Cover by Karo Duro 

 

New approaches to African American Studies advance the discipline in the twenty-First Century.

Philadelphia, PA (May 31, 2023) – The next generation of Africology and African American Studies is exploring the growing significance of the generative ideas and intersection of Afrofuturism, Afropessimism, posthumanism, esotericism, metamodernism artificial intelligence, forecasting. and culture.

The theories highlighted in The Shape of Things to Come: The Rise of Afrofuturist Studies articulate the innovative ways Afrofuturist studies is addressing the accelerating rate of change in the African geospatial and geopolitical imagination and how it interacts with a changing world. These theoretical approaches reflect the continuing trajectory of Africans and their diaspora articulating their agency in a twenty-first-century post-American and post-European world world order.

Furthermore, the ideas in this issue build upon what the scholars C.T. Keto, Molefi Kete Asante, and others previously articulated regarding the interrogation of “motifs, symbols, signs, and ideas” of our ancestral and historical legacy to provide guidance for contemporary society and a “Time Map” for the future to come.

-Reynaldo Anderson

 

For a limited time, access the introduction by guest editor Reynaldo Anderson, and “Black Muslims and the Angels of Afrofuturism” by Ellen McLarney and Solayman Idris for free.

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. You can subscribe to our 53rd volume here. A limited quantity of print back issues are available in our store.

Our final issue of 2023 will be a double issue, Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II. For our 2024 volume, look for Amiri Baraka’s Blues People at 60, Black Women’s Contemporary Speculative Fiction, Ceddo: Black British Independent Film, and more….

 

Cover art by Lavar Munroe

 

From the introduction of 53.1:

“The clock is ticking at The Black Scholar. Changes that will affect the editorial team, vision, and ownership are emerging and surging. There is still some time but within two years the journal is likely to change hands. Hopefully—indeed we insist—we will maintain the remarkable community that has built up around the journal in its current incarnation, and the quality of scholarship and thought it has featured since its founding in 1969. This community of course expanded and redefined those earlier communities who stuck with TBS throughout multiple incarnations and no shortage of ups and downs. Internal ups and downs in terms of personalities, agendas, and the struggles needed for solidarity and shared vision to work. External ups and downs in our attempts to capture and comment on the wider worlds of culture, politics, and changing modes of scholarly interrogation and interpretation.”

Issue includes the following:

• The Forgotten Voices of Democracy: Black Political Activism under Brazil’s Military Rule, by João Batista Nascimento Gregoire
• #MakeNigeriaGreatAgain: Donald Trump in Nollywood’s Social Media, by James Yékú
• Black Ecology in COVID Times, by Bénédicte Boisseron
• Having Become Free by the Law of 1780: Black Liberation and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society Archives, by Michael Lawrence Dickinson
• Book Reviews: Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Worlds
  by Jennifer Leetsch / Spandita Das; Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad
  by J. Brent Crosson / Ahmad Greene-Hayes

For a limited time, download and read the introduction and “Black Ecology in COVID Times” for free.

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. You can subscribe to our 53rd volume here. A limited quantity of print back issues are available in our store.

In our 2023 volume, keep an eye out for Africology and Afrofuturism, and a double issue for Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II. For our 2024 volume, look for Amiri Baraka’s Blues People at 60, Black Women’s Contemporary Speculative Fiction, Ceddo: Black British Independent Film, and more….

 

Cover art by Alanna Fields

 

Black Archival Practice II is a collection of reflections, celebrations, and prefigurations of and for the past, present, and future of the Black lives in the Archive(s). The essays in this issue center the work of Black women in the archive(s) as archivists, researchers, historical subjects, artists, and mothers as a way to expand current understandings of how Black archival practices get imagined, contested, and negotiated within traditional archival spaces and in spaces intentionally coded as Black.

Beginning with the remarkable cover by Alanna Fields, Black Archival Practice II announces its subject as a fugitive departure from tamed, disciplinary modes of archivy. Fields’ work is a new kind of archive that conceals as much as it reveals; and, just as it reveals the persistence of Black life that is often veiled in the archive(s), so, too, do the essays in this special issue.

These essays speak to the complexities of documenting Black women’s intellectual histories through Queen Mother Audley Moore’s Archives, Samaria Rice’s Black maternal archival praxis and the memorialization of Black death, an exploration of collective ethics of care in Black archival practices via the history of a community-led rediscovery of the free Black community of Weeksville and a Brooklyn, NY-focused digital humanities project, an intimate exploration of “hoarding” and home archives in Black communities through an atypical multi-generational collection, the use of dirt as enslaved Afro-Texan women’s testimony, and the application of Black feminist witnessing to reveal racial violences obscured in legal archives.

While the seven essays in this issue range in their use of various theoretical and methodological lenses, each author offers an approach to Black archival practice that both integrates and exceeds the practices of traditional archival work and research. Together, these pieces trouble the principles of traditional archives practices and celebrate, dissect, and testify to the power of Black archives, archivists, and archival practices in ways that are both rigorous and generative.

We invite you to engage with the essays in this issue as a means of thinking about the possibilities and realities of archives and archival practices that attend to Black life in public and intimate spaces—and all of the liminal spaces in between. In these pages, we hope you will find transformative inquiry, creativity, and hope; that you will be as moved and inspired as we have been by the authors, their words, and their muses.

– Tonia Sutherland and Zakiya Collier

 

For a limited time, access the introduction “The Revolutionary and Radical in Black Archival Practice,” by Sutherland and Collier, and “Disorderly Distribution: The Dispersal of Queen Mother Audley Moore’s Archives and the Illegibility of Black Women Intellectuals,” by Ashley D. Farmer for free.

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Volume 52 (2022) includes the above issue, plus Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, and the upcoming issues Black Archival Practice I and Black Religions in the Digital Age.

In volume 53 (2023), keep an eye out for The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies, a special double issue for Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II, and more. For volume 54 (2024), we’re working on Baraka’s Blues People at 60, Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (CFP), Ceddo: Black British Independent Film, and more…

Cover art by Shantel Miller

 

Black Religions in the Digital Age assembles six innovative essays that explore the intersections between Black religiosity and technology. These essays provide introspective views of intricate interconnections between Black religions, including African Traditional Religions, Christianity, witchcraft, and trans/posthumanism, and emerging digital technologies such as the Internet, social media, software applications, and virtual reality. As a result, these scholarly renderings lay the groundwork for a new subfield called “digital Black religion.”

On the cover, Shantel Miller’s Back in My Body beautifully captures a little Black girl freely playing in a room set apart from authoritative eyes. Similarly, scholars of digital Black religion, like those whose work fills this issue, are also freely at play. Operating outside the normative boundaries of religious studies and Internet studies, these scholars, in their own way, employ diverse methodological approaches to create new theories that capture the dynamic relationship between Black people’s engagement of technology and religiosity.

In the opening essay, Erika D. Gault considers how digital activism and digital cultural outputs empower Black users to create alternative life-affirming pathways, resulting in a new way of conceptualizing Black religiosity through a lens of digital activism. N. Fadeke Castor’s essay draws from the wellspring of virtual ethnography to advance a theory of political activism. She turns her attention to the various ways that practitioners of African Diasporic religions use social media and video conferencing software as modes of resistance against racial hegemony. Both essays capture the ways in which digital Black users use religion to push back against socio-political agendas of antiblackness.

The next three essays enter this conversation of antiblackness through Black beingness. In his essay Philip Butler presents “digital spirituality” as a biotechnological code that is most evident in Black people’s creative usage of digital tools to grapple with the mundaneness of life, while Marcelitte Failli considers how Black womxn and femmes witches employ social media to construct personalized and collective worlds defined by Black beingness. Michael Brandon McCormack further nuances Butler and Failli’s discussion of digitally-influenced modes of subjectivity. Specifically, McCormack’s essay illustrates how Black youth create virtual sacred spaces that offer a counter-narrative against an anti-Black world.

While this issue focuses on the “digital age,” the last essay by James Padilioni Jr. argues that digital technologies should not be viewed as something new. Instead, digital technology is best viewed as an extension of analog-algorithmic processes operating in Black Diasporic communities well before the digital age. A claim that he substantiates in his positing of Hoodoo as a cybernetic technology. Collectively, these essays show the nuanced manner that Black digital users are intentionally playing with definitional boundaries of Black religions, presenting new understandings of Black religiosity that are informed by liberation, spiritual citizenship, world building, transhumanism/posthumanism, life affirmation, and cybernetics.

– Margarita Simon Guillory

 

For a limited time, access the introduction “Playing on the Margins: The Emergence of Digital Black Religion,” by Margarita Simon Guillory and “Assembling an Africana Religious Orientation: The Black Witch, Digital Media, and Imagining a Black World of Being,” by Marcelitte Failla for free.

Subscribe to volume 52 (2022), which includes the above issue, plus Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Black Archival Practice I, and the upcoming Black Archival Practice II. Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues per volume.

In volume 53 (2023), keep an eye out for The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies, Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II and III (CFP), and more. For volume 54 (2024), we’re working on Black Women’s Contemporary Speculative Fiction, an issue on The New Black British Cinema, and more.

Cover art by Alanna Fields

 

This issue on Black Archival Practice is a collection of reflections, celebrations, and prefigurations of and for the past, present, and future of the Black lives in the Archive(s). The essays in this issue center Black(end) archival knowledges as a way to expand current understandings of how Black archival practices get imagined, contested and negotiated within traditional archival spaces and in spaces intentionally coded as Black.

Beginning with the remarkable cover by Alanna Fields, Black Archival Practice announces its subject as a fugitive departure from tamed, disciplinary modes of archivy. Fields’s work is a new kind of archive that conceals as much as it reveals; and, just as it reveals the persistence of Black life that is often veiled in the archive(s), so, too, do the essays in this special issue.

These essays speak to transformation through witnessing and testimony in the archives, Black women stewarding collections of their own experiences, Audre Lorde’s queer and deviant library science practices, the questioning of what we know and from where we know it in Octavia E. Butler’s archival practices, poet Arna Bontemps’s Black archival labor in the Fisk University W.E.B. DuBois collection, the use of narrative prose to probe the limits of care and affection in undoing archival harm, and an interview with Black Bottom Archives Director Paige “PG” Watkins that thoughtfully engages abolitionist organizing with Black memory work.

While the seven essays in this special issue range in their use of various theoretical and methodological lenses, each author offers an approach to Black archival practice that both integrates and exceeds the practices of traditional archival work and research. Together, these pieces trouble the principles of traditional archives practices and celebrate, dissect, and testify to the power of Black archives, archivists, and archival practices in ways that are both rigorous and generative.

We invite you to engage with the essays in this issue as a means of thinking about the possibilities for seeing and celebrating Black life in spaces that have traditionally been understood as anti-Black or as hostile to Blackness. In these pages, we hope you will find transformative inquiry, creativity, and hope; that you will be as moved and inspired as we have been by the authors, their words, and their muses.

 – Tonia Sutherland and Zakiya Collier

 

For a limited time, access the introduction “The Promise and Possibility of Black Archival Practice,” by Sutherland and Collier, and “Narratives of Interiority: Archival Practices of Care and Affection (and its Limits)” by Paula C. Austin for free.

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Volume 52 (2022) includes the above issue, plus Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, and the upcoming issues Black Archival Practice II and Black Religions in the Digital Age.

In volume 53 (2023), keep an eye out for The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies, Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II (CFP), and more.

Pioneering Black British independent filmmaker, Henry Goule Martin, died at 70 years old on May 13^th of this year after months of a struggle with cancer, which he, characteristically, kept private. Though his name might be unfamiliar in the United States, Martin started the important production company, Kuumba in 1982 along with two other Black pioneers—Menelik Shabazz and Imruh Bakari. This company would provide a base for the Ceddo Film and Video Workshop founded later that year. In an era of notable Black film/media collectives such as Isaac Julien’s Sankofa and Black Audio, Ceddo made a significant mark as the center of radical Black filmmaking in London for over a decade. For example, the workshop would produce seminal films, including Milton Bryan’s, The People’s Account (1985), Shabazz’s proto-Afrofuturist Time and Judgement: Diaries of a 400 Year Exile (1988) and D. Elmina Davies’ groundbreaking womanist documentary, Omega Rising: Women of Rastafari (1988).

Shabazz was the well-known director of Burning an Illusion (1981), only the second film directed by a Black director in British history and winner of the Grand Prix at the Amiens International Film Festival in France. He would direct others including, Step Forward Youth (1976), Time and Judgement: Diaries of a 400 Year Exile (1988), The Story of Lovers Rock (2011), and publish the magazine, Black Filmmaker in the 90s. Imruh Bakari directed films such as Riots and Rumors of Riots (1981), Street Warriors (1985), The Mark of the Hand (1987), and Blue Notes and Exiled Voices (1991). Devoting much of the years since Ceddo building the filmmaking infrastructure of the African continent, Bakari directed the Zanzibar International Film Festival (1999-2004) and has developed screenwriting and production projects in Tanzania while teaching and publishing critical works as well as collections of poetry.

Martin was never a member of Ceddo. But he worked closely with the collective, producing Bakari’s Blue Notes and Exiled Voices and The Mark of the Hand, and devised and ran Screenwrite (1993), an influential screenplay program for Black writers, in association with the British Film Institute and Channel 4 Television. While maintaining this commitment to Black independent film and filmmakers, he worked in the wider British film industry, even directing a season of early 80s children’s television program, Everybody Here.

Born to Trinidadian parents Claude and Vida Martin in Lewisham Hospital, London, in 1952, Henry Martin returned to the island at three months old to spend his formative years in the heady climate of Carnival culture in the capital city, Port of Spain. Across the street from his home in the Woodbrook neighborhood was the legendary Little Carib Theatre. This hub of cultural activity drew into its orbit everyone from Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott to dance pioneer Katherine Dunham, and the great African American singer/activist, Paul Robeson. Also nearby was the pan-yard of the equally legendary Invaders Steel Orchestra. It was in between those spaces of cultural activism that he would develop his political and artistic sensibility in advance of his return to England in the very early 1970s. He returned already a pan-Africanist, but one who had discovered that ideology as much in the anti-colonial street culture of Port of Spain as in the zones between theatre and pan-yard.

His experiences with film in the Caribbean had taught him the power of the moving image. This led him to study film at the West Surrey College of Art and Design. There he committed himself to bringing Afro-Caribbean street culture and politics into film, a mix he believed could be revolutionary. His first film expressed that Trinidadian influence, a short documentary for the Arts Council of London called Grove Carnival (1981). Without dialogue it told the story of a day in the life of the Black community as it prepared for the Notting Hill festival. But like his colleagues in Ceddo, his work was also made in response to the almost annual series of riots that had rocked England since 1976. That first film would inspire his next, the controversial documentary on the militant music and culture of Ladbroke Grove, Grove Music (1981). It was a community he’d become a part of, the late night shebeens, the squats, the hustlers, and revolutionaries. That was why the film featured local musical legends Aswad, and the Sons of Jah. It remained Martin’s favorite of his films. He felt it enabled Black people to finally speak honestly about their interactions with the police as well as express unfiltered views of their lives in England.

However, the honesty that the film portrayed would lay the foundation for why he would eventually abandon filmmaking. Despite the enthusiasm of viewers and the fact that the very influential Channel Four bought the film, its release and advertising was so limited as to effectively ban it. It seemed to Martin and his comrades in Kuumba that this was due to the allegation by theater owners and others in the film industry that Grove Music affirmed and encouraged the violent confrontations between racist police and the Black community. This charge was not unfamiliar, having been made against many of the early films of Shabazz and Bakari, and later, in relation to Ceddo’s, The People’s Account. As well as documenting lived realities, these films had in fact been made to document the police harassment and violence towards Black people that instigated the uprisings in the first place.

That charge would also feed a level of street-level support that other collectives could not boast. Yet despite this support, his authentic voice as a filmmaker, which blended the music and cultural activism of street culture with Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism, had been stunted. The sabotage of Grove Music, though, wasn’t enough to diminish his commitment to independent filmmaking. Nor did it diminish his radicalism: his next two films focused on transformations in the Caribbean as the islands lurched from colony to neo-colony: Grenada, Is Freedom We Making, and Trinidad and Tobago—Money Is Not the Problem, both from 1983.

He returned to his interest in Black street life and culture with the drama Big George is Dead (Kuumba Productions, 1987) made for Channel Four. On it, Martin worked with one of the very few Black female producers at the time, Deanne Edwards. This film starred two of Britain’s finest and most highly praised Black actors, the late Norman Beaton, and Rudolph Walker CBE. Both relished the freedom to perform outside of the stereotypical roles available to them in mainstream British media. But beyond its notable performances and a script by Black writer Michael Abbensetts (1938-2016), the film is remarkable for its depiction of Caribbean migration and generational change. Told over the course of one long night carousing in Soho, Big George is Dead remains one of the most evocative stories about the racial transformations of British street culture ever filmed.

Where Shabazz and Bakari remained engaged with the ups and downs of independent filmmaking, particularly after the drying up of formal support from the British Film Institute, Channel Four, and the Greater London Council, Martin made a momentous decision. Feeling that too much of the support for his films required that he betray his independence, he retired. In his own words, he was a revolutionary, not a hustler, though he freely admitted that the latter could be just as vital to the task of liberation.

Henry G. Martin leaves behind a loving family, many friends, and a network of Black writers and filmmakers grateful for his work and mentorship.

Cover art by Cienna Smith

Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades convenes social commentary and scholarly critiques on the post-soul aesthetic’s ideological entanglement with Afro-Latino subjectivity, expressive culture, and political thought in the US and Latin America. Historical and cultural contiguity provide the rationale for this long overdue intervention. The post-soul condition and sustained interest in Afro-Latinidad by US scholars emerged simultaneously in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power/Black Arts movements. Recognizing this harmonic convergence, the co-guest editors of this special issue bring together writers and scholars who variously embrace, reject, and modify conventional understandings of Afro-Latinidad and the post-soul aesthetic.

Cienna Smith’s innovative rendition of the Orisha Oshun graces the cover, figuratively signaling the issue’s understanding of post-soul Afro-Latinidad as an inherently diasporic, elastic, eclectic, and transnational concept of ethno-racial belonging and identification. The issue opens with “Naming Loss: An Interview with Naima Coster.” Coster, a best-selling novelist of Dominican, Cuban, and Curaçaoan heritage, discusses her views of the post-soul aesthetic and shares with the co-guest editors how being an Afro-Latina writer shaped her MFA experience, her themes and characters, and the marketing of her novels. Examining the impact of US Soul music in Panama, Matti Steinitz traces how Black Power symbols, styles, and discourses provided many young Afro-Latin Americans across the hemisphere with a means to break with prescribed nationalist and folkloristic identity constructions of blackness. Moving the discussion southward to Brazil and forward to the present, Bryce Henson explores singer-songwriter Karol Conká’s music, videos, and role on Big Brother Brazil to examine the tension between mestiço-oriented brasilidade’s erasure of blackness and the Brazilian post-soul aesthetic’s use of Black Brazilian musical genres and social movements to disrupt that erasure.

The next three articles investigate post-soul Afro-Latinidad in video games, social media, and trap rap. Examining the Sony PlayStation video game Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020), Regina Marie Mills argues that Miles Morales, as Spider-Man, is a post-soul superhero who invites readers and players to contend not only with what it means to be Black but also with the marketability of blackness and Afro-Latinidad in post-Civil Rights America. In her article, Omaris Zunilda Zamora examines how Cardi B’s trance-inducing social media presence challenges Black feminism, Chicana feminism, and the post-soul aesthetic to substantively engage, rather than elide, Afro-Latina epistemologies. Calling attention to Mexican-American rapper Kap G and the post-soul South, Rodolfo Aguilar contends that Kap G’s sonic fusions of cumbia and trap rap symbolically represent the Latinx transformation of Atlanta’s demographic landscape and hip hop scene.

The issue concludes with “Our Patrias Cannot Liberate Us from Anti-Blackness: Post-Racial Myths in the Latinx Diaspora,” a personal essay by Ayendy Bonifacio. Using the day that he became a US citizen as a point of departure, Bonifacio meditates on the anti-racist protests stemming from the murders of Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, asking Latina/o/x communities to come to terms with their histories of anti-blackness.

– Trent Masiki and Regina Marie Mills

 

For a limited time, access the intro and “Naming Loss: An Interview with Naima Coster” for free.

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Volume 52 (2022) includes the above issue, plus Black Archival Practice I and II, and Black Religions in the Digital Age.

In volume 53 (2023), keep an eye out for The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies (CFP), Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II (CFP), and more.

Cover art by Diedrick Brackens

 

From the introduction, “Going Electric” by Paul J. Edwards:

“Dylan is not alone in producing speculative knowledge of Black trauma within circuits of white American poetics. Ezra Pound provided the only first-person account of the death of Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father. Executed by the US Army at a detention center near Pisa, Louis’ only chronicler was his fellow prisoner, Pound, who recorded only fleeting mentions of the man in The Pisan Cantos, noting Till’s nickname by his fellow prisoners and a slightly longer passage that functions as a eulogistic note. Again, this moment is marked by its apparent ambiguity. It only becomes legible to scholars after Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam murdered Emmett Till a decade later. Maddeningly, Louis’ death was kept from his family until it was used to smear him and his dead son, suggesting that the Tills shared a genetic predisposition—like all Black men—to assault white women. Such a sardonic line retrospectively seems oddly Dylanesque with its inclusion of Louis’ death with a sense of a feast being prepared. In either case, in Pound and Dylan, the Black body can only be speculated on, never quite in focus but instead more citational than critically engaged with. Although Pound and Dylan do not feature in this issue, each of our contributors counter the obscurations of Dylan and Pound’s white poetics.”

Issue also includes the following:

• Violent Illumination: Street Lamps as Sites of Lynching and Black Resistance, by Leah S. Yared
• When Militancy Was in Vogue: Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, and the Precarious Desires of White Audiences, by Zachary Manditch-Prottas
• Sex and the Future of History: Black Politics at the Limit in Sutton E. Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio, by Melissa A. Wright
• Book Reviews: Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America by E. James West / Sid Ahmed Ziane; Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick / Cera Smith; Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past by Christopher E.W. Ouma / Daniel Chukwuemeka; Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights by Samantha Pinto / Margarita Lila Rosa; Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital edited by Adrienne D. Davis and the BSE Collective / Kirin Wachter-Grene

For a limited time, read the introduction and “Violent Illumination” for free.

 

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Until the end of 2021, you can subscribe to our 51st volume here.

In our 2022 volume, keep an eye out for Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Black Archival Practice (two issues), and Black Religions in the Digital Age. Our 2023 volume will include issues on Afrofuturism, and more…