teens once he realized his plans and

 Three primary avenues through which Chandler explores the “historicity” of Du Bois’s work cover the range of his career’s trajectory from the late-1800s through the end of World War II. For this chronological unfolding see Du Bois, W. E. B. (2015). The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays, ed. Nahum Dimitri Chandler. New York: Fordham University Press, especially his “Introduction. Toward a New History of the Centuries: On the Early Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois,” 1–32; Chandler, N. H. (2012). “The Meaning of Japan,” CR: The New Centennial Review 12(1) (2012): 233–256; Chandler, N. H. (2012). “Chapter 16—Jones in Japan,” CR: The New Centennial Review 12(1) (2012): 257–274; Chandler, N. H. (2012). “Chapter 17—Jones looks back on China,” CR: The New Centennial Review 12(1) (2012): 275–290; Chandler, N. H. (2012). “A Persistent Parallax: On the Writings of W. E. Burghardt Du Bois on Japan and China, 1936–1937,” CR: The New Centennial Review 12(1) (2012): 291–316; and Chandler, N. H. (2013). Toward an African Future—Of the Limit of the World. London: Living Commons Collective. For a philosophical analysis of modernity more generally, see Chandler, N. H. (2014). X—The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. New York: Fordham University Press. 4

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ambitions to study race, politics, culture, and history, what he called the Negro problem (Aptheker 1973). The well-known intellectual declaration in 1893 on his 25th birthday to make a name for himself in both science and literature “and thus to raise my race” illustrates an early career elaboration of this line of archival thinking. Through the rhetoric of synthesizing parts into units, Du Bois forecasted the aesthetic, scholarly, and poetic dimensions of his future work by announcing, “Now I will, so help my Soul, multiply breadth by breadth, Beauty by Truth and then Goodness, strength, shall bind them together into a solid whole.” Plans to investigate the “breadth” of subjects and issues followed by the analytical promise to “bind them together” discloses a scientific, research-based horizon of global proportions in which he intended to “work for the rise of the Negro people, taking for granted that their best development means the best development of the world” (Du Bois 1893). Du Bois’s declaration promised diligent research and a perpetual search for understanding within the context of what such efforts might mean for the collective existence of Black people at home and abroad. The year after Du Bois’s death in 1963, in a speech at Roosevelt University in Chicago the famed Black anthropologist St. Clair Drake described Du Bois’s life as one “lived experimentally and self-­documented.” This insightful phrase contained a double meaning. “Dr. Du Bois conceived of his life as a continuous probe, touching the sensitive areas along the color-line, and considered it his duty to document the results of the probing as well as his own reactions to the situations. Certainly by the time he reached the 50-year mark, he also considered himself an institution as well as a person—and he was,” Drake observed. “Precisely because he was a man who insisted upon acting, and then reflecting upon his actions,” he continued, “writing about them what sometimes turned out to be very beautiful prose, he has left us a valuable legacy.” Although Drake here primarily refers to Du Bois’s published autobiographical writings, his larger point described the late Black scholar’s life as a kind of living archive of perpetual documentation. Part of the “legacy” about which Drake wrote was also the physical archive of papers, correspondence, and various other writings. Du Bois had meticulously documented

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his own history and deposited for subsequent generations archival traces so that scholars could study and interpret his life (Drake 1986). By the 1930s, students and scholars had already started to historicize and analyze his life in the context of African American history and culture.5 During the 1940s, when Du Bois was in his 70s, he and Herbert Aptheker started planning arrangements to catalog his correspondence. After decades of work, Aptheker completed his editorial efforts in the mid-1980s. He produced over 50 edited volumes of Du Bois’s published and unpublished writings. Reflecting on this work in 1997, six years before he died, Aptheker recalled that “W. E. B. Du Bois has filled my life—first as a teacher, then as a guide, inspiration and father …. Happily I devoted much of my life to him and his work in scores of volumes. I had the opportunity and honor of bringing forth his writings.”6 While Aptheker’s name is forever attached to Du Bois’s papers, around the time both men met Du Bois began to field inquiries from archivists and bibliographers about obtaining his archive. At the same time, he reached out to archivists about placing his papers in their collections, including Howard University. During his lifetime, Du Bois placed selected portions of his papers at the Schomburg Library, Fisk University, and Yale University. In such archival correspondence, he stated that his second wife Shirley Graham Du Bois would retain the bulk of the archive for the biography on him she planned to write. That book became His Day is Marching On: A Memoir of W. E. B. Du Bois published by Lippincott in 1971. There is much more to say about the longer history of Du Bois’s  For one assessment of the history of Du Bois scholarship, see Sinitiere, P. L. (2019). “‘A Legacy of Scholarship and Struggle’: W.  E. B.  Du Bois’s Life After Death,” in  Phillip Luke Sinitiere, ed. Citizen of the World: The Late Career and Legacy of W.  E. B.  Du Bois. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 227–266. 6  On Aptheker’s recollections and reflections about editing Du Bois’s archive see, among others, Aptheker,  H. (1997). “Personal Recollections: Woodson, Wesley, Robeson and Du Bois,” Black Scholar 27(2) (Summer): 42–45, and Aptheker,  H. (2002). “Vindication in Speaking Truth to Power,” in Benjamin P. Bowser, Louis Kushnick and Paul Grant (eds). Against the Odds: Scholars Who Challenged Racism in the Twentieth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 216–219. Also useful in narrating the politics of editing and publishing Du Bois’s papers, see Murrell, G. (2015). “Herbert Aptheker’s Struggle to Publish W. E. B. Du Bois,” in Citizen of the World, 201–226; cf. Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 195–226. On Aptheker within the context of the field of Du Bois studies, see Chandler, “Introduction,” 4–6, and Sinitiere, “‘A Legacy of Scholarship and Struggle’: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Life After Death.” 5

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vast archive, and where, why, and how his parts of his papers arrived to Connecticut, New  York City, Nashville, and Amherst, not to mention the presence of his UMass archive now online. Also relevant, to which the above reference to Shirley Graham Du Bois hints, is the story that the assembly and accession of the archive tells about inclusions and excisions of information, especially if we consider the contents of Shirley’s papers alongside of W. E. B. Du Bois’s. The point of rehearsing this brief summation of Du Bois’s practice of self-documentation introduces a unique way to frame thinking about him in relationship to Black futures: there is a very real sense in which Du Bois’s habits of documentation archived and curated his own future’s possibility (Sinitiere 2018).7 Another pathway through which we might think about Du Bois and Black futures is his practice of, commentary on, and reflections about propaganda. This particular site of analysis further discloses his methodology of looking forward into the past. The most well-known of Du Bois’s comments about propaganda dates to 1926, when in The Crisis he published an essay titled “The Criteria of Negro Art.” He wrote that for Black artists, creative expressions must work as a form of propaganda and perform a certain kind of political resistance. Black artists had a responsibility to exhibit truth, beauty, and goodness through the aesthetic exhibition of Black people as human beings. Du Bois wrote that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of Black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent” (Du Bois 1926). Du Bois’s claim in 1926 that “all art is propaganda” spoke not merely to a functionalized and politicized performance ethic of Black art: he was well aware that white supremacy had produced numerous forms of anti-­ Black propaganda since its inception. It is important to note that Du  Sinitiere, P. L. (2018). “‘There must be no idle mourning’: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Legacy as a Black Radical Intellectual,” Socialism and Democracy 32(3) (2018): 207–230; Sinitiere,  P.  L. (2019). “Black Radicalism and Shirley Graham Du Bois’s Curatorial Imagination,” Black Perspectives, March 15, 2019, https://bit.ly/3oqfcGe. 7

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Bois’s stated vision of propaganda appeared in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance and after over a decade of editing The Crisis magazine. This nuanced and multi-layered vision of “protest and propaganda” thoughtfully, creatively, and subversively assembled a constellation of words, images, statistics, and narratives of Blackness to make a very broad argument about the aesthetics of Black humanity and Black beauty (Kirschke and Sinitiere 2014). When Du Bois reflected back on his time as Crisis editor he often described it as a period of propaganda  (Du Bois 1961). The vantage points art provided—both the art he produced and the art he curated with literary editor Jessie Fauset for publication in The Crisis—gave Du Bois a way to advance arguments about Black agency in history while creatively depicting or presenting Black people as human beings within present conditions. To put it another way, Du Bois through propaganda wished to translate academic scholarship and social scientific research into creative expression meaningfully and accessibly to a wide audience. While this strategy was a form of what political scientist Robert Williams terms “positive propaganda” mediated through the journalistic medium of The Crisis, for the duration of his career Du Bois contemplated propaganda, its various meanings and usages, as well as its overall role in culture and society (Williams 2019).8 Several examples illustrate this trajectory. In his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois’s closing chapter analyzed what he called “The Propaganda of History.” It explored white supremacist historical narratives scholars produced about the Civil War and Reconstruction. “We shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges [scholars] who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race,” he argued. In reply, Du Bois emphasized the importance of gathering historical facts, unencumbered investigation, clear argument, and analytical application. “If history is going to be scientific,” he maintained, “if the record of human action is going to be down with accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as  Williams, R. W. (2019). “W. E. B. Du Bois and Positive Propaganda: A Philosophical Prelude to His Editorship of The Crisis,” in Protest and Propaganda, 16–27. On propaganda, aesthetics, and poetry in the register of Black futures, see also Sinitiere, P. L. ( 2019). “‘Hold sacred strong and purposeful art’: W. E. B. Du Bois and Poetry,” Phylon 56 (Summer): 156–179. 8

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a measuring rod and guidepost for the future of nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation.” The methodology Du Bois called for, in essence the practice of looking forward into the past, documented the intellectual and cultural currents against which Black Reconstruction moved (Du Bois 2007).9 Writing in his capacity as editor of the scholarly journal Phylon, a position he occupied from 1940 to 1944, Du Bois addressed the periodical’s aim and its essence in a short essay titled “Phylon: Science or Propaganda.” For too long, he argued, professional scholars and arbiters of public opinion produced work about US history and culture that either dismissed or eliminated the presence of African descended people; in turn, the same individuals criticized efforts like Phylon as too narrowly concerned with Black experiences. Du Bois refused such zero-sum logic. About scholarly evaluation and analysis of Black history and culture, he wrote, “This vast and poignant drama has been deliberately neglected, smeared with lies and elaborately forgotten by stupid and evil people. Yet it remains one of the most revealing and valuable fields of study. No group of facts is so worth scientific study, despite the desperate endeavor to distort, lose and belittle it. If the pursuit of this aim be propaganda, then Propaganda we welcome and embrace (Du Bois 1944). These sentiments, published in 1944, mirrored Du Bois’s “Apology” which appeared in Phylon’s inaugural issue. In 1940, he stated that the journal would study race, history, and culture from numerous disciplinary angles to ponder analytically the “rhythms and probabilities” of human society through “original research both direct and indirect, by essays on analogous but widely separated subjects, by a careful chronicle of events and an intelligent review of opinion; and at the same time recognizing the scientific value of the creative impulse in prose, poetry, and illustration (Du Bois 1940). Recognizing the assumed meanings of propaganda assigned to it by whichever group possessed political clout or social capital, Du Bois defended the idea of assembling scientific fact and analytical argument  Du Bois, W. E. B. (2007). Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880. New York: Oxford University Press [1935]. 584, 594. Also relevant is James Edward Ford III, “The Imperial Miracle: Black Reconstruction and the End(s) of Whiteness,” in Nick Bromell, ed. (2018). A Political Companion to W. E. B. Du Bois. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 101–120. 9

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with creative endeavor and artful expression. While he generally viewed propaganda as less scientific than scholarship, he practiced both as a form of resistance to white supremacy and as a way of looking forward into the past—all of which laser focused on the pursuit, achievement, and extension of Black liberation. The final portion of this chapter picks up on what Nahum Dimitri Chandler’s called the “historicity” within Du Bois’s work. He notes that the twin sensibilities of historical analysis coupled with urgent exposition of the current moment operate as a philosophical principle within Du Bois’s intellectual labor. What Chandler calls a principle I term historical practice over time, that is, a humanities methodology of looking forward into the past. My claim here is not a dispute with Chandler’s work. Rather, it is a preference to deploy the language of methodological praxis instead of postulations about possibilities that inhere in a horizon of thought. By praxis I mean the poetic restatements like The World and Africa’s “The Message” referenced below, the better known “The Forethought” and “After-thought” that bookend The Souls of Black Folk, or the entire aesthetic arrangement of Darkwater that straddles creative chapters of poetry or short stories between chapters of historical exposition. In what follows, I find at the site of these literary apostrophes Du Bois’s expressions of Black futures. In 1934, Du Bois alluded to this practice in a letter to publisher Alfred Harcourt. The context of the correspondence centered upon his desire to put the finishing touches on the manuscript of Black Reconstruction. “My method of writing is a method of ‘after-thoughts,’” he described. “I mean that after all the details of commas, periods, spelling and commas, there comes the final and to me the most important work of polishing and re-­ setting and even re-stating. This is the crowing of my creative process” (Du Bois 1934). Across the course of his publishing life, the aesthetic elaboration that defined his process of polishing manuscripts is precisely the place we observe his work’s intellectual connection to Black futures. These literary gestures began with his first book Suppression of the African Slave-Trade (1896) in a concluding section titled “The Lesson for Americans.” A short summary of the book’s historiographic contribution, it identified the “moral, political, and economic monstrosity” of “slavery compromises” that “arose principally from the cupidity and carelessness

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of our ancestors.” Yet, there’s a sense in which Du Bois refracted the commentary of the concluding “lesson” with the lens of the history through which he was then living (i.e., Jim Crow, Plessy v. Ferguson). “It behooves the United States, therefore, in the interest both of scientific truth and of future social reform, carefully to study such chapters of her history as that of the suppression of the slave-trade. The most obvious question which this study suggests is: How far in a State can a recognized moral wrong safely be compromised? … From this we may conclude that it behooves nations as well as men to do things at the very moment when they ought to be done.” In this way he recognized something about Black futures: generation after successive generation failed to reckon fully with the structural reality of slavery and its afterlife. A nation’s “moral cowardice” that dodges the economic and political consequences of enslavement’s afterlife spells an uncertain, and potentially disastrous future. The degraded economic, psychic, social, and political conditions produced by anti-Blackness have extended well beyond slavery’s legal termination into the present day. Du Bois insisted that the recognition of those conditions, however, provides the very possibility of liberation’s full realization as a goal of Black futures.10 Du Bois echoed these perspectives in moral creeds he delivered at campus chapel services while a professor at Atlanta University in the early 1900s. Published posthumously in 1980 under the title Prayers for Dark People, his meditations addressed questions of everyday life, education, manners, intellectual labor, and ethical obligations balanced between individual responsibility and collective action. Prayers titled “Ambition” and “Persistence” encapsulate poetic expressions in a Black futures register. In “Ambition” Du Bois referenced the inherent “aspiration, ambition, outstretchings toward the dim and far possible,” what he further expressed  Du Bois, W. E. B. (2007). The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade. New York: Oxford University Press [1896]. 136–137. In the volume’s editorial opening, Saidiya Hartman identifies the essence of Black futures. She states, “It would not be implausible to describe Suppression as an allegory of Du Bois’s present. In writing about the failed efforts to end the slave trade, he no doubt was also thinking about the incomplete project of abolition and the state of peonage in which the overwhelming majority of black southerners lived … An oscillation between expectancy and disappointment defined the arc of Suppression” (xxix). For commentary on the twenty-first-century present, see Sinitiere, P. L. (2019). “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Lingering Effects of Slavery,” The North Star, March 28, 2019, https://bit.ly/39PPZ3T. 10

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as “the unresting desire to be more than what we are and truer and better.” The sentiment he presented was not merely a Progressive era admonition for personal improvement, but efforts toward group transformation. He counseled that a stirring of this “mighty passion” might find “true inspiration” instead of “selfish temptation” after which he tapped history for additional motivation. He wished for his students to “taste the heritage of a mighty past, to pile the endowment of a greater future and above all to realize in our own souls all that God meant us to be. Amen.” The second meditation’s focus on endurance likewise pushed beyond the qualities of individual effort only (“deed on deed, and thought on thought”). “We want these young people to grow the grim grit of men who never know they’re beaten, never own defeat,” Du Bois resolved, “but snatch success and victory out of the teeth of failure by keeping everlastingly at work and never giving up.” The language Du Bois used in these prayers was not a spiritualization of progress steeped in romantic hopes petitioned toward an invisible deity; rather, their emphasis on ambition framed an orientation of possibility, which also required dogged persistence (Du Bois 1980). Du Bois’s method of documentation as a historian and his enlistment as a social scientist of democratic practice through forms of self-­expression and collective identity, acts of insurgency, resistance, or creativity within the world for political revision and economic readjustment shows how he spoke and wrote across the registers of poetic expression and scientific exposition for the duration of his career. Turning to his later decades, Chandler cites how in The World and Africa he restates his argument in a creative form. At the conclusion of his 1947 text in a passage called “The Message,” Du Bois wrote: Reader of dead words who would live deeds, this is the flowering of my logic: I dream of a world of infinitive and valuable variety; not in the laws of gravity or atomic weights, but in human variety in height and weight, color and skin, hair and nose and lip. But more especially and far above and beyond this, is a realm of true freedom: in thought and dream, fantasy and imagination; in gift, aptitude, and genius—all possible manner of difference, topped with freedom of soul to do and be, and freedom of thought to give to a world

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and build into it, all wealth of inborn individuality. Each effort to stop this freedom of being is a blow at democracy—that real democracy which is reservoir and opportunity … There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race, or poverty. But with all we accomplish all, even Peace.11

Sharp, refined meaning informed Du Bois’s meditation on freedom in the context of analyzing Africa’s past, present, and future. This late career afterthought did not merely express a form of mid-century liberal democratic individualism. Rather, given the increasingly leftist, socialist, and eventually communist convictions of this period of his life, Du Bois bound freedom’s subjectivity (i.e., “freedom of soul,” “freedom of thought”) to collective emancipation (i.e., “with all we accomplish all”). Additional meditations in the aftermath of World War II present Du Bois’s devotion to thinking about Black futures. An unpublished poem “The United Nations” voiced a sentiment of hope about the UN’s founding in 1945. “The hope of humanity singing/A hymn to a new world in birth,” commented Du Bois. Resistance to injustice might finally sway history’s racist progression (“The wrath of the people shall thunder,/Relentless at the time and tide”), and a world of Black futures might establish full and maintain a concrete form of equity in the coming generations: “A new day for mankind is dawning,” the poem concluded, “Our children shall live proud and free” (Du Bois 1995). Du Bois’s 1947 text Appeal to the World determined that an equitable future could only be on the horizon through an honest reckoning with history and a more just allocation of resources. “[A] great nation, which today ought to be in the forefront of the march toward peace and democracy, finds itself continuously making common cause with race hate, prejudiced exploitation and oppression of the common man,” wrote Du Bois in a key historical moment of decolonization while glancing back at history. “Its high and noble words are tuned against it, because they are contradicted in every syllable by the treatment of the American Negro for three hundred and twenty-seven years.” Thus, his appeal centered current conditions through explaining its historical development over time and postulating on the expansion of future possibilities for people of color both in the United States and the world. This  Du Bois, W. E. B. (2007). The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History. New York: Oxford University Press [1947]. 165; cf. Chandler, Toward an African Future, 99–100. 11

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issue of political injustice and economic inequity, he wrote, “is a basic problem of humanity; of democracy; of discrimination because of race and color; and as such it demands your attention and action. No nation is so great that the world can afford to let it continue to be deliberately unjust, cruel and unfair toward its own citizens.”12 A final example of Du Bois’s literary enunciation of Black futures comes from his late career on his final book’s closing pages. A summary text covering nearly 100 years, Du Bois chronicled his intellectual, social, and political journeys across the globe, and his work in education, scholarship, and propaganda. Front and center as well was his commitment to communism, “to each according to his need, from each according to his ability.” His thoughts on the past, present, and future converged in several creative expressions in The Autobiography of W.  E. B.  Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century.13 As Du Bois ended the book he wrestled with his life’s meaning over the course of the previous century while simultaneously expressing anxiety over his legacy. The strident anticommunism through which he had lived during the previous decade no doubt animated this concern  (Horne 1986). Yet from the angle of the present time he looked at the terminus of his years through poetic consideration of life beyond the grave. “Reveal, Ancient of Days, the Present in the Past and prophesy the end in the Beginning.” It is a statement of historicity, to use Chandler’s designation, while it is also an expression of Black futures, after which Du Bois pivots to history. “For this is a beautiful world; this is a wonderful America, which the founding fathers dreamed until their sons drowned it in the blood of slavery and devoured it in greed. Our children must rebuild it,” he stated in the book’s final paragraph. “Let then the Dreams of the Dead  Du Bois, W. E. B. (2008). “Appeal to the World: A Statement of Denial of Human Rights to Minorities…,” Blackpast.org, https://bit.ly/3m1VDmh; for exposition of this text in relation to reparations, a key topic for the study of Black futures, see Rabaka, R. (2008). Du Bois’s Dialectics: Black Radical Politics and the Reconstruction of Critical Social Theory. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 159–181. 13  Du Bois, W. E. B. (2007). The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. New York: Oxford University Press [1968]. 275. Earlier in the book Du Bois defined communism as “a planned way of life in the production of wealth and work designed for building a state whose object is the highest welfare of its people and not merely the profit of a part. I believe that all men should be employed according to their ability and that wealth and services should be distributed according to need” (35). 12

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rebuke the Blind who think that what is will be forever and teach them that what was worth living for must live again and that which merited death must stay dead,” Du Bois wrote. “Teach us, Forever Dead, there is no Dream but Deed, there is no Deed but Memory” (Du Bois 2007). In Du Bois’s configuration, the archive of the past allows the “forever dead” to speak from beyond the grave back to the present. The “deed” of “memory” compels the living to look ahead by peering through history. This chapter has asked how W. E. B. Du Bois imagined Black futures while remaining rooted in a methodology that privileged documentary research and historical argument. Through publications that spanned the duration of his career, this essay documented how he looked forward into the past by linking historical argumentation with poetic expression. It showed that by imaginatively stranding together perspectives on the past from the historical present, Du Bois’s intellectual production of Black futures consistently mobilized new thinking for the liberation of Black people throughout the United States and across the world. Theorizing with Du Bois on Black futures in light of today’s contemporary moment is equally revealing. It shows us how to remain attentive to history’s unfolding through the realities of economic precarity, extractive neoliberalism, the prison industrial complex, an invasive surveillance state, and a white supremacist White House unashamedly spewing racist violence in word and deed. The urgency of this counsel demonstrates the currency of Du Bois’s practice of looking forward into the past. Acknowledgments  I thank Keisha Blain and Philip Butler for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

References Aptheker, A. (1973). “Introduction,” in Herbert Aptheker, ed. (1973). The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, Volume I: Selections 1877–1934. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, xxiii. Drake, S. C. (1986). Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois: A Life Lived Experimentally and Self-Documented. Contributions in Black Studies: A Journal of African and Afro-American Studies, 8(10), 113–114, https://bit.ly/3lSRhgY.

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Du Bois, W. E. B. (1926). The Criteria of Negro Art. The Crisis (November): 290–297. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1934). “W. E. B. Du Bois to Alfred Harcourt,” November 17, 1934, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers Digital Archive (Identifier mums312-b070-i394). Du Bois, W. E. B. (1940). Apology. Phylon, 1(1) (1st Quarter), 3–5. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1944). Phylon Science or Propaganda. Phylon, 5(1) (1st Quarter), 5–9. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1961). A Recorded Autobiography. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways; “Oral History Interview of W. E. B. Du Bois by William Ingersoll, June 1960,” W. E. B. Du Bois Papers Digital Archive (Identifier mums312-b237-i137). Du Bois, W. E. B. (1980). Prayers for Dark People, ed. Herbert Aptheker (70–71). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1985). Celebrating His Twenty-Fifth Birthday (1893). In H. Aptheker, (Ed.), Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887–1961 (26–29). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1986). Winds of Time. In H. Aptheker (Ed.), Newspaper Columns by W. E. B. Du Bois, Volume 2: 1945–1961 (668–669). White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thomson. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1995). The United Nations. In D. L. Lewis (Ed.), W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader (127). New York: Henry Holt. Hartman, S. (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Hartman, S. (2008). Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Horne, G. (1986). Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963. Albany: State University of New York Press. Johnson, G. T., & Lubin, A. (eds.) (2017). Futures of Black Radicalism. Brooklyn, NY: Verso. Kelley, R. D. G. (2002). Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon. Kirschke, A. H., & Sinitiere, P. L. (eds.). (2014). Protest and Propaganda: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis, and American History. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Sharpe, S. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 1–14, 20–22.

3 A Black Tetratic Future: Blackness and the Age of Hyper-Exponentiation (Hyper-4) Philip Butler

This chapter will be an initial exploration of the era of tetration through an imagination of its relationship to those who embody Blackness. Tetration can be understood as repeated exponentiation. Simply put, it is a way to account for immediately explosive rates of growth. It follows exponentiation. Ray Kurzweil (2005) has argued for the categorization of this current temporal span as the era of exponential growth. In this chapter I will be applying the concept of tetration to theorize an anticipated time span that comes next. Simply put, in this chapter I posit the era of tetration as the era expected to follow the age of exponentiation. I describe this era, which is expected to be in the near-distant future (~50–500 years), as the convergence of tetratic/hyper-4 thinking and tetratic/hyper-4 technology. But to arrive at this speculative future, this chapter will begin by exploring and defining tetration. It will then outline the parameters

P. Butler (*) Iliff School of Theology, Denver, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 P. Butler (ed.), Critical Black Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9_3

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for tetratic thinking along with tetratic technology. From there, it will imagine the convergence of the two within the bounds of materiality as being composed of collisions/events that occur at only speeds of the imaginable/imagination. Further, this chapter seeks to situate itself within Black futurist frameworks, speculating beyond current notions of futuristic realities. It is important to note that this chapter is both critical and speculative. It is critical due to the requirements of tetratic thought. It is speculative as it will postulate what might exist beyond the current era given this understanding.

Tetration? What Is That!? Tetration is the fourth level of the hyper operation sequence in mathematics. It was coined by R. L. Goodstein (1947) in his article, “Transfinite Ordinals in Recursive Number Theory.” Tetration is Latin for four, and follows exponentiation as the fourth mode of mathematical progression. It is the first concept of hyper-exponentiality. Following tetration is pentation, hexation, and so on. It’s about to get trippy. But stay with me. As a hyperoperation, it takes basic exponential notation from xy to yx. Here, the exponent is moved from the right to the left. Tetration functions as the exponentiation of exponentiation. What does that mean? Let’s start with addition. Addition can be thought of as basic counting. For those who are not comfortable with mathematic notation addition (a + b) simply combines numbers through counting. Multiplication (a × b) is repeating the act of adding any number a by itself b times. Exponentiation is the continuous multiplication of any number a by itself b times ab = (a × a × a…b), where the amount of times a is multiplied by itself is equal to b. So, tetration is the repeated exponentiation of any number a, b times. I’ll use the ^ symbol to connote the exponent. Here, ba would be any number a that is exponentiated b times, such as (a ^ a ^ a), where b = 3, for example. A good example would be that 32 = 2 ^ 2 ^ 2 = 2 ^ 4 = 16. More specifically, 2 is exponentiated 3 times. Here, the final exponent is determined by calculating exponents from right to left. Starting from the far right, 2 ^ 2 = 4, the equation then collapses onto itself— moving to the left once more placing 4 as the new exponential value. So,

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2 ^ 4 = 16. Now, due to the rate of growth associated with tetration 42 = 2 ^ 2 ^ 2 ^ 2 = 2 ^ 16 or 65,536. And, 52 = 2 ^ 65536, which is insanely large number. It is 19,729 characters long! Now, 62 is currently too large to calculate with the majority of present-day computational power (Vū 2020). That’s wild! I demonstrate this point to suggest that while exponentiation starts off slow before picking up speed and switching gears to rapidly increasing numerical increments, tetration does not. The rate of numerical increase associated with tetration raises incredible questions for what awaits during an era/dispensation of time/materiality where experience coincides with this level of rapid expansion, manifestation, discovery, sociality, and technology.

Tetration as an Era Following mathematical logic, as a mirror for tertiary existence, I speculate that the era of tetration will follow the era of exponentiation. Ray Kurzweil and other transhumanist cultural architects claim that the era of exponentiation followed what they previously considered ages of linear progression, that is, the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution—as examples (Peters 2017). More specifically, exponential growth is said to follow socially significant technological innovations.  However, until recently, considerable amounts of time would lapse between the introduction of socially significant innovation (i.e. pen to printing press, human power to waterpower, hand-crafted goods to textile factories, etc.). Presently, we exist in an era where socially significant innovations occur at roughly 6–24 month intervals. Moore’s Law becomes an example of observable rates of growth and advancement which are meant to evidence the exponentiality associated with a given era. For instance, Kurzweil likes to reference the timeline of the human genome project to substantiate the era of exponentiation. During the first seven years of that project, little to no progress was made (~2%). However, the rapid rate of discovery associated with the final seven years (98%) allowed the project to conclude. Although issues such as the genome’s incapacity for racial/ regional accuracy suggests it is still not perfect/completed at all (Sherman et al. 2019). This does suggest that the rate of growth continues to double

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at each interval of time, culminating in the singularity—an expansion of human intelligence by a factor of trillions merging with nonbiological forms (Kurzweil 2005). This differs from the era of tetration. Further, in whatever form the singularity takes, it will be considered a quark sized element in the historeographic annals of the era of tetration. The era of tetration (which can also be known as the tertratic era) grows hyper-exponentially over each interval of time. So, with each passing temporality—whether it be a second, a singular perceptible moment (set duration of time, moments and space), an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year, and so on, the defining characteristics associated with each span of existence tetratically expand as it enters/moves to the next. Now, this expansion crosses over into everything. This suggests that matter expands (we may become giants but this phenomena might be imperceptible to us as the other elements of our environment would grow with us), the chronology of actions occurs more rapidly (and at much higher speeds) as evidence of this expansion, technologies advance (as systems of automation), and the ability to effect change is ever felt due to the increased human capacity for temporally delineated hyper-exponential reverberations. This means each moment manifests as an exponentiated version of the previous exponentiated moment. What may once have been impossible mere seconds ago (as an example) now supports multiple iterations of what was technologically non-existent, imperceptible, and was once completely nonsensical. In the era of tetration once something manifests there are simultaneously felt impacts that echo throughout the corresponding timelines. So, not only does the amount of accessible information grow, so do the technological innovations that are experienced. The entirety of existence experiences this shift in tetratic phenomenology as well. Animals, as we currently classify them, will have access to this tetratic technology/space/era and Tetration era people will be exposed to the manifesting qualities of their own imaginations as well. I argue that, in the era of tetration, technology and information work at the speed of imagination. Given the shear speed of growth associated with the principle of tetration, the expansion of information and the innovation of technological imagination will converge at tetratic rates. Within this era, whenever someone thinks of something, literally anything, it appears/manifests in the physical environment. So, then,

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ontological spaces only occur in the moment before an imagination’s appearance/ingression/manifestation. No time will lapse between thought, concept and physical manifestation. Historically, ontological existence (framing in the mind) occurs prior to physical appearing. Here, ontology simultaneosly meets the immediacy of what is required to break into the present moment and the repurcussions of sudden physicality. While there may be differences between the imagined space and the reality of any imagination, the technology of this age will adjust said difference. But that is a matter of imagination as well. Now, this may be an issue of metabolic speed, related to the relationship between human enhancement and embodied abilities, but it also might have more to do with the way that exponential technologies will exist in a manner that, together, instantiate and support/bear the weight of the framework that makes the era of tetration possible. For instance, a kind of nanobot might exist in the air (in a community of nanobots, of this type and other types) that draws elements out of the air, land, and water (nearby water bodies, distant water bodies, from the air itself, or otherwise) that work to make the simultaneous construction of ideas possible. Similarly, artificial intelligence descendants of the singularity would function in relationship to people to predict, pushback, and simply be in conversation (as a communicative conduit) between the technologies of the time—people, proposed nanobots (and their types), animals, plants, climate(s), and so on, to facilitate said imaginative construction. Here, “people” is intentionally used as a term to connect future people and iterations of posthumanity/ non-­humanity together as genealogically situated bodies. There is an assumption within this critical imagination that people in the era of tetration will be posthuman for a couple reasons: (1) their experiences are fundamentally different than our own due to directed evolutionary processes that will have taken place leading up to this time; (2) the technologies that these “people” are in relationship with which inhabit their temporal existence force their experiences to be fundamentally different from those of “humans.” One could raise questions around what exactly does fundamentally different mean? This is also a question of biology and environment. One’s environment shifts one’s perception given the stimuli associated with the other variables of/within that environment. But this has more to do with the way in which patterns, habits, and

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technology influence one another to determine difference. Having a cell phone is radically different than being bound to cave drawings—for several reasons; and (3) their nominal designation will probably no longer be human. They will probably realize that human is a limiting and immobilizing term. What they will be called has yet to be determined, but there is an assumption that the descendants of “humans” will self-identify through another label altogether (Butler 2019). Moving at the speed of imagination becomes the devastating reality of the era of tetration. Due to the nature of imagined reality being concrete existence, different technologies, terrains, clothing, ethnicities, and so on exist in small batch quantities (as individuals or communally). Because multiple reality generating technologies exist simultaneously, there is an awareness that not everyone has the same technology, but that everyone’s technologies are an extension of their imagination. So, in this way, people glean from one another, but not entirely. You can think of this as similar to when someone tries to appropriate Black culture. Because technology that is imagined in response to what another person has is only a secondary configuration of what that person imagines/thinks that technology is capable of doing—which is the result of watching it. So, unless someone has the cognitive blueprint for the technology in question (which will be entirely possible in the tetratic era) each iteration is merely a rough sketch of the technological capacities preexisting in the “original.” Further, each new iteration is only the version someone else can imagine as a part of their own reality. But what might be considered original in this space? A full-fledged construction of a reality over against another. Still, that originality is only original as it reflects the individual inflections inherent to an individual/reality’s existence. Whenever someone shares/summons their reality, it instantaneously manifests/materializes. When one person’s imagination is placed in conversation with another, something incredibly terrible happens. These manifestations send literal concrete, physical bodies, worlds within universes and galaxies, animal species, national defense systems, categorical ontologies, suns, particles, and so on crashing into one another. The felt/ echoing/reverberating collisions of the material world rattle the perceptions of the people who are meeting/interacting. In doing so, no one’s reality is left the same/intact, because of the repercussions from colliding

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worlds. Individuals existing in the same space, but not in conversation, coexist by accounting for the other with a placeholder. In this way, they don’t actually see the other. They see a figure/icon of the other. For instance, if someone is walking down the street and passes another person, this happens without these world bending collisions due to the assumed/presumed assertion of what/who that person in passing stands for. Determinations of what the other “means” is already built into the reality of each person’s imagination due to previous encounters with “like” individuals, and, through what people are told about individuals who are “like” those they pass (Hall 2001). However, this is only the case when the marker of meaning attached to the individual in passing is not perceived as dangerous. Perceiving one as dangerous stems from a negative, or fear based, association with the symbol/meaning attached to that which is situated as other in a singular/ individual or an amalgamative/communal tetration era imagination. This danger is often associated with the ways that an individual shatters the symbol of meaning previously attached to their designated marker. The tension between the perceived danger of a symbol (that an individual represents or that represents an individual) to a perceiving individual, and what/who one actually is is reflected in actual encounters with the perceived other. Here, actual encounters serve as a way to describe concrete events, or interactions among actual entities/bodies/realities (Whitehead 1979). These encounters bare the potential to inflict damage upon the imagined tetration world(s) of the perceiver. And, it is as those actual encounters are damaging to preconceived symbols that they can then replace symbol with experience. Experience provides greater detail to the nuances of what it means to be in a world that encompasses others and their/other worlds in the social imagination (Mills 2000). This leads to an infinite multi-dimensional space where one is aware of one’s own world and the simultaneous existence of other worlds. When individuals are accounted for in the world of a perceiver, that perceiver now accounts for their own understanding of those they perceive—and the worlds connected to those they perceive. Any distance between understanding and actuality is unknown to the perceiver until made perceptible by the perceived. This can roughly be attributed to Du Bois’ phenomena of double consciousness (2008). Where Black people

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recognize there is a way they know themselves to be (individually and collectively) that is in stark contrast with how Black people are categorized in larger society. It also speaks to the manner in which those perceiving the world do so through their own gaze/lens (Jackson 2013). So, thought and perception are inextricably linked to the era of tetration.

Tetratic Thinking/Thought By itself, thought is the central component of the age of tetration. Everything hinges upon thought. In this era, technology can only be utilized to the extent that those who interact with it employ a systematic approach to their thinking. In conversation with Peter Checkland (1999), “At the core of systems thinking is a concept which clearly derives very directly from our intuitive or casual knowledge of organism: the concept of a whole entity which can adapt and survive, within limits, in a changing environment” (49). Thinking which forms self-replicating loops of existence/organization that are resistant to entropy and degradation from outside factors is key to the age of tetration. Systems, as conceptual organisms (produced by thought), provide the epistemic framework and necessary foundation to direct tetration era technology. Systematic thinking also operates as the glia/glue which maintains the integrity of hyper-4 technologically constructed reality(ies) that individual and communal epistemologies (points of emphasis, concepts/nodes of import, definitions, and contexts, etc.) take. I am intentional about the use of the word glia due to the role/responsibility that glial cells have in the brain. Glial stems from the Greek word glia (or glue), and, in the brain, are the white matter that hold the brain together and are argued to determine the strength of interregional connectivity (Hussaini and Jang 2018; Losada-­ Perez 2018). Their relation to epistemology can be understood through the parts of epistemological formations that are taken for granted. For some time, white matter regions were less studied due to an emphasis on neuronal activity that is more readily explored through neuron rich gray matter. The historical lack of appreciation regarding white matter speaks to the way that epistemologies include significant aspects that are often overlooked, and, whose existence often assumes comprehension. Something

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that often happens when terms are fuzzy due to unreflective use in everyday settings (Checkland 1999). Yet these overlooked and assumed concepts hold linchpin qualities within systems of thought that are vitally integral to the life of these systems of thought (epistemologies). Further, systems are important to tetration era-based thinking due to the ways that they primarily function on a two-dimensional spectrum: between open and closed (Von Bertalanffy 1950), and between self-replicating (autopoietic) and other replicating (allopoiesis) (Luhmann 1995). The coordinates that describe any given system (along this 2D existence) tend to operate according to the rules of their formation with very little outside influence. Too much outside influence would be seen as a threat to the stability of the system. So, the glia of any system are the rules that uphold it. Similarly, in the age of tetration, technology creates self-­ replicating realities that can only be maintained through the well-­ distributed contingencies and fail-safes that are required in the formation of strong interdependently functioning systems. Here, one could argue that the strength of the glia might be found in the manner in which rules are situated that allow for a third dimension of relationality/existence. The third dimension would be rigidity and fluidity. Where rigidity might signify brittle fragility and fluidity would designate malleable resilience. So, in this regard, systems would exist between three dimensions: being open and closed, self-replicating and other generation, and rigidity and fluidity. Still, not every system will be as thoroughly constructed/imagined as the next one. We could think of these limitations as holes in one’s epistemology. These holes would allude to the virtuality of epistemic systems in the era of tetration (DeLeuze 1997). In theory, these holes would provide views into a less virtual, more stable reality. The stability of this reality would be less dependent on being accepted by the viewer. To that extent, it would exist beyond the virtual epistemology (viewed as real). But there are a couple of issues here. First, this more stable/less virtual environment could not be some all-encompassing universal reality. It would merely be the virtuality/reality that is foundational to the present reality of the viewer/perceiver. Her holes would allude to the existence of a more solidly grounded version of the perceiver’s current epistemic structure. In this next layer are less holes, and, hopefully, more cohesion of thought.

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Similarly, this next  layer (which, conceptually, is more stable than the previous) would be an incomplete construction as well. This then leads to an infinitely recursive process of exploring, undoing, and constructing one’s epistemological formation in order to find a more thorough and cohesive approach to thought—the primary currency in the tetratic era. Secondly, no matter which system is subscribed to (in a hyper-4 era) there is always something that exists beyond/behind the epistemology that makes a hyper-4 reality possible. This is different that burrowing further into any one framework. It has more to do with the interconnections inherent to the hyper-4 existence that do not allow for any one thing to stand alone as itself. All is interwoven. All is entangled. Similar to how quantum entanglement is understood in physics as shared proximal space, inseparability, interdependence and interconnection. Entanglement, in this sense, is the positional awareness of the ways one is inextricably interconnected with everything. However, one’s configuration of said entanglement is indicative of one’s epistemology, embodiment, and perceived reality. Each functions as a separate factor that must constantly be reimagined. Configuring reality is akin to “decod[ing] the matrix” (Hussle 2018). And, while it can be said that Galileo (1564–1642), Shirley Jackson (1946–), and Philip Emeagwali (1954–) each existed on earth, there were different technological and scientific manifestations associated with each figure. Some might suggest that earth was not the same in the span between thinkers (due to changes in atmosphere, extinction of species, technological advances, etc.), but if there were major differences it might be attributed to data. Now, decolonial thinkers would assert that data accrual is not necessarily a good thing given the means utilized to gather data (Mignolo 2006). We could even say that cultivation of data further takes people into realities that support the value attributed to data. Still, I wonder about the data, or information, that has been unearthed through asking questions. This has been the case whether through some empirical escapade or through the decolonial practice of undoing, delinking, and redoing (Mignolo 2011). This speaks to the relationship that questioning has to systematic or tetratic thought. Questioning becomes the device/tool of reverse engineering epistemologies/realities that allow for stronger thought/technology/reality to emerge. In addition, the strength of each reality rests on their ability to exist with

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the least amount of holes. This speaks to the three-pronged correlation thought has to technology and reality. Strong systems of thought lead to stronger technology, which ultimately lead to stronger realities. These strong realities are the most “advanced.” Here advanced suggests detailed, clarified, and mapped. Holes speak squarely to an epistemology’s virtual quality. This is to suggest that tetration era epistemologies that have the strongest systematic orientation will have the longest life span. It is not to say that systems which encompass the most answers always win out. Systems thinking accounts for entanglement. It does not deny it, or work to exist without it in an unmitigated fashion. More answers may seem like more stability. But depth of clarity amidst entanglement helps create fluid systems. Depth is understood as being the result of critical exploration. Length of response is not. This could be argued given that holes in one’s epistemology represent weakness in one’s epistemology. Lengthy unsubstantiated ideas/concepts are also considered holes/weaknesses. Weaknesses in any epistemology speak to the limitations of that epistemology. Good epistemologies acknowledge their weakness/limitations (Popper 2014). They do not try to exist as infallible. Even more so, limitations are also indicators of spaces/concepts/trajectories that are inadequately unaccounted for in a particular epistemological formation. Which could simply mean that there is room for further exploration— hence the movement to the less virtual reality/epistemology. But the measure to determine what might qualify as adequate accountability (determination of virtuality) is a matter of value and context as well. Regardless, systematic thinking, inclusive of critical questioning, is tetratic thinking. Subsequently, tetratic thinking, as systematic thinking, is the key to manipulating/harnessing tetration/hyper-4 technology.

Hyper-4 Technology Hyper-4 technology is both visible and invisible, material and immaterial. It exists and it doesn’t. It does because it is the tangible and the intangible elements that form to make existence. It doesn’t because it hasn’t been imagined yet—by a person with access to components of the age of tetration. It simultaneously exists in hyper real superposition (as existing

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and non-existent/yet-to-exist) because its evolution/upgrade/manifestation is always happening and about to happen. It just needs to be brought into awareness. Unless you’re reading this chapter in the age of tetration, hyper-4 technology might seem like magic. But every next era technology might seem like magic to its predecessors. Imaginations appearing out of thin air. Thoughts turning into matter. Anticipatory technology taking one’s wants/desires and manifesting them as perceptually concrete realities. So, anyone in this era becomes a master of the elements. They are socially accustomed to the direct relation of their thoughts to their world, and their experiences. They wouldn’t know anything different. This mastery would equate to “ultimate entanglement.” As an extension of Schrödinger’s notion of proximal interdependence, ultimate entanglement depends on one’s inescapable and tetratically compounding thrust towards imminent actuality. Ultimate entanglement is collaboration with nature. This collaboration is the result of asking nature what does it want? Mastery in this sense is not domination, but awareness of the desire to be while holding space for that desire to take fruit. Because it not only recognizes that nature has its own cybernetic, nature has its own way of activating that cybernetic framework. So, hyper-4 technology is the culmination of that mastery as submission. The technology that was created to allow for this kind of existence was done in response to listening to the organic and inorganic compounds in the environment in order to give them the chance to move freely. People are the vessel for freedom—as it pertains to nature. The same goes in reverse. Nature is the vessel of freedom for people. People move in nature, and nature moves with people. Hyper-4 technology allows nature to speak for itself. And in so doing, opens the door for innovation at rates that are only describable as the speed of imagination. This level of simultaneity that results from this era is the result of hyper-4 technology being the extension of personal imagination. Further, it can be more readily conceived as a oneness/ wielding of nature through that very same imaginative extension. While this oneness/wielding dichotomy could easily lead one’s thoughts to a detection of a contradiction, it is merely describing the way being at one with nature is inescapably tied to the ability to wield nature. This happens in the same space and at the same time. Hyper-4 technology’s superpositions are base level components of the larger hyper-4 grounded

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system. But a larger question looms. What is underneath the hood of hyper-4 technology? Technology undergirds reality in the age of tetration. To that point, technology is elemental to reality. But what undergirds technology? At this point, there are a few ways this can be understood: (1) thought undergirds technology, (2) technology undergirds technology, (3) nature undergirds technology, and/or (4) reality undergirds technology. In the first scenario, systematic thinking becomes the frame through which technology is upheld. Historically, examples of this scenario have been evidenced through art, literature, physics, the Iron Age, industrial revolution, expansion of information, and so on. Each are technologies of thought situated within expansive disciplines that have  subsequently developed discourses of thought (compiling histories) that demonstrate an evolution of thinking within the bounds of each discipline. In this way thought becomes more complex and shifts over time These  respective evolutions of thought methodologically outline the connections, of these converging disciples, to the technologies that they have produced. Moving to the second example, science and technology scholarship has worked against what it marks as a common misconception: that technology is fundamentally grounded in scientific knowledge. Here, technology is thought to have a stronger connection to visual imagery conjured by the mind (Ferguson 1977). Thirdly, this idea posits that organized structures (as a whole, i.e. trees, people, bridges, buildings, airplanes, etc.) are a composite series of organized structures that relate to one another in a three-dimensional plane. Although mathematical principles may undergird those relationships, materializing the design becomes the most fundamental aspect of any technology. This is also the case for tetration era technology which is grounded in thought. Within this vein, the fourth example (reality undergirds technology), is demonstrated through the idea that thought/thinking (as epistemology) shapes perceptual reality which then influences, shapes, and undergirds the technologies that epistemic realities produce. Further, it appears that knowledge of design/ organization becomes the bridge between tetration era technology (that moves at the speed of imagination) and the thoughts that undergirds its manifestation into existence.

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One could go the Adorno and Horkheimer route, and view technology as the fulfillment of knowledge manifesting as power. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), Horkheimer and Adorno argue that knowledge is power. Their description of this equivalence is meant to illuminate the manner in which they see this correlation of power—to a knowledge of natural systems. Natural systems (be they the laws of physics, mathematics, biological systems, etc.) allow for technology to be created. For example, the steam engine relies heavily on thermodynamics and mechanical engineering or that computers are made possible through electrical engineering and computation (among other things). This does not suggest that knowledge of a system always precludes the formation of a technology. Regardless of whether one possesses the knowledge of how a system works leading to an intentional discovery of a technology, or not. The growth of knowledge about the system in question requires knowledge of previous modes of technology to do so. Just as Alfred North Whitehead would argue that an entity is both an event and an entity, each component of a system is a system unto itself. This is the crux of hyper-4 technology. It is an infinitely fast, infinitely recursive, system of systems/ complexity of complexities where thought, matter, and the immediate present meet/collide. Nothing exists apart from systemic overlaps which lead to more systematic struts which keep reality from folding onto itself.

Access in the Era of Tetration The combination of imagination and technological manifestation suggests that technology in the era of tetration is ubiquitous to the experiences of people in this era. It is equitable in ways that have not been equitable in the past. Prior to the age of tetration, technological existence meant that there were barriers to accessing the best possible technologies. In the era of tetration, thought is technology. Thought is also attached to technology. So, the relationship between thought and technology can be visualized as a self-replicating system (spiraling and open). Thought precedes the activation of technology which then leads to the use of technology, and the production of thought which leads to new modes of technology. While one could argue this is the same process that has led to

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technological innovation and production, historically, in the era of tetration  it happens instantaneously (and in real time). So, technology becomes active through thought, responding to the depth of thought that pulls technology into the matrix of existence to build and maintain a livable reality. In this way, technology is dependent upon the personal epistemology that underpins technological formations  and reality construction. Since there is no crevice that the imagination cannot enter. Theoretically, no one has been abandoned by imagination. And, barring some imaginative regression, no one will be without the means to command tetration era technology. The only limitations will be that of those imagining.

Out of Thin Air... It is important to keep in mind that in the tetratic era imagination activates hyper-4 technology. Hyper-4 technology is an extension of the time. As a material convergence between the bioevolutionary (Wynter 2007) aspects of people, and the supposedly outward display of prosthetic technology by way of manipulating the natural world, technological manifestation meets at the intersection of all this—the physical plane. The prevalence of tetration level post-singularity advancements of artificial intelligence, post-post-quantum realization and transcendence, nano-nanotechnology, quasar harvesting, subatomic control, time melding, genetic and mechanical enhancement of biolog(ies), and teleportation, all become necessary foundational elements/assumptions of tetration era technology. The connection of all these technologies (existing along with those that require further imagination) to one another and to the cognitive faculties of individual people makes it seem as though realities manifest out of thin air. But in actuality that is not the case. The predictive qualities of tetration era technology combined with the volitional and subconscious physiological tendencies of individual biochemistries allow for the instantaneous manifestation of reality via technological formation. Similar to the way that virtual reality or story-­driven games have levels that seem to become clearer with each step (especially when going down a long dark corridor), so does reality in the age of tetration. Because

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thought initiates technologically mediated realities, any movement within said reality is based upon one’s ability to hold the physicality of said thought in tension with the variability within the moment. In this way, each reality is the result of one’s imagination and simultaneously is the culmination of one’s praxis of life (Maturana 1988) as reality. This creates a sense of disjunction within reality, because as one’s reality manifests through some tetration era internet of things people would realize just how different their own realities are. While it cannot be directly spoken of—just yet—about what it means to experience these differences as a tetration era posthuman person, what we can highlight is the sheer inability for complete uniformity to exist. Although each person’s wildest dreams can manifest with a thought, no one dream is the same. Further, the more complex the reality, the greater the tension it requires to uphold it. This suggests that realities can manifest in an instant. But, under too much stress, they can dissipate just as quickly. So, the importance of tetratic thought.

Blackness and The Era of Tetration The era of tetration is an opportunity for Black people to level historically disproportionate power structures.  As mentioned above, the strongest imaginations survive in this era. Given the rate of growth associated with this era, if an imagined world is not given to a strong systematic foundation it will experience the same rate of decay as it does growth. Thus, the things that do not work are discovered quickly—because they require strong systems to be maintained. Without strong design thinking and systems design, these imagined worlds deteriorate—although it looks more like disintegration. But how does that impact Black people? Is there an assumption that Black folks do not think systematically? Does this era project to reify the hierarchical inequalities common to previous eras? And, to what extent do Black people partake in the age of tetration? In regards to the first question (How does this impact Black people?), the era of tetration places immediacy and imagination in the hands of Black people. Thus it  is an opportunity to disrupt, dismantle and destroy historically disproportionate power structures. If capital, or assets,

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or access to resources were delimiting factors to shifting unfavorable sociopolitical power dynamics in the past, then the potential to turn imagination into reality make the era of tetration an opportune moment/ duration of time to instantiate the type of sociopolitical changes that would necessitate the desired shift. To answer the second question (Is there an assumption that Black folks do not think systematically?), the answer is no. Black folks have a history of thinking in a systematic fashion. Whether referencing the geometric designs of Benin homes, the rules, and configuration of the East African version of mancala which predates all other iterations (Huylebrouck 2006), the library systems of Timbuktu (Kane 2016) or Alexandria (Phillips 2010), or even Hannibal’s march, Black people have been thinking systematically. Therefore, tetratic thinking is nothing new to Black people. The only thing missing from these historical examples is hyper-4 technology. This conceptualization of the future in relationship to Black people is meant to spark interest in this “coming age” along with a framing of the potential for Black people to thrive from a position of power while embedded here. It is mainly an invitation to begin thinking in systematic ways that allow for Black people to conceive of tetratic structures that are far ahead of their counterparts: being less penetrable, more stable against vulnerabilities from the outside, and self-replicating. This is different from shifts in systematic thinking by Black people in the past. During the antebellum period (or any other colonial period in recent history) Black people had to rethink their systems. In America, being stripped from their land, their customs, and dignity, enslaved Africans formed new systems to help cope with the conditions of chattel slavery. Among those systems was religion. Religion is an important set of systems. It provides keen insights into Black experiences given its relationship between Black behavior, Black imaginations, and the transformation that African traditional religions underwent, preceding the formation of Black religion in the antebellum period. A focus on Black religion as a key system also highlights necessary components of tetratic formations.

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Black Religion as Tetratic Formation It should be noted that Black religion is not limited to Americana Christianity. Sherman Jackson (2005) highlights the manner in which Blackness—associated with religiosity—is committed to the destruction and dismantling of white supremacy. This is important in comparison to his description of African American religion, which centers around concepts such as integration, equality, and progress. Here, Black religiousity is unbridled. It is not one type of religiosity. It is more so a demeanor, or an approach, a spirit. The same can be said for African Americanness. It provides its own way of navigating the American Terrain. Gayraud Wilmore (1972) would suggest it is a spirituality of survival. Yet, one could argue that these notions of identity are not entirely separate. The model that Jay-Z employed in the climbing phase of his career seems to be one that exhibits his African Americanness. But as he approached and surpassed the billionaire threshold, he appeared to become more explicit about drawing on, and deploying measures, that could be more clearly representative of a Black methodology. This potentially hybrid approach still incurs the ire of certain segments of the Black community because he insists upon measures of “progress” via gentrifying one’s own hood. So, while he may be working toward undoing white supremacist socioeconomic gestures, he still engages the neoliberal capitalist ploys of the African American. Nevertheless, the Formation of Black religion did not always work to dismantle white supremacy. In some ways, it often mimicked it. Wilmore mentions the role that the Black church played in alienating poor and working-class Black people at the turn of the twentieth century. Many Black religious scholars have made the connection between the desire to fit in with white society as a factor that helped to further this alienation of poor and working class Black folks (Wilmore 1972; Brown Douglas 2006). The result of the Black church’s social neglect spurned the formation of Islamizers (Nation of Islam), Black Zionists/Hebrew Israelites, Black Power Movement, Black Panthers, and Five Percenters (Chireau 1999; Jackson 2005). In doing so, it reiterated stratification as an acceptable social framework amidst the onslaught of racist social factors that

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remained: working against social equity, let alone working toward social disruption that might equate to Black freedom. But whether we analyze the dominant religious system among Black people in American history (Christianity), or one of the smaller Black religious sects, what we are going to find are systems interacting in a way that could be described as preserving, pushing, or dismantling (at various degrees) the white supremacist regime of their time. Deciding to alienate in response to alienation can be seen as an attempt to determine where groups fit into the already fractured and complex American hierarchy. However, as Jackson highlights, Black religions provided protective identity markers for their adherents in response to a society ever ready to predefine and constrict (dehumanize) Black identities to a subhuman/incapable/disvalued status. Black religious dispositions are important to the relationship between Blackness and the era of tetration because of the role Black religions play in mediating Black imagination. The manner in which Black religious affiliation is closely tied to Black identity formation suggests it is the linchpin for not only how Black folks see themselves, but what Black folks see as an acceptable course of action. Given the variable proclivity of religious spaces, the limitations of each space are taken into consideration when accounting for versions of Black freedom. This is to say that the systems in each religion (clergy, laity, institution, sacrament, traditions, scripture, epistemologies, etc.) have been unleashed on society, and more often than not the outcome has not been very Black (disruptive or dismantling of white supremacy in its physical manifestations). In Habeas Viscus, Alexander Weheliye has something else to say about Blackness. He begins with drawing upon Maurice Merleau-Ponty: [who] describes the general provenance of the flesh, which is not “a color or a thing, therefore, [but] a difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility. Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things.” (Weheliye 2014, 52)

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Further, Weheliye draws upon Giorgio Agamben, when suggesting that “potentiality and freedom are intimately related: ‘The root of freedom is to be found in the abyss of potentiality. To be free is not to simply have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simply the power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free is … to be capable of one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s own privation’” (Weheliye 2014, 130). Through a composite look at Blackness as defined by Jackson, coupled with Blackness as framed through the lens of Weheliye—a thing with open potential—one might suggest that Blackness could actually be anything in the effort to dismantle and disrupt white supremacy. However, the idea is that the world would be moving toward that end. However, critics such as Michelle Alexander (2020), Ruha Benjamin (2019), or Safiya Umoja Noble (2018) would argue that racist systems are changing shape. They are not actually going away. And while each analysis provided is another gift of systems thought, they are more evidence that Black people are more than capable of critical and constructive analysis. What I am offering through this chapter is an opportunity for Black folks to use this ability to: create systems of thought that hold tetratic worlds (hyper-4 technology) in place; systems capable of exerting themselves against other tetratic imaginations that insist on modes of co-existing while maintaining disproportionality; and systems that sustain themselves against outside attacks/thoughts through dynamic/organic fluidity.

Seeds The era of tetration is characterized as a time where design meets imagination to the extent that it is supported by systems thinking, multiplied by technology that physically manifests at the speed of tetration ((d + i ∕ sT) × ba). The difference between this age and any other is the rate of manifestation. Hence, hyper-4 technology is already partially present in any age. That is to say that people are already functioning tetratically. Black folks, specifically, are operating tetratically. Yet, even in the age of exponential growth (where access to information occurs exponentially, but access to resources does not) Black bodies continue to experience discrimination (Blanchett 2006), death, devaluation, and a lack of access (Pulido 2016) at disproportionate rates (Patterson 2018).

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Bottom line is Black folks are frustrated. The worlds they have imagined as liberative are different from the ones that they currently experience. There is a growing sentiment that these new worlds will take a considerably long time to materialize. But, the type of thinking that uses imagination to construct a new world is always in motion. So, there is a constant tension between what we can imagine and what we can materialize. In this era, there is potential for what once was a space of frustration to eventually be a space of solace. Once the means to instantaneously imagine, create/construct/deconstruct, and materialize one’s thoughts (flattened into one simultaneous and chronological movement) is placed at the hands of the thinker, nothing will be in the way of the thinker. This places a high level of responsibility upon the thinker. Presently, all thinkers are stuck behind the incrementally released rollout of time. Because the thinker does not have the means for tetration level materialization. Historically, this has placed levels of import, or genius, on the thinker who has had the time or means to create the world she has envisioned (Altshuller et al. 1996; Bell et al. 2019). However, the age of tetration would require people to reconfigure their relationship to technology, that is, the manner in which people exist with, within, embody, or are alongside technology. Because, in order to simultaneously imagine and materialize imaginations through hyper-4 technologies, people must reassert themselves into the physical environment in ways much different than what is available now. So, the era of tetration places the weight of systemic thinking on Black minds. But if Black minds are already thinking tetratically, then two things need to happen: (1) Black folks must begin to recognize that the telos of said system must be the actual and likely end of the systems they encounter and (2) that tetratic thinking must be bent toward the era of tetration itself. Thought that is bent toward the era of tetration must have tetration level fail safes. It must be conceptualized to bring the hyper-4 realities into existence. Black people must be the progenitors of this era, the designers of its manifestation, the architects of its technologies, and the minds behind its standards of existence. Imagination that utilizes the intricacies of design thinking through systematic framing lays the seeds of this era. One day those seeds will produce hyper-­exponential growth that will not only be conceptualized, but made tangible as well.

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References Alexander, M. (2020). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press. Altshuller, G., Al′tov, G., & Altov, H. (1996). And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared: TRIZ, the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. Technical Innovation Center, Inc. Bell, A., Chetty, R., Jaravel, X., Petkova, N., & Van Reenen, J. (2019). Who Becomes an Inventor in America? The Importance of Exposure to Innovation. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(2), 647–713. Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. John Wiley & Sons. Blanchett, W. J. (2006). Disproportionate Representation of African American Students in Special Education: Acknowledging the Role of White Privilege and Racism. Educational Researcher, 35(6), 24–28. Butler, P. (2019). Black Transhuman Liberation Theology. New York: Bloomsbury. Checkland, P. (1999). Systems Thinking. In W. Currie, B Galliers & R. Galliers (Eds.). Rethinking Management Information Systems, (45–56). Oxford: Oxford University Press Chireau, Y. (1999). In N. Deutsch (Ed.), Black Zion: African American Religious Encounters with Judaism. Oxford University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1997). “Immanence: A Life...” Theory, Culture & Society 14, no. 2: 3–7. Douglas, K. B. (2006). Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective. Orbis Books. Du Bois, W. E. B. (2008). The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford University Press. Ferguson, E.  S. (1977). The Mind’s Eye: Nonverbal Thought in Technology. Science, 197(4306), 827–836. Goodstein, R. L. (1947). Transfinite Ordinals in Recursive Number Theory. The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 12(4), 123–129. Hall, S. (2001). Encoding/Decoding. In M.  G. Durham & D.  M. Kellner (Eds.), Media and Cultural studies: Keyworks (163–174). Blackwell. Horkheimer, M., Adorno, T. W., & Noeri, G. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hussaini, S.  M., & Jang, M.  H. (2018). New Roles for Old Glue: Astrocyte Function in Synaptic Plasticity and Neurological Disorders. International Neurourology Nournal, 22(Suppl 3), S106. Hussle, N. (2018). “Loaded Bases” Victory Lap. Los Angeles. All Money In No Money Out.

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Huylebrouck, D. (2006). Mathematics in (Central) Africa Before Colonization. Anthropologica et praehistorica, 117(2006), 135–162. Jackson, S.  A. (2005). Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking toward the Third Resurrection. Oxford University Press. Jackson, Z. I. (2013). Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism. Feminist Studies, 39(3), 669–685. Kane, O. (2016). Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa. Harvard University Press. Kurzweil, R. (2004). The Law of Accelerating Returns. In Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker (pp. 381–416). Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. London: Penguin. Losada-Perez, M. (2018). Glia: From ‘Just Glue’ to Essential Players in Complex Nervous Systems: A Comparative View from Flies to Mammals. Journal of Neurogenetics, 32(2), 78–91. Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Maturana, H. R. (1988). Reality: The Search for Objectivity or the Quest for a Compelling Argument. The Irish Journal of Psychology, 9(1), 25–82. Mignolo, W. (2011). The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Duke University Press. Mignolo, W. D. (2006). Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity. American Literary History, 18(2), 312–331. Mills, C. W. (2000). The Sociological Imagination. Oxford University Press. Noble, S.  U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press. Patterson, O. (2018). Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface. Harvard University Press. Peters, M. A. (2017). Technological Unemployment: Educating for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Education Philosophy and Theory. Vol. 49 (1). 1–6 Phillips, H. (2010, August). Great Library of Alexandria. Library Philosophy and Practice. 1-40. Popper, K. (2014). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Routledge. Pulido, L. (2016). Flint, Environmental Racism, and Racial Capitalism. Capitalism Nature Socialism Vol. 27 (3). 1–16 Sherman, R. M., Forman, J., Antonescu, V., Puiu, D., Daya, M., Rafaels, N., & Levin, A. M. (2019). Assembly of a Pan-genome from Deep Sequencing of 910 Humans of African Descent. Nature Genetics, 51(1), 30-35.

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Von Bertalanffy, L. (1950). The Theory of Open Systems in Physics and Biology. Science, 111(2872), 23–29. Vū, N. (2020). The Power Tower Puzzle: Lockdown Math Ep. 8. 3Blue1Brown. Youtube. https://bit.ly/2JttAhY Weheliye, A. G. (2014). Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke University Press. Whitehead, Alfred N. 1979. Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press Wilmore, G. (1972). Black Religion and Black Radicalism. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Wynter, S. (2007). Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto. Unpublished Essay.

4 Towards an Afrofuturist Feminist Manifesto Caitlin O’Neill

In the fall of 2009, Renina Jarmon moved to a new city, became a new graduate student, and broke up with her partner in one fell swoop. Tired, overwhelmed, and afloat, Jarmon called her father a few days before New Years to tell him she was lonely. A wise confidant, her father advised her to return to Brooklyn, New York, and the community of chosen friends and family she had cultivated since beginning her undergraduate studies at the New School. Jarmon’s life in College Park, Maryland—with all its trials and tribulations—would be there waiting for her return. Taking her father’s advice, Jarmon packed a bag, suited up in a pair of fancy silver leggings, and headed home. “When I arrived,” Jarmon (2018) recounts fondly, “my home girl took one look at me and my shiny silver leggings and said girl, where did you come from the future?” Confident that she had made the right choice, Jarmon rang in the New Year surrounded by love. A month later, she would commemorate her experience—and her silver leggings—by beginning the twitter hashtag #blackgirlsarefromthefuture, predating the use of #blackgirlmagic by at least a year. In 2013, C. O’Neill (*) Brown University, Providence, RI, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 P. Butler (ed.), Critical Black Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9_4

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after years of writing as a Racialicious contributor and member of the Crunk Feminist Collective, Jarmon would self-publish a book named after the hashtag, Black Girls Are from the Future: Essays on Race, Digital Creativity and Pop Culture. Taken at face value, Jarmon’s story can be appreciated as a heartwarming message about the importance of self-care and chosen family, but most interesting is the question posed by her homegirl. Did Renina Jarmon indeed come from the future? To truly consider this, it is important to (re)turn to the writing of bell hooks, pioneering black feminist theorist and author of influential critical black feminist theoretical texts such as Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self Recovery, where hooks’s writes of an experience that eerily echoes the conversation between Jarmon and her father, 20 years earlier. In this instance, hooks was speaking to one of her students while also referring to her own taxing experience of working at a small liberal arts college where she was not valued or supported in her work. Late one night, hooks received a call from a student in her campus support group for young black women, who was badly recovering from a romantic break and considering suicide. Soothingly, hooks shared with the other woman what she referred to as a “spell” that she used often to aid in recovering from heartbreak and burnout. The most significant part of the spell, hooks insists, is the only part privy to the book’s readers. “When you wake up and find yourself living someplace where there is nobody you love and trust, no community, it is time to leave town,” hooks (1993, p. 150) says. “Pack up and go” she advises, while reminding us “(you can even go tonight). Where you need to go is any place where there are arms that can hold you, that will not let you go” (hooks 1993, p. 150). Though the economic and social realities of many black women’s lives may make leaving difficult, if not impossible, it may be feasible to grasp hold of this advice in snatches, like Jarmon who returned “home” if but a short while, to bring in the New Year prosperously and surrounded arms that had guided and loved her over the years. There is something magical, about the way hooks’s words from the early 1990s reverberate in Renina Jarmon’s retelling of how her hashtag came to be. There is a sense of foresight in hooks’s wisdom, a timelessness in her insistence on self-care and healing as central to the survival of black women in both the late twentieth and now, the early twenty-first century.

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Perhaps as Jarmon harkens back to the past, the bell hooks of 1993—who spins curative spells for black women who are constantly healing from the white heteropatriarchal capitalist regime—is hurtling into the future. And though Jarmon and hooks are, like all black women, deeply and inescapably impacted by the ghosts of histories past with a foot (or in some cases an arm) firmly grounded in the past, they are undoubtedly from the future. For if, as Walidah Imarisha (2015) claims, “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction,” (p.  3) then the act of a black woman choosing to enact self-care and advocacy, however, briefly is an act of speculative and science fiction. Renina Jarmon and bell hooks both engage in a black feminist tradition of speculative fiction as it is connected to activism and social justice by intervening in a global narrative that requires their dehumanization. In a world that systematically devalues the lives of black women and femmes, Jarmon and hooks’s decision to defy convention and invest in themselves and the community of black women that love and respect them should not be taken lightly. Whether into the future or the past, black women, and femmes must be prepared to move through the fabric of time and space to seek out places of possibility and affirmation that can give way to black feminist futures. Broadly defined, speculative fiction is an umbrella term that encompasses several better-known subgenres such as fantasy, horror, and science-­ fiction, or any text that exchanges the given rules of the universe as we currently understand it for more imaginative ones, incorporating supernatural, futuristic, or even mythical elements in the writing. In this way, #blackgirlsarefromthefuture takes on new meaning as black women and girls the world over imagine themselves as thriving, creating spaces where they are celebrated, engaging in an act of time travel and making present a world that does not yet exist. A world in which black women and femmes are safe and valued. A world yet to come. #Blackgirlsarefromthefuture because they have to be. And yet, in a world where black women—especially black trans women—are under threat of state and interpersonal violence, it can prove difficult for black feminists to invest in fictions permeated with visions of alternate timelines and

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other worlds. The material conditions of black women across this globe are all too painfully real. In her 2015 case study of black girls in New York and Boston school system, “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected,” Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw reminds us that black girls are prepared for a lifetime of state violence at a very early age. The suspension and expulsion rates black girls face at a rate of 53 times more than white girls “reflects an overlooked crisis that affects not only their life chances, but also the well-being of their families, their communities, and society as whole” (p. 26). Consequently, the school-to-prison pipeline in the U.S. results in black women being incarcerated four times the rate of white women (“Women of Color & Prisons” 2018). According to a report by the National Center for Transgender Equality (2018), LGB people are three times  more likely to be incarcerated compared to the general U.S. population. Furthermore, 85% of incarcerated LGB youth were people of color demonstrating the ways queer youth are particularly impacted by the school to prison pipeline (Lydon et  al. 2015  as cited in NCTE). In the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, James et al. found that our black trans sisters remain especially vulnerable as nearly one in ten black trans women respondents had been incarcerated in the previous year, nearly ten times the rate of the general population. In addition to higher rates of expulsion and imprisonment, the CDC reports that black women are the most susceptible to the leading cause of death for women under 45—homicide (Petrosky et  al. 2017). For black trans and gender non-­ conforming people, this number is surely more disproportionate but becomes difficult to quantify due to misgendering by state officials and surviving family members. In the face of what Crenshaw refers to as a very “real” challenge facing black girls and other black LGBTQ youth and the adults they will become, where does the role of the imagination, fantasy, speculative, and science fiction come into play? Images of the past, though they remain deeply informative, cannot offer black women a haven from which to imagine a less endangered future. As sci-fi author Samuel “Chip” Delany once said, “We need images of tomorrow, and our people need them more than most” (Dery 1994, p.  190). Black women’s gravely imperiled pasts, presents, and

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futures necessitate the charting of alternative futures and reimagined pasts that continue to push the limits of our understanding of the current global sociopolitical and economic positioning of the Black Woman (in all her iterable manifestations). Here, I am reminded of Afro-Caribbean and Canadian speculative fiction author Nalo Hopkinson’s response to an interview with The Globe and Mail. When asked what historical period she wishes she could have lived through and why, she replies, “None of them. I figure this current era of history is the one with the best chance of quality of life for a black, female, disabled, middle-aged, queer person who’s most comfortable not fitting in. The odds still aren’t great, mind you. But I’ll take my chances with the 21st century” (“Nalo Hopkinson” 2015). Hopkinson’s general rejection of the question at hand is not an uncommon response for black people when faced with such a frankly insensitive question. Her insistence on the present, even as a woman with numerous marginalized identities, merits greater interest and demonstrates the need for a renewed focus on forms of writing that do the work of grappling with the realities of the present while imagining alternative futures. Though I have a sustained interest in the past, I must admit that as a fat, black, genderqueer woman I am also not too sure about taking my chances in any century but this one. In precarious political times, when even time-travel to the near or far future cannot implicitly offer black women safety or security of freedom, black women must retain the ability to return home and be grounded in the present. #Blackwomenarefromthefuture but which one? Speculative fiction allows black women and femmes an invaluable opportunity to deeply engage their imaginations and their potential to project the most marginalized and endangered of us all into hypothetical future spaces where we are free of gender, racial, and sexual oppression. Black feminist speculative fiction provides both a necessary break from quotidian scenes of violence as well as an imaginative theater for staging strategies for survival and thriving in a present that is becoming increasingly dysphoric. Just as social justice and movement building is—in essence—speculative fiction, speculative representations of black women and girls that creatively resist oppression and organize for the liberation of black, queer, women, and trans people in future worlds and alternate

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universes are an example of political action. Black feminist worldmaking is not an indulgence or a passing fancy any more than poetry—as Audre Lorde (2007) reminds us—is a luxury. The act of black feminist worldmaking does, however, engage a deep devotion to fantasy and the imagination’s power to act as archive, inspiration, and recourse. Be it poetry or speculative fiction black feminist creative writing “forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (Lorde 2007, p. 37). This essay recognizes the salient need for an Afrofuturist feminist manifestary sensibility that adequately addresses the uniquely combined needs that black feminists and black women writers have for future images that do not distract from the pressing demands of the present, but are instead weaponized to galvanize movements for material change across the globe. If, as the Combahee River Collective Statement asserts, freeing black women “would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Smith 2000) thus resulting in planet-wide liberation, then there is an urgent and present need for black women’s speculative fiction and thought that explores possible paths to liberation. We must first imagine a future before we can enact it. This essay does not purport to offer the demands or prescriptions one would expect from an Afrofuturist feminist manifesto. Instead, this essay undertakes the early foundational work of any manifesto—identifying the need for a critical intervention, situating this need and intervention in a broader discourse, and finally, gesturing towards possible practices for determining a course of action. In short, this essay does not seek to be the definitive word on black women’s speculative fiction or what shape the genre should take in the future. Rather, I am saying that there is still much to be explored about black women’s centuries long commitment to imagining and writing visionary futures that are not limited to science fiction any more than they are to community organizing or direct action. Whether found between the pages of Harriet Ann Jacobs’s historic antebellum slave narrative, Assata Shakur’s autobiography, or in the sci-fi worlds of genderqueer author Rivers Solomon’s work, black women and gender diverse people have the ability to make manifest liberatory futures through the power of the spoken and written word.

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This essay is anchored by close readings of three futurist manifestos, “The Foundations and Manifesto of Futurism,” F.T.  Marinetti (1909), “The Mundane Manifesto” by Ryman et al. (2004), and “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” by Martine Syms (2013). Together, the texts establish a noteworthy tradition of manifesto writing in the genres of science fiction and fantasy where creators and critics demonstrate their concern regarding the development of public discourse on the future, cognizant of the powerful impact speculation on the future can have on the present culture and politics. Discussion of these manifestos is supplemented by close readings of two foundational black speculative texts, W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” (1920) and Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred (1979). Read in tandem with the manifestos, these works reveal common and divergent threads in the ways black scholars, writers, and artists have conceived of the future and have expressed concerns about black people’s place—or lack thereof—in it, offering a valuable opportunity to envision new directions and commitments in the continuing struggle to materialize a more perfect freedom.

The Futurist Manifesto The genre of the manifesto has a specific role in the advent of Futurism and the call for a relevant aesthetic that better reflected the rise of modernism in a rapidly industrializing world. “The Foundations and Manifesto of Futurism,” penned by Italian artist F.T. Marinetti in 1909 is a four-page frenzy that demands new ways of seeing the world that integrate the budding technologies of the automobile, locomotive, and freighter. He detests museums and cemeteries, or at the very least what he interprets as monuments to a static past instead of an investment in a dynamic future that he and his compatriots race towards, leaving the threat of death behind in the billowing smoke of their “burning tires” (Marinetti 1909). He knows, however, that this new world will not be achieved without contention. Struggle, Marinetti (1909) believes, is the only honorable origin of art and philosophy. “No work without an aggressive character,” he insists “can be a masterpiece” (Marinetti 1909).

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Initially, such a conviction resonates with beliefs of the Black Arts Movement and black feminist organizing rallying cries that insist that art, like the personal, is always already political and should arise out of our circumstances, reflecting our continuous struggles with hegemonic forces. But unlike Suzanne Césaire’s own manifesto regarding Martinican poetry that asserts “poetry shall be cannibalistic or shall not be,” (Césaire et al. 2012, p. 27) Martinetti is not interested in the self-reflexive act of aggressively examining and transmuting his own work, but in the defensive devouring of others. As he continues, his exultation of struggle and aggression comes to resemble American domestic and foreign policy in the late twentieth century more than those who actively resisted it. Marinetti’s futurism is predicated on the destruction of anything, intentionally or unintentionally, that would oppose the movement. The “multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution” he imagines futurism will bring at the turn of the twentieth century, sounds flat and monochromatic a hundred years later in its glorification of war, destruction, “militarism, patriotism…and scorn for woman” (Marinetti 1909). His is the “multicolored, polyphonic” revolution of the young white, able-bodied, male with ample investment capital and access to a bevy of technology a staggering majority of the world’s population could never imagine owning in their own home. Marinetti’s futurist aesthetic is not for everyone, nor was it intended to be. There is no room in his futurism for the colonized, feminized bodies upon which an industrialized West has been built. Alondra Nelson (2002) states that “in constructing his vision of the future, Marinetti implicitly evoked a subjectivity that was decidedly male, young, and carved out in relation to the past and the ‘feminine’” (p. 2). A closer look at Marinetti (1909) reveals that this young maleness is also decidedly white and that the feminine past is a black one full of “black spectres,” a “maternal ditch almost full of muddy water” reminiscent of the “blessed black beast of [his] Sudanese nurse.” In “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” the past is a car wreck that Marinetti has wrestled with and won. He careens into the ditch of a black and female past. He emerges from the wreckage bruised, bloodied, and with his arm in a sling, but intact and alive, resolved to never look back. The future is for the white and the living. The past is for the black, the feminine, and the dead.

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Of course, the future that Marinetti imagined and promptly wrote black women out of is quite simple compared to the spaceships, transporters, and clone armies of today’s science fiction. And yet, one of Marinetti’s legacies endures—black women are nearly invisible in science fiction today. Notably, it is not only in the work of white authors that black women’s futures are dismissed. W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 short story “The Comet,” is one such example of a text that nearly disappears the presence of the black woman. Often heralded as a foundational moment in Black Speculative Fiction, “The Comet” tells the story of Jim, “a tall, dark workingman of the better class” and Julia a white woman “rarely beautiful and richly gowned, with darkly-golden hair” (Du Bois 1999), both of whom believe they are the last living souls on Earth after a comet strike destroys the city of Manhattan. In the wake of large-scale tragedy and devastation, socioeconomic stratification melts away. Jim ceases to be the long unrecognized bank errand “boy” and Julia no longer the frangible daughter of a New York business tycoon. In an instant, what once was forbidden and unthinkable becomes entirely logical, if not poetic. The last man and woman alive prepare to fall into each other’s arms, determined to repopulate and build the world anew. Before they can draw any closer to one another, however, additional survivors surface around the city and converge on their position. Among them are Julia’s white father and fiancé who quickly lead her away, but not before handing Jim a few dollars for his troubles. And just as Jim is left alone to reflect on his losses, a “brown, small, and toil-worn” (Du Bois 1999) woman mounts the platform and rushes towards him. In one of her arms lays “the corpse of a dark baby,” (Du Bois 1999) while the other reaches towards Jim—the man assumed to be her husband—who catches her in his embrace. His wife lives but the future he had once planned with her has perished like their baby, ending as abruptly as the future he had so quickly imagined with Julia, the would be “mighty mother of all men to come” (Du Bois 1999), and their bronze-skinned children who will never see the light of day. In the world of Du Bois’s short story, the promise of freedom, racial solidarity, and a future that overcomes centuries of systemic dehumanization is only possible with the destruction of everything and everyone but the black man and the white woman. “The Comet” is not a text I am

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interested in centering in a lineage of Afrofuturistic feminist sensibilities or black women’s speculative fiction. It is difficult not to suspect that “The Comet” advocates for a world without black women, however unintentionally. At the close of the story, the promise of equality and a white woman to bed rapidly fades as the “brown, small, and toil-worn woman” approaches (Du Bois 1999). Jim returns to his broken-down wife who— holding firm to the corpse of their baby—could no more signal social death than if she too were dead. Here, the black woman is the anthesis of the future as time slows to a standstill around her. Marinetti and Du Bois’s work paint black women as dangerous harbingers of death and misfortune unbearably mired in the past when in truth, black women are not dangerous so much as endangered because of the unique position they occupy in space and time. Jim’s “toil-worn woman” carrying death in one arm is uncannily reminiscent of Dana Franklin, the complex protagonist of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, whose arm is not clutching the past but is literally stuck in the past. The novel centers around Dana, a young black woman aspiring to be a published writer, who has the unbelievable misfortune of coming face to face with the historical past of slavery and is repeatedly transported between her California home in 1976 to antebellum Maryland in the early 1800s. On her last trip to the past, Dana’s arm is painfully extracted from her body and does not survive the trip back home. Dana is permanently mentally and physically changed by her sustained run-ins with the past, but she lives. Unlike Marinetti and Du Bois, Butler’s groundbreaking work as a black woman writing speculative fiction resists the equation of black women as the dead weight of the past while also resisting the “futurist” construction of the past as uninstructive or useless. Today, Octavia Butler’s impact on the genre of science fiction and black women’s writing is widely recognized. Though Butler never had any children of her own, in the years since her death, groups of queer and trans community organizers and artists of color have situated Butler as an ancestral mother whose writing was key in their politicization and their belief that other, freer worlds are possible. But before Butler’s work was to be celebrated, it first came under scrutiny during the Black Power Movement. During a phone interview with Gregory Jerome Hampton in 2002, Octavia Butler recalls the challenges of writing the “unreal” during

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the height of the Black Arts movement. “When I began writing back in the 60s, my writing of anything but utter reality was considered some kind of, almost a betrayal, a waste of time at best. I was supposed to, according to some people” Butler says, “be contributing to the struggle and not writing things that weren’t real” (Hampton 2010, p. 137). Yet, is Butler’s work, influenced by her lived experience as a black woman and girl, any less true, powerful, or fictive than the autobiography of Assata Shakur who imagines herself to freedom when, after years of being embroiled in the prison industrial complex, she realizes that the real prison is in her mind? Is Butler’s work any less theoretical than that of Audre Lorde’s biomythography, told in a mix of poetry and prose, and filled with imagined encounters with spirits who may not be present but nonetheless feel real? Regardless of Butler’s political leanings or insistence that her books are not meditations on race and racism, her work—like Shakur and Lorde’s— bears resemblance to what Smith and Watson (1998) have named the autobiographical manifesto, a liberatory practice of “self-conscious encounters” forcing issues of the present and recent past “into the light of day” (p. 435). Butler’s experiences growing up as a black woman in the United States during desegregation are undoubtedly woven through her work. Likewise, the deleterious effects of racism, sexism, and poverty that touch the lives of so many black women across the world are threads woven into the tapestry of Butler’s untimely death in February of 2006 at 58 years of age, on the walkway just outside of her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington. It is no coincidence that Butler (1988), who was known to do her own manifestary writing where she would declare the future success of her books and prophesize the financial stability necessary to purchase and pay off a new home for her mother, once deemed it necessary to declare “I will get the best of health care for my mother and myself.” In light of the untimely demise of black feminist creatives and scholars such as Butler, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and others, the work of the imagination becomes necessary in keeping alive the work of influential black feminists. Speculative fiction provides an avenue for the recovery and the remembrance of those whose manifestos “through compelling myths and metaphors… map[ped] alternative futures for the ‘i’ in the late twentieth century” (Smith and Watson 1998, p. 439). And it is

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black women’s speculative fiction in particular that challenges us to create worlds where paradigm-shifting scholarship, art, and mentorship need not necessitate black women’s death. It is also no coincidence that Kindred’s Dana Franklin loses an arm on her last trip home. In Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction, Sami Schalk interprets Dana’s disability not as an empty metaphor or plot device but as “a material reference to experiences of slavery,” and the sobering reality that black women are, by design, among those populations most vulnerable to the inevitability of disability. Schalk (2018) even goes a step further to offer a reading of Dana’s involuntary time travel as an abstract form of disability, “For [Dana], time travel is not voluntary or fun. It is a difficult and painful experience that constantly endangers her” (p.  52). Dana does not choose to leave her arm in the past. The arm is forcibly taken from her, a price exacted for her return to the future, a physical reminder of just how much a lack of progress around race and gender is inscribed onto her body. Dana’s body becomes a literal bridge between the past, present, and future. Even when Dana finally returns to the present, her empty sleeve and phantom pains remind her that she cannot escape the material reality of the past. For Dana, the past is so inescapable—so present—that her story begins as it ends, with the loss of her left arm. Butler’s play with temporality regarding the events of the novel insinuates that Dana may never have had both her arms to begin with and, even if she did, they were never fully hers to claim. For every infinite number of Danas missing an arm, there are an infinite number of black women who are missing something, or, returning from their journeys with something extra. Like “Dana’s arm, Dana’s body, and Dana’s memory” they too are “past-­ elsewhere and present-incomplete” (McKittrick 2006, p. 35). The past, Butler shows us, is not simply wreckage or a wife and dead child from which we can walk away. It is impossible to walk into the future without carrying the past with us, this is especially so for black women and gender diverse people for whom the past has very present and real consequences. Our relationship to the past must be constantly renegotiated and our interactions with the past must be instructive. Dana’s story begins after she’s returned from her last trip to antebellum Maryland. Butler’s novel resists white western conceptions of time by

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demonstrating how greatly intertwined the threads of the past are in black women’s lives. Black women experience time differently, in ways that at once defy and are structured by white supremacist logic. Kindred also demonstrates that although one’s proximity to a slave past can be indicative of their proximity to immanent death, the past itself is not dead. The past and all of its attendant meanings are living things or, at the very least, undead ones. If, as Schalk (2018) proposes, Dana spends the novel haunted by the threat of disability then it is also instructive to consider the past, like Dana’s disability, a part of that haunting. The Weylin plantation and all of its inhabitants are haints that haunt Dana’s life in 1976 but through the device of time travel, she experiences them as living and breathing beings. Within the construct of haunting, Dana’s movements to and from the past take on altered significance. As Avery Gordon (2011) establishes in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, haunting is a dynamic experience because it requires action, requires a “something-to-­ be-done.” Dana cannot travel into the past and do nothing. The problem however is that Dana makes a fatal calculation. She believes that the ghost who haunts her is that of her maternal white great-great-great grandfather Rufus Weylin who is the first person she encounters in her visits to the past. Each time Dana is pulled back in time, she encounters a version of Rufus who is on the brink of death. Her mission, Dana believes, is to preserve the life of her white slave-owning ancestor long enough for him to father the child that will ensure Dana’s future birth. What Dana misses and what Linh Hua’s incisive reading of Kindred makes clear, is that it is not Rufus’s life she has been given the incredible opportunity to save, but the life of her enslaved great-great-great grandmother Alice. Alice Greenwood is a born freedwoman who is sold into slavery after an attempt to escape north with her enslaved husband Isaac is foiled. Just as Dana encounters Rufus at various points in his life, she too encounters Alice at various crossroads since the other woman’s life is bound to Rufus by his desire for Alice’s companionship, which later becomes indistinguishable from his desire for complete ownership. Though Butler tells us that Dana and Alice look remarkably similar, as readers it is difficult to imagine them to be so alike because of the century between them. As the first-person narrator of the novel, readers must come to rely on Dana’s

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perspective to make sense of her story. It is clear that Dana certainly imagines herself very different from Alice as a “modern” black woman who is paid wages and has the right to vote in elections and legally marry and cohabitate with her white husband. Dana is insistent that she is a visitor to the past, not a resident. And yet, though Dana’s visits to the past are temporary, they are not ephemeral. The more often Dana returns to the past, the longer she stays and the more difficult it becomes for her to keep up the appearance of control over her time spent on the Weylin plantation. Though Dana’s time travel ability has fascinated slaves and masters alike on the plantation, Alice Greenwood is far from impressed. As a formerly freedwoman, Alice is intimately familiar with the slippage between the categories of free and enslaved and recognizes how dangerously close Dana is to losing everything. It is also imperative to note that, whether or not Dana realizes it, her patrilineal investment in Rufus is a simultaneous divestment from Alice, whose children are the result of rape and other acts of violence and control that Rufus wields over the enslaved woman as her master. Unfortunately, the success of Dana’s mission is entirely dependent on further circumscribing Alice’s freedom. As Angelyn Mitchell (2001) writes, “Dana’s charge,” however difficult it may be, “to keep Rufus alive until he fathers Hagar, is actually less complicated than Alice’s mission, which is to continue to live in a state of bondage that offers little incentive to live” (p. 62). A major source of contention between the two women can be attributed to their shared relationship with Rufus and the fact that overtime, Rufus’s fascination with Alice is split by the presence of her doppelgänger and descendent Dana. Alice’s strategic refusal to grant Rufus her emotional companionship is undermined by Dana’s care for him. Though Dana once believed her presence could save Rufus from moral failings of plantation ownership, her arrival ultimately makes it easier for Rufus to fulfill his desires. “He likes me in bed, and you out of bed,” Alice tells Dana. “You and I look alike if you can believe what people say…all that means we’re two halves of the same woman” (Butler 2004, p. 228). What Dana imagines to be a mountain of difference between them appears, to Alice, a molehill. Though Alice may be envious of the extent of Dana’s

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self-determination, she is most deeply troubled by  the discovery  that Alice and Dana are far too much alike in status than they should be. For some of the slaves on the plantation, Dana is a beacon of hope that the domestic slave trade will soon come to an end. For others, Dana’s presence is a source of resentment, a bitter reminder of their inability to escape their circumstances as demonstrated by the disastrous results of Alice and Isaac’s failed escape attempt. Curiously, though feelings between the two women are charged, Alice arguably falls into neither camp. Though Alice may have been initially impressed with Dana’s ability to negotiate living conditions on the Weylin Plantation, Alice’s thorny interactions with Dana demonstrate that she is skeptical of the promise of the future, and rightfully so. It is no coincidence that Dana and Alice are two halves of the same woman, one living at the height of the domestic slave trade, and the other living just a few days before the celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial. Alice has seen the future in the face of her very great granddaughter, but where she hoped to see signs of a paradisiacal future, Alice sees only a distorted mirror that reflects the woman’s own face back at her. Alice is not hopeful. Nor is she jealous so much as she is disappointed. Alice recognizes in her descendent the signs of a woman with circumscribed agency all too well and knows that Dana is less free than she herself realizes and less free than any woman should be in 1976. The time traveler’s very presence on the Weylin Plantation is a stark reminder that the promises of emancipation are empty and cold. The future, Alice decides, is far from safe and the present is horrifyingly unbearable. Where everyone else in town fails to notice the peculiarity of Dana’s left arm, Alice sees it. Alice sees through the dizzying glimmer of magic that hides an empty hanging sleeve, the ghostly shadow of an appendage that will be forfeited to a cruel master the same as any other fugitive slave sentenced to severe punishment for running. In the end, Dana’s greatest transgression is choosing Rufus over Alice. At no point in the novel does Dana imagine another relationship between her and her foremother to be possible. This is made all the more tragic by Dana’s failure to recognize that to choose Alice would have been tantamount to choosing herself. Hua’s reading of Kindred reveals that Dana’s choice was not a compulsory choice but a poor choice that would cost both women their lives as

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they previously understood them. In the novel, there is no scientific or mathematical explanation provided for Dana’s trips into the past. We do not know how, exactly, Dana time travels, only that she does. Therefore, the novel presents no real evidence that Dana must protect Rufus’s life to preserve her own. Instead, Dana’s investments in speculative time are the logics that structure her actions on the Weylin plantation. Hua (2011, p. 391) defines speculative time as a “correlation between whiteness and futurity that is secured through contractual investments in the slave trade, investments that are sentimentalized into a historical narrative by liberal philosophy as the developmental time of the subject.” Simply put, white futures have been and continue to be secured on the backs of black people and the commodification of slave labor. It is not that Dana must save Rufus, but that the afterlives of slavery and plantation logics lead Dana and the novel’s readers to assume Rufus is the only way forward. Speculative time is so insidious that Rufus’s violent and sexual coercive relationship with Alice is not his greatest shortcoming but is instead his greatest economic success. Dana is the return on his speculative investment. Dana’s missing left arm is not a metaphor but a lesson. Unlike Marinetti and Du Bois, she cannot afford to invest in a white heteropatriarchal future that necessitates the death of black women and femmes so that others may live. In the end, Dana’s connection to the past is permanently severed and she returns home for the last time on July 4, 1976. During her last trip to the plantation, Alice commits suicide, Dana murders Rufus for attempting to rape her, and Nigel—an enslaved man belonging to the Weylins—burns down the house to cover up the true cause of  Rufus’s demise. Where Dana expects to find a sense of finality, she instead finds herself haunted by her experiences. At the close of the novel, Dana and her white husband Kevin who also had the misfortune of traveling back in time, make their way to the former site of the Weylin Plantation. Though both Dana and Kevin experienced shared traumas as a result of their time in the 1800s, Kevin is not affected physically, mentally, nor spiritually in the same ways as Dana. Trauma is not tantamount to haunting, though Gordon (2011) acknowledges that trauma can produce haunting. Dana is the one haunted by her time in Maryland, not Kevin. It is Dana who is confronted with the something-to-be-done (p. 2).

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And, as Dana finds at the end of the novel, the only way to exercise a haunting is to confront it, to move through it, and towards the something-to-be-done. Kevin’s ability to create emotional distance from the past is indicative of his white maleness. “It’s over,” Kevin says, misunderstanding that the past is not over for Dana. In fact, it is the “over-and-done-with,” that Gordon (2011, p.  2) defines as a significant part of misunderstanding haunting in general. Their literal trips to the past may be over but afterlives of those experiences, the afterlives of slavery, continue to impact everything from the landscape  that surrounds them to the minutia of their everyday lives. If Kevin is right about one thing, it is when he insists “There’s nothing you can do to change any of it now” (Butler 2004, p. 256). It’s not that Dana was always powerless to change the past, but rather that the immense possibility her travels once presented has been curtailed by her inaction. Though it might be difficult for Dana to comprehend, there is no reason to believe that Dana’s presence on the Weylin Plantation did anything. Dana’s actions to prevent disturbances in her “timeline” effectively result in no changes to her present. Alice, Nigel, and the others will continue to haunt Dana because when there was a something-­to-be-done, and Dana did not do it. Outside of the converted mansion of the Maryland Historical Society, Dana touches her empty sleeve and questions why she cannot let go of the past. “Why did I even want to come here. You’d think I would have had enough of the past.” The last page of the novel ends with Dana deeply troubled about the lack of archival information available regarding her enslaved friends and family members she left behind. Dana’s story ends much like the others on the plantation, frustratingly unresolved. Regrettably, not even futuristic sci-fi written by other black women can promise a world in which black women are free of gendered, racialized, or economic oppression—nor should it. The act of imagining liberated futures for black women is most useful as an exercise or brief respite but should not be used to evade inescapable material realities. Traditionally dominated by white men, speculative fiction too often dismisses current and historical issues of race and gender in the genre, externalizing white supremacist fears of growing populations and freedoms of people of color into zombie outbreaks, hostile inhuman aliens, and various other

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doomsday situations. Susana M.  Morris (2016) finds that the “fearsoaked doomdayism and apocalyptic fervor” in speculative fiction and everyday discourse reflects white people’s “terror of being unable to adequately contain, police, and repress people of color” (p.  37). At other times, the deployment of popular speculative fiction tropes is less about exploring spellbinding alternate universes than it is a reflection of poorly veiled “yearning for the “comforts” of heteropatriarchy,” or a disturbing “vehicle for disseminating a vision of the future that looks startlingly like the past” (Morris 2012, p. 150). Where uncritical white sci-fi luxuriates in the fantasies of monoracial societies with endless supplies of sexually willing alien beauties  and sprawling utopias where all seriously deviant threats have been successfully eradicated, black women’s speculative fiction is less an escape than it is a training simulation to keep minds sharp, battle ready, and prepared for a range of different scenarios that are progressively plausible as current affairs become increasingly dystopic. Black women’s speculative fiction uses the conventions of the genre as a stage to examine familiar inequalities in new and compelling situations that may yield surprising strategies for coping with injustice by directly addressing disparity rather than creating escape hatches around systemic oppression. Kindred, for example, is not a vacation from black women’s material challenges, but rather a detailed survival manual that encourages black women to reflect critically on the limits of emancipation and the perturbing similitude of freedom and bondage. Dana’s story is a cautionary tale about the insidiousness of speculative time. Unlike Marinetti and Du Bois who have the ability, or at the very least are afforded the illusion of walking away from the “wreckage” of the past, Dana cannot truly walk away from Alice. As Dana realizes each time she reaches for her empty left sleeve, Kindred stands to remind all black women that we will never be free until the most embattled of us are free.

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Mundane Futurism At the 2004 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, Geoff Ryman and other participants drafted a manifesto that would be the center of the mundane science fiction movement, encouraging a new approach to science fiction as a genre that ultimately focuses on human cultures and technologies, imagining the myriad ways they could develop on planet Earth. The manifesto calls for the creation of sci-fi that is not dependent on faster-than-light space travel and communication, dismissing mass-manufactured sci-fi like Star Wars and Star Trek as fantasies that absolve today’s human beings from responsibility to planet Earth and to each other. Instead, the undersigned authors—who also call themselves “The Mundanes”—believe that the most exciting challenge of science fiction is to consider that “Earth is all we have” and ask, “What will we do with it?” (Ryman et al. 2004). What happens when there is only Earth and a future carefully extrapolated from the costly and slow-developing technology we have now, “no alternative universes or parallel worlds,” and “no time travel or teleportation?” (Ryman et al. 2004). Though these boundaries may be interpreted as creatively oppressive by some, The Mundanes believe that realistic constraints give way to a further complex imagining of the future of the human condition. In a keynote speech at Boréal, a Canadian francophone science fiction and fantasy convention, Ryman details his broader critiques of the genre that led him to found The Mundanes, and the philosophy that structures the movement. In conversation with the introduction to Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, Ryman alleges that dependence on unlikely technologies, and tropes—labeled the “bonfire of stupidity”—allow people to escape into a dream of a world that will never be, rather than dream of a world that could be. This focus on the impossible detracts attention from the mundane challenges of everyday life, functioning as a Deus-Ex-­ Machina to “save” humanity from having to clean up its own environmental, political, and economic mess. Perhaps, more than anything, such fiction is born of what Arendt, writing in the age of Sputnik referred to as a “rebellion against human existence as it has been given” (as cited in Ryman 2007), a deep desire to leave humanity and the course of human

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history as it has unfolded, behind. Exchanging it for something engineered. In mass-produced sci-fi, “the aim is NOT to write about a real future” Ryman (2007) tells us, because mass-market sci-fi does not want to think of the future or even the present so much as it wants to project its favorite aspects of the past into a badly imagined future that is “just like the more exciting parts of the past only with better toys.” Ryman associates a sense of escapism and a desire for new adventure far away from home to the innate biological desire of humans in their adolescence to strike out on their own, for adult humans to escape—even in thought—the drudgery of their domestic lives. For him, the larger themes that drive mass-market sci-fi and the fantasies most common to the genre reach beyond the cultural, tapping into a psychology that is relatable to people across the globe. There is merit in Ryman’s argument regarding the ways the human condition influences our engagement with, and production of, mass market sci-fi. Cultural context in science fiction, however, is too significant to be overlooked. If the majority of popular futurist writing is, in fact, not concerned with the future at all but rather harkening back to a romanticized past with new technological bells and whistles, which pasts are readers and writers longing for? If the publication, televising, and filming of science fiction like many Anglophone literary fields, began with and continues to be inundated with white and presumably heterosexual men, then the dreams and desires that shape much of mass market sci-fi is cultural to a greater extent than Ryman or others realize. The universal narrative that Ryman looks to deconstruct is a white one, interested in returning to pasts where the benefits of white supremacy were believed to be more abundant. It is not communities of color that assert a desire to promote cultural norms of the 1950s, or even the 1850s, into space as a form of enjoyable escape from the mundanity of life. The dreams of mass market sci-fi and the pasts they romanticize are incredibly dependent on the systems and power relations that structure everyday life. Despite the prominence of some sci-fi narratives over others, different marginalized communities have their own dreams, however basic or complex. Though “The Mundane Manifesto” does not address race, gender, or sexuality; it does not foreclose a discussion of intersecting identities either. Arguably, the commitment to Earth and the exploration

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of its cultures would necessitate full consideration of the diverse range of human populations and the realities of their living conditions that have been shaped by centuries of war, environmental disregard, and economic inequalities endemic of global capitalism. As Ryman (2007) says, “We face so many unpleasant and pressing issues for which there will be no cheap, quick easy fixes.” Mundane Science Fiction presents an opportunity for mainstream sci-fi to address the “unpleasant” and “pressing issues” of the present, or explore the risks of ignoring worsening social, political, and economic conditions.

Burn This Manifesto Remaining true to their desire to disrupt the status quo, The Mundanes end their declaration with both a promise and a directive—To burn this manifesto as soon as it gets boring (Ryman et al. 2004). The work is by no means exhaustive, nor does it claim to be. Instead, The Mundanes invite challenge and debate that aptly reflects the changing times to which they have dedicated their work. Ryman and The Mundanes faced so much resistance that Ritch Calvin’s feature in the 2009 Science Fiction Research Review covering Mundane Science Fiction, dedicates a section to “The Controversy” surrounding the manifesto’s publication, referring bluntly to the “great deal of vitriol” (p. 14) faced by the authors. Critics, it seems, were all-too-happy to burn the manifesto and not in the spirit of jest The Mundanes originally intended. It would be nine years after the 2004 Clarion workshop that Martine Syms, a black multimedia artist and conceptual entrepreneur, would present her take on the project—a mundane manifesto specifically meant for a black audience. “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” was originally written as part of a larger project Syms had undertaken, a sound work named Most Days comprising of a table reading of a play written by Syms and a score composed in tandem with Neal Reinalda. More than palimpsest, “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” borrows its entire form from “The Mundane Science Fiction Manifesto.” Both manifestos are composed of the same four sections that first “recognize” an initial set of unifying beliefs predicated on actively rejecting popular tropes, then “rejoice in” setting

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fire to said tropes while “also recogniz[ing]” the generative possibilities Mundane (Afro)futurism offers the science fiction community and, in this case, black artist and scholar communities. Finally, each manifesto ends with a “promise” to create projects that follow in the proposed tradition. And, in the spirit of Mundanes everywhere, The Mundane Afrofuturists promise to “burn this manifesto” as soon as it gets boring (Syms 2013). For all their initial similarities, however, it is the differences between the two manifestos that are most interesting. Unlike those at the Clarion West Workshop who were interested in incorporating scientifically accurate technology and terminology in their work, Syms rejects the venerated positioning of Fact and Science noting that historically,  both concepts have been essential in upholding white supremacy and hegemony. Instead, Syms (2013) calls for a focus on “an emotionally true,” widely shared and accessible reality which she believes is a necessary shift from an unequivocal acceptance of white cultural and political norms to properly prioritizing and validating the beliefs and observations of African descended people. In addition, while both manifestos share similar beliefs about the scientific and financial unlikelihood of interstellar space travel, more of the Mundane Afrofuturist’s critique of space travel is centered in rejecting the likelihood that space travel will put an end to centuries of global economic, racial, gender, and sexual inequality. “Cyberspace” too she reminds us “was prefigured upon a ‘master/slave’ relationship” (Syms 2013). Even the most basic hard drive start-up functions on our computers are informed by histories of colonialism and chattel slavery. Though the two manifestos share an important premise—to center humanity, the extraordinary of the everyday, and remain connected to Earth—their audiences are vastly different. Given Ryman’s connection to science fiction publishing and the context “The Mundane Manifesto” arose out of, particularly his mentoring of science fiction writing neophytes, his manifesto speaks to science fiction authors both established and obscure, but especially new authors, who might be among the ranks of “whoever will join [The Mundanes] in Mundanity.” Syms, who circulates mostly in the black art world in Los Angeles, is speaking to broader audience of creatives, academics, and art aficionados who may be readers of the New Museum’s experimental digital art and culture blog Rhizomes

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where the manifesto was published in 2013. “The Afrofuturist Mundane Manifesto,” invites a wide range of readers, but speaks directly to black audiences in a way that “The Mundane Manifesto” could not. Where Ryman vaguely gestures at the importance of dealing with the complicated mess that humanity is in, Syms does not shy away from labeling. For her, centering the future around humanity means dealing with very specific and namable problems. Actively resisting the detrimental urge to escape our daily realities means “No forgetting about political, racial, social, economic, and geographic struggles” (Syms 2013). This directive is not only addressing the most privileged who are directly responsible or reap the benefits of these struggles, but also the marginalized communities that are most affected by these struggles. When Syms (2013) declares “No revisionist history,” and “no portals to the Egyptian kingdoms…no flying Africans to whisk us off to the promised land” she is speaking to creatives and their audiences who engage these tropes not to evade the consequences of their harmful actions, but to rest from the daily “nonsense that regularly—and sometimes violently—accents black life.” Solely fantasizing about portals and black holes to worlds where white heteropatriarchal capitalism is easily disappeared does not, in the long term, bring us any closer to making such a world a reality. This is why mundane Afrofuturism is imperative. Instead of using fantasy and science fiction to avoid struggles, Syms wants to use the imaginative to address injustice  head on. There is, after all, nothing like “the electric feeling that Mundane Afrofuturism is the ultimate laboratory for worldbuilding outside of imperialist, capitalist, white patriarchy” (Syms 2013). There is nothing like the electric feeling that dealing with the most miserable and dangerous aspects of our lives might be the most effective way to ensure our wildest fantasies come true. Despite the urgent need to examine the ways black futures are imagined and enacted, there is also a humor to Syms’s work. Though Ryman has insisted that “The Mundane Manifesto” was jocular in nature, it was not received as such (Calvin 2009, p. 14). Syms’s pastiche, however, is appreciably humorous. It is difficult to resist the flippant tone with which the Mundane Afrofuturists dismiss decades of tropes in Afrofuturism, despite how near and dear these tropes may be to longtime fans of the genre. Syms (2013) is “alternately pissed off and bored,” with many of

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“the hackeyed tropes” common to Afrofuturism like “jive-talking aliens; Jive-talking Mutants; Magical Negroes,” “sassiness,” and even “platform shoes.” Illusions to ancient Egypt are not safe either, nor are references to white enslavement. And, most painfully, the Mundane Afrofuturists reject much beloved black entertainers such as Sun Ra, Parliament Funkadelic, and Janelle Monáe. It is also amusing to note that the Wu Tang Clan made the list as well, directly after the manifesto rejects “inexplicable skill in the martial arts” (Syms 2013). Whatever Syms’s (2013) original intentions, the manifesto laughs at itself and invites others to do the same, promising “to burn this manifesto as soon as it gets boring.” Certainly, Syms’s manifesto is not above critique. Her proposition is compelling and presents an excellent foundation for considering how Afrofuturism can be an especially meaningful artistic form to transform African and African diaspora people’s relationship to the future, but “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” does not read as inherently diasporic in nature. In particular, Syms rejection of magic, the supernatural, fantasy, and the magical potential of black people’s relationship with the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea and thus, possible connections between the Middle Passage and space travel, misses the mark. Though “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto” refuses to be centered in “hard science,” both manifestos operate with the assumption that a mundane future is synonymous with a “real” future, aligning with a sense of realistic fiction. Emphasis on realism forecloses the contributions of many authors and artists from Africa, the Caribbean, and their more immediate diasporas where what is considered magic and fantasy in the white West is mundane for people whose cultural and religious beliefs (and the struggles to maintain those connections) are often the fodder for white fantasy tropes and franchises. In a candid discussion at The University of Texas at Austin Symposium for African Writers, Somali-American and Nigerian-American fantasy and science-fiction authors Sofia Samatar and Nnedi Okorafor shared their opinions on “magic realism” as a misnomer for black speculative fiction, the need to emphasize the African continent in Afrofuturist discourse, and the “incredibly awkward” (Bady 2015) experience of receiving the bust of celebrated Science Fiction icon—and renowned

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racist H.P. Lovecraft—as a symbol of their high achievement in the field. Before 2018, Samatar and Okorafor were the only two writers of African descent to ever have won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel since the award’s  inception in 1975. Though Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany are recipients of two other prestigious science fiction and fantasy awards, The Hugo and The Nebula, they have never even been nominated for the category of best novel. Samatar and Okorafor are far from unaware of the racist origins of sci-fi and how these origins continue to play out in award decisions. The beginnings of magic realism also have racist roots in attempting to denaturalize or exoticize the experiences of people of color or as a strange catchall for what Samatar believes is more accurately “speculative fiction by brown people” (Bady 2015). While both writers are suspect of exactly which works have come to be categorized as magical realism (Samatar outright rejects magic realism as a genre), Okorafor acknowledges that the genre can serve as a doorway into sci-fi and fantasy for people of color citing that she was only able to meet her Creative Writing PhD requirements by temporarily reclassifying her writing as magical realism as her program did not allow for her to write ‘Science-Fiction.’ “It’s complicated” Okorafor admits, “I can’t fully dismiss magical realism because…most magical realist writers are incorporating the mystical aspects of their culture into their works, and that’s different than fantasy” (Bady 2015). Samatar and Okorafor are gesturing at the difficulty of classifying the work of black diasporic writers within western categories and the need for either new categories or more capacious ways of conceptualizing existing categories. Okorafor specifically foresees this as a noticeable difference between Afrofuturistic writing in the west—primarily the United States as the geographical origin of “Afrofuturism”—and a growing presence of futurist writing on the African continent. Though there are undoubtedly shared cultural beliefs and experiences between black communities in both places, Okorafor believes that American Afrofuturism is heavily based on a western tradition of “Science-Fiction” whereas Africanfuturism has the potential to draw from sources outside of an American mythos or model, “writing from their own roots, rather than imitating what’s already out there” (Bady 2015).

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Regardless, Okorafor’s opinion is that science fiction, simply put, “is just speculating about the future, and imagining” (Bady 2015). Even still, Samatar and Okorafor contend that there should still be important conventions for the genre, no matter how broad the interpretation, that includes a sense of connection to the present and the past. To speculate about the future, one must draw from an established past and present. This is especially so for Afrofuturism, which as Samatar says “has always been concerned with the past” (Bady 2015). Considering that Afrofuturism responds to the concerns of those who have been figuratively and literally written out of the future, it would be impracticable for Afrofuturist writers not to examine pasts and presents of enslavement and imperialism that, without physical and mental resistance, foreclose future possibilities for afro-descendant peoples. And yet, as Martine Syms makes clear, recycling images of black pasts from Ancient Egypt or conflating experiences of The Middle Passage with outer space with little concern for contemporary Africa, does not inherently produce radical or liberatory writing that embraces a diversity of black sexualities, genders, and cultural backgrounds.

Afrofuturist Feminism In “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E.  Butler’s ‘Fledgling,’” named for Renina Jarmon’s hashtag, Susana M.  Morris, a founding member of the influential Crunk Feminist Collective, outlines her vision for the profound connections between Black Feminist Thought and Afrofuturism. Morris credits her understanding of Afrofuturism to scholars such as Mark Dery, who established the term in 1994 (see Dery 1994); Alondra Nelson, who edited a special issue of Social Text on the subject (see Nelson 2002); Kodwo Eshun who deftly articulated the significance of reimagining and “recovering the histories of counter-futures” as central to the project of Afrofuturism (see Eshun 2003); and Lisa Yaszek, who situated Afrofuturism in a tradition of black speculative fiction writing in the twentieth century (see Yaszek 2006). In short, she sums up their contributions as demonstrating how “Afrofuturism insists that blacks fundamentally are the future and that

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Afrodiasporic cultural practices are vital to imagining the continuance of human society” (Morris 2012, p. 153). Morris acknowledges that Octavia Butler’s writing has been most influential in outlining Afrofuturist Feminism, particularly citing the author’s short essay “Positive Obsession” as establishing Butler’s belief in the potential of speculative fiction “to catalyze progressive political change” (Butler  as cited in Morris 2012, p. 154). Speculative Fiction writing is an act capable of enacting—if not essential in—the positive transformation of the future. Morris contends this sentiment is decidedly an Afrofuturist feminist notion. This transformation, however, is not achieved by the invention of quick-fix utopias. If Butler’s fiction serves as a blueprint for other Afrofuturist Feminist work as Morris contends it does, then it is significant that Butler’s writing centers full and complicated (hi)stories of black women and their struggles to realize the creation of a just future. Afrofuturist Feminism supports the most important concepts of Mundane Afrofuturism, particularly embracing speculative fiction as a vehicle for change and as an anti-capitalist anti-white supremacist “worldbuilding laboratory,” without dismissing the speculative fiction of black women that rework and often subvert, tropes involving magic, maritime adventures, and time and space travel. Afrofuturist feminism does not purport to solve the world’s problems, but rather uses projections of the future or reimaginings of the past to suggest different ways that we might approach systemic change in the present. If the work of an Afrofuturist feminist, Morris (2016) asserts, “is actively reconfiguring the contours of futurist discourse” (p. 36), then the work of an Afrofuturist feminist manifesto would be the same. As artist Taneyka Word insists, an Afrofuturist feminism “rooted in ethnicity and gender” can enjoy the most elaborate conventions of science fiction and fantasy without “need[ing] to eradicate the black or female body nor the history it has witnessed” (Pezanoski-Browne 2014). For example, Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy violates a number of tenants of Mundane Afrofuturism in centering the story of a black woman named Lilith who is saved at the eleventh hour from assured nuclear destruction by a race of space-faring aliens. The Oankali, who have technologically reversed the inhospitable environmental conditions of Earth, intend to use Lilith to repopulate the human race. Even with the not-so-mundane

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introduction of faster-than-light space travel and highly technologically advanced alien species, the novels remain largely centered on humans, their interactions with each other and the planet around them. Lilith’s Brood, as the trilogy is more commonly known, presents a complicated yet somehow familiar dystopia where the future is rife with nuclear war, invasion, rape, and murder. Amidst the destruction, however, the dangerous but lush and thriving environment promises a sense of regeneration and possibility that cannot be ignored. Though Lilith’s Brood engages tropes Syms’s manifesto longs to set “alight,” the late 1980s novels have had such a meaningful impact on the public imagination that it is the first major example of a black woman’s science fiction novel being optioned for film or TV. Ava DuVernay, most known for directing Wrinkle in Time, Queen Sugar, and Selma, announced she would be developing the series in August 2017 alongside friend and colleague Victoria Mahoney (Pinchefsky 2017). Similarly, in conversation with Ryman and Syms’s questions, Lilith’s Brood asks us to consider that if this newly terraformed Earth is all we have, what will we make of it? When presented with new choices we could never have imagined, will humans choose to be enmeshed in old conflicts rather than approaching new horizons together? Inevitably, the key to the mundane manifestos is not what they choose to throw on “the bonfire of Stupidities” listed above (Ryman et al. 2004; Syms 2013), but what they choose to embrace—works of science fiction and fantasy that meaningfully and progressively engage with the present and the present’s interconnectivity with legacies of the past. An Afrofuturist feminist manifesto would maintain that black speculative fiction and art imbued with queer, trans, crip, and diasporic feminist sensibilities invite audiences to collaborate in the conjuring of promising futures imagined by the most besieged of us, by the Afrofuturist feminists whose liberation will be foundational to the liberation of us all. To echo June Jordan and the elders of the Hopi Nation, these stories are the ones we have been waiting for. But to put it like Renina Jarmon (2018), “#blackgirlsarefromthefuture because we make the shit we believe in.”

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References Bady, A. (2015). Things to Come. The New Inquiry. Retrieved from https:// thenewinquiry.com/things-­to-­come/. Butler, O.  E. (1988). “I shall be a bestselling writer…” [Digital Image]. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Retrieved from https://www.huntington.org/sites/default/files/styles/photo_ gallery/public/photo-­gallery/octavia-­butler_4_0.jpg?itok=pqacPQbT. Butler, O. (2004). Kindred. Beacon Press. Calvin, R. (2009). Mundane SF 101. SFRA Review, 290, Summer, 14. Césaire, S., Maximin, D., & Walker, K.  L. (2012). The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Crenshaw, K., Ocen, P., & Nanda, J. (2015). Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, Columbia University. Dery, M. (1994). Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (p. 190). Duke University Press. Du Bois, W.  E. B. (1999). Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. Courier Corporation. Eshun, K. (2003). Further considerations of Afrofuturism. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(2), 287–302. Gordon, A. (2011). Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity. Borderlands, 10(2), 1–21. Hampton, G. J. (2010). Changing Bodies in the Fiction of Octavia Butler: Slaves, Aliens, and Vampires (p. 137). Lexington Books. Hong, G.  K. (2008). “The Future of Our Worlds”: Black Feminism and the Politics of Knowledge in the University under Globalization. Meridians, 8, 95–115. hooks, b. (1993). Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-recovery. South End Press. Hua, L. U. (2011). Reproducing Time, Reproducing History: Love and Black Feminist Sentimentality in Octavia Butler’s “Kindred”. African American Review, 44(3), 391–407. Imarisha, W. (Ed.). (2015). Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction stories from social justice movements. AK Press. James, S., Herman, J., Rankin, S., Keisling, M., Mottet, L., & Anafi, M. A. (2016). The Report of the 2015 US Transgender Survey.

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Jarmon, R. (2018). What is Black Girls are From the Future? The Meaning and History. Retrieved from http://blackgirlsarefromthefuture.com/ what-­is-­black-­girls-­are-­from-­the-­future-­2/. Lorde, A. (2007). Poetry is Not a Luxury. In Sister Outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press. Lydon, J., Carrington, K., Low, H., Miller, R., & Yazdy, M. (2015). Coming Out of Concrete Closets: A Report on Black & Pink’s National LGBTQ Prisoner Survey. Marinetti, F. T. (1909). The Futurist Manifesto. Le Figaro, 20, 39–44. McKittrick, K. (2006). Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, A. (2001). Not Enough of the Past: Feminist Revisions of Slavery in Octavia E.  Butler’s “Kindred”. Melus, 26(3), 51–75. https://doi. org/10.2307/3185557. Morris, S. M. (2012). Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s “Fledgling”. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 40(3/4), 146–166. Morris, S. M. (2016). More than Human: Black Feminisms of the Future in Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories. The Black Scholar, 46(2), 33–45. Nalo Hopkinson: “I’ll Take My Chances with the 21st Century”. The Globe and Mail. Last Modified August 21, 2015. Retrieved November 28, 2015, from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-­and-­media/nalo-­hopkinson-­ ill-­take-­my-­chances-­with-­the-­21st-­century/article26048188/. National Center for Transgender Equality. (2018). LGBTQ People Behind Bars: A Guide to Understanding the Issues Facing Transgender Prisoners and their Legal Rights. Nelson, A. (2002). Introduction: Future Texts. Social Text, 20(2), 1–15. Petrosky, E., et al. (2017). Racial and Ethnic Differences in Homicides of Adult Women and the Role of Intimate Partner Violence  — United States, 2003–2014. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 66, 741–746. https:// doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6628a1. Pezanoski-Browne, A. (2014). Black to the Future: How Women in Pop Are Carrying the Mantle of Afrofuturism. In Bitch Media. Retrieved from https:// www.bitchmedia.org/article/black-to-the-future-afrofuturism. Pinchefsky, C. (2017, August 15). Octavia Butler’s Dawn to be Adapted by Director Ava DuVernay. Retrieved from https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/ octavia-­butler-­novel-­dawn-­to-­be-­adapted-­by-­director-­ava-­duvernay.

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Ryman, G. (2007). Take the Third Star on the Left and on Til Morning. Retrieved from http://mundane-­sf.blogspot.com/2007/09/take-­third-­star-­on-­left-­and-­ on-­til.html. Ryman G., et  al. (2004). The Mundane Manifesto. Retrieved from https:// sfgenics.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/geoff-r yman-et-al-themundane-manifesto/. Schalk, S. (2018). Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Duke University Press. Smith, B. (Ed.). (2000). Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Smith, S., & Watson, J. (1998). Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Syms, M. (2013). The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto. Rhizome. Retrieved from http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/dec/17/mundane-afrofuturistmanifesto/. Women of Color & Prisons. (2018, August 02). Retrieved from https://incite-­ national.org/women-­of-­color-­prisons/. Yaszek, L. (2006). Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future. Socialism and Democracy, 20(3), 41–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 08854300600950236.

5 Writings on Dance: Artistic Reframing for Celestial Black Bodies Raissa Simpson

Codelining (Coding + Redlining) in partnership with the African American Theater Alliance for Independence, Bayview Opera House, and CounterPulse is an ongoing exploration of new media tools (motion capture, wireless sensory, projection mapping, etc.) to explore redlining, gentrification, the digital divide, and the real or perceived barriers between artists, technologists, and the African American Community. Memories are a form of knowledge. Storytelling is an impulse to recall memories and share them in a public light. In the act of telling stories, personal histories are revealed and brought to the forefront of discussion. Codelining is a series of personal critiques of San Francisco’s gentrification process. As it unfolds, the project receives input from the participating artists and residents living and working in San Francisco’s disappearing Black neighborhoods. The project’s respondents contributed their stories on a range of topics like displacement, eviction, and collective trauma. Throughout the rehearsals, the respondents imagined alternative futures

R. Simpson (*) PUSH Dance Company, San Francisco, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 P. Butler (ed.), Critical Black Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9_5

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as their memories acted as a catalyst to unearth their subconscious thoughts. Revealing what might have otherwise remained invisible. As a technology hub, I think the dance project recounts how we construct narratives surrounding San Francisco’s benevolence as a bastion for liberal idealism. Herein lies the dilemma for Black Choreographers in this uncharted terrain of gentrification; a new type of modern-day colonization has surfaced. I have observed elsewhere that “Codelining presents and represents the authenticity of movement through Black embodiment to explore the out-migration of African Americans from San Francisco due to the very coding tech industry [that] hopes to provide technological access to those Black bodies” (Simpson 2019). Codelining, coding plus redlining, is a multi-year work exploring access and the digital divide. Gathering a group of Black bodies onstage has been somewhat an almost intangible exercise in aptly bridging dance and the tech sector together. Black dancers are dispersed among the different Bay Area counties and beyond due to a mass outmigration caused by skyrocketing rents and the cost of living. I don’t consider myself an expert on the technology, nor on urban renewal policy of gentrification. However, my main reasoning for exploring the topic is to lay bare the Black embodiment and collective identity distilled in its process. How is the Black body signified in the promises the tech industry has made to build a better and harmonious future?

Signification of Celestial Bodies Afrofuturism is one such asset with the power and significance to be a catalyst for social commentary on gentrification. By signifying the body with meaning, I feel inclined to combine elements of past hip hop dances from the 1970s and 1980s (i.e. boogaloo and tutting) and movements found in Western modern dance with new media and interactive technology. Although dancemakers continue to explore extraterrestrials (aliens), science fiction, and futurism, these narratives are fraught with dominant white Western modern dance cultures and themes. By exploring tensions between dominant culture and unheard voices, I believe those segmentations of narratives allow for me, as Choreographer, to shift current dance

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practices from homogenous depictions of Black bodies onstage into an imagery of otherworldly beings. In essence, the transformation of Black dancers into celestial bodies is a counterplay on stripping away conventional dance forms down  to something rhythmically and semiotically gratifying. Afrofuturistc inquiry into movement allows me freedom to examine how Black embodiment distances itself from the white gaze. And, I strive to approach this devisement of celestial movement phrases from Africanist principles (Osumare 1993). The act of manufacturing dances through a mix of sci-fi and speculative fiction paves the way to distinctly create an Afrofuturistic characteristic and to choreograph it. Perhaps this is due, in part, to my approach to shed old colonial practices found within my own rehearsal process and make space for ancestral ritual. An example of this is evident by shifting the perspectives around what makes a dancer’s body refined, what dance techniques are displayed on stage, and overlapping unfamiliar stylistic boundaries. These departures from traditional concert dance and the association of Black identity to the past intentionally and synchronously carves out artistic autonomy.

Paradoxical Universe Many Black modern dance practitioners embrace what dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild describes as “The Black Dancing Body” (Dixon Gottschild 2003). Black dance and its choreographic forms are othered along with Black bodies in presentational stage environments. However, neither self-awareness of being the other nor Black subjectivity is exclusive to dance. While working with a group of Black mothers on a separate project, I found it was almost impossible for us as a people to discuss the future while focused on moments of survival. Without a clear path to a livable future, we’re all victims of past trauma. The habit of always being in a survivalist mode makes us inclined to avoid taking risks whereas perseverance encourages a type of unscripted spontaneity. Similar to these women, I confined myself to fear of making mistakes, a byproduct of perfectionism. As I entered the rehearsal process, I set an intention to challenge conventional notions of Black subjectivity with

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permission and forgiveness if I fell short of my goal. How we persevere is dependent upon having the capacity to use our imaginations. One of the interesting aspects of Afrofuturism is how adept it is at acknowledging past histories while attempting to redefine alternative futures. In lieu of the project’s ongoing experimental phases, the process extended me different residencies and access to members of the African American community to add their input on the simple question: How do you engage with technology on a daily basis? Admittedly, I am a choreographer whose work habitually researches the subject matter through interviews, historical data, and accompanying dance genres outside of my Western Modern dance career. I have little prior hip hop dance training, but I suppose that growing up in a science-­ fiction cult-like setting of the 1980s and 1990s in addition to breaking, popping, locking, tutting, and voguing have exposed me to these different cultural aesthetics. As far as Afrofuturism is concerned, these popular dances were born out of musical movements by artists like Sun Ra and Parliament Funk’s Mothership Connection and again by Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force’s Planet Rock and Janelle Monáe. For African Americans and other communities of color, I suspect there to be a deeper connection to rap music and hip hop culture, as these dances are recycled through time to reappear in other names and forms throughout the generations. Perhaps Katrina Hazzard-Gordon described it best when she opined the following statement: A cyclical quality distinguishes African American dance from dance elsewhere in the African diaspora. That is, an African American dance appears, then goes underground or seems to die out, only to emerge twenty years later as a “new” dance (Hazzard-Gordon 2001).

As an African American dancer of mixed ancestry who has trained extensively in European American forms of Classical Ballet and Western Modern Dance, I have a heightened awareness of my otherness in these social settings—the tools used to assimilate my appearance, to hide my Black embodiment and the performativity of my actions—as well as the veiled double consciousness employed to mask it. I contend these projections subconsciously frame phenomenological perceptions of Black

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embodiment where the stage is concerned. Black Choreographers, like myself, owe much of their lineage in concert dance to past choreographers who were able to present the Black experience in the public eye: Katherine Dunham, the first Black Choreographer to put Black Dancers on stage, opening up opportunities for Blacks in Concert dance (1943) (Fauley Emory 1988), and Alvin Ailey noted for choreographing the Black Experience during the Civil Rights Movement (1958) (Ailey 1995). Where Black embodiment is concerned, these choreographers transcended collective knowledge and current narratives to blend Black Dance with Western forms. In the following, I offer a journal of my experiences forming a research-­ to-­ choreography methodology, and using it, along with my African American dance lineage to explore themes of Afrofuturism, I explore the tensions between Black bodies dancing in white spaces, and collective histories of race as an element of struggle, I also argue for the inclusion of an intersectional construct. The works of many Black Choreographers are autobiographies drawn from memory but uniquely attuned to diasporic movement. I, too, wish to mediate between traditions such as Western Modern dance and Africanist principles while being able to argue for how Black embodiment can include the co-existence of present-day narratives in addition to futurism.

The Mechanization of Dance In a previous essay, I noted, “Black bodies are in crisis in San Francisco” (Simpson 2019). Beyond its reputation for cultural diversity and technological innovation, San Francisco’s African American population (3–6% or approximately 40,000 among 800,000 residents) has diminished rapidly in recent years. As it pertains to this project, the high cost of living and housing has left Black dancers with no choice but to seek refuge elsewhere. In the wake of this Black exodus, tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter continue to grab land and resources for its workers. Place, in itself, is a metaphorical false notion of security in this project. Spaces, where we live, have blood memories or “critical memories” (Young 2012) and the bulk of social life is granted by those residents in the areas.

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Biologically, Black bodies navigate the erasure of culture, critical memory, and physical stability in these spaces. I have emphasized before that, “Codelining presents and represents the authenticity of movement through Black embodiment to explore the out-migration of African Americans from San Francisco due to the very coding tech industry it hopes to provide technological access to those Black bodies. Codelining, coding plus redlining, is a multi-year work exploring access and the digital divide. Gathering a group of Black bodies on stage has been somewhat an almost intangible exercise in aptly affording to compensate the Artists.” (Simpson 2019)

To flourish as an artist in San Francisco, some Black dancers were traveling some 50–75 miles to work. They simply did not want to miss out on one of the few opportunities to tell their own stories through movement. There were dancers of other racial backgrounds participating, listening, and supporting the creation of the work. Rather than contend with Black people being a monolithic group, the intersectional discussions in Codelining expressed carefulness to understand futurism through the perspective of Black embodiment. Though much of the dance was set in an Afro-dystopian future, these narratives—some of which were generated through historical slave narratives—were sourced from my own experience combined with personal stories from San Francisco’s Black residents. To the audience, the technology reshapes the theatrical landscape with constant reminders of gentrification’s effects on the human body and psychosis. Fueled by the capabilities to follow the motions of the dancers and generate the proper graphic, the technology is an entropy creating an entry point with some forbearance into the future. The process reimagines fiercely held narratives about liberal rich residents, most of whom are white, moving into Black neighborhoods while pushing out some of the poorest residents outside the City. In some instances, the project engaged with white tech workers. However, these interactions oftentimes played out as a public relations stunt of great performativity, for fear of how tech workers might be positioned in these conversations—as the catalyst for ethnic cleansing in the areas they inhabit. The process continues until a configuration is formed to address

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the larger theme of race and spatial politics. During the process, four stages of developing the project took place: start by forming a relationship and trust, build a level of chaos and harmony, disorientate current meanings and definitions, and build space for the future. The choreographic treatment of hip hop dances, specifically tutting, became an evident pattern in Codelining’s manipulation of combining classical technique with popular street dance forms. With the fieldwork of interviews from San Francisco’s African American residents affected by gentrification to the Artist input of movement, the tutting serves as an ethnographic identity for the piece. Here the interpretation of the tutting is derived from revivals of images from Ancient Egypt, dances from the 1980s, and the multitude of gestural robotic motions found in android-­ like cyborgs in popular science fiction films. Dance writer and dramaturge Ayo Walker best described the process as: Raissa’s work reveals a generative approach to presencing nuance in the familiar. Her process produces a granular view of what the choreography is doing and undoing to the subjective gaze. Raissa states, “my process is a research to performance method that allows what I’m doing in the studio to be ever evolving instead of formulaic. It’s almost like the process is something that is personified and equally involved in what materializes on the stage.” (Walker 2018)

Largely performed in white western modern dance spaces, Codelining transforms the relationship between the viewer and the performer, creating a type of mutual agreement to accept upright pirouettes from Ballet and bent knee motions derived from African aesthetics on the same stage. In sum, in an attempt to find authenticity in Black embodiment, the bodily experience of combining Western forms of dance with Africanist principles creates visual symbolism of Afrofuturism in the complex choreography. Through the lens of Afrofuturism, dance can offer an intimate glimpse into principles guiding the formation of cultural imaginaries in order to reframe present-day societal hardships. To think about the future gives power to those who live in constant threat of existence and whose work remains stagnant in survivalist modes. What is made visible are a set of values concerned with the representation of Black embodiment, the

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formation of an unimagined societal construct and an agile form of movement vocabulary. As I choreograph Afrofuturism, I discover how Blackness on stage ascertains power over its prescribed colonial past.

Moving from the Past In 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson (Young 2012) delivered a keynote address to scholars, writers, and aspiring artists. His monumental address called for the creation of ethnic theatres whose missions championed more roles for Artists of Color. He criticized colorblind casting for its inability to adequately depict cultural differences or historical context. His call for racial syncretism was controversial at that time due to his direct analysis of how the theatre industry did little to support or appreciate the distinct voices of Artists of Color. The inscription placed on Black bodies continues to be projected in collective memories of African Americans through slavery, colonization, and gentrification. I contend these projections frame phenomenological perceptions of Black embodiment throughout the rehearsal where concert dance is concerned. As a young professional dancer, I landed in San Francisco in the early 2000s just ten days prior to the September 11, 2001, national tragedy in New York City. The City by the Bay served as a refuge and here I found a tightly knit dance community composed of sociopolitical activism and postmodern experimentation. There was everything from the hippie spirit to a small but strong Black dance scene. In 2002, I landed a job with Robert Moses, a well-respected Choreographer, and began to gain national recognition on stage as a performer. Aside from myself, I was only aware of two other Black dancers in major modern dance companies in San Francisco at the time. Dance is not exempt from ubiquitous anti-Black bias or a lack of access to formal dance training, which keeps Black dancers from achieving the professional level. Around 2007, Joanna Haigood came in as a guest choreographer for Moses’ season, and from there it seemed this was a time where I discovered the humanity of dance. Her postmodern Africanist aesthetic placed “the process” over “the product” (Dixon Gottschild 1996) in what she called time-based installations set outdoors with a focus on “the space”

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(Desaulnier 2014). Her process created artistic avenues to dialogue with her dancers; it felt as though I was not just dancing in the piece but that I was an essential part in the creation of its meaning and theme. She delved into historical Black vernacular dances as a means to create dances in the postmodern genre. An example of this can be found in her project Invisible Wings where dancers performed slave dances like the buzzard lope and ring shout on-site through the historical Underground Railroad stop at Jacob’s Pillow in Massachusetts. Like Moses, Haigood codified a movement language unique to Black experiences. After dancing with Haigood, assisting her in rehearsals, and providing administrative support, I cultivated a movement language of my own. In this exploration, I had my own ideas of Black embodiment—how Black bodies migrate from one area to another and adapt to our surroundings—dealing with aspects of African diaspora and specifically how African Americans move from one place to the next through migration, bringing movement and culture to wherever they go. Perhaps this link to a type of dance ancestry shapes movement and themes within my work, and yet, through my own methodologies, I feel the freedom to explore the visual symbolism of Afrofuturism. As an artist I know how to cultivate a sense of multiplicity in the rehearsal space in the audacious attempt to find balance in honoring my trajectory as a dancer to a choreographer. From my perspective, working with choreographers like Moses’ and Haigood’s had heavily influenced the distillation process of making Afrofuturistic dances. I had grown accustomed to being one of few, if not the only Black dancers in so many different processes in San Francisco. Although both choreographers worked within the African diaspora, the latter made dances for Black people and exclusively with Black dancers. Rather than stopping where these choreographers have left off, I keep allowing for nuances in the African diaspora to arise and take flight. As more Black dancers gain access to professional level training, I can designate works like Codelining to search for what is unknown to me in the larger landscape of Black cultural heritage. The cycling interpretation and reinterpretation of the dance’s movement were ultimately determined by the dancers in rehearsal. In many ways, the dance or what I often refer to as the “work” (the actions generated to compose a dance) consists of

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shared consciousness among the group. Like both choreographers I mention above, I desire truth and an openness to present the variables of temporal, geography, and economic vicissitude in Black experiences.

Technologies, Rehearsal, and Training Motioncapturing—It was by no accident that prismatic motion-capture devices were one of the first technology tools introduced into the project. Like the autofocus lens on a camera, these technologies capture movement while adding a latent meaning around surveillance for policing Black bodies. Nevertheless, the element of being followed whether it be Shopping While Black or Barbequing While Black (Pereira 2019). Incidents like those in Oakland, demonstrate the orchestrated aspect of technology’s paradoxical treatment of Black bodies in primarily white spaces. Sensory motion—Whereas motion capture is used in technology like an autofocus lens of a camera, sensory motion technology is best known as a responsive wearable device triggered by the body’s  isometric muscle contractions. Sensory motion can also be used to measure audible sound like clapping or stamping one’s feet. At the onset of the project, a wearable wristband known as the Myo armband was introduced to trigger actions in the background multimedia and musical score through isometrics of the forearm. In later versions of the project, the wearable technology involved a suit providing more sensors throughout the whole body. Projection mapping—Again and again, maps are redrawn to suit an infrastructure designed for the tech industry by land  developers and municipal beautification policies. In the arena of the stage, projection mapping becomes a viable way to pinpoint locations where media can be displayed with specificity to the contour of the setting. An example of this was achieved through the addition of a wooden scenic design in the shape of a city landscape. As multiple projectors, one in particular, were augmented to fit within the confines of the set. Once paired with a technological device, the bodies must par down their superhuman abilities to adapt to the range of motion specified by the technology. Perhaps it is worth examining how the athleticism and

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tender gracefulness of the dancing Black body are best suited to show the spirit of human potential. Without much judgment as to whether or not diluting these abilities to pedestrian movements were good or bad, I returned to simple human interactions to further complicate the timing and triggering of the actions through the technology. One particular challenge was the precariousness of using a motion capture sensor on the floor in order to pick up the movement, which in return, would then trigger images through the multimedia background. Even though minimalism exists  within the movement’s vocabulary, it wasn’t the intended exploration. The discovery of stillness led to a few latent symbolic measures of captivity during slavery. Wristband technology became physical chains and red lines transformed graphics into imagery of the Middle Passage, and drones became surveillance tools to monitor Black bodies; all this pointed to rituals found in present day societal issues in San Francisco. Dance isn’t just an art; it’s a form of survival. While San Francisco presents itself as a progressive and tranquil city, Black bodies are forced to remain in constant vibration. As Black communities face gentrification in San Francisco dance has become an integral part of preserving complex relations and representation of Black embodiment. Through visceral and physical gestures, I situate my dances as an archival gathering of a dwindling community. If not a depiction of time and space. This phenomenon is best depicted in the “power section” of the piece when two groups of dancers begin to do small vibrations, bursting into a full amount of body shaking. At the same time a different dancer is offset into the background. Doing an abrupt solo of popping and locking. Always considering the underlying motif of Afrofuturism, these present-day depictions are lifted off into the cosmos by reframing ritual dances with technology. As complicated as it is to combine elements of tech with dance, these transitory moments of trial and error serve as a redesign of the overall project. Perhaps these gestures of choreographic modification signify an adaptation of a twenty-first century prosthesis. Where very pronounced dance language functions as a type of surveillance. Policing the movements of Black bodies. In an attempt to enhance the language of dance, perhaps the opposite is being slightly achieved, the humanization of the dancing body. However, this bridging of the dance eras with technology gives

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flight to celestial beings on stage, unrecognizable in pieces but quite distinguishable as a whole. It is a simple lesson in the corporeal experience— becoming human again with the hyper-awareness of being Black in the context of American culture—a challenge sometimes far beyond the reach at times for these celestial bodies.

Seen and Unseen Black respondents are members of the public, ranging from age  12 through adulthood, whose neighborhoods face hyper-gentrification from the tech boom. These varied perspectives are divided into age groups and occupations such as  students, tech workers, and so on, to engage the public in Codelining’s thematic storytelling. In the dance, members of the cast are also asked to contribute their conscious decisions to either continue to live in or leave San Francisco. Time was taken to document the habits and how respondents engaged with tech in their lives. The process is meant to record, how each individual body navigates new media and technology, examining the perils of gentrification’s ethnic cleansing of those bodies. I have said elsewhere: Gathering the stories of these young participants gestures towards predicating the ideal vision for the Bayview neighborhood. They navigate these issues like cosmic observers throughout the dance as if to forebode a dystopian society where the very humanity of its residents are at stake. As the Artist, it’s a refreshing break from searching historical records to go beyond human timelines to find the very essence of the bodily spirit in Black bodies. (Simpson 2019)

I learned why choreographing abstraction was a “catastrophic closure for the real and lived experience” of the residents. Despite the stories offering confluence of the truth of the future to come, the dance was leaning toward romanticizing these experiences. Ergo, I went back into the studio with the dancers and collaborators. Together we worked toward more contrasting modes to analyze Afrofuturism and found three guiding categories: semiotics, phenomenology, and eccentricism.

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Prior to starting Codelining, the issue of pairing phrase work and new media technology didn’t seem like it would become a complicated task. The project might like a promise to bridge the digital divide between Artists and Technologists. Yet, the combination of dance and tech is filled with a stupendous amount of trial and error. At length, the timing of the new media tools with the dynamic motion of the choreography proved difficult to sync. Materials generated by the dancers are ripped apart and modified in service of the technological limitations of the hardware. The choreography becomes in service to the projected multimedia. Otherwise, it becomes visually indecipherable to the eye. The addition of multimedia raised questions around the importance of the theme, such as: How does the title Codelining create a deliberate play on terms like “coding” and “redlining” in order to adequately describe the gentrification process in San Francisco?

Devising and Choreography In my fictitious brain or artistic imagination, all three elements of multimedia, technology, and dance simultaneously inhabit the rehearsal process. Yet in reality, elements of the piece reside in the process of ideas swarming in abstraction until there is time to work with these ideas in rehearsal. With so much experimentation, failure, and ponderous imagination, it seems making a sci-fi futuristic dance is overshadowed by a few shortcomings. There was difficulty executing various plans laid out on paper. In rehearsal, my collaborator and technologist dævron (spelled one word, lowercase “d” and “æ” or ash) introduced five scenes paired with different technologies. During a creative residency at Bayview Opera House, we agreed to not look for what’s right or wrong with any of the three elements, but find a deeper investigation of what is useful or not useful in their relationship to one another on stage. While in residency, the dancers are invited for two to eight weeks at a time. In Codelining, the role of Choreographer (the sole decision maker) and the concept of hierarchy become the focus of interrogation. This is intentional as the role of choreographer and the power it possesses are investigated to open up authorship to those involved in the making of the

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work. Here, I will refer to the movers as dancers and nonmovers as collaborators; however, both terms are easily exchangeable in this case. I composed three sections of the music scores needed for the 30-minute work, while dævron added two scores to round out the scenes. Encounters take place in the early part of the day when space is available, a common phenomenon in theaters whose work takes place in the evenings, so we bypass conflicts with shows and other events. As someone working in the technology field, dævron has a full-time job, which has granted him permission to be at the daily rehearsals. This schedule works for the dancers who in addition to being paid for their time on this project have multiple jobs in the late afternoon and evening. At the onset of the meetings, I begin to look for movement materials generated from the preconceived choreography by the dancers. In essence, the dancers are modifying the African presence in the choreography using their own bodily experiences (style, genre, and aesthetics) in order to then form a new type of pattern within the work. These movement motifs galvanize the physicality of the work as we continue to discover more patterns. This type of process essentializes the communal formation of a pattern of dances that harken themselves to Africanist principles by gaining a deeper sense of ownership from the pupils involved. Found movements in the form of improvisation from the dancers are serendipitous in nature as they offset monotonous patterns.

Celestial Bodies, Onstage, and Offstage This section outlines the histories and movements of key dancers in the work. Terrence—a self-described street dancer proficient in various forms of hip hop dances starts off with an improvisation to the first sound score. Some of the movement mirrors the rhythmic polycentrism of the music’s synthetic sounds. As a Mocap suit is introduced into the costume design, the straps and wiring attached to Terrence’s joints create images of a futuristic hybrid of cyborg and human. This imaginative, yet functional, usage of the suit enhances the Afrofuturistic interpretation of the work. With the tutting, a sense of Black embodiment creates an authenticity of the underlying theme and dominates the performance. He starts on stage

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as the lights dim up as if to have been teleported to this specific location in the staging of the work. Lydia—walks in just behind Terrence like a cosmic deity. She performs a hybridization of Modern dance and tutting to the contours of a doorway. The movement looks fully serene as she is about a foot off the ground and stands at over six and a half feet. The effect of this positioning is to give the sense of taking flight and lifting off into the cosmos. Every aspect of her geometrical shapes are intentional to create a type of pattern or language both she and Terrence can understand. They later join together in a duet continuing the impulses of patterns set to depict celestial beings traversing around each other through space. Kao—Sitting across the stage near the audience is Kao. A significant figure within the piece who in real life does not identify as a person of African descent. We started off discussing his Southeast Asian background in order to appeal to the notion of how minorities might uphold white hegemony. While these interpretations of race are abhorrent, Kao is given autonomy as the performer to decide if he wants to represent this stereotype. After this discussion, it was clear a reframing of colorblindness in casting for this occasion was transformed into a representation of the tech field and how its Asian American/Pacific Islander workers navigate this white space through assimilation. Kao is positioned in the piece as a body with access to the technology, dishing out various devices and apparatuses to the other performers. Ashley and Noah—Illusions of how technology will bring the communities and Black bodies together permeate the work from the very beginning. In a scene where performers Ashley and Noah find themselves together in the room, this symbolism of tech innovation becomes a very contradictory moment. Although the pair is side-by-side Ashley is consumed by the seemingly love affair with a cellular device. The emphasis on the scene is technology’s ability to create a lonely and isolating dystopia, void of human contact. What Ashley generates through the device’s camera is carried through to a box with mini-projection set upon Noah’s head. He cannot see the outside world in this box, only what Ashley wants him to see between the pair. The beginning and the end of the work is marked by the symbolism of futuring Black bodies from having to leave their current hardships—the

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perpetual pattern of being forced out of the surroundings—a final planetary destination. The multimedia projected on the back wall and ground serves as an ever-changing landscape for the performers. A change in movement dictates a chameleon-like response in the multimedia by way of the new media technology and wearable devices. Traveling movements were utilized in contrast to stillness for their nimbleness and dynamic power. These habitual images of African American dancers engaging with technological advances on a stage immersed in a futuristic fashion are arguably the footprint of the project.

Space Is the Place Regarding the body and Afrofuturism, it is important to analyze the perspective of Afrofuturistic musician and filmmaker Sun Ra as a cosmic observer sent to the Earth to persuade African Americans to leave this planet for a better life in another nebula. This inspiration gave me the first glimpse of Black bodies as otherworldly beings, taking flight from present day hardships of income and racial inequality through a powerful diasporic journey to a new planetary Motherland. For the dancers in the piece, their fantastical bodies stretch the bounds of the human experience due to their advanced training in contemporary dance forms and African dance aesthetics. In Codelining, the tutting draws out depictions of experimental robotics where the body seems uncommonly scientific, a deconstruction of pedestrian movement. The major transformation of our personal histories from the topics of displacement, eviction, and cultural cleansing shed away into a perpetual shifting of paradigms of Black identity. I can only imagine past luminaries like Sun Ra possibly thought we, Black People, would be further along in our fight for civil and human rights. Technology has broadened activist communication in the twenty-­ first century like the Black Lives Matter #hashtag movement but, it also has unearthed white supremacist subcultures as found in the Unite The Right event in Charlottesville. Years after Sun Ra’s epitomical phrase, “Space is the Place,” how can we fully discern its meaning in today’s technology age? Upon further examination in relationship to the work, I can

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only conclude the following: Afrofuturism is about identity formation and once Black bodies begin to discuss their futures, we begin to imagine our liberation. By signifying the body’s meaning to Blackness, Codelining challenges the confines of a binary “us” versus “them” but to maintain the notion that Black dance is American dance. It evolves the place for Space to be an embodied practice for the futuring Black identity through physical research. The work does not claim to devise dances to develop an endpoint where Blackness moves beyond one’s sense of self or in search of post-Blackness. The dance hopes to revise stereotypical images of Blackness to a more recognizable representation of the lives of African Americans. Onstage, Black dancers navigate othering by infusing their roles with the sensibility of individual identity to preclude any notion of African Americans being a monotonous group. Where power is concerned, Codelining is a study of the mechanization of dance or more specifically how Black bodies can manipulate current technologies through dance, representation, and cultural values.

Dancing and Messaging Fundamentally speaking, I believe the Afrofuturist writings—mostly from Octavia Butler (1979) and Sun Ra (1971)—reveal how no matter how much struggle or many challenges, Black people deserve a right to existence. The need to harken to a time when Blacks were slaves is an unceasing examination around the question: if we were never considered human, then maybe we were rightful descendants of alien beings from outer space? The symbols embodied through this line of inquiry gives rise to different occurrences to take place in the project. The focus in the work is to circulate symbolism behind Afrofuturism while allowing each participating body to take part in its creation. How can the work lift off? In the analysis of symbolic gestures found is the devised piece of choreography, the work becomes a practical mode/ example of Afrofuturism due to the tangible integration of media, new technology tools, and sheer physical effort. As ideas took shape, I learned how departures from traditional dancemaking led to the reinterpretation

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of what was seen. Despite wanting to bridge technology and dance in a cohesive manner, my interest is not solely in how the pair is connected, but more of where the disconnect lies. Approaching the issue of race brings me to the challenge of affording the performers more agency within the work. By virtue of Black representation in the cast, the work displays oppositional meanings and how technology forms identity. Whether I have established Black bodies as celestial beings is dependent upon the viewer/reader. I often cultivate the notion of Africanist principles and traditions in my pieces to be not as blatantly visible to the audience. Yet, the imprints of Black embodiment are all there for those who are able to see its signs. The theme of the work genuinely deals with race through the lens of Afrofuturism, while the style of the dance bridges concert dance with popular and vernacular African American dances. The identification of Blackness with dance is in itself an acknowledgment that Black dance is American, a sociocultural institution linked to national life, symbolic power structures, and social values. Intersectionality is a counterbalance to multiculturalism’s mantra of “everyone’s equal”. Thus, once a race is introduced, the “space” receives transformation into its binary presentational/representational form, as the work is politically reconceptualized. Once Black bodies are in the space, they begin to stop us in our tracks, confusing us when the depictions aren’t historical or built off of tradition. These bodies are doing what they do to counterbalance erasure and representation: adapting and preparing for the future.

References Ailey, A. (1995). The Early Years of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. In Revelations: The Autobiography of Alvin Ailey (pp. 89–102). Carol Publishing Corporation. Butler, O. (1979). Kindred. Beacon Press. Desaulnier, H. (2014). Flying Somewhere New: Introducing the Center for Dance and Aerial Arts, in conversation with Joanna Haigood. In Dance.

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Dixon Gottschild, B. (1996). First Premises of an Africanist Aesthetic. In Digging the Africanist Presence in the American Performance (pp. 251–280). Praegar. Dixon Gottschild, B. (2003). Blood Memories, Spirit Dances. In The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (pp.  251–280). Palgrave Macmillan. Fauley Emory, L. (1988). The Pioneers: Katherine Dunham & Pearl Primus. In Black Dance from 1619 to Today (pp. 151–268). Princeton Book Company. Hazzard-Gordon, K. (2001). Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture (p. 220). Temple University Press. Osumare, H. (1993). An Aesthetic of the Cool Revisited: The Ancestral Dance Link in the African Diaspora. UCLA Journal of Dance Ethnology, 17, 23. Pereira, A. (2019). Oakland Locals Crowdfunding 2nd BBQ’n While Black Barbeque Party at Lake Merritt this Summer. San Francisco Chronicle. Simpson, R. (2019). Spatial Politics. Dancing Around Race Zine. Young, H. (2012). Introduction. In The Cambridge Companion to African American Theatre (pp. 1–11). Cambridge University Press.

6 A Disruptive Visual Respite: Stacey Robinson Stacey Robinson

Tokie Rome-Taylor Creolization is a hybridization of African cultural traditions and those of the new world of the Americas as a means of survival, subversive rebellion, and autonomy from those that would otherwise oppress them. The creolization of common Western symbolic elements of wealth and status, jewels, lace, velvet, and so on, psychologically shifts the internal narrative of the viewer toward elevation of the subjects, acceptance, expanded perception and expectation. Subjects are inserted into the past of an alternate reality, creating the narrative of them being their ancestors in the present for their heirs to see in the future. These ancestors embody power over destiny, representation and spirit, influencing the viewer as their descendants.

S. Robinson (*) University of Illinois, Champaign, IL, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 P. Butler (ed.), Critical Black Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9_6

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Delita Martin The Veilscape is the space between the physical and the spiritual realms. This space allows for our transition into the spiritual other. It is a space of infinite spiritual awareness and the highest truth of who we are is revealed. As we marry into the veilscape we experience beyond the physical realm, allowing the intangible to be made tangible and the unseen to be seen.

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Black Kirby (John Jennings and Stacey Robinson) BauHop is a multimodal practice that overlaps Hip-Hop’s five primary elements with Sacred Geometry, African History, and Black Speculative thought to analyze, deconstruct, and reconfigure traditional Bauhaus design aesthetics. As a diasporic African power system, BauHop is a template that builds Black autonomous futures through liberation theories, narratives, and acceleration by considering Critical Race Design’s intersections of visual anthropology, critical race theory, and speculative design as a cohesive critical making practice.

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Lauren Ashley Howard Speculative Afrotheism is the distillation of Afrofuturism’s spiritual component into an exploratory space for belief, with specific emphasis on Afrotheist traditions. The religious practices of people of African descent are infused with futuristic themes to imagine realities existing outside of spatial and temporal constraints.

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Patrick Earl Hammie Oedipus considers the prenatal prophecies carried by Black people. Reminded ceaselessly how little Black lives matter in the American project, I reflected on my survival despite statistics and effort to avoid fulfilling a predetermined script. Black narratives have long been framed by non-Black authors, and now algorithms-as-oracles project our future successes, trials, and deaths. Oedipus sits in flux, as a finished work-in-progress, proposing a multi-faceted self that recalls the past and reweaves its story past the Fates.

7 Black Radical Nationalist Theory and Afrofuturism 2.0 Reynaldo Anderson and Tommy J. Curry

In the twenty-first century, Afrofuturism is emerging as a Pan-African transdisciplinary technocultural movement with planetary goals and is guided by a long-term interstellar vision. The convergence of Afrofuturism and Pan Africanism is the result of how global Black life over the last 500 years has been marked by three critical points in world history, namely; the trans-Atlantic and Arab slave trade whereby African people “were transformed into human commodities and human money”, the literary record of their experiences demanding status a full human beings that were punctuated by revolution or rebellion, and market globalization, environmental collapse, and digital technologies (Mbembe, p. 2-3, 2017, Segal, 2002). Furthermore, juxtaposed against a social contract, the global racial contract for Black life during this time has progressed from slavery and colonialism, to neocolonialism and systematic racism guided by international White supremacy. Moreover, these

R. Anderson (*) Harris-Stowe State University, St. Louis, MO, USA T. J. Curry University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 P. Butler (ed.), Critical Black Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9_7

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actions by overlapping Diasporas of the “White Atlantic” from the western hemisphere to Europe and Africa, and include states and networks from the Muslim and Asian sphere of influence, maintain cultural-racial hegemony through statecraft, international finance, and military force ( Kinni, 2015, Rahman, p. 18). Finally, this notion of racial hegemony is extended into the imaginations of future-time for the White Atlantic whether by literature or cinema productions such as the movie Interstellar, and whiteness is formed against a black shadow (Ani, 1994, Morrison, 1992, Wilderson III, 2010). This has led to a state of affairs where early in the twenty-first century the survival of Black Africa and its diaspora in a hostile twenty-first-century social Darwinist environment in the midst of massive climate change and technological acceleration requires a reaffirmation and repurposing of a nationalist and transnational ethics informed by a critical Afrofuturist sensibility, and Pan African praxis to forecast, guide, and frame a plan for black survival. Afrofuturism 2.0, or Black Speculative thought and praxis, is a transnational, diasporic, and cultural worldview that interrogates the past, present, and future in the humanities, sciences, and challenges Eurocentric motifs of identity, technology, time and space, and religion (Anderson and Jones 2015). It expands former Afrofuturist ideas of the past into the areas of theoretical and applied science, metaphysics, social sciences, aesthetics, and programmatic spaces, and acknowledges the increasing necessity to challenge a trenchant and growing wave of fascism and anti-­Black sentiment. These shifts have all contributed to establishing Afrofuturism 2.0’s transdisciplinary, Pan-African reach. Although Afrofuturism conceptually originated in the North American African diaspora, practitioners in Africa and its larger diaspora as well as non-­African adherents have embraced and begun revising it in relation to their own geopolitical contexts and conditions. Furthermore, contemporary Afrofuturism is maturing in metaphysical areas such as cosmogony (origin of the universe), cosmology (structure of the universe), speculative philosophy (underlying pattern of history) and philosophy of science (the impact of theoretical and applied science on society, culture, and individuals) (Anderson and Jones 2015). The second wave of twenty-­first-­century Black futurity—Afrofuturism 2.0—builds on these approaches and is currently experiencing a generative and historic moment as a potential Black radical project. However, the Black Nationalist revolutionary tradition, the oldest of the radical traditions, has been underdeveloped in relation to the Black Speculative futurity tradition. Furthermore, to

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redress this underdevelopment this chapter critiques the notion of Black hypermasculinity, sexual parochialism of Black Power, and the revolutionary logic of Black Males. Select traditions of feminism have mischaracterized the Black Nationalist tradition of speculative literature. Following the Black feminist literary productions of the 1980s to present, Black nationalism is depicted as patriarchal and phallocentric—an unimaginative political affect centered on the rise of Black men and the marginalization of Black women. For example, in Kali Tal’s (2002) “Black Militant Near Future Fiction,” she argues that Black militant (near future) fiction is characterized by a nascent sexism characteristic of the political temperament of the times. She writes: “these texts are written by men and feature male protagonists. Women, when they are included, are secondary characters.” Tal suggests that Black Militant Near-Future Fiction is uniquely masculinist and consequently sexist, because it does not portray representations of Black female political agency and consciousness throughout its various texts. Tal states: The masculinist tendencies of the civil rights movement and the hyper-­ masculinist attitudes and self-presentation of the black power movement reinforce the already extremely sexist biases of the genre. These are not the books to read if one is searching for black women’s perspectives on revolution and struggle. In fact, I have been able to locate no piece of writing by a black woman that could reasonably be described as belonging to this genre. It is entirely a masculine production (69).

Another critic of Black male speculative production appears in Mark Bould’s (2007) Come Alive by Saying No: An Introduction to Black Power SF, where he expands upon the presumed masculinism and sexual parochialism of the Black Power era through his interpretation of Nivi-Kofi Easley’s The Militants. Following Steve Estes’s (2000) historical interpretation of the Black Power movement’s masculinist break with previous Black male lead civil rights activism, Bould argues that the interracial ménage-a-trois between Nick, Gina, and Phyllis demonstrates how the “phallocentric individualism perpetuates the masculinism that, however problematic, was so essential to certain aspects of the civil rights and Black Power movements” (233). Depending on Tal’s previous account of the subjugation of women in the Black Power  movement, Bould adds

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that Nick represents Easley’s imagining of a pornotopia is excessively heteronormative and exemplifies the suppression of homosociality and homoeroticism in much Black Power literature. Bould suggests that Easley’s depiction of Nick’s sexual epoch is merely the pretense of revolutionary sexual praxis, since Nick does not represent sexual revolution, but merely sex with white women in a better neighborhood and stylish apartment. Bould writes,  “This utopia is heavily, libidinally invested in the commodity form, and this cathexis is perhaps the single most significant (because most invisible) inheritance and constraint on the Black Power sf imagination and revolutionary consciousness more generally” (234). But what is the literature through which Bould reads Easley’s sexual depiction? Throughout the primary writings of Black Power leaders and thinkers there are multiple references to the reorganization of sexual life. Bould chooses to rearticulate the secondary literature’s depiction of Black Power writings, specifically Steve Estes’s text, rather than examine the primary texts of Black Power leaders and members himself. Like many previous historiographies of the Black Power era, Steve Estes’s (2005) I Am a Man begins with the quote by Eldridge Cleaver from Soul on Ice (1965) that reads “We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempt to gain it” (61). In the chapter of his book dealing with the Black Panther’s masculinist ideology, Estes spends 16 of the 24 pages engaging the sexual politics of Eldridge Cleaver. Estes incorrectly interprets the masculinity of Cleaver as central to the BPP despite adamant and public condemnations of Cleaver’s views of masculinity by Huey P. Newton in “The Defection of Eldridge Cleaver and Reactionary Suicide,” through Bobby Seale’s disagreement with the political direction and representation of the party, and the work of George Jackson. Instead of simply imposing a hyper-heterosexuality on the language used by Cleaver in Soul on Ice, Black speculative thinkers have an opportunity to reimagine the complexities and gaps in previous assumptions about Cleaver’s sexuality, other Black men, and political ideology given this new research. Contrary to the previous feminist historiographies offered by Michelle Wallace and others, Cleaver emerges as a conflicted Black man who is potentially looking for a way to fit his own homosexuality within the heteronormative organization of society that demands revolution and overhaul.

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Tal misses perhaps a most obvious and epistemologically relevant criterion of the genre she describes—it is not about Black women, but the ways in which Black men engage the limitations, possibilities, and structure of the realities they experience. Beyond the mischaracterizations of Black Power as sexist and hypermasculine, this is a select feminist trope that has not held up to historical examination or the self-admitting revelations of Michelle Wallace and more recent scholarship. It is also the consequence of how Tal conceptualizes the problem of gender throughout her work. In her analysis, gender only concerns itself with “the roles that female characters play in each novel and their implications for thinking about black militancy,” (67) not conditions, trauma, or death-bound subjectivity that motivate Black males to imagine and strive for militancy. The assumption common to many gender critiques of the 1970s is that there is an epistemic vacuity to the testimony and imaginings of Black males. Tal argues her interpretation of Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio; George Schuyler’s Black Empire; John A.  Williams’s Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light; and Chester Himes’s Plan B tells the reader something about the structure of Black militancy and its imagining or rendering of un-finished-ness to the overall project of liberation. For example, when she remarks that this genre is linked by “secret societies, charismatic leaders, tension between positions of violence and nonviolence, differing status among African Americans (often symbolized by skin color), and marginalization of women characters, whose sole purpose is to further the plot and enhance our understanding of the protagonist,”  (88) her aforementioned interpretations of these novels relegates the experience of Black men, their death, and fears to political projects assumed to be decadent and exclusionary to women, rather than sociological renderings of interpersonal violence and systemic oppression that accumulates around the peculiarly racialized maleness of the authors. Consequently, gender in the mind of Tal is not a category of theoretical clarification, but conceptual condemnation, because it renders the focus on Black male experience—its turn to militancy and the killing of the white oppressor—into pathological politics rather than an existential response.  This futuristic rending produced by Black male existential imagination needs to be taken more seriously, not only as an option for engagement but as a medium for Black males to situate themselves as making it through realities that are, themselves, existentially threatening.

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In returning to Bould, the problem is that his interpretation, which is dependent on the reading offered by Estes, is that it simply cannot imagine a Black male revolutionary beyond the Macho caricature carried forth by select traditions within feminist ideology. Bould limits how he can conceptualize and interpret the substance of Black Nationalist science fiction by asserting little more than the authority of feminist historiography to assert his interpretation of Black male militants. He relies on caricature rather than a serious analysis and mining of the Black Revolutionary Nationalist literature. His secondary sources rely upon this caricature for their interpretations of history. Black Power thinkers are not only more sexually progressive on the revolutionary potential of Black women, but ahead of the sexual politics Bould woefully misrepresents. They are not, in fact, an extension of masculinist thought rather than an experimentation and reflection—if read through Cleaver, Newton, Bobby Seale, George Jackson, and others with more care. For example, the aforementioned works of Bould, Estes, and Wallace miss the mark in four crucial aspects, first, that the Black Panther Party was a Youth Movement that ranged from 14–21 years of age; only about 1 percent of the membership was over 25 years old. In contrast, Eldridge Cleaver was 33 years old and seen as an elder. Second, Estes’ account and interpretation of the Black Panther Party based upon the actions of Eldridge Cleaver is ahistorical and shallow. The social dynamics of the party were more interpersonally dynamic and complex around gender and class over the life of its existence, and its relationship to Black communities. Third, the Black Militant fiction of the day were an antidote to the stereotypical representation of Black people represented in popular media through programming like the Amos and Andy show and Tarzan (Oklopcic 2017, Shankman,1978). Books like The Spook Who Sat by the Door and The Man Who Cried I Am were a Black radical response to the dearth of available literature and presented alternatives to what was presented by mainstream publishers about Black speculative experiences. Fourth, the Black Panthers and the Black Power advocates were exemplifying bravery. Bravery should not be reduced to pathologized notions masculinist ideology. Nor, should it be limited in its expression by Black males. Further, the Black community admired their courage. They were carrying on in the tradition of Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Demark Vesey. They were the vanguard of the revolution. Finally, the obsession with the sexual mores of Black men smacks of the

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drapetomaniac  pseudo-science of the nineteenth century that thought Black people were crazy for wanting to run away or resist their oppressors. Correspondingly, this state of affairs has impacted the study of the genre of speculative thought and its political implications around race. For example, in April 1906, the science fiction writer H.  G. Wells noted America’s inevitable social problems regarding race from his writing desk: “What is going to happen to the United States of America in the next thirty years or so?” (4). In the body of the text, Wells attempted to forecast the social relations of the former masters and the former slaves. Among his musings he  suggested Booker T.  Washington was more statesman-­like than the seer-prophet W. E. B. Du Bois. However, Wells could not foresee the futuristic impact of Du Bois’s work. His civil rights and Pan-African initiatives, or his contribution to the emergence of modern Afrofuturism with his short story The Comet. It was  published in 1920 speculatively mused upon the psychological wages of whiteness in the face of a catastrophic event. More recently, in 2016, the United Nations issued a report in support of reparations for African descendants, echoing the nineteenthcentury sentiments of Alexis De Tocqueville, noting the legacy of white supremacy will ensure the United States of America will not be a socially cohesive society now or into the foreseeable future. Historically, during periods of overt anti-Black white populism, Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism have been fierce radical approaches influencing the destiny of the African Diaspora and Africa. For over 200 years, Nationalism has been articulated as an important ideology by leaders such as Edward Blyden and Marcus Garvey in the African Diaspora and Africa. In light of the recent poor and parochial nationalist leadership cadre in the Diaspora and the continent, the Neo-Nationalist turn in international relations characterized by the rejection of Neoliberalism, the rise of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and others, it is important to reconsider the influence of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism in Black Speculative futurist thought and Afrofuturism. The connection between Black Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Black Speculative Culture specifically intersects around the life and career of Martin Delaney. In the twentieth century, Black Nationalism, Pan-Africanism and Black Speculative Culture are represented in the ideas of W. E. B. Du Bois, Amy Jacques Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Sam Greenlee, etc. In reference to Black futurity, Kodwo Eshun (2003) asserts:

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Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken. (288)

Nationalism is a controversial topic now because of the unprecedented change that is currently happening internationally due to the globalization of markets, environmental stress, and accelerated technological change. For example, populist leaders like American president Donald Trump have been able to successfully mobilize white American discontent around nationalism to address their self-perceived decline in the world. Furthermore, it is compounded by the fact that social media has connected communities and cultures in a way that their discontent can be swiftly mobilized. Former presidential advisor Zbigniew Brzinzki noted during a speech: For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive… The resulting global political activism is generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination… The worldwide yearning for human dignity is the central challenge inherent in the phenomenon of global political awakening… That awakening is socially massive and politically radicalizing… The nearly universal access to radio, television and increasingly the Internet is creating a community of shared perceptions and envy that can be galvanized and channeled by demagogic political or religious passions. These energies transcend sovereign borders and pose a challenge both to existing states as well as to the existing global hierarchy, on top of which America still perches. (2008)

However, there is unprecedented risk during this era also. The hyper-­ connectivity and advanced technology also has made it hard to govern modern society. Brzinzki also added: major world powers, new and old, also face a novel reality: earlier times, it was easier to control one million people than to physically kill one million people; today, it is infinitely easier to kill one million people than to control one million people.

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These developments are the result of the accelerating rate of technological development and the political polarization that has been growing for a generation. Although the end of the Cold War and the transition into contemporary globalization was celebrated by some in the 1990s, many traditional policies of Liberal democracies began to weaken and impacted the working class (Snyder 2019). Chief among the changes was the rising impact of technology, its economic impact and the transfer of manufacturing jobs to the developing world (Snyder). In the 2000s and 2010s these developments have led to the rise of an illiberal populist nationalism that is in tension with globalist cosmopolitan elites, and a sense of a lost national purpose (Snyder). Correspondingly, this destabilization has had an impact on working class men and in particular working class Black males. Black Revolutionary Theory has its historic roots in the resistance of Africans to the European slave trade and Black slave rebellions led by Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, Nat Turner, and Toussaint L’Overture. However, the philosophy of a modern international antisystemic-­oriented Black Revolutionary Theory was developing at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. African-Americans during the period of the Nadir (Post-Reconstruction), 1885 to 1915, analyzing their own circumstances began to sympathize with non-white races that had been colonized by American and European powers (Gallicchio 2000). W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) recognized the racial implications of white dominion in his 1903 magnum opus Souls of Black Folk, when he exclaimed, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” (9). Dubois also recognized the racial implications of WWI. He identified the war as a fight for control of the world’s darker races and natural resources (Gallicchio 2000). The transformation of the international worldview of African-Americans was complete by 1919 and African-Americans would increasingly view their struggle in global terms (Gallicchio 2000). The surge of an international perspective in Black communities was noted by sociologist Robert Park and Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Park (cited in Gramsci and Hoare 1971) remarked in 1923:

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The American Negro no longer conceives of his destiny as bounded by the United States. He is seeking alliances and creating loyalties that transcend the boundaries of our American commonwealth. The Negro, in his racial relationship at least, is internationalist. He is becoming a citizen of the world. (284–300)

Finally, Black Revolutionary Theory historicizes from an African-­ American perspective. Malcolm X argued for the need for people of African descent to review their history with respect to white Europeans in order to understand how African-Americans had come to be in their present social, political, and economic situation. Malcolm X often drew upon the history of Blacks under slavery to drive home his points: Prior to one hundred years ago, they didn’t need tricks. They had chains. And they needed chains because you and I hadn’t been brainwashed thoroughly enough to submit to their brutal acts of violence submissively. Prior to a hundred years ago, you had men like Nat Turner, that Brother Benjamin was talking about, and others, Toussaint L’Ouverture. None of them would submit to slavery. They’d fight by any means necessary. And it was only after the spirit of the Black man was completely broken and his desire to be a man was completely destroyed, then they used different tricks. They just took the physical chains from his ankles and put them on his mind. (Breitman 1965, 80)

However, Malcolm X also diverged from most previous leaders in the kinds of Black populations he targeted for organizational development and the seeds of a practical theory of Black Revolution when he worked among unemployed African-Americans, youth, incarcerated African-­ Americans, and African-American women in ghetto churches who comprised the Black underclass (Friedland 1982). Malcolm X intentionally recruited from these elements of African-­ American communities instead of the Black middle class for two reasons. The Black middle class interests tended to be concentrated in two areas: (1) a belief in capitalism, and (2) a desire to integrate. Both positions indirectly supported the societal structures that oppressed all Africans. This belief in capitalism was supported, although Black-owned businesses existed on the economic periphery of the society. Many of the same

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integrationist bourgeoisie that supported capitalism, supported the contradiction of Blacks supporting Black-owned businesses while having to compete against white businesses. This schism between the well-to-do and the poor is the result of an economic and socially catastrophic dislocation of Africans for the purpose of cheap wage labor. The end result has been the development of two broadly distinct elements within Black communities, that of the petit bourgeoisie and that of the working/ underclass (Marable 1983). According to Marx, the fact that capital simplified and increased class antagonisms had the overall effect of fragmenting the interest of a society (Reiss 1997). Marx also recognized that a limited amount of upward mobility from the oppressed class to the ruling class would reinforce the power of the capitalist system by co-opting the “best” of the dominated class (Reiss 1997). A generation earlier, prominent Pan African  Nationalist Marcus Garvey’s analysis was similar to Karl Marx’s position that the behavior of the Black bourgeoisie was similar to that of the white bourgeoisie in the systematic exploitation of the working class. However, Garvey extended a racial component to his analysis when he noticed that the primary difference between the Black bourgeoisie and the white bourgeoisie was that white millionaires would support and create charities while the Black bourgeoisie’s parasitic nature was to exploit Blacks, ape the behavior of whites, and hold in contempt native Black institutions. This same analysis would be made a generation later by E. Franklin Frazier (1957) in his text Black Bourgeoisie, when he exclaimed, “Lacking a cultural tradition and rejecting identification with the Negro masses on the one hand, and suffering from the contempt of the White World on the other, the Black Bourgeoisie has developed a deep-seated inferiority complex” (27). Later, Malcolm X elaborated on what African-Americans would have to do to gain meaningful freedom in his speech The Black Revolution: If George Washington didn’t get independence for this country nonviolently, and if Patrick Henry didn’t come up with a nonviolent statement, and you taught me to look upon them as patriots and heroes, then its time for you to realize that I have studied your books well … 1964 will see the Negro revolt evolve and merge into the world-wide Black revolution that has been taking place on this earth since 1945…Revolution is always based

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upon land. Revolution is never based on begging somebody for an integrated cup of coffee. Revolutions are never fought by turning the other cheek … Revolutions are never even based upon that which is begging a corrupt society or a corrupt system to accept us into it. Revolutions overturn systems. (Breitman 1989)

However, the Black Panther Party, under Newton’s leadership, was  influenced by the writings of Franz Fanon and Malcolm X, As a result, it began moving beyond the concept of Black Power that was seen as reformist and developed a modern Black Revolutionary Theoretical paradigm (Hilliard and Cole 1993). The party in its early stages was a self-defense nationalist organization that was concerned with police brutality in the Oakland community (Hilliard and Cole). The party, under Newton’s influence, later adopted a more aggressive stance of Marxism-­ Leninism in 1967, incorporating the philosophies of Karl Marx, Lenin, Franz Fanon, and Mao Tse-Tung (Hilliard and Cole). This ideological stance was incorporated into a unique philosophy that combined the historical experiences of Black Americans, and was interpreted through the lens of Marxism-Leninism (Hilliard and Cole). The Black Marxist-­ Leninist position held that Black people must view their experiences from the perspective that economics was the major force in history and it was the exploitation by capitalists that influenced the racism experienced by African-Americans (Hilliard and Cole). The exploitation by racist capitalists using the powers of the state made it necessary to create a vanguard party to organize the masses of African-Americans to fight the Racist capitalist class and the Racist State apparatus (Hilliard and Cole). The vanguard party would be led by the Black Lumpenproletariat or Black underclass. This distinction would differentiate the ideology of the BPP from the Chinese or Russian ideologies and Marxist orthodoxy of its contemporaries. By the the late 1960s, Black Revolutionary Theory had coalesced into an antisystemic paradigm based upon four premises. The first premise, because of its largely segregated and isolated residential relationship in relation to Racist elements of the larger white community and its Historical development in relation to the forces of production controlled by the White Power Elite, Black Communities formed a composite internal colony within the United States existing in a Neocolonial

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relationship with Black compradors or petit bourgeoisie acting as agents for the White Power Elite (Anderson 2005). Second, the revolutionary cadre would include Nationalistic Black petit bourgeoisie, a radicalized Black working class, and the Black underclass. The vanguard element of this cadre being the Black Lumpenproletariat composed of Black prisoners, unemployed, students, and poor Black women  (Anderson). Third, the struggle would take place in an urban context, where most AfricanAmericans lived, unlike other Third World Revolutions that were based in rural areas; fourth, this vanguard Black element would lead other progressive elements in the United States in a revolutionary struggle to seize political power and reorganize American society (Anderson).

The Revolutionary Logic of the Black Male Contrary to Bould’s quandary of space-time as an inevitable obstacle and limitation of Black Nationalist science fiction, Black men have understood their death as a communal echo to oppressed people the world over. Newton’s (2009) original formulation of revolutionary suicide orients the Black male revolutionary as a we against the cogito of the Cartesian I/individual. Newton writes: “There is an old African saying. ‘I am we.’ If you met an African in ancient times and asked him who he was, he would reply, ‘I am we’ This is revolutionary suicide: we, all of us are the one and the multitude” (354). Death is both an end to the individual self and a calling to the we beyond the body we possess. The futural self, as in white sf in the context of this chapter, is the possession of the white privileged subject in Newton’s thinking. The I persists throughout time, an un-affected ego that projects itself beyond its now on nothing more than the power of its racial narcissism that marries life and futurity to the white I. It is here that Newton reveals the eschatological dilemma of Blackness, Black maleness, and death. The beyond of the self is the now that resists against the caricatures of Blackness as death. To choose to die in resistance to the structures and existential angst and suffering that drives one towards reactionary suicide which is “the reaction of a man who takes his own life in response to social conditions that overwhelm him and condemn him to helplessness” (Newton 2). The young Black

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men Newton reads about in Hendin’s study on Black suicide have been deprived of human dignity, crushed by oppressive forces, and denied their right to live as proud and free human beings.” Thus, death is being engineered into the psychology of the oppressed. The remedy to this condition is not merely politics, or practical activity as problematized in Bould’s invocation of Gramsci, but a new eschatological resolve that requires both the knowledge of one’s immediate doom in the present and the expansion of the now which is the replacement of the delusional future for a death-bound subject. The future can no longer be a white thing. Although Newtown might have argued it as the capacity the white human he believes is the direct consequence of his individual agency. It is not the possession of the Black revolutionary or militant. While Bould does acknowledge the eschatological burden of Black men, as in Malcolm X’s Autobiography when Malcolm pens “I do not expect to live long enough to read this book in its finished form,” (398) his discussion of space-time mistakes the eschatological reflections of X as depending on an anticipation of futurity. Drawing from Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, Bould understands the space-time of Black Nationalist science fiction as a manifestation of “some temporal knot, an uncanny space-time, in which the threefold nature of the present moment, composed equally of the past (memory) and the future (expectation), is brought into consciousness: ‘not a future time, a past time, and a present time, but … a present of future things[,] a present of past things, and a present of present things’” (220). This rendering of what Black male authors are describing, anticipating, and attending to in their activity of writing, is not as paradoxical as Bould seems to think. In The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (Curry 2017), this has been argued as a problem of personal eschatology for Black males—a process of engaging with their own dying. Whereas Bould is comfortable invoking the rhetorics of Black male authors like Du Bois’s double-consciousness or Fanon’s colonized mind, the existential pscyhologism, the processes of Black male nationalist affect, remain confined to descriptions of temporal paradoxes read through the theories of Ricour, Bakhtin, or Gramsci. Additionally, Bould claims the use of violence by Black Power militants traps them within a practical political activity that unites this with the oppressed and a

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theoretical consciousness uncritically inherited from the past. This decadent thought often takes the form of violence according to Bould. “While black power sf fantasizes violent revolution so as to negate an existing order, that order persists precisely through rendering its own acts of violence normative, legal, and effectively invisible. Many might perceive the ongoing need to revolutionize American space-time, but grasping the means to do so is often hampered by the consciousness inherited from the past”  (Gramsci 1971, 333). Ironically, however, Bould does not appeal to a survey of the revolutionary Black Power literature accompanying many of the works he interprets. Instead, Bould prefers to read them as a white oracle, spatially distant and culturally removed from the speculative anticipation and reflections upon Black death and (dying) life. Such distance renders the engagement with Black Nationalist works descriptive at best, since the existential content expressed by the science fictive accounts of Black male being—as ending beyond the present, but not into the future—is foreign to the orientation of the theorists deployed by Bould to understand these works. The structure of dialectical materialism presented by Newton (2002) in “The Mind is Flesh” asserts that “the flesh both evolved and functions in an environment that is modified and partially created by the history and presence of the ‘mind.’ To change the environment is to change the mind at the phenomenal level”  (317). Newton’s conceptualization of revolution and Black Power political consciousness requires more than simply violence and has within it a system to move beyond the decadence of the past. Violence is transformative, not politically expedient. Newton posits the overcoming of the present consciousness of death through dialectic engagement with the world. The dialectic resolve of Newton’s revolutionary consciousness demands that consciousness changes with the socio-historical location and temporality of the body. Contrary to Bould’s claim that there are uncritically accepted doxa that predetermine the fate and end of practical (political) activity and reorganization of life, Newton’s understanding of dialectical materialism is grounded in an ever-evolving and transformative nature of the mind, which is the flesh of the body impressed upon by the world. It is, then, the task of dialectical materialism to invoke the entire human body in a complete social-historical context whenever the

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concepts “mind” or “brain” are brought to play in the dialogue of alienation that modern science has become. Our field is real life where each arbitrary order of abstraction (mind-brain-body) is always a function of human flesh and blood. And the sum of these abstractions is the supposition of a soul. And that this soul and ego (of the psyche) may be congruous when the ego (the “I”) and the race are perceived as functions of each other always and everywhere. Thus, dialectical materialism presses, always, toward a structuralism of dynamic process. In order to take increased responsibility for directing our own biology, consciousness must be improved steadily, diligently applied to understanding the world and controlling ourselves, but resolutely prevented from interfering with activity properly left to automatic behavior. The revolutionary who emerges from oppression cannot expect to live. George Jackson (1990) writes in Blood in My Eye: “if revolution is tied to dependence on the inscrutabilities of long range politics, it cannot be made relevant to the person who expects to die tomorrow” Said differently, the temporal displacement of death—the knowledge that one is death bound—reconfigures what is assumed by Bould to be a necessary orientation of time that is simply divided into the past, present, and future. He cannot hear the words of Black revolutionaries, or even the testimony of Malcolm X who tells of no future. The future is what the Western-white humanist order demands for its persistence. The Black male body holds no such requirement or necessity. In fact, the paradoxical nature of Bould’s description of space-time is evidence of this different temporal order. He simply cannot recognize it from the assumptions made about human (European) anthropology. However, Jackson writes the colonial victim, however, is “born to a premature death” (7). Guided by the work of Albert Camus, Newton (2009) theorizes a new revolutionary orientation that understands that the “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present” (358). Or as Bobby Seale (1970) proclaimed, the necessity to Seize the Time. This existential claiming of time, of the now is what served as the basis of Black Power and the Black Panthers. Newton writes, “the Black Panther Party embraces this principle. By giving all to the present, we reject fear, despair, and defeat” (358). It is the adamancy through which the Black male confronts the now that defines his resistance against the repressive forces at

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the foundation of racism and the mimeticism of masculinist ideology. The revolutionary Black male does not simply appeal to the values given by the system, because those ideas lead to death. As Newton said in “Fear and Doubt” “society responds to [the lower socioeconomic Black man] as a thing, a beast, a nonentity, something to be ignored or stepped on. He is asked to respect laws that do not respect him. He is asked to digest a code of ethics that acts upon him but not for him”(80). Black maleness is situated on this precarity and disregard for the trope of futurity through a concretized individual self. However, it was during this same era that the seeds for modern Afrofuturism were sown in the Bay area when the avant-garde jazz performer Sun Ra and the Black Panther Party reconceived the relationship between Black vernacular culture, technology, and performance and its impact on the development of a Revolutionary Black conscious (Kreiss 2008). For example, although Kreiss highlights a conflict between Sun Ra and the Panthers, one could ask what might have happened if the cosmic philosophy of Sun Ra and the revolutionary praxis of the BPP had been able to reconcieve of their theories in the context of future forces of production in a post industrial, post capitalist society? Against the backdrop of the Cold War, anticolonial movements and the Black Revolution they presented contrasting approaches to Black conscious and development. These contrasting approaches would show up in urban politics and cultural performances for the remainder of the twentieth century and in the twenty-first century. However, in light of the recent events surrounding the 2020 presidential election, and its attendent problems with the COVID19 pandemic, economic instability, and racial terrorism, Black Revolutionary rhetoric is erupting in the discourse of radicals in African American communities for the first time in decades. For example, the subtle rejection of the accommodationist approach of former POTUS Barack Obama by a growing number of intellecctuals  and activists is revealing the class polarization within Black communities, and the slow realization by these same communities, that the reformist characteristic of the Black Lives Matter Movement is an insufficient approach to deal with growing armed and organized fascist elements in the broader American society.    At the time of this writing a significant number of Republican elected officials seek to reject the ballots of voters in states

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with sizable African American populations engaging in what Martin Luther  King Jr.  called    interposition and  nullification of Black agency, and rejecting the ability of Black people in America to collect on the promissory note of American citizenship. However, in this political vacuum, the speech by  Malcolm X “The Ballot or The Bullet”  still rings true:  Its’s time for you and me to become more poltically mature and realize what the ballot is for; what we are supposed to get when we cast a ballot; and that if we don’t cast a ballot, its going to end up in a situation where we are going to have to cast a bullet. It’s either a ballot or a bullet. Following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor several months ago, continued state sanctioned violence against Black men, women and children, along with the recent threat to lynch a Black woman elected official in Michigan and to kidnap its governor, a Black milita movement has been growing in numbers the last several years. It has committed to taking up arms in response to the emerging fascist movement in America. These recent events, and more have serious implications for the development of Black Revolutionary Theory in a post-capitalist age, and the ability of Afrofuturism to adapt in a era of uncertainty, hyper-change and acceleration.

References Anderson, R. (2005). See You in Dar-es-Salaam: The Rhetoric of the Heartland Black Panther Party and the Repression of the Black Revolution. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Anderson, R., & Jones, C. (2015). Introduction: The Rise of Astro-blackness. In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. Lexington. Anderson, R. & Barber, T. (2020). The Black Angel of History and the Age of Necrocapitalism. In Terremotto: Contemporary Art of the Americas. Issue(18). Bould, M. (2007). Come Alive By Aaying No: An Introduction to Black Power Sf. Science Fiction Studies, 220–240. Breitman, G. (1965). How a Minority can Change Society: The Real Potential of the Afro-American Struggle. Pathfinder Press. Breitman, G. (Ed.). (1989). Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. Malcolm X Speeches & Writings.

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Brzezinski, Z. (2008). The Global Political Awakening. The New York Times, 16. Cleaver, E., & Geismar, M. (1968). Soul on Ice. New York: Dell Publishing. Curry, T. J. (2017). The man-not: Race, class, genre, and the dilemmas of black manhood (p. 306). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. De Tocqueville, A. (1982). Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy, Revolution, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). Of Our Spiritual Strivings. In The Souls of Black Folk. New York. Du Bois, W. E. (1989). The Souls of Black Folk [1903]. na. Easley, N. K. A. (1974). The Militants. New York: Carlton. Eshun, K. (2003). Further Considerations of Afrofuturism. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(2), 287–302. Estes, S. (2000). “I Am a Man!”: Race, Masculinity, and the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Strike. Labor History, 41(2), 153–170. Estes, S. (2005). I Am a Man!: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights ovement. Durham: University of North Carolina Press. Frazier, E. F. (1957). Black Bourgeoisie: The Book that Brought the Shock of self-Revelation to Middle-class Blacks in America. Nova Iorque: Free Press Paperbacks. Friedland, R. (1982). Power and Crisis in the City: Corporations, Unions and Urban Policy. Macmillan International Higher Education. Gallicchio, M. S. (2000). The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945. Univ of North Carolina Press. Gramsci, A., & Hoare, Q. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks (p. 276). London: Lawrence and Wishart. Greenlee, S. (1990). The Spook Who Sat by the Door: A Novel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Griggs, S. (2007). Imperium in Imperio. Westminster, MD: Modern Library. Hilliard, D., & Cole, L. (1993). This Side of Glory: The Autobiography of David Hilliard and the Story of the Black Panther Party. Little, Brown. Himes, C. (2013). Plan B (Vol. 279). Madrid: Ediciones Akal. Jackson, G. (1990). Blood in My Eye. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Kreiss, D. (2008). Appropriating the Master’s Tools: Sun Ra, The Black Panthers, and Black Consciousness, 1952–1973. Black Music Research Journal, 28(1), 57–81. Malcolm, X. (2015). The Autobiography of Malcolm X.  Brooklyn: Ballantine Books.

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Marable, M. (1983). Groundings with my Sisters: Patriarchy and the Exploitation of Black Women. The Journal of Ethnic Studies, 11(2), 1. Newton, H. P. (1967). Fear and Doubt. Essays from the Minister of Defense, USA. Black Panther Party. 15, 15–18. Newton, H. P. (2002). The Mind Is Flesh. in David Hilliard & Donald Weise, eds. The Huey P. Newton Reader, 317–330. New York. Seven Stories Press. Newton, H.  P. (2009). The Defection of Eldridge Cleaver and Reactionary Suicide. In Revolutionary Suicide, 328–331: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition). Penguin. Oklopčić, B. (2017). Adapting The Adapted: The Black Rapist Myth in E.R. Burroughs TARZAN OF THE APES and Its Film Adaptations. Anafora: Časopis za znanost o književnosti, 4(2), 313–330. Reiss, E. (1997). Marx: A Clear Guide. Pluto Press (UK). Ricoeur, P., & Blamey, K. (1990). Time and Narrative, Volume 3 (Vol. 3). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seale, B. (1970). Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton, London: Hutchinson. Schuyler, G. S., & Hill, R. A. (1991). Black Empire. Lebanon, NH: Univerity Press of New England. Shankman, A. (1978). Black Pride and Protest: The Amos’n’Andy Crusade of 1931. Journal of Popular Culture, 12(2), 236. Snyder, J. (2019). The Broken Bargain: How Nationalism Came Back. Foreign Affairs, 98, 54. Tal, K. (2002). That Just Kills Me: Black Militant Near Future Fiction. Social Text, 20(271), 65–91. Tolomeo, I. (2016). WEB Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: The Comet. II Tolomeo, 173. Tony, M. (1976). Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggle of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA. Greenwood Press. Wells, H. G. (1906). The So-Called Science of Sociology. The Sociological Review, sp3(1), 357–369. Wallace, M. (1999). Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (Vol. 26). Brooklyn: Verso. Williams, J.  A. (1999). Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light: A Novel of Some Probability. Northeastern Library of Black Literature (Series). Lebanon, NH: Univerity Press of New England. Williams, J. A. (2016). The Man Who Cried I Am: A Novel. New York: Open Road Media.

8 Afrofuturism and Black Futurism: Some Ontological and Semantic Considerations Damion Kareem Scott

Introduction When adopting a Futurist point of view, we often work with background notions of what is properly ‘Afro’ about Afrofuturism (AF) or ‘Black’ about Black Futurism (BF). There are various compelling views on the relations and senses of Afrofuturism and Black Futurism, both orthodox and unorthodox. I will begin by examining the original usage of the word ‘Afrofuturism,’ which depends on unanalyzed conceptions of ‘Africana’ and ‘Blackness.’ The definitions that set the initial usage are apt for clarification via a semantic analysis of the concepts embedded in propositional usage in the original definitional stipulations. My contribution to Critical Black Futures is an argument for a difference, if not a complete disjunction, between the concepts ‘Afrofuturism’ and

D. Scott (*) City College of New York, New York City, NY, USA Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 P. Butler (ed.), Critical Black Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9_8

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‘Black Futurism’. I conclude with specific applications of aesthetic, semantic and social-­ ontological insights in relation to concepts of Afrofuturism and Black Futurism. These applications draw primarily from Martin Delany’s novel Blake, or The Huts of America along with the film Black Panther. The term “Afrofuturism” was first named by Mark Dery in his seminal collection of interviews and commissioned essays by various authors titled Flame Wars (1994).1 Dery described “Afrofuturism” as categories of art and thought giving rise to a cultural-aesthetic movement. When he categorized the developing relationships among art, science fiction, fantasy, scientific research and practice, technology, futurism, and of course, race and ethnicity, he helped to give voice and organization to ideas that numerous originators had been synthesizing since the mid-nineteenth century.2 For Dery, Afrofuturism is necessarily and sufficiently related to speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns specifically in the context of twentieth century technoculture. His specification “in the context of ” functions as both qualification and also as a mode of being contextualized practically as embedded in a world of perspectives, including theirs and ours. If Dery’s definition of Afrofuturism is (as he himself acknowledges) imprecise and tentative, the intelligibility of Afrofuturism for him—and his fellow contributors Samuel Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose—recognized how historical forces shaped the genre and helped its emergence. Dery’s categorization did not invent but rather described an already extant historically-conditioned phenomenon.3  Mark Dery, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate and Tricia Rose” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 180. 2  As Afrofuturism is initially presented as an aesthetic movement, parallels can be drawn across a wide range of scholars and artists; see the works of Martin Delany, Charles Chesnutt, Frances Harper, W. E. B. Dubois, Octavia Butler, Samuel L. Delany, Nichelle Nichols, Levar Burton, Will Smith, Laurence Fishburne, Al Matthews, Sun Ra, Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Earth Wind and Fire, Herbie Hancock, George Clinton, Afrika Bambaataa, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Underground Resistance, Drexciya, Jeff Mills, Fabio, Grooverider, Ray Keith, LTJ Bukem, Dillinja, Lemon D, and Breakage. This is merely a partial list. 3  Lisa Yaszek, “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future,” Socialism and Democracy Vol. 20, 3 (2006): 41–60. Siah Lavender III, “Critical Race Theory,” in The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, eds. Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint (New York: Routledge, 2009), 185–193. 1

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The early uses of ‘Afrofuturism’ by Dery, S. Delany, Tate, and Rose, detailed the journey of African Americans who had begun appropriating the themes and tropes of futurist literature, science fiction, speculative fiction, and electronic music as vehicles for a new type of Futurism.4 Afrofuturism’s reliance on the conventions of science fiction and technological mediation poses one set of questions and problems to address— what is entailed by “futurism” as necessarily related to scientific advancement and technological innovations. Furthermore, how modernity’s technoscientific progress connects to the racialized experiences of African and Africana Diasporic peoples raises another—what makes it ‘Afro.’ It is this latter set of questions that is of interest to this essay. In Flame Wars, Dery et al. use ‘Afro’ and ‘Black’ interchangeably, without qualification. They define and expand without focusing on the logic of the concepts embedded in their assertions. The legacy of this synonymous usage by Afrofuturism’s early scholars remains salient in Afrofuturistic and Black Speculative literature today. Kodwo Eshun in “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” Ytasha L.  Womack in Afrofuturism: The Rise of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones in the introduction to Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, Adriano Elia in “The Languages of Afrofuturism,” and Myungsung Kim in “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the Reinvention of African American Culture” all touch upon issues of definition but none provide much by way of logico-linguistic or explicit phenomenological analysis. Anderson and Jones (2016), following some precedent set by Eshun (2003), ostensibly define the term ‘Afrofuturism 2.0’ as expanded usages that go beyond the scope of African American or the Black experience in the West in terms of art and aesthetic experience. Anderson and Jones advocate for using Afrofuturism in expanded philosophical, political and technoscientific contexts in terms of ‘Astro-Blackness’ and speculative fiction. These prescriptive definitional stipulations are meant to function as part of the admirable critical-­ theoretical project of transforming Africana Diasporic consciousness and  See for example, Greg Tate, “Kalahari Hopscotch, or Notes toward a Twenty-Volume Afrocentric Futurist Manifesto,” in Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 331–341; and D.  Scot Miller, “Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black is the New Black—A 21st Century Manifesto,” San Francisco Bay Guardian, May 20, 2009. 4

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practice. However, it remains unclear as to exactly what necessary and possible senses of ‘African’, ‘Africana’, African American’, ‘color’, ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ have in relation to ‘Blackness’ much less a ‘universal Black consciousness’. If prior historical usage and potential to affect social change determine the definitional stipulations, then would ‘Astro-­ Blackness’ be coextensive with ‘Bantu Futurism’ or ‘Negrofuturism’? Ytasha Womack also discusses ‘redefinition’ in Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture: Afrofuturists redefine culture and notions of blackness for today and the future. Both an artistic aesthetic and a framework for critical theory, Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs. In some cases, it’s a total reenvisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques.5

Womack provides illuminating discussions and critiques of the practical intersections of Black culture, art and aesthetics, science and technology, weaving autobiographical narrative with literary and film criticism. It is a joyful, uplifting read. However, throughout her text, Womack uses color-­ spectrum terms for subjectivities, socioculturally-constructive terms for causally-related objective relations, fictional referential contexts for actual causal relational contexts and projectable lived perspective-dependent terms for inductive inferential understanding of objective fact. Sometimes these conflations and categorical mistakes obscure the meaning of what is meant in the work. Adriano Elia and Myungsung Kim both begin their critical treatments with stipulations of usage. Elia explicates ‘Afrofuturism’ in terms of differences and similarities with Italian Futurism and other Eurocentric contexts of language and artistic practice. Elia highlights how language use may encode racist overtones of white hypermodernity and black purported quasi-modernity. Elia discusses ‘metaphorical’ meaning formal,  Ytasha L. Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Kindle Locations 124–125). Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition. 5

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conceptually determined meaning. Kim’s text is a sustained and rigorous survey of Afrofuturism as African American technoscientific and artistic practices. Kim does not countenance semantic problems regarding color spectrum terms for far future non-racial subjectivities or geographically-­specific terms in non-Western contexts. Returning to Eshun’s “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” we find a highly nuanced take on the relation or purported identity of African and Black identities in futuristic, ‘chrono-political’ contexts. Eshun is sensitive to a wide range of Black (or Brown) perspectives, making distinctions about and between Africana, African, Sub-Saharan African, Afro-British, African American, Black, New World Black, dark, Western, Global Southern, etc., peoples and subjectivities. His critiques and conclusions are influential and deservedly so. Eshun’s work reflects a particularly insightful understanding of the discursive tensions in modern debates within Afrofuturism that result from the terminological conflation of ‘African’ and ‘Black.’ This conflation often expresses itself as a default assumption of Black American subjectivity in Afrofuturistic works. It leads to insufficient attention to the specific concerns that constitute the myriad of Black (or Brown) perspectives. Eshun highlights how the shared ‘Black’ perspective itself may fracture in terms of differences of Africana lived-experience. For example, Eshun critiques the tendency toward dystopianism in African futuristic speculative works—a specifically African concern. Within an economy that runs on SF capital and market futurism, Africa is always the zone of the absolute dystopia. There is always a reliable trade in market projections for Africa’s socioeconomic crises. Market dystopias aim to warn against predatory futures, but always do so in a discourse that aspires to unchallengeable certainty.6

The persistent assumption of Africa as a site of inevitable future crisis and decline in need of salvation is in itself an indication of a lack of authentic ‘Afro’ voices. This authenticity is a matter of lived, not imaginative experience.  Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2, (Summer 2003): 292. 6

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Eshun’s work touches upon several significant historiographical points. Most notably, Afrofuturism began as a categorization of a subnational cultural movement with Black Americans as its primary subjects, imagined both locally and transnationally. While embedded in Black American historical and modern contexts, it also utilized themes, visuals, and symbols from African and Africana Diasporic cultures around the world. However, in the past 27 years since Dery’s initial categorization, the ‘Afro’ part of Afrofuturism has expanded to include as its subjects, peoples of sub-Saharan African descent from Africa and Europe (this is part of the project that Eshun names ‘Black Atlantic Countermemory’) as well as Asia and South America. Today, Afrofuturism is a transnational cultural movement even if the discursive framework of its subnational origins remains problematically dominant. Afrofuturism’s referential contexts are both Afrofuturistic and Black Futuristic even if the semantic framing in original usage often remains primarily ‘Black African-Americana.’ This recognition of Afrofuturism’s particularistic origins allows us to avoid the pitfalls of paradigmatic universalism. In order for Afrofuturism to discursively reflect its growth from a subnational to transnational cultural movement, we are obligated to work towards greater discursive clarity and precision to be truly inclusive of all the ‘Afro’ perspectives in Afrofuturism. However, for all of the brilliance found in Eshun’s critical discussions of Afrofuturism, especially via references to ‘future African Archaeologists’, ‘capital’ and ‘counter-futures,’ he defines and expands contexts by way of reference to prior linguistic usage and commonly accepted presumptions. Eshun along with Anderson and Jones all understand some aspects of this discursive problem. However, they have a tendency to lapse into the language and methods of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Raising issues of ‘Late Capitalism’ and the ‘Neo-liberal marketplace’ all have their places, but it is apparent that the tired focus on the jargon of Western Marxism vs Neoliberalism binaries fosters excessive ideological commitments rather than actually alleviating such commitments. It is important to think through the semantic issues with the least amount of political-­ theoretical commitment as possible before we can get clear on what actually works for political transformation. Politics, as with ethics, and aesthetics are value-laden. Objective facts might inform evaluations but

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evaluations are not descriptions despite the distorting effect of an allencompassing political ideology. Moving from a focus on Afrofuturism to a more specific focus on Black Futurism, Eric K. Arnold (2013) in “Why I am a Black Futurist” in the compilation Black Futurists Speak: An Anthology of New Black Writing from the Black Futurist Collective states: I am a Black Futurist because this is the age I was born into: one where the future bends into the past, thereby creating the present. I say Black Futurist because the concept of Afro-futurism has been co-opted by non-black peoples—just like Ethnic Studies courses at universities taught by Caucasians. Black Futurists reject the Eurocentric notion of avant-garde; we‘d rather say, it is what it is. We draw inspiration from a cornucopia of cultural stimuli from seemingly outside the African American canon—visual art, music, movement—and become experts on everything from anime to Zen Buddhism in the process. Yet we know, at the same time, our influences are drawing inspiration from us. We are the beautiful ones who are not yet born; this is our birth cry.7

Arnold addresses a purported disjunction between Afrofuturism and Black Futurism. He expresses an antipathy towards ‘non-black peoples’ just like he seemingly does with ‘Caucasians’ in the larger context of advocacy for Black resistance to white supremacy. He asserts that he is focused on the ‘concept’ of Afrofuturism in relation to Black Futurism, with him choosing to self-identify with the latter. However one may feel about Arnold’s intuitions, he mixes up conceptions of ‘Afrofuturism’, ‘Black Futurism, and ‘African American identity’ for faulty reasons; even if he is right about his reasons for fighting Eurocentrism and white-­ washing. Arnold is also seemingly lacking the self-awareness about his own eagerness to ‘co-opt’ Asian ‘cultural stimuli’ himself. Additionally, it appears that Arnold wants to utilize a well-established sense of AF as BF while negating AF for BF. Arnold, Eshun and the other authors discussed here have contributed to collective understandings of Afrofuturism and Blackness. Some of the  Erik K. Arnold, Black Futurists Speak: An Anthology of New Black Writing (Kindle Location 141), Legba Digital Press. Kindle Edition. 7

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arguments or perspectives might be more politically astute or aesthetically illuminating than others. I think, however, that there exists plenty of discursive space for pragmatic, phenomenologically informed formal semantic and ontological analyses in regard to Black Afrofuturism. My focus is less on the ‘meaning’ of words and sentences as etymological stipulation, through academic or popular usage but more on ‘meaning’ as necessary or probable conceptual relations conjoined with the pre-­ reflective significance of conscious subjective experience. I delineate senses of Afrofuturism and Black Futurism that could advance the potential political efficacy and aesthetic potency of an Afrofuturism as a shared project. An Afrofuturism that meaningfully refers to the actual historical and socioeconomic situations of African and Africana Diasporic peoples in their full plurality. While Black Futurism could refer to these actualities, it does not necessarily have to refer to such actualities. Here, informed by Eshun and others, I define ‘Black Futurism’ as referring to the conceptual relations of relative power-dynamics necessarily related to the future as reflected in the historically contextualized present.8 Furthermore, Black Futurism is understandable as having a sense of relative epistemic clarity, or vaguery, independent of references. It is not as precisely determinant as Afrofuturism but tends to have a wider scope when it comes to the plurality of human experiences, both historical and projectable. The speculative component of my claim is that future power-­ dynamics may be intelligible in the present absent any actual referential relationships. The conceptual structure of both the referential determinacy of ‘Afrofuturism’ and ‘Black Futurism’ and their possible intelligibility are constrained by pragmatic conventions of communication, logical consistency, and the power of the imagination. The distinction between Afrofuturism and Black Futurism represents a theoretical rejection of the notion that the two concepts must be assumed to be functionally equivalent. Specifically, the argument being forwarded here is that the connotations of ‘Afro’ and ‘Black’ Futurisms must not be assumed to be identical with one another universally. Turning to applications, this chapter  Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no 2 (Summer 2003): 293–4. 8

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examines Martin Delaney’s novel, Blake, or The Huts of America and the movie Black Panther within a novel discursive framework. This connotative and functional distinction gives us the opportunity to more effectively explore power imbalances and epistemic injustice as well as the efficacy of modes of resistance to such power imbalances and their potential for affecting present and future change. Blake is an origin point for a modality of Afrofuturism that made Black power thematic and that resulted, to some degree, in real-world ramifications and actualities that certainly contributed to the project of emancipation. In contrast, the movie Black Panther exemplifies a Black Futuristic narrative. Let’s remember that Marvel Comics narratives were mainly dreamt up by two white Manhattanites of European-Jewish descent. In 1966 Stan Lee was 44 years old. He had little to no experience with actual Sub-Saharan African cultures as far as I know. However, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby did have experiences with American injustice as antisemitism and an awareness of the African American project of resistance to the oppressive and alienating effects of white supremacy. There is, at best, second-hand acquaintance with lived experiences and testimonial knowledge of the ‘Black’ experiences as advocacy for both moderate and radical African American social and political initiatives. Black Panther ostensibly presents characters enacting, combatting, and coming to terms with a racialized phenomenology in the idealistic fictional setting of “Wakanda,” an imagined world inspired by but not strictly determined by actual cultural and geographical references.

 frofuturism’s Conceptual Structure: Formal A Relations and Possible Meanings The challenge here is the problem of linguistic ‘use/mention.’ In order to describe the initial sense of a concept of Afrofuturism, we must use the word even if the logic and semantics of the concept remain unanalyzed. Therefore, like much prescriptive conceptual revision, it might seem like confusion generated by using a concept in a propositional definition while simultaneously mentioning another conception operant in the

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same instance of linguistic usage. To resolve this dilemma, it may be useful to think formally about the genre of Afrofuturism—similar to how formal relations are understood in the sciences mathematically to minimize bias and distortion in inductive explanation. We may move from truths about Afrofuturism to sets of truths to the rule-governed truth functionality of propositional and predicate logic. Universal thinking is only falsely universalist in scope if the claims are indeed false or in some way pernicious. Unless we are prepared to say that quantitative, algorithmic thinking is in some way, somehow a function of ‘Western Logocentrism,’ then we may stand to benefit from the occasional usage of formal methods in semantics and ontology. There are at least two, perhaps three fundamental senses of ‘Afrofuturism.’ The original and most common usage of Afrofuturism as discussed by Dery, Anderson, Jones, and Elia involves a problematic conflation of imaginative Blackness and the exclusive reality of African-­ American experiences (AF1). On the other hand, Afrofuturism in the sense of actual reference to cultural, socio-economic and historicalcausal contexts can be termed AF2. Eshun’s approach may be categorized as AF2 as he shows more sensitivity to internal differences and pluralities of the lived experiences of Africana people across cultures. He is more explicit and precise in his usage of ‘African’ and ‘Black’ in historical, current and projected contexts. Finally, we have an AF2 that is semantically informed by discernible conceptual relations to BF. AF2 will suffice for my purposes here as I argue that AF2 is a cluster concept not a prototypical concept such that depending on the type of relationship with Black Futurism, either necessary or sufficient, the concept could have the same sense with slightly different references or have a slightly different sense determining the truth values of propositions referring to the same phenomena. An AF3 would be something for possible future treatment if needed. Subsequently, AF2 may also be analyzed in terms of logical and semantic relationships with Black Futurism further subcategorized as historically-­ contingent Black Futurism (BF1) and identity-sufficient

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Black Futurism (BF2).9 As such, we could think of the set of propositions implicated in truth-functional, referential contexts as AF1 iff (BF1 or BF2) or simply, AF1 if BF2 as the novel conception of Afrofuturism (AF2). This novel conception may be symbolized formally using single letter variables as:

A 1 ↔ ( B1 V B 2 ) V ( A 1 → B 2 )



AF1 Afrofuturism holds that the two notions—Afrofuturism and Black Futurism—are both necessarily identical and thus synonymous in terms of current standard linguistic usage. It suggests that both definitions express the same propositions or the same sets of concepts. Necessary and sufficient formal relations are easily understood by referring to often-used mathematical examples such as two is necessarily greater than one (2 > 1) or that the set of twos is sufficiently an instance of a discrete quantity. The parallel distinctions between number and numeral, word and concept and sentence and proposition are central to any sort of formal reasoning that employs methods of abstraction. These methods are essential for symbolic logic, mathematics, epistemology and ontology. To illustrate this distinction, think about the following four natural language sentences and their propositional content: 1. Ikamva lase-Afrika liyafana nekamva elimnyama. (isixHosa) 2. ア フ ロ フ ュ ー チ ャ リ ズ ム は 黒 い の 未 来 で す 。 (日 本 語 or Japanese) 3. L’afrofuturisme est le futurisme noir. (Français or French) 4. Afrofuturism is Black Futurism. (English) All four of these sentences express the same proposition and grammatical subject- predicate relations. The proposition may be denoted in first  iff and ↔ are biconditionals and express the relation if and only if V is the symbol for disjunction and expresses the relation or → is the symbol for the conditional and expresses the relation if, then ∀ is the symbol for universal quantification and means ‘for All’ ∃ is the symbol for existential quantification and means ‘at least one’

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order logic as a propositional constant ‘A’ such that A if the proposition is true and ¬A if the proposition is false. Now we are in a position to demonstrate the efficacy of formal approaches to semantics, as we may see how conceptual structure determines ranges of possible references. Anything that we can say truthfully or falsely about AF, BF and conceptual or semantic relations can be thought or proven propositionally and in terms of subject-predicate variable relations which further depend upon necessary or contingent conceptual or truth-functional relations. Their truth values do not depend upon stipulation. Logicians and mathematicians think of proofs in roughly the same way. Any proposition can be determined to be true or false as either an axiom, where the falsity of the proposition would imply a contradiction, or as a further assumption, where the truth value of that proposition is strictly determined by rules of inference in relation to an axiom. In first order regimentation, these four sentences are represented as ∀x F(x) where ∀ expresses ‘for all x’s’, x as the predicate is ‘Black futuristic,’ y as the predicate is ‘afrofuturistic,’ and F stands for ‘Afrofuturism’ such that the claim “all instances of Afrofuturism are just instances of Black Futurism” which may be symbolized as

∀x F ( x ) ≡ ∀y F ( y )



Now compare the following sentences: (i). Afrofuturism is Black Futurism. (ii). If something is Afrofuturistic then it is Black Futuristic. (iii). If something is Black Futuristic then it is Afrofuturistic which while pragmatically similar are formally dissimilar: (i). A → A in terms of propositional calculus yet A →B when considered in terms of first order subject predicate relations, ∀x F(x) → ∀y F(y) (ii). A → B propositionally, ∀x F(x) → ∃y F(y) predicatively (iii). B → A propositionally, ∀x F(y) → ∃x F(x) predicatively

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Historically, the understanding of necessary and sufficient conditions has developed in conjunction with formal logic. Whatever the background theory of logical relations one favors, for example, either absolute metaphysical necessity or highly probable pragmatic co-extensiveness, we can still understand necessity and sufficiency in contexts of Futurism. Afrofuturism, when used co-extensively in conjunction with Black Futurism, is simply too broad. There is simply no way to imagine or conceive of truth claims regardless of history, futuricity or temporal indexicality. AF1’s co-extension relies on past, present, and future uniformity of usage and is meant to identify the same exact things. Phenomenologically, AF1 signifies that if a future subject (organic, artificial, human or post-­ human) chooses to self-identify as African or shares African genetic genealogy, then the subject would also affirm a socially constructed or imagined Black identity whether they know that or not; or should affirm a Black identity on pain of inauthenticity. Afrofuturism (AF2) refers to elements of African and Africana Diasporic conflict or hope set amongst futuristic, technological, or surrealistic themes and containing specific geographical, historical, and cultural attachments to these problems, hopes, and goals. In the phrasing of sociologist Alondra Nelson, “Afrofuturism means using the past in the future while not forgetting the past lives of Africans and African-Americans and our culture. It is an exploration of how scientific and biotechnological innovation is changing in the face of black art and popular culture”10 (AF2). The orthodoxy of this definition—that it requires historical and socioeconomic reference points—is over-determined and imprecisely descriptive. There are no discernable ‘matters of fact’ about the far future, the far past, or imagined possibilities that border on intelligibility. Such senses and usage give a false sense of referring to and picking out phenomena that it actually does not refer to or pick out. There are no definitive descriptions involved in counterfactual assertions, alternative histories, of pre-modern ‘peoples of color,’ ‘aboriginal’ or ‘indigenous’

 Alondra Nelson, “The Social Life of DNA: Racial Reconciliation and Institutional Morality,” keynote presentation at Technocultural Futurisms: Code, Hack, Move—Symposium, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana Illinois, April 11, 2018. 10

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peoples nor are there in fictional or projectable factual claims of power dynamics in the far future. Historically-contingent Black Futurism (BF1) may address socio-­ political problems from the perspectives of self-identified peoples of color, or another culturally normative spectrum of deviation, such as the racial categorization of the Irish as the “Blacks” of Europe. These semantic conditions may also lead to problems between ethnic groups and the ways they might address outsiders as “others”, “aliens”, “tokens,”, “untermenschlich”, “pets” or “slaves.” Black Futurism, BF1, holds that clear, direct, specific relationships to terrestrial histories and terrestrial geographical locations are sufficient but not necessary logical identity conditions. It is possible that Black Futurism, (BF1) might only be sufficiently, but not necessarily, related to these same histories and traditions. BF1 may well provide examples of racial categorizations of people and species without necessarily engaging in the “actual” history or socioeconomic realities of marginalized peoples. It offers a wider view of the field in so far as it allows for an ahistorical conceptualization of peoples and species and the narration of their experiences. However, the omission of history—actual or even invented for the sake of narrative—creates an array of aesthetic, ethical, and political questions about the real potential for the actual liberation of marginalized peoples despite the common trope of speculative fictions that envision a future of racial harmony. In terms of phenomenology, an Africana subject may identify as Black in futuristic contexts but is not obligated to do so epistemically and is not necessarily included as Black, although it is, of course, a social-ontological possibility. Identity-sufficient Black Futurism (BF2) provides further contrasting differentiation with both articulations of Afrofuturism. While BF1 does not always literally—as in being precisely referential—engage with past and present material actualities, it still metaphorically refers to the cultural artifacts, histories or technology as well as the future problems and hopes of historically oppressed peoples in the actual world. On the other hand, BF2 argues for fewer conditions. I believe that Black Futurism may be subcategorized without much reference to actualities and that only a minimal set of conditions have to be met before something can be categorized as ‘Black Futurism.’ The propositional language of these

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narratives derives its senses from Afrofuturism and other types of Futurisms but strictly speaking, does not refer to it.11 Although one implicates the other, it does not necessarily entail the other. BF2 is the vaguest of these competing notions of identities and definitions. However, its phenomenological range allows for greater freedom and plurality of futuristic self-identification and self/group categorization in social ontology. Other types of futurisms centering around power dynamics of domination and oppression, in lieu of a construction such as “Power-Dynamic Reliant Futurism”, may fit under the BF2 conception, if we understand the concept of blackness epistemically and ontologically and not racially. Epistemic clarity or ease of understanding, especially understanding the perspectives of others is qualifiable in terms of relative transparency in contraposition to relative darkness. On one pole, we have epistemic parity and phenomenological intelligibility moving on a spectrum to the opposite pole of epistemic incommensurability and alienated phenomenology. Basic phenomenological relations would be impossible if we were radically alienated from ourselves. Temporal alienation would mean that a self (or subject) would not or could not sense its past or future stages such that any concept of prudential reasoning would prove incoherent. Epistemic alienation would mean that we could not learn from parents or care-givers much less any other member of our species, in just one example. Before there were ‘Black’ and ‘White’ races of people, there were already pre-existing notions of immediacy of perception or recognition or the lack thereof that are logically determined partly by using color spectrum relative concepts. These color spectrum concepts are used to describe and explain fundamental biological and psychological notions of day versus night perception and ease or difficulty of our understanding, regardless of culture or natural language. Until the early modern period, this had nothing to do with race or ethnicity, although racialist thinking may well be so thoroughly conditioned in the patterns of contemporary  Other types of named futurisms may include Asian Futurism, Indofuturism, American Futurism, Chicanafuturism, Gulf Futurism, Indigenous Peoples Futurism, Italian Futurism, Russian Futurism Sinofuturism etc. For an example, see Ken Liu, Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation (New York: Tom Doherty Associates Book, 2016), especially his essay “Introduction: China Dreams” and the essay “What Makes Chinese SF Chinese?” 11

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English speakers in Europe or North America as to justify the seeming intractability of such a conflation. It is better to explicate such a concept of abstract identity sufficient Futurism as a type of Black Futurism as ‘Black Futurism’ is already in use. More importantly, the logical entailment conditions of black/white oppositional dynamics are formally contrapositive in the exact same manner as the contrapositive relations of ‘oppressor/ oppressed and alienator/alienated dynamics. These contrapositive relations like other logical relations of conditional negation and conversion hold regardless of one’s theory of concepts. A Prototype theory of concepts might demand deductive proof of my claims about the concepts of Afrofuturism and Black Futurism while various types of functionalist or naturalistic accounts of concepts might require empirical confirmation of projectable forms of linguistic usage governed by rational norms. Either type of theory accommodates my view.

 oward Mutual Respect and Recognition: T Aesthetic Potency and Political Efficacy of Afrofuturism and Black Futurism Blake, or The Huts of America Martin Delaney’s 1859 serialized novel Blake, or The Huts of America was written as a response to white abolitionist fiction and specifically, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Stowe’s novel presented a fictional account of the horrors of American slavery. While it was based on an abolitionist’s speculative imagination of a possible future world free of slavery, the book is not, properly speaking, science fiction. Instead, Stowe’s novel aimed at a certain type of social realism while also offering a romanticized version of southern antebellum life. Even though the value of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is undeniable for specific moral and political decision-making processes of the pre-Civil War era, it nonetheless had its limitations. Critics at the time leveled charges of excessive sentimentality. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, whatever its literary worth, undeniably shaped North American culture. One may think of the subsequent widespread use of

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the titular character’s name “Uncle Tom” as pejorative as a somewhat trivial example of the novel’s power. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was, more crucially, one of the first major American novels to popularize the horror of a distinctly race-based system of chattel slavery. Additionally, Stowe’s novel was also one of the most popular novels in terms of sales in American history up to that point.12 Historians have left little doubt that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a major watershed moment in the North American abolitionist movement and more generally in mid-nineteenth century American culture. It provided conceptual resources for antislavery and by extension, resistance to anti-Black racism. M. Delany’s Black Modernism was representative of an early version of Afrofuturism (AF2). Unlike Uncle Tom’s Cabin, M. Delaney’s novel Blake was explicitly themed as alternative history. In terms of existential context, M. Delany also felt that a true depiction of the dehumanization and alienation of the American “negro slave” ought to be done from an authentically “black” perspective. In his correspondence, M. Delaney discusses his motivation to provide a more psychologically accurate account of slavery and more importantly, sketch a revolutionary program of resistance.13 In M. Delaney’s Blake, the titular character, Henry Blake is a highly intelligent and physically imposing African-(non)American. Early in the narrative, Blake escapes bondage and secretly travels around the South looking to foster open rebellion against the slaveholders in power. He ultimately coordinated slave revolts and uprisings as he makes his way towards the possibility of fleeing to his native Cuba. “Hush! Listen!” admonished Phebe. “What is dat? Wy don’t Tyger bark? I doll’t understan’ it! Seth, go out and see, will you? Wy don’t some you men make dat fool stop? I wish I was man, I’d break ’is neck, so I would!” during which the betrayer was shuffling, dancing, and singing at such a pitch as to attract attention from without. Seth seizing him from behind by a firm grasp of the collar with both hands, Tib sprang forward, slipping easily out  Claire Parfait, The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852–2002 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 91–95. 13  See Martin R. Delany, Letter to Frederick Douglass, Esq. from April 18, 1853, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, May 6, 1853, http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/africam/afar03rt.html (access March 18, 2018). 12

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of it, leaving the overcoat suspended in his assailant’s hands, displaying studded around his waist a formidable array of deathly weapons, when rushing out of the front door, he in terrible accents exclaimed “Insurrection! Insurrection! Death to every white!14

The novel hints at a possible future that includes widespread revolutionary violence in the service of emancipation. A few years after publication, the American Civil War broke out. Ironically, M. Delaney was often criticized as having a “freeman’s” perspective and hence, people at the time—especially abolitionists—often looked to the writings of M. Delany’s one time friend and fellow African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass to provide both an expressive articulation and a genuine connection to such a dehumanized existence. Both M. Delany and Douglass spoke and wrote powerfully on the topics of emancipation, freedom, and political equality. Delany fictionalized history while Douglass’ work was autobiographical. Nonetheless, fictional narratives that are unified by the themes of equality, recognition, and justice exhibit formal and conceptual relationships that are actualized in the domain of everyday politics. Delany’s novel offers a case in point. Already, in the nineteenth century, Delany reserved a specific place for violence as a pragmatic means for Africana Diasporic emancipation and empowerment. He conceived of a qualified type of violence, mainly interpersonal for self and family defense and political for large scale revolutionary emancipation. In his non-fiction work, for example, the allusion to the power of latent Black militancy is specified by the valorization of the “Colored Warriors of America” in his work The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of America (1852). At the onset of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln made Delaney a major in the Union Army upon meeting him for the first time.15 In a sense, like Henry Blake, Delaney recruited and oversaw thousands of Black soldiers during the war. The actual world of 1861 referred to possibilities of his fictional world. Thus, speculative fiction can have an impact on the world by providing concepts and imagery that can be used  Martin R. Delany, Blake, or The Huts of America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 107.  Martin Robinson Delaney, Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. by Robert S. Levine (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 385. 14 15

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pragmatically to effect change to the degree that people may imagine, conceive of and choose to act towards what is different from what is actual. Through the power of intelligible fiction and causal power of fact, people can change, worlds may transform, and phase-spaces relative to discrete universes split.

The Black Panther The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s film Black Panther illustrates the overlap of Afrofuturism (AF1) and Black Futurism (BF1), even potentially problematizing that overlap as a subtheme of the film. Stan Lee, Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole’s narrative evokes both Continental African and African Diasporic themes. The specifically Africana visual elements of the film correspond with the physical geographical backdrop that one finds in Eastern Africa’s Great Rift Valley—extending from the Sinai Peninsula south through Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda. The costumes of most characters are inspired by traditional, modern or postmodern assemblages of clothing and adornment styles found throughout much of Sub-Saharan Africa. The Wakandan language is—despite frequent pronunciation issues—identical to isiXhosa, a natural language spoken by millions of South Africans. The Wakandan traditional music and ceremonial rituals in the film resemble cultural rituals found throughout several Western African nations, especially Nigeria, Benin, and Ghana. In the flashback scenes set in the 1990s United States, we are presented with African American art forms such as hip-hop music and graffiti murals. Though visual reference points provide some semblance of socioeconomic and historical realism, the world created is unreal. The central characters in the film are the protagonist King T’Challa, who is also the ‘Black Panther,’ and his long-lost cousin, the antagonist Eric “Killmonger” Stevens who seeks to usurp T’Challa’s position. Offering a different slant from the typical allegory of immoral ambition versus moral altruism, the two argue over claims of ethical and political responsibility of a fictional African superpower. This set against a backdrop of pervasive and ongoing oppression and injustice faced by many

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people of recent African descent in the Americas, Caribbean, and Europe. In a flashback sequence that is crucial to the narrative, Killmonger’s father (uncle to King T’Challa) explicitly criticizes the isolationist policies of the Wakandan political elites. In short, they represent competing philosophies of resistance in the face of external oppression. King T’Challa’s attempt to reconcile the facts about his nation’s hidden power and geopolitical significance with the hope of fostering political transformation rooted in pragmatic, moral law is an ever present theme of Black Panther’s storyline. This struggle is represented by his conflict with the usurper, Killmonger. Maintaining the most typical convention of the superhero movie, T’Challa fights Killmonger several times in the film culminating in a climactic battle between competing worldviews. It is important to note the moral ambiguity of Killmonger. He fights for what he feels is right. His goal is the world-wide liberation of oppressed peoples of African descent. However, as he says, just before his first fight with T’Challa, he has killed “his own kind.” He kills in cold blood. He strangles the elderly woman who serves the royal household and looks to execute or expel any remaining competitors to the throne. As a result, the remaining Wakandan royals, Queen Mother Ramonda and Princess Shuri, flee the palace seeking refuge in the Mountains with the leader of the Jabari Clan, M’Baku. The usurper seeks to eliminate possible competitors and change long-revered Wakandan traditions. The denouement shows T’Challa coming to love his cousin upon understanding that, like many in the history of radical Black revolutionary movements especially in Diasporic nations, the ultimate ends of Black power struggles were, and remain, reasonable equality and mutual respect (BF1). The film hints at a future in which this tiny, reclusive African nation will take its rightful position not only as a model of scientific and technological achievement but also an example of how a multiethnic yet “racially” homogenous society can project and defend multicultural cosmopolitan values, national sovereignty, and international cooperation. Within a Black Futurist (BF1) framework dominated by the political and philosophical disagreements of the main characters, the secondary characters offer explorations of the relationship of a racial versus ethnic phenomenology. They illustrate the loss incurred in racialized experience and ultimately, render the rift between Black Futurism and Afrofuturism

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salient. Specifically, the character Everett Ross, a European-American CIA agent, experiences a revelation upon recognizing the multitude of potentialities and possibilities of “Black” power. Drawing on the features of science fiction, the futuristic referents highlight Wakanda’s powerful and advanced communications, medicinal, and most importantly, military technology. In the film, Ross’s gradual skepticism about a seemingly backwards nation of “herders and farmers” gives way, much to his astonishment, to the realization that he was taken to the most technologically advanced nation on the planet. Ross’s experience of revelation is intended to have a mimetic effect on the viewing audience who might also experience a revelation of new futures to imagine. At the same time, Ross’s development represents an awakening to the biases of Amero-centrism and Eurocentrism and their historically transcendent assumptions of white supremacy. The speculative science fiction of Black Panther relates to the logic of the narrative, forming a coherent gestalt of potential authenticity balanced with the requisite elements of science and technology, mystery or magic, and a conceivable Afro-futuricity. The Black Futurist (BF1) elements of the narrative address actual global and historical power dynamics instigated by the European transatlantic trade of people, the geopolitical and social-psychological effects of Europe’s colonization of Africa and the Americas, and the Black relatability of South Korea, a postcolonial Asian nation that is not European or “white” (BF2). At a cultural and interpersonal level, we have a phenomenological lesson illustrating a way of being-in-the-world, a way of existing and thinking, that discloses values that may have withered due to a legacy of cynicism but remain actual positives and virtually possible.

Conclusion Delaney’s Blake, or The Huts of America shares with Black Panther a sense of the latency of Black military power in a centrally Africana context. However, Blake contrasts with Black Panther’s in the scale of their respective conflicts. Blake’s speculative fiction (properly speaking) makes littleto-no references to science fiction conventions of advanced

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scientific and technological resources besides the pitchfork and the rifle. Blake’s power lies in its moral persuasion, as an attempt at an authentically Black, early pan-African tale of loss, ‘sufferation,’ and dehumanization motivating a call to violent, organized resistance in the face of overwhelming odds. Blake ends at the beginning of this new set of possibilities. While Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was far more popular among American Northerners, both African (‘freedmen’) and European (women and male ‘citizens’), Blake was indeed cited as an inspiration by many “Radical Republicans” and abolitionists at the time. Blake was initially published in serial form in a literary magazine. It might not have enjoyed a popular audience, yet it was a very effective work. Conversely, Black Panther became an immediate global phenomenon, stimulating conversations and motivating practical action in the spheres of social justice, international justice, criminal justice reforms, anti-Black racism and cultural cosmopolitanism. Within Black Futurist discourse, the film provides a clarion call for recognition between competing modes of resistance to external oppression. This analysis has sought to explore and narrate a divergence within the field of Afrofuturistic science fiction and speculative fiction, ultimately to offer a more nuanced description of the field that Dery first helped to identify. By analyzing the ontological structures and formal assumptions of the Afrofuturism that he broadly construed, we find irreconcilable ideas about darkness and blackness that bring into view a type of a “dark ontology.”16 While the polarity of different senses of Black Futurism and Afrofuturism may suggest an evaluative judgment on the aesthetic potency and political efficacy of these subgenres, my analysis suggests both can offer valuable contributions to the projects of liberation, qualified equality, and mutual recognition and respect. Ultimately, this contribution works to provide a more detailed account and framework for understanding a propositional ‘definition,’ as determined by a more rigorous conceptual analysis. My historically situated conceptual analysis of Afrofuturicity and Black Futuricity itself could be categorized as technoscientific. It is technologically productive if we think  See Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 16

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experimentally about concepts and again, not just about present word usage. We could apply the same type of conceptual analysis of ‘necessary’ and ‘sufficient’ relations shared by darkness and epistemic clarity to the relationship between Blackness and African socio-cultural historical identity. The strength of my argument varies depending on whether we can test or at least, imagine Africanness without “dark/non dark” power dynamics in the abstract. Additionally, the conclusions vary in strength depending on what degree we can test knowledge of ourselves and others with clarity or obscurity or relative ‘transparency’ or ‘darkness’. I am not only making claims of validity, I am offering testable hypotheses. This conceptual revision opens space for creators and thinkers engaged in futuristic or technological endeavors to have a better understanding of the assumptions and competing definitions they hold. And subsequently, how they might affect individuals and societies, both real and imagined in speculative narratives. The past, present, and future potentiality of Afrofuturism functions as an anti-material annihilation of the material presence of the “neutral” faux-universalism of Futurisms that exclude ethnic and phenomenological diversity or even uplift white supremacist ‘Eurofuturism’ such as in William Peirce’s The Turner Diaries. The dark ontology of Black Futurism (BF1 & BF2) may have powerful metaphysical and semantic implications for future histories. Future subjects will benefit from a liberalized conception of futurism that is more open to transhumanistic and post-humanistic power dynamics, temporalities, and identities. Ultimately, we might find greater appreciation of the powerful potential inherent in conceptions of future possibilities and possible futurity. Acknowledgments  I would like to thank my parents Norman Scott and Jennifer Tull-Scott as well as my research assistants Eric Lubarsky and Joann Chin for their invaluable support with this article and elsewhere.

References Anderson, R., & Jones, C. E. (Eds.). (2016). Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-­ Blackness. Lanham: Lexington Books. Appiah, A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton & Co..

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Appiah, A. (2018). The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity—Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture. London: Profile Books and New  York: Liveright Publishing, Profile Books. Booth, K. (2013). Black Futurists Speak: An Anthology of New Black Writing. Legba Digital Press. Bristow, T. (2012). What is Afrofuturism to Africa? Impakt, 5. Retrieved from h t t p : / / i m p a k t . n l / a rc h i ve / 2 0 1 2 / e s s a y s / t e g a n -­Br i s t ow -­w h a t -­i s -­ Afrofuturism-­to-­Africa Cormier, H. (2007). Race Through the Alpha Quadrant: Species and Destiny on Star Trek. In M. Grebowicz (Ed.), Sci-Fi in the Mind’s Eye: Reading Science Through Science Fiction. New York Open Court Press. Cormier, H. (2017). American Experimentalism. In P.  Taylor, L.  Alcoff, & L.  Anderson (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race. New York: Routledge Publishers. Delany, M. R. (2003). Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader (R. S. Levine, ed.). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Delany, M. R. (1971). Blake: Or the Huts of America (F. R. Miler, ed.). Boston: Beacon Press Delany, S. R. (2000). Racism and Science Fiction. In Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Warner Books. Dery, M. (1994). Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. DuBois, W. E. B. (1920). The Comet. In Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New  York: Harcourt, Brace and Company. Retrieved from http://www. gutenberg.org/files/15210/15210-­h/15210-­h.htm. Elia, A. (2014). The Languages of Afrofuturism. Lingue e Linguaggi, 12, 83–96. Eshun, K. (Summer 2003). Further Considerations on Afrofuturism. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(2), 287–302. Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Goodman, N. (1983). Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Kim, M. (2017). Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the Reinvention of African American Culture. PhD diss. Arizona State University. Kreiss, D. (2008). Appropriating the Master’s Tools: Sun Ra, the Black Panthers, and Black Consciousness. Black Music Research Journal, 28, 57–81. Lavender, S., III. (2009). Critical Race Theory. In M.  Bould, A.  M. Butler, A.  Roberts, & S.  Vint (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (pp. 185–193). New York: Routledge. Lewis, D. (1986). On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

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Liu, K. (2016). Invisible Planets: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese SF in Translation. New York: Tom Doherty Associates. Miller, D. S. (2009, May 20). Afrosurreal Manifesto: Black is the New Black—A 21st Century Manifesto. San Francisco Bay Guardian. Mills, C. W. (1998). Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nelson, A. (2018). The Social Life of DNA: Racial Reconciliation and Institutional Morality. Keynote Presentation at Technocultural Futurisms: Code, Hack, Move—Symposium, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Urbana, IL, April 11. Nelson, A. (2002). Introduction: Future Texts. Social Text, 71, 20. Parfait, C. (2007). The Publishing History of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852–2002. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Phillips, R. (2016). Black Quantum Futurism: Theory and Practice, Volume 1. Philadelphia, PA: House of Future Sciences Books/The AfroFuturist Affair. Tate, G. (2016). Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, P. C. (2013). Race: A Philosophical Introduction. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Thomas, S. R. (Ed.). (2000). Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Warner Books. Turner, J. M., with the assistance of Burghardt Turner, W. (2005). Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. White, M., Piper, K., Nelson, A., Kemp, A. J., & Muhammad, E. D. (2001). Afrotech and Other Spaces. Art Journal, 60, 90–91. Womack, Y. L. (2013). Afrofuturism: The Rise of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books. Yaszek, L. (2006). Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future. Socialism and Democracy, 20, 41–60. Yongo, M. (2014, January 1). What Is Afrofuturism? Media Diversified. Retrieved from http://mediadiversified.org/2014/01/01/what-­is-­afrofuturism/

9 Super Fluid/Super Black: Translations and Teachings in Transembodied Metaphysics Ni’Ja Whitson

Breathe. I’m here, but have come from far away. Eu venho de longe I’m going to put my palm into heat. Some liquid without wet. Going to slice into a giant gaseous cosmic cluster. Walk bridges that rise from swamps. Say “fuck” three times. Now 4 times. Glide us in something we can’t retrieve without the back of the throat or stomach lining. While in my first full-time teaching position (at an institution that shall not here be named), I laid on my acupuncturist’s table for the umpteenth time to treat back pain. I was experiencing debilitating spasms, daily, unrelenting. I was teaching between four and six classes a semester and was at the start of my transition away from using she/her pronouns. This time, at the head of the table, was my acupuncturist’s partner, a

Ni’Ja Whitson (*) The NWA Project & UC Riverside NY/LA, Riverside, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 P. Butler (ed.), Critical Black Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9_9

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magical energy worker and physical therapist who was called in to intervene in my treatment. She placed her hands under my head and said, “hmmm,” “this isn’t physical. What is it that you need to say that you are not saying?” After tears and consultations with wise ones (thank you to the Coalition of Diasporan Scholars Moving, to Onye Ozuzu, and Dear One, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones), I resigned from my position, committed to change my relationship to academia and to my art, reclaiming the latter as my priority. All of those healers, in their own ways, taught me about the injuries of blood stasis. I’ll return to the blood. Healing on a quantum level Healing on a quantum level Has already happened Healing then in the temporary temporal Is that of repair The journey of repair on this plane Toward that which has actually Already occurred Healing then Is the act, the future impacting a past Where the choices we make in journeys of Disillusioned repair derails the healing we are to step into You have to forgive me. I have been dreaming in music. Repair is implied in the words “you have what you need” “You can do this” “Trouble don’t last always” But repair and healing aren’t the same Healing isn’t passive Isn’t a witness in wait

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It doesn’t reach around a traveled track And pull along a believer Weary from the beat up And pulled down I’m climbing over walls to write this In the darkness of everything Darkness meaning the seed and fruit Black beginnings of life Healing doesn’t wait It is a future, however, And there is no healed (a past tensed e-d) There is a future where The memory of the pain Gets absorbed in sound The looping has multiplied to so many roads That its selves are too many to be recognized only as The One Rotten Thing that started it all There isn’t a healed but there is a symphony Healing is the journey of music In your bones The fabric of constellations of notes and pings Creating walruses of times inside a body It isn’t about dancing Although it is a dance When you get in Then you leave this here Proposal we call healing to honey or Jupiter to a crashed recital of my favorite things Because you can’t occupy the future while walking to it YET

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But you do when you’ve claimed that future first Then it is already gone And you are walking somewhere it has not been I don’t really believe that you can’t occupy A future and a now simultaneously Of course, you can To ing a thing is to invoke a future Heal Ing We go to a place that is not ever again.

I wrote this awakened from a sweat-filled colorfully kaleidoscopic dream. The day before I was in a House Sermon led by the legendary performance artist, writer, and ordained minister Marvin K.  White, whose ceremony titled Housemology: The Theory of Ehvurething was exactly that—Ehvurething. He deepened the slippage in the waters of House; he invited us to experience the collisions of the Praise House and sweat circle, a now internationally embraced culture started by Black gay men in Chicago in the 1980s. It was another way they were painting their lives back alive, documenting and jacking something that would live beyond the Warehouse or AIDS. Pastor White spread baby powder at the threshold of the entrances. Our footsteps created ghosts of we and us of our befores—lest we let ourselves disappear. So I say again. I’ve been dreaming in music. And seeing in the dark.

I—in the Ifá tradition, a “+1” invokes the infinite. The next. The Yorùbá cosmology reflects an awareness that there is a world to be, a knowing of ourselves to be and an earth to become.

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Quando a maré vazá Vou ver Juliana aê Vou ver Juliana aê Vou ver Juliana

I sat next to Mestre. On his left sat every inch of his age present on the bateria. He listened to, listened in with the time at his feet, at his eyes and said, “Canta.” Quando a maré vazá

I was transported to the waters I remembered of Bahia and the smells of fresh cheese grilled with oregano, skirts spinning in circles, palm leaves falling on my lap. Vou ver Juliana aê

The sound of samba drums still echoed themselves against the Pelourinho cobblestones although we were in Harlem. And I thought of a woman. Not only flesh, but too, a place. A sharpened blade. Mestre said, “Stop.” “That is a song a man sings to a woman.” Vou ver Juliana

I kept thinking to the expanse of ocean against the corner that became me in that room. A dam that walled back the tides of my sexuality and my gender. That story, too, woke me out of a kind of sleep. In preparation for this keynote, I was thinking about Black Diasporic traditions, liquid or liquidity, where we have met each other. And the far too plentiful experiences of boulders and rough edges. I searched for another proposal. Something fluid but not liquid. A Blackness with flow, yet free from water scenarios that position our conditions with drownings, murderous submerges, or the ocean nightmare of our way to Diaspora. The flow that honors transformation, the fluidity of the ocean floor shapeshifting to galactic space. Where Blackness births things. II—One and One as One and Two, The sacred twins, Ibeji. The force of two as one, enfleshed and spirit. We/Us.

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I’m going to talk to you about the dark.1 In 1929, the United States began its withdrawal from Haiti (Danticat 2015). By 1934 they officially withdrew, yet its occupation had succeeded in creating lasting economic dependence and enduring imperial presence (thank you to my dear colleague Maria Firmino-Castillo for reminding me of this). In 1930, the Carnegie Corporation initiated a study on poverty entitled The Commission on the Poor White Problem in South Africa (Columbia University Libraries of Oral History Research Office n.d.). The study was published in 1932 and became a foundation for the apartheid project. The recommendations this study made to address white poverty included initatives/policies  to segregate and delegate Black labor, along with directly taking land from Blacks to give to white farmers. In 1932, Thomas Dorsey after losing his wife and newborn child authored “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” (Public Media Group of Southern California 2018). In 1932, the 40-year Tuskegee assault, concocted by the U.S. Public Health Service (with support from the American Medical Association and National Medical Association) began. Six hundred Black men were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” 399 were given syphilis, 201 were given nothing. Neither group received actual treatment for their real illnesses, nor the disease inflicted upon them. In 1933, there were 28 reported lynchings in the United States (Jacobs 2018);2 28 sorrows, missings; 28 times that white people dressed up and took photographs next to bodies as bonfires, or put on hoods, or simply stepped out of doors—28 times that we know. In 1933, Dark matter made itself known. Dark matter wasn’t discovered. Its unconcealment (Heidegger 1972). was calculated in response to global, accumulated attempts at Black  In this section, I looked to sources that were accessible and readily available online in order to evaluate the developing ways that histories of Diaspora are disseminated and collected in the cyber global sphere. 2  It should be noted that, and as the passage suggests, this number is noted with as few as 24 and as many as 28. I elected to quote the higher number given the understanding that these crimes went largely undocumented. 1

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erasure. Dark matter is invisible, indirectly observable, yet undeniably there. The astrophysicist who discovered a mass in 1933, having more volume than could be explained by its luminosity, noted an “unseen mass,” dark matter. This unseen, “there” was the only possible explanation. As I have written elsewhere, “Newton Called it God” (Whitson n.d.) Its counterpart, dark energy, was unconcealed in 1998; even less is known about it beyond the fact that it repels gravity and it affects the rate at which the universe expands. Is dark/energy Black/magic acting upon the cosmos/Is dark/energy the constitutive element of Black magic/Dark matter is the aspect of the universe/that early astronomers could not explain/Newton called it God/ Nothing:/a shepherd into the densities/of God/Zero is not nothing/It is the unseeable/unknown/uncontainable light/a Black so Black [dark] it’s dark [Black]/ (Whitson n.d.)

Recently scientists have hypothesized that these two forces may not be two different elements at all, an invisible 96% co-composing the universe, but one dark “superfluid,” an extremely cold substance with negative mass (Williamson-Rea 2018; Irving 2018). I thought: superfluid and superblack. A dark fluid. #queerasfuck. #transasfuck.

Heidegger in Time and Being says “unconcealing prevails a giving, a giving that gives presencing, that is Being, in letting-presencing” (Heidegger 1972, 5). To let-presence, rather than to be, is the foundation that connects Being with time. One is not a static being, is not asserting a that is, one presences, lets-available. Being as a giving in this context can be likened to the Black Queer colloquialism “giving life,” a recognition of the highest order, where the person whom has shown themselves, has shown out themselves and subsequently gifts the possibility of beingness in another. To “give life” is to let-presence one’s virtuosity, to unabashedly

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activate letting-presence. Heidegger makes no determinations between levels of letting, neither do I. In the Black Queer context, “giving life” is a Being. It is also pertinent that Heidegger differentiates a matter—“something inevitable is concealed within it”—from “matter”—a “something which is.” Being is a matter, not matter. Thus, Being is to unconceal the something inevitable. Dark matter and dark energy, or the superfluid, are unconcealed not coincidentally in a particular temporality and simultaneously unconceal a baffling intelligence. Something inevitable is indeed concealed within it. Dark matter and dark energy exemplify the great what ifs? They say simply, “no thank you” to and defy binary classification demanding that language be invented, that imaginations and realities be stretched or abandoned, that paradigms be dismantled from simply knowing that it is here. The inevitability of its something is the work. The something makes itself known regardless of a language, context, or desire to receive it. In fact, the work of trying to know or name that which is present will always fail. You gotta be with it. #queerandtransasfuck. “Newton and Einstein knew there was another element of the universe they couldn’t explain. Newton invoked God, Einstein added lambda— the element to keep the universe from collapsing that counteracted gravity” (Panek 2011). The framework and languaging of the invisible co-compositional powers of the universe as a “dark fluid” or a “super fluid” mimic the wrought histories of scientific racism, yet I find that they also partner many elements of Black Transembodied experientials and Black experimental performativities. Many a scholar, a poet, an artist, a homie on the block have articulated the powers of Black being and of the performativities of “the cool.” And, I believe, there is more to it. The dark fluid/super fluid theory is evidence that our beingness-es are old and ancient, that the dark unconceals a cosmic evidence beyond some easy balance, either-or dichotomy, as it is understood that “inhomogeneities make the universe possible.” The universe being composed, mostly of a fluid invisibility, unlocks both that fluidity is at the core of what keeps gravity and our universe in check, and its invisibility suggests

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something of our Divine cosmologies at work. We simply know that it is because it is here doing its work. I must make it plain that I am not suggesting that the invisibilization of any of us is something to try to make galactic or any other sense of. I am saying that we are not (and neither is the superfluid) actually invisible, but that darkness is a sacred magic that requires something other than eyes, and a new seeing altogether, which Blackness has always demanded. A truth that Black Trans and Nonbinary-embodied experiences are, too, invoking of us. And there is a danger when we accumulate unacknowledged invisibilities and make voids of ourselves or inside ourselves. III—Esu I’ll return to the dark. Hear the sound of a caixixi - the soft percussion reminiscent of a rain sticka Brazilian handheld shaker woven like a small basket with an arched handle that allows for the instrument to be cupped in the palm of the hand

The center of four intersecting lines. Surrounded by roads and directions. Cigar smoke coding the air coating the sky. I searched the messages for more 33s. 3s. 3s. 33s. 3s. 3s. 33s. Between January 1, 2018, and September 30, 2019, 331 transgender and nonbinary people were killed worldwide. Those lost to us who we could name because their gender identities were honored, and their deaths reported (Transgender Europe and Balzar 2019). 130 in Brazil 63 in Mexico 30 in the U.S. 1 plus 3, 4 plus 6, 10 plus 3, 4. 4 plus 3 is 7.

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Overall, 3314 transgender and nonbinary people were killed globally between January 1, 2008, and September 2019. At least 10 in the United States thus far in 2020.3 There is a danger when we accumulate unacknowledged invisibilities and make voids of ourselves or inside ourselves. In 1933 (the year Dark Matter was unconcealed)—1 plus 9, 10.3 plus 3, 6. 6 plus 1 is 7. Yemanja—the great mother. Cool nourishing water and fierce protector. caixixi silences hand falls empty

To whose feet we are being called to answer to the murder of her children. And not only in the silences, but also the dying from which there are no earthly returns. We here, do not have an out. We all, you all too, have a responsibility to save and better the lives of the Black Queer, the Black Transgender and Nonbinary students in your classrooms, those SuperFluid Walking Glories in your dance companies, in your auditions, in your lives. It is not enough to have Trans and gender diverse folk in the room without also disrupting the binary thinking, practices, and “traditions” that serve to further ostracize and injure. Consider how lines moving across the floor divided by binary genders create a liberated space for all of the bodies in it? Whose line is it anyway if it serves to marginalize the walking glories in the room? Our traditions are not insulted by our revolutions. Consider how binary changing rooms create spaces of potential anxiety, trauma, or violence.

 When the Collegium for the African Diaspora Dance (CADD) conference took place, there were three murders of a transgender person reported and circulated by news media. By the time this piece was edited for publication in May, there were 11. By Transgender Remembrance day in November, there were 37. Due to under-reporting and misgendering this number is conservative, at best. 3

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Consider how heteronormative constructs of masculinity and femininity limit choreographic practices and forms, as well as performance opportunities and self-expressions. Consider how funding, leadership, community-building, and choreographic opportunities offered to women with an asterisk are still only really invitations for cisgendered women. If Transwomen and Nonbinary people assigned female at birth are not named, it cannot be assumed that the constructs that undergird those spaces themselves are in turn made safe for us. Black Trans and Nonbinary, Black Queer dancers, we are too of this Diaspora—and always have been—we’re here needing a space in dance that feels as Black as our skins, something that belongs to the bones like our genders and our sexualities belong to us. We are trying to live and breathe and sweat on the floor to lift we up from the 3s and 33s, the dying around us. Around the Black transwomen most vulnerable to antitrans violence. That space in dance, too, has to be made to be as superfluid as our genders and sexualities and darkness. Pronouns, presences, and bathrooms only begin to unconceal what is there of who we are. And we keep on naming ourselves to stay alive. Our beautiful Diasporic community is no less a continent than the land from which we were seeded. We have always been a many. Our languaging of gender in fluidities, resist binaries that were never meant to hold our continents anyway, so why would we accept that somehow colonizers got gender or sexuality right but enslavement and genocide wrong? Breathe. IV—Super Black—400 + 1 the infinite, a many. I am a Black Queer Trans Nonbinary Artist, “flowing fluently like the memory of my” superfluid slipping ancestors and transcestors. As elder Iya Fakayode often reminds me “If we are then someone else in our line was. We are not the first.” S.A. Smythe (very much alive), scholar, translator, poet, in their forthcoming article, “Can I get a Witness? Black Feminism, Trans Embodiment, and Thriving Past the Fault Lines of Care” writes, “What does it mean for a space to be open to trans, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary folks other than just the ones we think we like or know? The problem of hypervisibility/invisibility is one that is incredibly salient for all Black people

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and a key feature of the antiblackness that makes this world. Black people are routinely unseen as themselves because they are seen through the metrics of threat or excess” (Smythe n.d.). Through whose eyes are we seeing each other? What does it mean for the Superfluid of us, to actually be invited to these spaces? What does this “practice of care” entail? Is the space itself, the organizing accountables challenging of binary thinking and positionalities? Having Transgender and Nonbinary folk in the room is, too, an invitation for us to evaluate and if necessary, remake the room itself. But if it is a real invitation, that evaluation and labor can’t wait on our arrival. Breathe. The Dark around you unconceals slightly Suddenly

One of the mythologies of the caixixi is that the first one was filled with the teeth of a murdered African woman, a powerful warrior whose call to liberation persists every time this instrument is played. I assert that we should also consider the ways this story amplifies the ongoing, often invisible labor of Black women, and the expected laboring of the Black body even in death. There is a danger when we don’t see us. When we accumulate invisibilities and make voids of ourselves or inside ourselves. An Interlude: A Numerological Mathematics on the Voids of This May Moment This is a numerological remix. The numbers below follow, in order, the accumulated voids of the proceeding passage. The underline separates void from void. 1 + 9, 10 = 1 3 + 5, 8 + 8, 16 = 7 1 + 1 = 2 2 + 2 = 4 5 + 3, 8 + (2 + 2) = 12 = 3 + 5 = 8 2 + 23 = 25 = 7 2 + 2 = 4

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2 + 3 = 5 5 + 25 = 30 = 3 2 + 2 = 4 4 + 3 = 7 + 4 = 11 = 2 + 3 = 5 2 + 5 = 7 5 + 27 (=9) = 14 = 5 2 + 2 = 4 1 + 8 = 8, 8 + 2 = 10 = 1, 1 + 4 = 5, 5 + 8 = 13 = 4, 4 + 7 = 11 = 2, 2 + 4 = 6, 6 + 5 = 11 = 2, 2  +  3  =  5, 5  +  4  =  9, 9  +  5  =  14  =  5, 5  +  7  =  12  =  3, 3  +  5  =  8, 8 + 4 = 12 = 3 A May moment of more 3s. 33s. 3s. 3s. 33s. 3s. 3s. 33s At this May moment, in 2020,  the global pandemic identified as COVID-19 has claimed the lives of at least 358,000 globally. Due to an inept and disastrous federal response in the United States  (Glanz and Robertzon 2020), the corona virus has become weaponized against marginalized folk, ravishing Black communities disproportionately. So dull and clinical a descriptor: disproportionate. Convenient even. Erasure by another name. It isn’t that the dark opens and ends. It upends. There have been at least 11 murders of transgender or nonbinary people at this May moment in 2020. Nina Pop was murdered in Missouri on May 3, 2020; she was the fifth transwoman that month to lose her life by violent means. On February 23, 2020, two white men murdered Ahmaud Arbery while he was jogging, a third white man videotaped their pursuit and subsequent ambush. On May 25, 2020, three Minneapolis police officers killed George Flynn by holding him face down with their knees on his neck and torso. A fourth watched. The rest of the world witnessed due to videos taken by bystanders. The police knelt on his neck and body for 7 minutes, killing him by minute 4. For 3 minutes they kept him down. And dead. At this May moment there have been days of protests across the United States in response.

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Two days after George Flynn was murdered, Tony McDade, a Black transgender man, was shot five times by members of the Tallahassee police on May 27, 2020. There was no video. And no national outcry. Breathe. The Dark around you fully unconceals it is Black

Now, I return to the blood. An invitation to be in the flow. To acknowledge the shapeshifting liquidity of Blackness, that has always been anyway is, to be confronted with the ways the internalized terror known as white supremacy enables stasis. In Eastern medicinal and spiritual traditions, blood stasis speaks to blockages of flow inside us that are caused by physical, emotional, or energetic traumas. Blood stasis causes pain, disease, dis-ease, and illness requiring us to examine every road in our lives. Whether it be from pigeonholing our fullest explorations of “tradition” or supporting only the most “respectable” of Black performativity with our witnessing or our dollars, we create a stasis in our blood. These erasures don’t just resolve themselves “up there” so they can therefore be tolerated; they are ruptures here, now. Beyond and including this room, this context. Blood stasis muddies the blood memory our ancestors have gifted us along with that which we serve to pass on to our next ones. And haven’t we inherited enough traumas? The embrace of our dark capacities expands the possibilities of flow to being beyond salt-watered absorption and coagulated stillness. As the dark teaches us, we were meant to move, cool, fluid, Black. Breathe in the dark with me for one more moment. A Ritual for the Flying4

 From my unpublished manuscript, The Unarrival Experiments.

4

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We are already ourselves becoming. Or refusing to be. Whole, in our un arrival. We’ll live adrift in the cosmic trails by which our bodies are threaded. Maybe our lives will pass each other in the ether. Maybe they will forgive each other for every time they forgot that they could see stars up close, witness each other in past/future of them/we/selves. Even if on the tongue of a sharply evaporating second. Maybe. On the underside of our brownness is a meandering chameleon. It creeps with black, a tiny solar system descends its spine. Beneath It licks at we. Shifts hue in slithering consonants marks into we and we change with it. We slip through selves together, dividing supernova. Make we a crescent moon. I’d like to see the possibility our dark made.

The body reaches itself in spirals through gender. It transposes galactic light. It carves vertiginous densities. Every time a splendid arrival, turns afoul vile expectations of ordinariness. Each fractal reflection inhabits the preciousness of a breathing ghost, with swells of purple particle lassos dusting what once held the quiet of a start. We’ve inherited and shepherd these rotations. To access the yes in our Queer skins is to invoke a portal to ancestral intelligences. To un gender is to conduct the magic of living. We fly, real winged journeys. And we must.

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References Columbia University Libraries of Oral History Research Office. (n.d.). Carnegie in South Africa. Carnegie corporation oral history project. https://bit. ly/3mXubXM Danticat, E. (2015). The long legacy of occupation in Haiti. The New Yorker. https://bit.ly/3mYasY0. Milestones: 1914–1920. (n.d.). “U.S. Invasion and Occupation of Haiti, 1915–34.” Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute https://bit.ly/2VQgduX Glanz, J., & Robertson, C. (2020). Coronavirus Distancing Deaths. New York Times. https://nyti.ms/2IolQxk. Accessed May 28, 2020. Heidegger, M. (1972). On Time and Being (trans. J. Stambaugh). New York: Harper and Row. Irving, M. (2018). Dark matter and dark energy may really be one “dark fluid” with negative mass. New Atlas. https://bit.ly/36StIk3 Jacobs, F. (2018). Chilling maps of lynchings in 1930s America. Big Think. https://bit.ly/36UIJlt Panek, R. (2011). The 4 percent universe: dark matter, dark energy, and the race to discover the rest of reality. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Public Media Group of Southern California. (2018). How sweet the sound: Gospel music in Los Angeles. California African American Museum, Los Angeles. Smythe, S. A. (n.d). Can I get a witness? Black feminism, trans embodiment, and thriving past the fault lines of care. Unpublished article. Used with permission by Smythe. Transgender Europe (TGEU) and Carsten Balzar. (2019). TMM Update Trans Day of Remembrance 2019. In Trans Respect Versus Transphobia. https:// bit.ly/37LRT2W Williamson-Rea, J. (2018). Physicist theorizes that dark matter is superfluid. Penn Today. https://bit.ly/2VNH7Ui

10 Race, Economics, and the Future of Blackness Joshua Bartholomew

Introduction We live in the most technologically advanced global society in human history. Innovations in science, industry, robotics, medicine, and so on are inextricably linked to modern notions of progress. Modernity’s conception of progress carries with it a Western belief that capitalism can and will improve the lives and conditions of all people. While the demands of a capitalist market may drive the competitive fervor necessary for future technological innovations, its dependency on hyper-individualism creates theo-ethical quandaries for Black liberation. The current capitalist modality employs neoliberal1 values, privileging individual’s maximization of profits as essential social value while simultaneously  Neoliberalism hinges on the capitalist axiom of Adam Smith’s notorious “invisible hand” (which describes the unintended social benefits of an individual’s unchecked self-interested actions), charging government intervention of the economy as both un-natural and adverse (free enterprise). “Neoliberalism…was coined in the late 1990s to describe the social and moral implications of the free-trade policies of global capitalism (liberalism) since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc (neo-, 1

J. Bartholomew (*) Cambridge, MA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 P. Butler (ed.), Critical Black Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9_10

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dismissing how structural constraints perpetuate poverty among Black communities and disadvantaged communities of color. In so doing, it blames poor persons and communities for their own deprivation and commodifies human beings. In order to imagine a more preferable future for a global society, Black liberationists can forge an antiracist economic model of social justice as an alternative to capitalism. Much has been written about the future of race in Black Theology (Pinn 2010; Clay 2010; Evans 2012; Sinclair 2013); however, there remains a need for Black liberationists and Womanists to offer an economic model of racial justice that challenges capitalism’s paradigmatic features of individualism and  can  empower  people to outlast the institutionalized forces responsible for their marginalization. Liberationist scholars have critiqued normative Eurocentric models of economics that endorse capitalism’s ability to improve the lives and conditions of all people (Cone 1969; Grant 1993; Douglas 1994; Cannon 1995; Hopkins 2001; Townes 2006; Day 2011), but they have not developed a socioeconomic model of praxis as an alternative to capitalism. While Black liberationist ethics remains a radical response from Black Christians to the mainstream of white religious history, its racial politics of liberation have not fully established an economic model of social justice that prioritizes a future of political self-determination for Black people and for all people around the world. Because Black Theology has its roots in the U.S. Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party’s activism from 1967 to 1971—the most revolutionary example of racial politics for Black liberation during and after the Black Power movement (Bloom and Martin 2016)—offers a model of economic and political praxis that needs to inform the construction of liberationist models of economic ethics. I argue that Black theological ethics can build upon the principles of the Black Panthers’ socialist praxis and offer an alternative to capitalism that is missing from Black liberationist and Womanist discourse. Such a model provides a framework of guidance for the forging of a just, global society. This chapter is concerned with the development of a constructive ethic of counter-capitalist resistance, in spite of racism, as a necessary and basic strategy in the process of imagining a just, global society. Black theology meaning new or recent).” Miguel, A. (2014). Doing Christian ethics from the margins. Orbis Books, 78.

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can revisit its historic, anticolonial roots in order to inform the possibility of a better future. As a fundamental aspect of racial justice, economic justice is concerned with individuals and groups receiving an equitable share of the burdens and benefits of social cooperation, particularly as these pertain to allocation of resources, distribution of wealth, alleviation of poverty, and the right to participate in the economy (meaning to engage in meaningful work) without discrimination. The struggle for racial and economic justice has been the main emphasis of Black politics of liberation. A review of the Black Panther Party’s socialist political activism from 1967 to 1971 serves as a revolutionary economic model of racial justice upon which Black liberationist and Womanist discourse can build. By utilizing the economic model of praxis established by The Black Panthers, this essay will contribute a pragmatic ethic of resistance that builds upon principles of Black socialism and offers an alternative to capitalism that is missing from Black liberationist and Womanist discourse. In doing so, this essay will provide an innovative understanding of liberation in global contexts in general and in Black liberationist and Womanist theo-ethics, in particular, as a way to cultivate cosmopolitan2 racial dialogue. As Womanist scholars argue, “If black [and trans] women are liberated and lifted up then surely everyone else will be” (Floyd-Thomas 2006, 98). Although I am not a Black woman, and can, therefore, not be a Womanist, a Womanist methodology is of paramount importance to my argument. The centrality of Black women’s perspectives as a paradigm of epistemological privilege can help describe, analyze, and empower all oppressed people for positive social change. This essay will use a Womanist methodology to be critical of The Panther’s patriarchy, critiquing not only their gender and sexual politics, but the patriarchal culture and spirit of the (ongoing) Black Power Movement. The goal of this essay is (1) to show that normative Eurocentric models of economics are morally bankrupt in contrast to Black liberationist modes of praxis, and (2) to  Processes of globalization seek to integrate countries and individuals into a larger sort of cosmopolis of human networks. I utilize the term “cosmopolitanism” because it provides a meaningful backdrop for grasping interconnections in present day, global realities. I will expound more upon this in the final section of this essay. 2

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emphasize the need for anti-capitalist collective liberation for a preferable future for all peoples, not just Black peoples. What follows is a contribution to the discursive context for Black liberationists’ relationship to political economics and transnational notions of justice, emphasizing how Black theo-ethicists utilize capitalism as source, sin, and salvation. Then, after an overview of the economic philosophy of the Black Panther Party’s political praxis, I will put the Panthers’ social theory in conversation with Black theo-ethical concerns regarding the future economic context of human striving. Womanist themes from Kelly Brown Douglas and Jacquelyn Grant will be used to frame a Christian ethic of economic liberation, and Joan Martin’s Womanist reading of enslaved women’s relation to work will guide an ethical approach to work and labor. I will conclude with a discussion about antiracist cosmopolitanism as a new identifier for human becoming around the world. In order to begin this essay’s conversation about the future of race, Blackness, and economics, a consideration of what is meant by the capitalist political economy is necessary.

 olitical Economy, Black Theology, P and Womanism Political economy is concerned with the nature and exercise of power within the material social context in which human beings live. On a basic level, political economy refers to the relationship between politics and economics; however, this definition presumes the ability to separate politics from economics. The political economy involves the inseparability or mutual influence of resource mobilization and wealth creation (the economic) and authority, power, and control (the political) (Strange 2015, 18). In the modern era, capitalism3 represents the particular sort and practice of power that defines the political economy. When referring to  While there are many modes of capitalism, of which the U.S. has experienced modifications or variants, I concentrate on the capitalist axiomatic, which includes the production of commodities for market exchange driven by a priority of private profit, where allocation is presumably governed by market pricing, and surplus labor is pumped out of workers through the contract wage form. Some justifications for capitalism emphasize the unchecked pursuit of self-interest as a timeless part 3

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the political economy, theo-ethicists are “concerned with the broader issues of the way in which economic organization relates to the historical experience of humanity in general” (Fitzgerald 1999, 218–234) and to the value God places on people living in conditions of poverty. As a platform for social ethics, Black Liberation Theology emerged to transform society as it viewed capitalism as a culture, not merely an economic system, whereby some societies do better than others in dealing with the maldistributive logic of the global market. In the U.S., Black liberationists understand that patriarchy, racism, and poverty are not preordained; they are largely the outcome of specific institutional structures in a racialized society. The method supporting capitalism’s injustices, “human nature’s” unchecked pursuit of self-interest is a historically contingent sociocultural product of modernity.4 There are two main historical problems with the modern capitalist modality. First, it is highly individualistic. It confines all theories of agency to the individual as the ultimate entity in society, both neglecting inherent collectivism within racialized identities and facilitating a reductionist approach to what kind of decisions people can make within a free market. The second problem, which is related to the first, is the way modern capitalist relations make sense of the idea of freedom. Liberal, neoclassical economists believe that their conception of a free market will solve social ills. To them, a free market entails equal freedom to decide what to do with a monetary budget; people are equally free to make their choices given the budget constraints that they face. However, their conception entails no consideration of race, class, gender, and differing sets of opportunities within a free market. This simplistic way of making sense of oppression and equality does not account for the systemic obstacles poor persons face. As long as poor persons are equally free to spend their budget and make a living, capitalists believe the free market will remedy social inequalities (e.g., see Friedman 2009, 93–101). Instead, its view of freedom consists of “freedom from something,” whereas most Marxists and socialists focus not on whether people are equally “free from of human nature. Connolly, W.  E. (2008). Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. Duke University Press, 9–10. 4  The philosophical anthropology of capitalism centers individuality; it does not presume collectivism of racial communities as a starting point of agency.

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something,” but whether people actually have the same kinds of opportunities, “the freedom to become or to do” (Berlin 2017). Although capitalism is not the prominent topic in Black and Womanist theologies, it has always played an instrumental role in shaping social problems of the Black communities (Murphy 2012, 28). The impact of capitalism for Black people can be seen as early as the enslavement of ethnic peoples from Africa for the purpose of forced labor in the Western world. Slavery in the Americas was an economic institution that, in effect, functioned as a “solution” to the plantation labor problem (Williams 2014, 7–19). According to Historian Eric Williams, “the very existence of British capitalism [which is the model and parent of capitalism everywhere] depended upon the slave-grown cotton of the U.S.” (Williams 2014, 190). To speak of American slavery, or of Black slave experiences in the U.S., is to speak indirectly on its traditional capitalist context. Thus, slavery and capitalism are symbiotically related. While racial prejudice and misinformation about African and indigenous peoples around the globe existed throughout continental Europe during the early stages of colonialism and modernity, the structural and social system of racism was really a consequence of slavery (Williams 2014, 7). Systemic racism became the byproduct of Eurocentric bias rooted in ideas of human identity grafted onto a capitalist sociopolitical order. Black Theology of the 1960s and Womanism in the 1980s cite the experiences of Black slavery as a key characteristic for the interpretation of Black religious experiences. While Black theo-ethicists do not represent a monolithic body of thought, Black liberationists challenge racism and also care about the ways in which oppression is embedded within the capitalist spirit and application. In this way, for Black and Womanist liberationists, privileging the role of (Black) experience for theological construction becomes a modality not just for analysis of racism as social sin, but also of capitalism through notions of classism and economic exploitation as a fundamental theological source of oppression and God’s revelation. While Cone did not systematically develop an alternative model to counter capitalism, his earliest work, Black Theology and Black Power, did reject the “white lie” that Black laziness and inferiority caused Black poverty (Cone  1969, 25). Black people, who are predominantly poor,

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according to Cone, are connected with Jesus, who “had little toleration for the middle’ and upper-class religious snob whose attitude attempted to…destroy the dignity of the poor” (Cone 1969, 36). For Cone, Black experiences of poverty become revelatory through a relationship with Jesus. He emphasized economically exploited situations and poor conditions as “the common experience of black people in [the U.S.] that Black Theology elevates as the supreme test of truth” (Cone 1969, 120). Cone criticized theologians who “speak for a people who control the means of production [because] the problem of hunger is not a not a theological issue for them” (Cone 1969, 48). In My Soul Looks Back, Cone constructs an explicit link between poor persons and God’s revelation where he claimed that for the church to have its experience be valid for determining God’s will, it “must be in concrete solidarity with the poor who are struggling for freedom” (Cone 1986, 75). By this stage in Cone’s career, his engagement with South American theologians and Christians from developing  nations confronting economic oppression allowed him to acknowledge class privilege and the gap between wealthy persons and poor persons as relevant to Black liberation, a sentiment he expressed in the preface to the 1989 preface to Black Theology and Black Power. Womanist5 theo-ethical correctives developed Cone’s work into a more radical appreciation for both the feminist and racial dimensions of Black theological experiences. The goal of Womanism is community building, to establish a positive quality of life—economic, spiritual, educational— for Black women, men, and children. Like Cone, Womanists have not systematically constructed alternative economic models to capitalism, but they have critiqued capitalism as an issue of racism. Womanists who have critiqued capitalism include Jacquelyn Grant, Katie Cannon, Emilie Townes, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Keri Day, and Kelly Brown Douglas. Because Black theo-ethicists and Womanists analyses critique capitalism but has not developed an alternative model for economic justice, they could benefit from articulating concrete approaches to justice that not only respond to enduring poverty but also highlight paradigms of action 5  For a four-part definition of Womanism, see Walker, A. (2004). In search of our mothers’ gardens: Womanist prose. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, xi–xiii. See also Floyd-Thomas, Mining the Motherlode, 5.

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that present alternatives to modern economic arrangements. The Panthers offer a constructive conversation partner.

The Black Panther Economic Philosophy The Black Panther Party was founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California in 1966. From its inception, the organization functioned as one of the most trenchant critics of American racism, imperialism, and economic exploitation. It became the most widely known Black activist political organization of the later 1960s. Notorious for wearing distinctive black leather jackets and black berets, and often openly displaying weapons, The Panthers were innovative community activists who applied civil laws of self-defense against manifestations of systemic racism, advocating politics of self-determination as tactics of freedom for Black communities around the world. The need to build self-­ sustainable, interconnected communities from the margins of society influenced the intellectual and sociopolitical principles and philosophies of The Panthers. As members of a long tradition of Black people in the struggle for freedom, The Panthers were most of all a revolutionary Black American socialist organization, whose radical views of racial justice laid an important foundation for moral visions of a just global society. From 1967 to 1971, The Panther’s politics of armed self-defense and revolutionary community services gave them political leverage, forcibly contesting the legitimacy of the U.S. political regime and providing a culture of (self-)defense for disenfranchised Black people. Even though they structured their ranks like a paramilitary force, they were not just about armed action; the Panthers were a legitimate voice of Black people and took care of the broad range of the community’s needs. They were the vanguard party of the Black Power revolution. First publicized in May 1967, The Black Panther Party’s original Ten Point Program6 covered demands that were essential to survival. They believed that Black people  The platform drew heavily from the ten-point platform that Malcolm X crafted for the Nation of Islam, published in August 1963; however, it modeled Malcolm X’s nationalism without the Islamic flavor. “What the Muslims Want, What the Muslims Believe,” Muhammad Speaks, August 16, 1963. 6

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would not be free until Black people were able to determine their destiny, and they believed in reparations and cooperative economics. After Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in April 1968, The Panthers picked up where King’s poor people’s campaign left off, but with a socialist twist. At this point, the civil rights practice of nonviolence against racial exclusion had few obvious targets and could no longer generate massive and widespread participation. The Panthers filled the vacuum both locally and internationally (against the backdrop of the Vietnam War), frequently helping poor Black communities handle problems with landlords, spousal abuse, or the police, and filing for status as an official “nongoverning organization” of the United Nations (Bloom and Martin 2016, 148; Forman 1972, 534–538). Chapters sprang up all over the U.S. from Los Angeles to New York. By the fall of 1968, The Black Panther Party announced its intention to launch the Free Breakfast for Children Program in Oakland, one of its core and most notable community programs. The purpose of the Free Breakfast for Children Program was to temporarily alleviate the pain of poverty. It also became a way for The Panthers to generate revenue for their cause. By April 1969, The Panthers reported feeding more than 1200 children per day at nine facilities in California, Illinois, and Iowa. By November, the program spread to 23 cities nationwide, and at the height of the effort, between 1969 and 1971, virtually all chapters ran a Free Breakfast for Children Program at some point. While children ate their meal, members taught them liberation lessons consisting of Panthers’ messages and Black history.7 These programs were run mostly by Panther women and helped to raise public consciousness about hunger and poverty in the U.S.  Women kept the community programs alive and did most of the painstaking day-to-day social labor necessary to sustain the chapters.  From August 1969 through August 1970, The Panthers developed an array of community programs in chapters throughout the country. These programs included The Free Breakfast for Children Program, liberation schools, free health clinics, the Free Food Distribution Program, the Free Clothing Program, child development centers, the Free Shoe Program, the Free Busing to Prison Program, the Sickle Cell Anemia Research Foundation, free housing cooperatives, the Free Pest Control Program, the Free Plumbing and Maintenance Program, renter’s assistance, legal aid, the Seniors Escorts Program, and the Free Ambulance Program. Jones, C. E. (1998). The black panther party (reconsidered). Black Classic Press. p. 30. 7

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The Panthers viewed Black people as a colony in the U.S.  Through their revolutionary services, The Panthers redistributed wealth in society; the services bridged artificial separations between labor and ownership: those who labored to produce the services also owned and directed the benefits of their labor in a manner that was cooperative. What made these services different than programs like the Red Cross or non-profit charity and self-help services were the fact that The Panthers explicitly tied their programs to community-based socialist ideologies with revolutionary intent. Instead of divesting power, resources, and capital from disenfranchised Black communities, The Panthers invested, shared, and circulated capital into Black communities in order to uplift and meet the needs of the people. The Panthers’ socialist ideals and communal practices informed their programs, supporting and empowering Black neighborhoods across the country, while simultaneously making real the socialist world for which The Panthers’ advocated in theory. The community service programs were part of a broader insurgency to change the U.S. capitalist system to a more equitable socialist one. Both external and internal factors contributed to the decline of the Black Panther Party. State repression was a key external factor. The FBI infiltrated The Panthers, shrouded its politics, ultimately discrediting their image and repressing the organization’s long-term potential. Gender bias was an internal factor of repression within the party, and sexism in the Black Panther Party constituted a significant problem. The Panthers were not reflexively critical of patriarchy and (Black) male privilege; the party did not primarily imbue their politics with tactics for self-­ determination that centered on the systemic oppression of Black women and emphasized the confluence of racism and sexism in their struggle for liberation. By 1971, The Black Panther Party was quickly unraveling. The greatest strengths of The Panthers’ politics after 1971 were its notoriety and its concentration of relationships and resources in Oakland.

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A Liberationist Model of Racial Justice When putting Black Theology in conversation with ideas of Black Power, there is constructive potential for Christian social ethics to engage the ideas of The Black Panthers. While Black and Womanist theo-ethics represent the academic arm of Christian communities, the racial and economic aspirations they signify share significant similarities with that of The Black Panther Party. Both social forces believed that authentic human existence means being in freedom; Black and Womanist theo-ethics and The Panthers share philosophical concerns that emphasize sacred anthropological need for concrete, spiritual negations of social oppression. The Panthers were able to present a sketch of human liberation primarily because they stressed that people must liberate themselves from settler colonialism. For Black and Womanist ethics to say anything about what society can be, they can adopt and recontextualize the clear-cut social theory that The Panthers employ about what society is. Liberationists can use The Panthers’ racial politics not to advance The Panthers’ cause, but to strengthen Black Theology’s formulations of Black Power as a model of “wholeness” and “self-determination” for the liberation of Black communities. Black and Womanist theo-ethicists can now more easily develop prescriptions for ethical approaches to labor that highlight social evils within the system of capitalism. Doing so would enhance the way Black and Womanist theo-ethicists engage internal dynamics of liberal, capitalist America. The Panthers performed an important service for Black and Womanist theologians: they modified (European) Marxist thought by emphasizing the need for poor Black communities to gain significant control over their lives. No school of thought within the heterogeneous Marxist intellectual tradition has accomplished such a task. The Panthers’ theoretical innovation of centering the Black abject, lumpen proletariat,8 leaned  Another reason The Panthers’ politics and programs were revolutionary in character was because they emphasized the empowerment of the most abject, disadvantaged class of people (as opposed to the atomic individual in a free market) as the pathway to racial and economic emancipation. According to Newton, “The Panthers seek to organize the ‘unemployable’ elements of society, or lumpen proletariat, because they form the only revolutionary class in technological society. As the ruling circle continue to build their technocracy, more and more of the proletariat will become 8

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heavily upon the significance of Black experience to achieve an egalitarian society. While there is a plurality of Marxist beliefs, The Panthers fashioned a unique form of Marxist thought that was concerned specifically with Black peoples’ abilities to control means of production and to establish themselves as un-exploitable communities of resistance. “No narrowly working-class Marxist revolutionary formation in the U.S. has had nearly as transformative a historical effect as the Black Panther Party” (Bloom and Martin 2016,467). The Panthers were synonymous with a liberationist Black community. Kelly Brown Douglas holds together the individual and the community in her liberationist attempt to seek “wholeness.” Douglas appropriately says, “Black women have traditionally been concerned, not just for their welfare, but for the welfare of their entire community and families” (Douglas 1994, 98). Douglas contends that consistent commitment to family and community has led Black women on a search for a politics of wholeness as they have evaluated their participation in various freedom movements such as the contemporary woman’s movement and the 1960s freedom struggle. She writes, These women needed a political strategy that would assure black people, men, and women, rights to live as whole, free, human beings and that would keep the black community whole, unified, in striving for liberation…[Wholeness] does not seek to prioritize different forms of oppression, or to pit women against men/the poor against the rich…this analysis of wholeness might challenge the ‘haves’ in the black community who maintain their status by supporting structures of oppression. It will confront the alienation that often develops between the black middle class and the black poor. (Douglas 1994, 99)

Her “underlying assumption is that only individuals who are at least moving toward wholeness can nurture wholeness within the community” (Phillips 2006, 104). This essay adds to Douglas’s sentiment that the health of the community also impacts the health of the individual. In the unemployable, become lumpen, until they have become the popular class, the revolutionary class.” Newton, H.  P. (1970). Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 18, 1970. The Huey P. Newton Reader, 160–75.

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context of economic justice, a vision of “wholeness” for Black liberation directly influences and challenges Black peoples to participate in activities that advance the unity and freedom of individuals within Black communities. As Douglas seeks to bring all Black peoples together, Jacquelyn Grant posits a vision that reinforces the need for Black economic self-­ determination. Jacquelyn Grant views economic liberation as freedom for a life of “self-direction”; liberation means to no longer be another’s servant either in language or in practice. Because Black women’s job prospects have been relegated to roles primarily as domestic servants in the post-slavery U.S., according to Grant, economic liberation is the need for greater decision-making and bargaining power for Black women workers, and concomitantly Black people in communities (Grant 1993, 205). Jacquelyn Grant envisions a world where Black women’s economic opportunities are not restricted, so long as they do not oppress others as they themselves have been oppressed. I agree with incorporating Black peoples and women fully, along with greater decision-making for workers (on the job), and here, I utilize Grant’s idea of “self-direction” to facilitate a socialist vision. Using Douglas’s theme of “wholeness” and Grant’s understanding of “self-direction” for the purpose of a constructive dialogue with socialist modes of liberation moves Black and Womanist ethical discourse forward. As a form of economic liberation and resignification of Black Power, what do Womanist themes of “wholeness” and “self-direction” look like for Black communities? “Wholeness” for the economic liberation of Black communities can model traditional Womanist concerns for communal striving. It is the direct antithesis of capitalism’s hyper-individualistic starting point. Moreover, it facilitates a socialist approach to community wealth building in society. For Black people in communities “to be whole,” Black self-love must be the number one priority, centering poor Black and trans women. An unapologetic desire to remain connected to the uplift of Black women and Black people in poor Black communities is of paramount importance to “wholeness” as economic liberation. “Self-­direction” as economic liberation reflects political agency to determine work and inclusion. A vision to create a self-sustainable economic community requires an intentional organizing force that is responsible for the community it serves. A “self-directed” Black

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community envisions labor to be self-fulfilling, a supplement to wellbeing that involves the acquisition of skills and parity of health and welfare. While there certainly were problematic aspects to the Black Panther Party, and even though it was not a Womanist organization, it shared the value of community-oriented self-determination. When recontextualizing economic liberation, Womanist Joan Martin provides an ethical way to deal with labor and work that can assist in situating “wholeness” and “self-direction.” In More Than Chains and Toil: A Christian Work Ethic of Enslaved Women, Martin analyzes women’s work during slavery within the framework of Christian social ethics. She explicates the experiential realities in lives of enslaved women and their social world in the ante-bellum concerning the relationship among moral agency, work, and human meaning (Martin 2000, 4). According to Martin, slave narratives represent sacred texts that enable one to see the processes whereby religious faith becomes a source of power for Black people as oppressed people (Martin 2000, 22). To lay a Womanist theoretical foundation, Martin uses Pierre Bourdieu’s Poststructuralist “logic of practice” (Bourdieu 1990) for its concept of social space as multidimensional, relational, and interactive, and couples it with Anthropologist James C.  Scott’s theory of hidden transcripts (Scott 1990) because “Bourdieu inadequately addresses the power of subordinated groups to resist and subvert the dominant objective structures even if they must do so in ways that appear passive, ineffective, and short term” (Martin 2000, 69). Scott gives Martin’s reading of slave narratives currency to see the often-neglected social spaces and actions wherein marginalized peoples experience relative autonomy within their structured livelihood. According to Martin, four constitutive elements for constructing a work ethic based on experiences of oppressed Black women are the following: Black women’s theo-ethical understanding of the relations of God to slavery, Womanish moral authority, instruction, and action as an inter-­ generational dynamic for communal resistance, empowerment, and solidarity in the context of oppression, black women’s struggles for self-­ determination in the use of one’s own sexual and reproductive labor, and

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black women’s work-related attitude of self-reliance, and confidence in one’s owned learned craft and skill. (Martin 2000, 80)

Martin’s engagement with these four elements buttresses economically just themes of “wholeness” and “self-direction” because it highlights a fundamental dynamic in the narratives of enslaved, and conversely poor, Black women; work as exploitation is considered evil, but work that functions as a resistance strategy engenders moral living. Martin creates a way for Black liberationist and Womanist theo-ethics to articulate moral agency through an approach to work that enables Black people, especially poor Black and trans women, to be their fullest selves while also establishing bases for communal self-determination. Martin clearly shows how a Womanist interpretation of God and Jesus Christ as Creator and Liberator does not approve of captivity, and motivates the ongoing search for freedom and wholeness over and against evils of economic and human oppression. Black and Womanist ethicists can define themselves as liberated beings in and through their work by owning the fruits of their labor, serving to help create a vibrant Black community despite the limitations placed on the community, especially Black women, by those on the outside. Martin writes, Enslaved women perceived work as ‘productive’ and ‘fulfilling’ when it contributed to the community in the ongoing struggle for emancipation and freedom. When we use our labor to meet material need, we realize our true humanity and enable our participation with God as co-creators. (Martin 2000, 152)

From an anticolonial socialist perspective, Black and Womanist theo-­ ethics can build upon the revolutionary example of The Panthers, recontextualizing their politics for the purpose of centering poor Black women within the “wholeness” and “self-direction” of Black communities. To achieve a more just society, Black and Womanist theo-ethics need not shy away from commitments to spiritual socialist revolution.

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 Just Global Society: A Antiracist Cosmopolitanism As a way to pragmatically counter capitalism, Black and Womanist theo-­ ethicists can articulate practical responses to chronic poverty experienced by marginalized individuals around the world. As a way forward, Black and Womanist ethics can adopt the Panthers’ emphasis on collective liberation. Collective liberation means recognizing that the struggle of all peoples is intimately connected, and that people must work together to create the kind of world where every person is worthy of dignity and respect. Collective liberation is both a noun and a verb; it refers to the idea that human collaborations provide tools to dismantle systems of economic and social oppression, and it is possible to create a world in which all people are seen as fully human. Contemporary politics within the theo-ethical community and beyond can be enriched by interaction with the memory of the Panthers’ anti-­ capitalist platform of collective liberation in the following ways: (1) Black and Womanist ethicists can develop an internationalist approach to praxis that highlights the interplay between globalized economic structural transformation and the enlargement of human capabilities as an alternative to capitalism, and (2) the Black prophetic tradition can craft a new ethic of resistance, a beloved community, as an antiracist cosmopolitan identifier for economic liberation in a globalized world. By describing the possibility of a just global society, the priorities of the Panthers’ racial politics offer an economic blueprint for Black and Womanist ethicists to realize racial justice as collective liberation. The theme of collective liberation situates an original attempt to ground a critical intellectual study of religion/theological ethics and globalization in relation to the praxis of Black socialist politics and radical movements. According to Angela Davis, Liberation is synonymous with revolution…A revolution is not just armed struggle. It’s not just the period in which you take over. A revolution has a very, very long spectrum…Che made the very important point that the society you’re going to build is already reflected in the nature of the struggle that you’re carrying out. And one of the most important things in

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r­ elationship to that is the building of a collective spirit, getting away from this individualistic orientation towards personal salvation, personal involvement…One of the most important things that has to be done in the process of carrying out a revolutionary struggle is to merge those two different levels, to merge the personal with the political where they’re no longer separate. (LIFE Magazine 1970, 26)

Because both the Black Panther Party’s domestic and global analyses did not account for the feminization of the global market (Hartsock 1983, 283–310), their politics of gender and patriarchy reduced the collective spirit of the Black Power movement’s revolutionary potential. Black Feminism/Womanism9 emerged as a theoretical and practical effort demonstrating that race, gender, and class are inseparable in the social worlds people inhabit. Insisting on the connections between struggles and racism in the U.S. and struggles against globalized economic injustices is a feminist process. Conscious interventions are necessary. Because sexism remains the nexus through which racism and capitalism function to exploit poor persons and marginalized communities, Black Feminist/ Womanist ideals create one of the most fruitful spaces out of which to construct a just economic theory for social change. Because the Panthers’ political task established a normative internationalist focus on communal striving, an appropriate response from Black and Womanist theo-ethicists to economic injustice must include a vision of moral action directed at policies that both underestimate the real harms associated with domestic and global markets and overestimate persons’ abilities to rise out of poverty based on individual freedoms, personal merit, and economic success to the exclusion of oppressive structures and inequitable institutional practices. As a way to carry forward the Panthers’ historic political task, Black and Womanist theo-ethicists can articulate liberation as the process and end goal for oppressed peoples within a capitalist global economy through policies that provide checks to market mechanisms and forces that perpetuate inequities worldwide. According to Keri Day, “communities of color can experience greater  While there is a distinction between Black Feminism and Womanism—the latter emphasizing more of the spiritual elements of a Black and feminist identity—I hold these social theories together in order to reclaim liberationist perspectives of both secular and religious thinkers. 9

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equity and equality by crafting a vision of a preferable future that includes the implementation of public policies in order to foster thriving and flourishing for vulnerable segments around the world” (Day 2011, 14). She writes: Public policies that are guided by normative commitments such as human dignity and communal accountability can cultivate the type of structural transformation and actualization of human potential needed to close the wealth gap between rich and poor countries and within individual countries themselves…Black liberation and womanist scholars must negotiate the significations of global political economy and how these relate to the integration of poor persons into modernizing global processes toward flourishing. (Day 2011, 14–15; also see Tanner 2005)

The historical factors that give rise to oppressed voices around the world point beyond happenstance and toward inequitable global productions. Black liberationist and Womanist scholarship function as a necessary rejoinder to faulty logic of capitalism and neoliberalism that can provide possibilities within this mode of economic activity. In building upon the economic priorities of the Panthers, a Black and Womanist theo-ethical vision of a preferable future for a global society includes “fostering a sense of transnational justice, thriving for the global poor, and public policies to regulate inequitable international markets, thereby minimizing economic disparities associated with capitalist exploitation and commodification” (Day 2011, 25). When turning to the problem of global poverty, Black and Womanist ethicists can couple their moral sensibilities with the Panthers’ transnational scope of justice and connect this to women of developing nations. Transnational justice is critical to thriving for poor persons around the world, particularly because throughout the global community women are overrepresented among the vulnerable class of impoverished individuals. Black liberationist and Womanist discourses can enrich their own theological discourses by relating their theo-ethical values, concerns, and commitments to an idea of global counter-capitalist communities. In this case, the idea of global counter-capitalist communities arises out of the global economic interaction and interdependent nation-states already

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experienced, which shows a way for values and norms that can guide and regulate global market interactions cross-culturally. According to Day, The concept of Imago Dei can contribute to the development of such values as human equality, fairness in market exchange, and defending the most vulnerable segments of society; values that are worthy of commendation…poor communities need more than survival, they also need to thrive. Poor global communities of color would benefit from a concept of thriving that details what cultural and economic resources are need for poor persons to participate, on par, with their peers in broader society…One normative commitment is gender equality across societies…[Martha] Nussbaum’s work on “human capabilities” (Nussbaum 2001) [is] compelling with respect to women. Nussbaum persuasively argues that any strategy to ameliorate poverty around the world must privilege women who constitute over half of the global poor. (Day 2011, 28–29)

Much like the Panthers did, Black and Womanist liberationists can engage democratic vitalities that will most likely ensure the possibility of social transformation, and the enlargement of human freedoms, in order for poor persons to self-actualize and this includes the implementation of normative commitments of increased regulation of international markets through public policies that regulate “inequitable markets in order to ensure equity on a number of social issues that affect the poor, such as wages, employment conditions, health benefits, and more” (Day 2011, 32). Angela Davis speaks of the kind of commitments for collective liberation Day highlights as a form of abolitionist advocacy (Davis 2016, 6). Black and Womanist ethicists can offer a vision for a new world by relating their theological reflections to a political economy of globalized communal hope, centered on abolitionism. At the heart of the Black Panthers’ revolutionary services was not only a concern for the survival and liberation of disadvantaged communities, but also abolitionist demands for quality education, for antiracist job strategies, for free health care, and the promotion of anti-capitalist critiques and movements toward socialism. Advocacy of “revolutionary transformation was not primarily about violence, but also about substantive issues like better life conditions for poor

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people and [marginalized communities]” (Davis 2016, 7). A normative focus of Black and Womanist ethicists as it relates to “abolishing the prison [economy] is about attempting to abolish racism… [a way for people] to develop the institutions that would allow for the incorporation of previously enslaved people in a democratic society” (Davis 2016, 23, 26). “Wholeness” and “self-direction” relate to abolitionist advocacy as a form of international collective liberation through concerns for global (inter-)communal striving. Much like the Panthers’ economic locus of revolutionary Black socialism, “wholeness” for global collective liberation begins with countries as “whole” communities. For countries under the superstructure of global capitalism to be considered “whole,” they must be free from dependency on Western hegemonic standards of First World “civilization.” Global economic liberation begins with centering poor women in  developing nations through a commitment to abolish the structural nature of interconnected international class issues. “Self-­ direction,” therefore, reflects the political agency of peoples around the world to determine work that is meaningful to them insofar as it promotes the economic self-sustainability of countries’ autonomous interdependence in a globally connected world. “Self-direction” as a form of collective liberation of abolitionist values looks like the ability for countries to organize labor forces that are responsible first for the peoples they serve, and not to the interests of a global hegemonic power and militaristic gaze. Class systems refer to the economic conditions wherein people encounter their position and status in any given society, whether local or global. Black and Womanist Christian liberationist ethics can contribute to developing an approach to realities of class systems as a basis for racial equality and economic exchange. As a way to build a platform for Black and Brown communities to do justice together, much like the rainbow coalition of the Black Power movement, this approach contributes to notions of antiracist cosmopolitanism. At the root of modernity comes a teleological view of the providential and progressive unfolding of nature and history that entails the necessity of race; however, I disagree with any exclusionary configuration of cosmopolitan thought. Rather, here,

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cosmopolitanism is an inclusive idea that views all communities and peoples as equal and capable of living in a global civil society. From the standpoint of communal “wholeness” and “self-direction,” antiracist cosmopolitanism refers to the state of people being citizens of the world. Cosmopolitanism is an important conceptual identifier for theories of globalization because it provides a meaningful backdrop for grasping interconnections in present day, global realities. Processes of globalization seek to integrate countries and individuals into a larger sort of cosmopolis of human networks. In a sense, (technological) processes of globalization reflect a reification of cosmopolitan thinking. And yet, while globalization has changed and enhanced communicative conditions around the world, globalization does not equate to notions of progress unless it underscores theories of difference from an inclusionary perspective. Instead of being from a particular nation or city-state, cosmopolitanism signifies the way in which people identify as citizens of the entire universe. Cosmopolitan thinking acknowledges universalism and difference in ways that are both aided by capitalism, and its current prevailing modality—neoliberalism. Cosmopolitan thinking can also work against its normalization of hegemony. The universalizing base of neoliberal ideology undermines rationalities and moralities beyond the marketplace, which can ironically be applied to work in favor of some aspects of cosmopolitan ideology. Neoliberalism entails an epochal shift in the relation of capital, labor, consumption, and place; it entails more reliance than ever on abstract media: on the transaction of quasi-monetary instruments across space and time in the electronic economy, and on means such as the futures market along with the extraction of profit from intellectual property. As sites of manufacture and consumption have been dispersed across the earth, their connection has become increasingly opaque, undermining the very idea of a national economy in which local interest groups recognize each other as interdependent components of a commonwealth (Hisrt and Bromley 2009, 68–100; Hirst et  al. 2015, 101–130). As a result, the spatial articulation of politics and economy has been fundamentally disrupted, and globetrotting capital has renegotiated the terms of its relation to the nation-state. Now political networks are often blurred or overlapping, and ever more intense, disarticulated flows of

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bodies, goods, finances, and media link “communities” in highly convoluted circuits of exchange that governments are increasingly less able or willing to regulate.10 In undermining rationalities and moralities beyond the market, neoliberalism has expedited processes of globalization and deterritorialization (Pauly and Reich 1997, 1–30; see also Deleuze and Guattari 1988). Cosmopolitanism is an important idea for Western, non-­ Western, and non-European economic thought because processes of globalization and deterritorialization create quandaries of human identity. Given the way in which global politics of identity privilege Western or Eurocentric modes of thinking, cosmopolitanism becomes a way to ground human agency in a more collective, inclusionary way. By acknowledging a theory of differences that involves appreciating the myriad ontic epistemologies across races, classes, and communities, antiracist cosmopolitan thinking has sociopolitical effects that can form human agency as a process through which an individual or community can intentionally shape their projects through nodes at intersections of inter-communal networks, over and against hegemonic systems of domestication. When thinking about human agency in this way, antiracist cosmopolitanism becomes important for Black liberationists and economic thinkers who prioritize disadvantaged communities because it grounds a moral imperative to center community-oriented agency and form an individuated collective identity necessary for social movement beyond universalizing neoliberal ideology. Cosmopolitanism, therefore, is an ideational viewpoint of philosophical anthropology that recognizes both the centrality of difference within human identity and the fundamental moral unity of human relationships. More importantly, it can be a fruitful way to think about equitable principles of market exchange. Couched within a Christian ethic of liberation, antiracist cosmopolitanism is an idea capable of disrupting divisions of identity politics based on socioeconomic, national, religious, and political social locations. Moreover, as a constructive way forward, a Christian liberationist ethic of collective liberation, of “wholeness” and “self-direction,” would even  Although new formulations of economic nationalism have cropped up in Europe and the U.S. (i.e., Brexit), the historical inertia of capitalist relations still produces economic outcomes that are difficult to regulate in today’s digital age. 10

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further an understanding of how antiracist cosmopolitan praxis relates to Western institutional power structures, which include (Black) churches in society, while still acknowledging its recovery from a Western episteme of social privilege. The hope is a vision of transforming the worlds of marginalized Black peoples into worlds that uphold their dignity, ensure equitable access to economic opportunity, and enable them to participate in a shared humane existence. The good news is that Black and Womanist theo-ethicists can carry forward, in hopefully radical ways, what was/is at hand in the Black Panther Party’s social, cultural, and economic revolution.

References Berlin, I. (2017). Two Concepts of Liberty. In Liberty Reader (pp.  33–57). Routledge. Bloom, J., & Martin, W. E. (2016). Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. University of California Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice (trans. R. Nice). Cambridge: Polity. Cannon, K. G. (1995). Katie’s canon: Womanism and the soul of the Black community. Continuum International Publishing Group. Clay, E. (2010). A Black Theology of Liberation or Legitimation? A Postcolonial Response to Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power at Forty. Black Theology, 8(3), 307–326. Cone, J. H. (1969). Black theology and black power. Seabury paperback. Cone, J. (1986). My Soul Looks Back. Orbis Books. Davis, A. Y. (2016). Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books. Day, K. (2011). Global Economics and US Public Policy: Human Liberation for the Global Poor. Black Theology, 9(1), 9–33. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing. Douglas, K. B. (1994). The Black Christ. Maryknoll: Orbis. Dwight, H. (2001). “The Religion of Globalization,” in Dwight Hopkins, Lois Ann Lorentzen, Eduardo Mendieta, and David Batstone, eds., Religions/ Globalizations: Theories and Cases (Durham: Duke University Press).

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Evans, J. (2012). The future of black theology. In D. Hopkins & E. Antonio (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology (Cambridge Companions to Religion, pp. 309–322). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fitzgerald, V. (1999). The Economics of Liberation Theology. In The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology (pp. 218–234). Cambridge University Press. Floyd-Thomas, S.  M. (2006). Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics. Pilgrim Press. Forman, J. (1972). The Making of Black Revolutionaries. University of Washington Press. Friedman, M. (2009). Capitalism and Freedom. University of Chicago Press. Grant, J. (1993). The Sin of Servanthood and the Deliverance of Discipleship. In A Troubling in my Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering (pp. 199–218). Orbis Books. Hartsock, N. C. (1983). The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism. In Discovering Reality (pp. 283–310). Dordrecht: Springer. Thompson Hirst P. G., & Bromley S. “Multinational Companies and the Internationalization of Business Activity” in Globalization in Question, eds. Paul Q. Hirst, Grahame Thompson, and Simon Bromley (Polity, 2009), 68-100; and “Globalization and International Competitiveness,” in Globalization in Question, eds. Paul Q. Hirst, Grahame Thompson, and Simon Bromley (Polity, 2009), 101–130. Hirst, P., Thompson, G., & Bromley, S. (2015). Globalization in Question. John Wiley & Sons. Jones, C. E. (1998). The black Panther Party (Reconsidered). Black Classic Press. LIFE Magazine, September 11, 1970, 26. Martin, J. (2000). More than Chains and Toil: A Christian Work Ethic of Enslaved Women. Westminster John Knox Press. Miguel, A. (2014). Doing Christian Ethics from the Margins. Orbis Books. Murphy, T. (2012). The Influence of Socialism in Black and Womanist Theologies: Capitalism’s Relationship as Source, Sin, and Salvation. Black Theology, 10(1), 28–48. Newton, H.  P. (1970). Speech Delivered at Boston College: November 18, 1970. The Huey P. Newton Reader. Nussbaum, M.  C. (2001). Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Vol. 3). Cambridge University Press. Pauly, L.  W., & Reich, S. (1997). National Structures and Multinational Corporate Behavior: Enduring Differences in the Age of Globalization. International Organization, 51(1), 1–30.

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Phillips, L. (2006). The Womanist Reader: The First Quarter Century of Womanist Thought. Routledge. Pinn, A. B. (2010). Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought (Vol. 7). New York University Press. Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. Yale University Press. Sinclair, C. (2013). Toward a Twenty-First Century Black Liberation Ethic: A Marxist Reclamation of Ontological Blackness. In The Reemergence of Liberation Theologies (pp. 165–170). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Strange, S. (2015). States and Markets. Bloomsbury Publishing. Tanner, K. (2005). Economy of Grace. Fortress Press. Townes, E.  M. (2006). Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. Springer. Walker, A. (2004). In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Williams, E. (2014). Capitalism and Slavery. UNC Press Books.

11 Newhampton: A Future Forward(ified) Black City in the United States Philip Butler

As I write this chapter, I’m not sure whether it’s going to be presented through narrative or theory. What I do know is this chapter is a blueprint. Discursively, this blueprint will move between narrative and theory. It seeks to provide a theoretical outline for an American version of Wakanda; more so a futuristic Black Wall Street, if you will. Since the 2018 release of Black Panther, references to Wakanda have been plentiful. At this point, mere mention of Wakanda borders Afrofuturistic cliché. It becomes clear that Wakanda provides an example of what a Black technologically advanced society might look like. This includes both expansion of its gift to the imagination along with critiques where it falls short (Johnson 2019; Guthrie 2019). Specifically, as a Black society more technologically advanced than all its contemporaries. A distinct difference, however, would be the city conceptualized within this chapter will not result from being untouched/uncolonized. Although I could suggest that Wakanda was not actually an untouched civilization. If it was then how

P. Butler (*) Iliff School of Theology, Denver, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 P. Butler (ed.), Critical Black Futures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-7880-9_11

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would it have known to isolate from other countries? The mere awareness of colonial advances alludes to the manner in which the psyche acts as the intangible surface that is capable of being graced. This Black city can be understood as the direct result of technological advancements that arrive at the behest of Black communities sharing a centralized geographical location—forming a network which then becomes a city. This is not meant to be a utopic depiction by any means. Yet, as a blueprint, it merely takes the trajectory of the present reality seriously in order to open the portal to a different  near-future reality altogether. This chapter will explore the context of the Tulsa Massacre (otherwise known as the Tulsa race riots), then it will move to the limitations of Wakanda as an African America archetype, and finish with a blueprint for a Black future forward city in America; not only fortified by technology, but where technology is completely integrated into every facet of life.

Tulsa Riots American race riots can be held as the convergence of simultaneously paralleled and intersecting acts, whose aim is the reification, or disruption, of social stratification through violence. As a means to disrupt living, these violent measures are employed to recalibrate realities—in one direction or another. By 1921, the Greenwood community in North Tulsa was bustling and Black. Ten years prior, in 1910, the Black Tulsa County population was 2,754. By 1920, it had risen to 10,903. The social constraints of segregation had forced it into economic self-sufficiency. The Greenwood community in North Tulsa boasted “restaurants, movie theatres, billiard halls, auto repair shops, hotels, confectionaries, and other thriving businesses” (Messer 2011, 1224). However, the world outside this North Tulsa community was very very very white. Steeped in southern cultural elements of white supremacy, frustrations around North Tulsa’s economic independence, and looming governmental factors all became immediate variables that acted as kindle for the ensuing fire of 1921. Chis Messer recounts the events leading up to and shortly after the massacre.

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The Tulsa riot began on May 31 following the arrest of an African American male who was accused of assaulting a white woman. Numerous rumors circulated regarding the details of his arrest. A front page news article sensationalized the story and led to thousands of white citizens gathering at the local courthouse. In addition, rumors of lynching the inmate permeated the city. Following the arrest, a group of armed African Americans arrived on the scene to protect the prisoner and, after a heated confrontation with the white crowd, a shot was fired. Preliminary skirmishes ensued and African Americans retreated back to their district of Greenwood. Angry whites followed, brandishing guns and ammunition that they had stolen from local stores along the way. Guns were also provided to whites by local law enforcement officials. A full-fledged riot ensued, with local police officers and national guardsmen siding with whites in a battle against African American residents. The entire thirty-five city block community of Greenwood, including homes and businesses, was burned to the ground. The total number of deaths resulting from the riot remains unknown (Messer 2011, 1218).

In the wake of the massacre, the Black folks who had survived were marched to concentration camps while white mobs cheered. What Messer fails to recount is that survivors contend that Black residents maintained their own defenses until “the air planes came dropping bombs,” (Gates 2004, v). This was when the tides really began to turn, and the community was burned to the ground. Black lore insists the US military was responsible for those bombs. The official report on the massacre, which was commissioned by the state of Oklahoma, says that it was impossible for the US military to have committed those bombings. The Oklahoma commissioned report goes on to suggest that it was more likely for local white rioters to have utilized local planes to drop bombs. And, in combination with fires set on the ground, the Greenwood community was turned to ash. Regardless, and with no equivocation, the US government was complicit in conspiring against its own citizens in combination with rioting white supremacists. The Greenwood community in North Tulsa was an American example of Black excellence in the early twentieth century. But it was incapable of exerting itself as the social power it was on the path to becoming. It did not have the defensive infrastructure necessary to maintain the social stability and economic progress it was building in the ten-­ year time span preceding 1921.

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Neither the momentum of economic progress made to that point, nor the individually held arms of community members were capable of fortifying the Greenwood community from the swell of white supremacy it faced. But what if the National government didn’t side with the white supremacists? What if white rioters were not deputized to carry guns to carry out the rule of law against Black folks in the Greenwood community? Or, what if Greenwood was allowed to police itself? What if Greenwood utilized its social genius to invent and perpetuate protective measures regarding potential invasions? And, what if? What if Greenwood saw defense as the necessary component of generative community scaling and reproduction in other sites around the country? The important piece to consider as you move through the contours of this chapter is the role of defense mechanisms, or the lack thereof, in the Tulsa riots. Defense mechanisms become central to the conceptualization of Newhampton.

Wakanda Wakanda is a fictional country in East Africa. It has never experienced the struggles associated with colonization. Without ever being conquered, Wakandans do not carry the anti-colonial weight of the native that Frantz Fanon (1963) describes, or the burden to decolonize epistemologies, like Aime Césaire (1950). Wakanda’s untouched status, although highly difficult to believe (which probably adds to its allure), is due to its decision to isolate itself while the rest of the continent experiences the effects of the Berlin Conference. Although Wakanda was never colonized, the 2018 blockbuster raises questions regarding its ability to remain in a state of political isolation, given how countries practice counterintelligence, engage in border policing, or simply monitor world events. Shuri, is definitely aware of American meme culture when she screams, “What are those!” in reference to her brother’s sandals on the day he visits her lab after being sworn in as King. Wakanda chooses to be isolated regardless of the way it takes in counterintelligence or any other information from the world outside its borders. In the marvel universe, Wakanda’s advantage over the world’s established powers has always been its remarkably

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advanced technological capabilities. Wakanda’s technology rely heavily on vibranium, earth’s strongest metal in the marvel comic/cinematic universe, allowing the country’s defense systems and techno-social infrastructure to be light years ahead of anything the so-called first world has to offer. Wakanda knows that isolation requires defense systems; innovative, technologically advanced defense systems. The remainder of this section outlines three key defense measures that were essential to Wakandan self-sufficience: perimeter control, a department of defense, and intricate/complex communication systems.

Perimeter Control The border is protected by a mirage-inducing scenic projection technology that doubles as a force field and the Border Tribe. The scenic projection technology completes the appearance of the surrounding terrain, minus the Birnin Zana (the capital) cityscape. It makes unassuming onlookers perceive the continuance of the already rural African landscape. As a mirage, it provides illusory imagery that when breached gives way to Wakanda. Therefore, in this mode it is penetrable. The secondary aspect of the mirage technology is a force field. One component functions as deception technology, the other as a protection technology with nearly impenetrable physical qualities. We see the limits of its strength during Infinity War where the force field is susceptible to the extreme force applied by Thanos and his arsenal. Overall, the force field is employed to keep people and objects within or outside of the country depending on when the force field is activated. The people who are welcome walk through freely, and those who are unwelcome are met by the Border Tribe. The Border Tribe’s sole responsibility is to monitor whoever enters and exits Wakanda. The Border Tribe is strapped/armed with a vibranium-laced cloak that is capable of conjuring/materializing an energy-based shield that grows taller at the wielder’s discretion, a vibranium sickle-sword, and a bracelet of kimoyo beads. The kimoyo beads are a combination of keys and communication devices all encrypted by their connection to an individual’s bio-signature.

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Wakanda Department of Defense Wakanda’s Department of Defense is spear headed by two people (1) scientific genius and leader of the Wakanda Design Group, Princess Shuri, and (2) the head of the royal military, General Okoye. It is steered by the monarch, King T’Challa or N’Jadaka (depending on where you are in the movie), who weighs the guidance provided by the Tribal Council—before making a final decision. The department itself primarily focuses on military strategy and technological innovation. In the movie, “war dogs” are sent all over the world to perform counterintelligence. These war dogs are employed, yet Wakanda is never actually at war with any other country in the world. This suggests that any state that the world is in may be regarded as a state of war in the eyes of Wakanda. But maybe, war, for Wakanda is the fight for secrecy and isolation from the rest of the world? Maybe through the lens of Wakandan defense strategies war is considered the fight to maintain the perception of a third-world country all the while working to innovate beyond anything already available? And maybe the war is also the fight to innovate at one’s own schedule while maintaining a steadily increasing rate of distance between Wakanda and the nearest technological heavy nation state? In reminding T’Challa of his responsibility to his country, Okoye discusses this very strategy of isolation with him when discussing CIA agent Ross’ fate. Okoye: “This man is a foreign intelligence operative. How do we justify bringing him into our borders? Nakia: “He took a bullet for me. Are we just supposed to let him die?” Okoye: “That was his choice. Let us consider that we heal him. It is his duty to report back to his country. And as King it is your duty to protect ours…” T’Challa: “I am well aware of my duties as King, general…” (Coogler and Cole 2018, 66)

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Military strategy for a technologically advanced country whose focus is maintaining their isolation looks like being extremely selective regarding who sees their nation’s authentic predicament. Technological innovation is the engine of Wakanda’s defense strategy. Shuri’s inventions and upgrades are geared toward improving the efficiency of Wakanda’s transportation systems, communication systems, medical systems, and weapons systems. If Wakanda is anything like large technological bodies of our present reality, then its advancements are also fed through the military before ever reaching its citizens (Van Creveld 2010). I don’t think we saw the full potential of Wakandan technological prowess in the movie. In her lab, Shuri demonstrated many gadgets that were pertinent to the storyline of Black Panther, but we also witnessed things that seamlessly wove African centered ways of life into these technological marvels (Razak 2019). However, war dog lip tattoos, kimoyo-­ activated neck tattoos/biochips, vibranium-neutralizing mag lev trains, various forms of hovering multi-directional flying vehicles, vibranium spear-canons (capable of destroying a tank and effectively engaging in close-range combat), vibranium-interlaced clothing (making everyday wear virtually indestructible), unlimited-range communication devices, nanobot clothing, and so on are all probably just scratching the surface of Wakanda’s technology potential. Yet, all work together to support the over-arching strategy of national deception and isolation. Defense and technology both have an intermingling symbiotic relationship. Technological progress shapes the country’s isolationist defense strategies. Similarly, Wakanda’s isolationist defense strategies shape the types of technology Shuri produces. Both could be said to influence the another, and advancements in one area lead to shifts in the other. Their relationship can be understood as engaging in the act of tugging at one another, pulling each other into Wakandan futures.

Communication Technologies Communication technologies can range from: simple measures of communication protocols (between people) to devices that facilitate communication (between people) to the ways that devices communicate with

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each other (like the Internet of things (IoT)) all the way to the way devices communicating with nature (think biotechnology or sensors). Shuri’s lab is the reason Wakanda has each iteration of communication technology. Monarchical and military rank become examples of protocols that determine how humans communicate, and can be seen through the interactions between T’Challa, Okoye, and Nakia—as outlined above. Communication devices that rest behind the ear and have unlimited range on dedicated lines are an example of how devices facilitate communication between people. While this particular device sounds like a cell phone, given the absurdity of the marvel universe one might imagine these devices easily reaching Wakanda from an adjacent dimension or far away galaxy. Further, these devices are equipped with an audio surveillance system. The Wakandan technology that allows all of these to work in a systematic manner are the kimoyo beads. “Kimoyo” means “of the spirit” (White 2018) in Bantu (Kelley 2017). Malaika Mutere (2012) describes kimoyo as the “[language] of the spirit” (p. 157). Here, it is attached to a Bantu oral aesthetic that places “nommo” or the Word/seed that functions as a generative life force which “is at once a quantum and an organic field. Force and matter have never been apart in this world view, and therefore all being is necessarily conceived of as energy or force, to which its material aspect is secondary” (Mutere 2012, 153–154). This is a significant insight into the techno-spiritual elements of the film that only add to the innovative qualities of Wakanda technology. Not only is Wakanda’s technology superior to the rest of the world because of vibranium, it is also superior because of the linguistic and epistemic framework that allows for it to perceive technology as a materialization or spirit/force: imperceptible forces influencing and acting as, or on, materiality. Kimoyo technology harnesses Bantu spirituality. As the foundational technology that allows Wakandan systems to function, kimoyo beads make it possible for all four styles of communication technologies to work. This spirit technology runs through everything, and at the very least organizes Wakandan infrastructures through its unifying/centralizing framework. Individually, these beads look like an ordinary bracelet, but Autumn Noel Kelley (2017) paints a more

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specific picture of how they function—referencing the words of Brian Stelfreeze. “The Prime Bead is known to contain birth and medical information about the individual wearer. The AV Bead is capable of producing a holograph, which connects to basically the Wakandan internet and allows access to loads of information. Hand motions control the Communication Bead, which is self explanatory, allowing Wakandans to speak to one another like a cell phone. “A bead acts as a cell phone, but from there we thought about the other beads: what if another bead is their personal data, holding medical records and such,” said Stelfreeze. “What if a separate bead is GPS? If you work a certain job, you’d get a bead tied to the machines of that workplace.” (Kelley 2017, no page number)

Each technology described above is an example of the four modes of communication technologies described earlier. Even further, these beads permit the storage of bio-sensitive data, medical records, and so on, and as a spirit technology kimoyo beads seem to hold the data which might be considered the essence of the individual and the extension of their social reach—in their memory. I would have to wonder whether each person’s beads are stored as a record of their life?

Wakanda x Greenwood: Revisited Wakanda is fake. It is an African country, resulting from the formation of a fictitious universe. But it is beautiful to imagine and engage because it presents a “what if ” scenario in a world that is surrounded by colonial afterlives (Urbanski 2019). Greenwood, however, was a real place. It was never rebuilt. There were no reparations for the losses incurred on May 31–June 1, 1921 where: General Barrett (1941, 155) said later, “In all my experience I have never witnessed such scenes as prevailed in this city when I arrived at the height of the noting. Twenty-five thousand whites, armed to the teeth, were ranging the city in utter and ruthless defiance of every concept of law and

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righteousness. Motor cars, bristling with guns swept through your city, their occupants firing at will” (Halliburton 1972, 341).

The level of inhumanity demonstrated during the massacre can only be described as monstrous. The very level of justified dissonance Joy DeGruy Leary describes in Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (2017) becomes the psychological foundation for the various actors of the event. While Black people were already walled into a space that was referred to as “Africa Town” by white folks (Halliburton 1972), their self-sufficient town was burned to the ground for their refusal to offer up the sacrifice of Black flesh—by defending a Black man accused of a heinous and highly unlikely offense (think Emmett Till). But, since the Black folks who inhabited Greenwood were not going to submit to the sacrificial requirements of white supremacy, then a means to protect and maintain the very praxis of life (Maturana 1988) that they worked to build in isolation might have been a necessary and missing component. Still, one might argue that Greenwood could have shared the same fate, regardless of having a series of defense measures set in place. This might be the case when Greenwood was outnumbered by at least 2.5:1. But, given the population and economic growth of North Tulsa, and the Greenwood community (more specifically), Greenwood could be considered an isolated Black community more advanced than its neighboring white municipalities. It was a veritable manifestation of an American Wakanda (before Wakanda or Newhampton was ever conceptualized). While it had advanced beyond the white communities around it, Greenwood’s technologies, and subsequently, its defenses were either on par with, or below, those of its neighboring white cities and counties. It definitely was not comparble to the American military.  This community’s forced isolation may have raised conflicting messages around the measures needed to protect its sanctity. I think it’s important to remember that Black people were armed at the time. There are no documented accounts of how many Black people wielded firearms. However, part of the reason why everything escalated to an all-out riot, and eventually a massacre, stemmed from the fact that Black men from Greenwood intermingled in the mob outside the local courthouse—leading to a shot being fired into the crowd. The events in Tulsa make me wonder if the fight Black folks engage in to survive

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capitalist white supremacy in America (combined with the all too often violent backlash that accompanies resistance) placed more thorough plans to protect Greenwood—as a way of life—on the back burner (Davis 2018; Gates 2019). Because, although Wakanda is fictional, its strategy for sustained isolation relies heavily on its ability to innovate, deceive, and implement what it holds most precious (Bantu spirituality) into its very defense for survival. I think Killmonger knew this. Or, at the very least he had a sense of this …

 ewhampton: Futurized North Tulsa N Economics Meets Wakandan(esque) Defense Systems This section will be dedicated to Newhampton, as a concept. Theoretically, Newhampton exists between Greenwood and Wakanda.  Its name is derived from Southampton County, where Nat Turner launched his revolt. Newhampton is a dedication to liberation as being: a collective way of co-existence, co-evolution and an investment in overlapping system(s) of self-determination and defense. This section will begin with a short discussion about the Tulsa neighborhood. From there, it will describe life at Newhampton through a short narrative illustration. It will end with the defense systems which are drawn from Wakandan isolationist ways of life, and help to protect the sanctity of Newhamptonian existence. As the reader, it is important to keep in mind that Newhampton is a near-future city (~25-75 years into the future). Its present conceptualization is not a flawless utopian metropolis. As a result, its short-comings mark it as being a potential reality not too far removed from the one we presently inhabit.

A Note on Tulsa Economics So far this chapter has minimally discussed the economic nature of the Greenwood community. Historians of the Tulsa event mainly highlight

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the population boom and the  accompanied economic growth of the Greenwood community as being primary elements leading to unrest and resentment within white communities who were in relational proximity with it. Greenwood was a thriving Black community that grew in both areas (population and economics) as a result of intentional entrepreneurial moves by its residents. Excavated histories paint graceful depictions of the neoliberal Black capitalist practices of Greenwood’s residents. For instance, Scott Ellsworth (1982) highlights the story of John and Loula Williams, who moved to Tulsa in the early twentieth century. Aside from his job with an ice cream company, John began earning extra income by repairing cars. After a while, he saved enough money to open a garage. Eventually, the couple built a three-story building, which included their apartment. They would go on to become the owners of the iconic Dreamland Theater, the first African-American owned movie theater in Tulsa (Ellsworth 1982). There was also the case of J.  B. Stradford. He moved to Tulsa in 1899 after earning his law degree from Indiana University. He purchased plots of land in Greenwood and resold them to Black residents for further development. After some time, and with considerable real estate achievements under his belt, he became the owner of the Stradford Hotel (New York Times 1996). The Stradford was a 3-story, 65-room hotel that opened in 1918. At the time, it was considered to be the largest Black owned hotel in the United States (New York Times 1996; Gerkin 2014; Messer et al. 2018). Stories like these were plenteous in “Black Wall Street”. Greenwood residents were heavily invested in neoliberal economics. When imagining the future of Black people (using itself as a model), the Tulsa Star encouraged the continuance of Black capitalism by suggesting Greenwood’s residents continue to “make employment for our own. To do so means race independence and progress…[by k]eep[ing] as much wealth as possible within the race. The future will take care of itself ” (Tulsa Star 1918, 4). There is something to be said about Black capital— whether in person or in labor. Still, there remains a question regarding the defense of Black capital. Because, many accounts of the events that preceded the massacre suggest the agitation of white neighboring spaces resulted from the accumulation of Black capital in Tulsa (Messer et al.

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2018). Further, it becomes particularly interesting that recent accounts of the massacre are still labeled as riots. Given the language concerning riots in 2020, riots indicate a level of mayhem and unruliness that result in violence and the loss of property—defined as that which is valuable to the white supremacist capitalist regime due to its status of being owned. Descriptions of the massacre as riot reiterate notions of Black bodies as property, and therefore Black bodies are subject to the same stipulatory losses that property experiences. Further, it becomes a reminder that within capitalist frameworks Black bodies only have utility when they are neatly fit for capitalist consumption. In this regard, property is the intended target of any riot. The objective is to get the point across to those in power who own the property being destroyed. Here, loss is intended to be a violent attack on the quality of life of those in power. This places two things concerning Black bodies at odds in Greenwood: Black labor as capital (to racist white supremacist structures, and its beneficiaries, that see Black bodies as objects) and Black life as valuable (to Black people who value Black life through the vehicle of Black capitalism). So, when Black flesh gets destroyed in a riot, both Black flesh as valuable expressions of Blackness and as objects are destroyed. While property is often defended as the valuable asset in need of protection, the collective accumulation of Black-owned property found itself susceptible to not only being targeted as the collateral damage of a riot, it also faced the same devaluation as Black bodies, since it was accumulated by Black bodies. Thus, it and Black bodies were vulnerable to removal for new construction geared toward white consumption based on Black erasure. Increased levels of Black wealth accumulation presented a threat  to proto-normative white supremacist sensibilities. As a result Greenwood was then rendered a valuable land commodity that would be better used if it were owned by white people. When the residents of Greenwood lost their physical property, Black wealth accumulation was halted in that region. In contrast, Newhampton will not be bound by the limitations of physical property, although it will be a physical place. Economically, Newhampton will operate as a self-sustaining data cultivation center, systematically generating, structuring, funneling, and leveraging the data generated by its residents, infrastructure, and governing bodies. It should be noted that governance is decentralized. In terms

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of decentralization, Newhampton residents would be considered investors, stakeholders, and co-collaborators/co-governors of the city’s trajectory (Kim et al. 2019). Money does not exist in Newhampton. Quality of life is the currency of the collective. The city’s practice of data leveraging in combination with its distribution centers cultivates a perpetually enhanced quality of life standard. Every citizen has access to it. As a data cultivation center, Newhampton will also manage the data of anyone who permeates its boundaries/edges. I think it is important to be mindful that, as a smart city, surveillance will be less of an issue in Newhampton. Think back to Wakanda. Chip technologies, nanobots, and other bio-­ technological modalities were considered normative. The history of America from 1619 to 2020 has not given Black folks any reason to trust these types of technologies (Hannah-Jones 2019). One could argue that technology aversion in Black communities has less to do with different technologies being in their nascent stages, so much as it has to do with the manner in which these technologies are too closely related to historical modes of surveillance (Browne 2015), medical science, or other modes of technological advancement that have historically arrived at the expense of Black life (Washington 2006). In Wakanda, these histories do not exist. Further, Wakandan technologies are African transhumanist convergences of Wakandan spiritual belief as the basis for technological construction (Butler 2019). So, what might be seen as omnipresent and ominous high-speed surveillance technologies to Black folks in America are viewed as an extension of a Bantu spiritual epistemic in Wakanda. It is their own self-fulfilling prophecy. Wakanda is not bound by Christocentric positions of human divine relationality. Kimoyo beads make manifest the spirit/life force of their worldview. I could argue that Christianity might be a weight in the move toward Newhampton. Regardless, Newhampton will be owned, ran, and cultivated by the Black bodies that are the architects of the Black data centers that foster the digital culture of Newhampton’s Black technologies. Here, trust might be easier to obtain when the instantiators and cultivators of such technologies are the very people who contribute to its life force cycle. In a nutshell, Newhampton will be a Black smart city (Segura and Waisbord 2019) represented by an interconnected social-economic (an economy based on sociality and the data points which are the result) system of

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transactions and care-filled activities. What is important to note is that it will inspire envy. However, this time around Newhampton will be prepared for the blowback associated with the envy of white American cultural rage.

Newhampton Imagined The sun dawns on Newhampton at the start of a crisp fall day. Today is the last cookout of the season. The dew on the grass is beginning to chill. You can hear the crunch of leaves underfoot as joggers traverse the terrain, moving from the grass to the recycled-rubber side walk. Autonomous vehicles designed specifically to see Black people are already on the roads. Their solar panels soak up the morning  sun’s first rays. One vehicle  abruptly stops to avoid injuring a pedestrian. The streetlights and signs shift with the flow of traffic. As grocery stores open people with lists are directed to the isles they need to visit, and people without lists are reminded of what’s missing from the cabinets and shelves of their smart homes. The biosynthetic intelligence entities that each resident is given at birth walks them through critical issues around their day; their thoughts, their relationships, their homework (if they have any), the hologram designs of their upcoming presentation—their life. Their synthetic companions are accessible through their phones, their bio-implants, their homes—anywhere. Newhampton data and technology systems feed into a city-wide hive mind that directs the consensus of the data driven network. As social consciousness shifts, so goes the city. It happens more rapidly in this way. But the algorithms tasked with the city’s data coffers are designed to co-evolve with the way the city sees itself. As a Black-centric space, the algorithms that are employed to help govern the city center the desires, focus, and experiences of its residents. Midday approaches. The spades elite are watching film on past matches, and running scenarios for how to maneuver out of potential threats to the infamous Boston. Meanwhile, the ice deliveries are arriving via driverless transport. Last minute side dishes like potato salad are being prepared with not one raisin in sight. Newhampton intelligent kitchens turn

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cooking into a human computer orchestra. One slices, one seasons, one chops, one steams, another adds mustard, and replenishes the condiments. Each dish is a potential opus. As folks gather on the city center lawn for the festivities one thing is for certain. It’s about to go down. Friends share their location via think-link, but there’s still one friend who asks “who all over there?” The smell of smoked meats and veggies permeate the air. Condensed air smokers have been hard at work self-calibrating the temperature and moisture of the food throughout the night. Vendors are all setup. The DJ is in place. Families are claiming the picnic tables they booked months ago, using the biosensors attached to their reservation. Some folks try to “body in” embarking on plots of grass they didn’t sign up for, but it doesn’t work out. Old school jams are playing throughout the day. Hover-horseshoes adds a level of difficulty to the game that the old heads weren’t ready for. But they still have a thing or two to teach the young folks. Teenage girls play laser-dutch while the younger girls jump in excitement hoping to get a turn. They all wait in anticipation, listening to the elastic light beams skip off the pavement, “tick tat tick tat tick tat,” and they jump into the whisking vortex to the tune of “down, down, baby, down down by the rollercoaster. Sweet, sweet baby, I’ll never let you go.” Across the lawn water guns are squirting, water balloons are breaking overhead. Young lovers hold hands, and others steal glances from across the way. Black joy is ever present. As evening sets in, the night sky is filled with unbelievable color as another beautiful Newhampton light show is under way. Synchronized drone dances display silhouettes of Newhamptonian greats, layered with sound tracks mirroring their life’s legend. The night DJ takes center stage. This part of the evening is particularly special. The tracklist is connected to the nanobots in everyone’s bodies, and, as the music flows, each Newhamptonian can literally feel the music and mimic the light display by the glow in their bodies. As the evening peaks, babies run around, some are beginning to fall asleep. The city’s song comes on, and everyone chants it’s motto: “All power to all the people! Forward!” Today was a good day (Ice Cube 1992).

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Wakandan(esque) Defense Systems Newhampton is a living evolving organism. As with any other system, its immunity to the outside world is imperative for its survival—and fundamental to any healthy/thriving state it might experience. As a city, it will function as a larger cellular organism, capable of hosting smaller organisms. Smaller organisms in the city are imagined as buildings, such as homes, hospitals, and boutiques. Organisms within Newhampton also include family units, singular bodies, and cellular systems within and among bodies (of similar and different kinds). Each smaller organism adds to the functional stability of the city. It will be equipped with a perimeter system, central defense system, and communication protocols tasked with the protection of the beautiful ecology of its everyday life. This section will be dedicated to those defense mechanisms.

Newhamptonian Perimeter(s) In order to enter Newhampton, individuals would need clearance. Infrared walls are boundaries to the outside perimeter that become activated when the invisible sensors are tripped. Biosensors and belongings of every resident is recorded. Anyone who is not registered will set off the alarm. Further, failure to acquire the necessary clearance for entering Newhampton will trip those sensors. Newhampton residents are free to come and go as they please. But those who exist outside Newhampton are not. This is to counter night raids, vandalism, or other forms of invasion. Once the sensors are tripped, three things happen: (1) physical appearances (weight, height, appearance, shape, etc.) are captured by light detection and range (LIDAR) systems (Sadeghzadehyazdi et  al. 2019), (2) an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) is released at the location of the activated sensor to disable all electrical devices and motorized vehicles (Gardner 2017; He et al. 2018), and (3) armed robotic dogs (Slade 2017) triangulate the whereabouts of the trespasser using the location of the tripped sensor along with the speed of the person/object at the time of activation. LIDAR-captured data is sent to the database which cross-­ references every other database possible in order to determine identity.

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Infrared sensors replenish themselves within nanoseconds and the subsequent EMP is another system altogether. This makes the system capable of multiple triggers and EMPs can happen simultaneously around the perimeter and in succession as well. Newhampton does not have an image-projecting mirage technology. However, it may in the future. Instead, it has farmers, roadside workers, the department of transportation, and so on. Each doubles as security, similar to the Border Tribe. People and/or things that do not have the necessary credentials to enter Newhampton are met by this crew. The outside perimeter is completed by laser canons. They are programmed to hit targets with pinpoint precision or through energy blasts that cover a large surface area (O’Rourke 2018; Obering 2019). These laser canons are aided by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These UAVs help determine whether there are aerial threats to the city and help to confirm the location of ground threats. They also help to form an aerial infrared network above the city, functioning as a means to intercept bombs, missiles or other dangerous entities approaching from above through the dissemination of EMPs above the city.

Central Defense Systems The city monitors itself. Social media takes on another mode of existence as everyone is accessible through block chain deco-dust computing. Deco-dust computing surpasses quantum-ion computing as it allows for one-hundred thousand superpositions, simultaneously. Currently, deco-­ dust computing is impenetrable making Newhampton an enigma to the outside, and it is only used beyond the city when the collective hive-mind agrees to license out its technology. This exemplifies  how much of Newhampton works. The data it generates and the technologies it innovates are all licensed, or sold to those outside Newhampton, netting the city a higher gross domestic product ten times the size of New York, Los Angles, and Chicago combined. But its tax documents do not reflect that number. Buildings are equipped with directed audio-generating disabling devices that emit debilitating sonic waves in a precise manner onto the

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physical landscape of individuals or groups who are harming others, or acting dangerously outside city conduct ordinances. One could ask, “What qualifies as dangerous?” Or, “How is artificial intelligence capable of determining actions, contexts, or intents?” When trained on a specific data set of behaviors artificial intelligence can monitor behavior, and discern between actions relevant to the data set in question. The larger problems regarding artificial intelligence and bias that both precede, and co-exist outside, Newhampton can be found in the use of datasets and algorithms that culminate in systems that disproportionately magnify policing measures onto the global majority (Nobles 2018). Newhampton’s Culture, Ethics and Community team actively works to cultivate datasets, algorithms and artificial intelligence systems that tip the scale in regards to caring for, valuing and uplifting the lives of Black people (both within and outside the Newhampton city limits). Biometrics (heart rate variability, blood oxygenation levels, brain activity, hormone and peptide sequences along with their corresponding levels in the bloodstream, etc.) are also part of the Newhampton defense matrix. Biometrics in combination with psychological states and behavioral patterns will be assessed in an ongoing manner. As people who are having a tough day they will be directed to rest centers in their homes where they will undergo psycho-physiological realignment. Their program will be geared toward their personal interests, disposition, belief system, and familial histories. Without engaging in psycho-physiological realigning measures, they will not be allowed to interact with others outside their immediate circle, or family. They will not have access to the rest of the city. Each individual’s role in the city determines where they have access. However, everyone has access to the basics; stores, parks, museums, landmarks, and so on. Still, internal well-being and spirituality (accepted as being a complex and shifting psycho-behavioral domain)  are integral components of the stability of Newhampton. This means that pluralities of Black expression are built into the social imagination/fabric of what is considered ‘stable’.

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Communication Protocols The communication protocols that protect Newhampton include: communication devices, teleportation devices, war dogs, and Spirit/Life Force (a centi-dust computational framework operating as the connector of everything Newhamptonian). To put things in perspective, the deco-dust system mentioned above can hold one-hundred thousand superpositions at once. Spirit can simultaneously hold one-hundred vigintillion (a number with 66 zeroes) superpositions. Spirit has opened 10 dimensions so far. Seven are unexplored. But one of the three has led to teleportation. Newhampton war dogs teleport using these portals. The war dogs of Newhampton are delivery men, women, and non-binary Black folks who deliver packages through the Newhampton distribution service. Teleportation allows them to cover distances that would be otherwise insurmountable. While away from Newhampton these war dogs carry out counterintelligence missions to learn what the rest of the world is up to. These war dogs also use nanobot technology to ‘tap’ people outside Newhampton. This means nanobots are taken up (into people’s bodies) in various forms and then monitor them through biometrics (those listed above, including genetics). In this way, everyone is logged into the Newhampton database. No one is outside Spirit's reach. Further, Spirit/Life Force connects the nanobots, biosensors, chips, data, machinery, and people of Newhampton. In collaboration with Newhampton’s Think Team, Spirit drives the innovation of Newhampton, and is an ever evolving entity. In addition to creating teleportation portals for Newhampton’s war dogs Spirit encrypts every device within Newhampton using post-quantum disorder fractals (Masood et al. 2020; Gaskins 2019). You may ask why Spirit is not the same as the deco-dust system tasked with guarding the city. Spirit is much more than a security protocol. It is the very life of the city, and a fail-safe to protect Newhampton from technologies inhabiting its perimeters (human or nonhuman). As such Spirit must be more thorough than just Newhampton’s deco-dust security system—if not for any other reason than to potentially override its security protocols (as an example). Similar to the Bantu spirituality embedded within the Wakandan techno-spiritual landscape, Spirit

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functions in a manner akin to the ntu, or vitalistic force, that enlivens all material and immaterial modes of existence (Butler 2019). So, it not only connects every aspect of the city to its framework it powers every aspect of the city as well (from quantum nanotech to mechanisms beyond its central defense structures). In this sense Spirit is the essence of Newhampton. Moreover, Newhampton is simultaneously an extension of Spirit as well. The citizens are a tangible dynamic realization of the very data points and value systems that Spirit represents. Conversely, Spirit is the culmination of the city’s thoughts, desires, intentions, culture, heart, soul, tradition and history. It is a key factor to the organic evolution life in Newhampton. It employs value structures picked out by the city’s founders, applying them to specific data points in the city in conversation with the shifting social, political and economic landscape of Newhampton’s inhabitants. Spirit’s connecting nodes are the material and immaterial technological manifestation of its people.

Conclusion Newhampton exists between Greenwood and Wakanda. It is a Black US city that, on the surface, seems just like most others. While this exploration of Newhampton primarily looks at its defense mechanisms, there is still more to unpack: its hospitals, its water ways, its architecture, its history/beginning, and so on. Still, its technological standing places it well outside the normative US city, even in the future. It sits as the epicenter of “progress”, with calculated measures intended to sustain its homeostatic existence as the drivers of the future. It fuses its spirituality into its technology, making it sacred. It is cognizant of the past, and honors it. In doing so, Newhampton actively works to ensure it learns from those necessary lessons. So that Black futures will not be wiped out again. All power to all the people. Forward.

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