Dr. Reynaldo Anderson is an Associate Professor of Communication and Chair of the Humanities department at Harris-Stowe State University in Saint Louis Missouri and serves as an executive board member of the Missouri Arts Council. He is the Past Chair of the Black Caucus of the National Communication Association (NCA). He has previously worked for international prison reform with C.U.R.E. International in Douala, Cameroon, and as a development ambassador in Ghana.

Dr. Anderson publishes extensively in the area of Afrofuturism, communication studies, and the African diaspora. He is the executive director and co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM), a network of artists, curators, intellectuals, and activists. He is the co-editor of the book Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (Lexington books); the volume Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent (Cedar Grove Press); co-editor of the forthcoming volume The Black Speculative Art Movement: Black Futurity, Art+Design; co-editor of “Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures,” a forthcoming special issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies; and co-editor of “When is Wakanda: Afrofuturism and Dark Speculative Futurity,” a forthcoming special issue of  the Journal of Futures Studies.

 

For those who are not familiar with your work and the rapidly growing Black Speculative Arts Movement, could you historicize and discuss the difference between Afrofuturism and Afrofuturism 2.0?

Afrofuturism is a word that emerged in the early 1990s during a period of time that I think was best characterized by scholar Barbara Christian in 1987 as “The Race for Theory.” During that period, towards the end of the Cold War, you had a generation of scholars like Cornell West, Molefi Asante, bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates, and others that gained notoriety and were introducing ideas to explain the cultural moment we were living in. During that time, the cultural critic Mark Dery and others coined the term Afrofuturism around predominantly African American speculative traditions and practices.

It can be argued we are currently in a second race for theory that can be traced back to the middle of the last decade with the emergence of social media, forces of globalization, and the economic crash of 2008. Afrofuturism 2.0—a term I described in interaction with Alondra Nelson during a conference at Emory University and published in a volume I co-edited with Charles E. Jones entitled Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness—represents the second phase of Afrofuturism emerging in the last several years that acknowledges its development as an emerging pan-African social philosophy characterized by dimensions that include metaphysics, aesthetics, theoretical and applied sciences, social sciences, and programming. Black Panther represents a mash-up of those dimensions in a popular cinematic format.

 

And what distinguishes the Black Speculative Arts Movement from Afrofuturism or how do they relate?

The term Black Speculative Arts Movement was coined by the visual artist John Jennings. The movement drew upon previous work by writers and thinkers such as Sheree Renee Thomas, Octavia Butler, Amiri Baraka, Kodwo Eshun, John Akomfrah, and Nnedi Okorafor. I would argue the key event where we acknowledge its existence as a movement was the exhibition Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination co-curated by John Jennings and me at the Schomburg library in Harlem. The traveling convention format was founded, with participation from Maia Williams, at Harris-Stowe State University in Saint Louis, MO at the end of the Harlem exhibition. The work from that co-curated event is coming out in a book this spring, Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent (Cedar Grove Publishing).

There are other international formations that are also engaged in this work, such as The Afrofuturist Affair in Philadelphia, BlackSpace in Durham North Carolina, Wildseeds in New Orleans, Chale Wote in Accra Ghana, and Afro-futures UK in Great Britain. The movement or the term Black Speculative Arts serves as an umbrella for different points of engagement that sometimes overlap, like Magical Realism, Black Science Fiction, Afrofuturism, Sword and Soul or Fantasy, SteamFunk, Afro-Surrealism, Ethno-gothic, and others. I would argue the Black Speculative tradition is the spiritual mother of Afrofuturism with its roots in nineteenth-century discourses around anti-slavery revolutionary practices, science, and early pan-Africanist sentiment.

 

Right now the film Black Panther has helped make Afrofuturism a public trend or topic of conversation.  What are your thoughts about the sudden Hollywood-sized publicity of something that many have been taking quite seriously for years?

I am happy it has made people more curious about the term Afrofuturism. I believe there is a paradigm shift going on among Black folks globally. The movie is impacting the young and the old. The last time I recall this much discussion about a cinematic event was the production of Alex Haley’s Roots in the ’70s. Yet this film is different than Roots in many ways. For example, Black Panther opened in the entire African world in 72 hours its first week, and the response has been dramatic on several sociological, psychological, and aesthetic levels. I have been intrigued by the response along linguistic lines. Afro-Brazilians have been heavily impacted by the film. I have seen some critics from the French cultural zone, although they should be slow to criticize anybody after the production of the Le Flop of a movie that Valerian turned out to be.

 

Tell us more about the significance of Black Panther to historical Black radical politics?  For example, is there an actual relationship between, say, the artist Jack Kirby who created the character and THE Black Panthers?

I think people should go back to the origin of the Black Panther Party in Alabama. In 1965 the Lowndes County Freedom Organization was founded. This organization adopted the Black Panther as its symbol. Huey P. Newton adopted the symbol from them. The Black Panther Party of Lowndes County Alabama believed in Armed Self-Defense in the tradition of Robert F. Williams. This predates both the 1966 founding of the Oakland Black Party by Huey Newton and Bobby Seal, and the launching of the comic series Black Panther in 1966. It should be noted that the Lowndes County Freedom Organization was started by the SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) as it was moving towards Black Power ideology. Thus, you cannot separate the symbol Black Panther from the Black Liberation Struggle. That is what the symbol stood for before there was a comic series and that is why the symbol was adopted by Blacks fighting for the right to vote in the south to Blacks in Oakland who were also suffering from racist oppression.

As far as relationships go, Jack Kirby and the artist Billy Graham were creating this character during a transitional time in America and the world system, in an environment of the Black Power movement, the Black Arts Movement, the African liberation struggle, and during the time of Black Jazz creatives, like Sun Ra during his New York period. Jack Kirby and Billy Graham were not operating in a cultural vacuum when these events were going on, and it probably impacted their creative expression.

 

A good deal of the response to the film in the Black world has been framed around tensions in the Black Diaspora, such as the representation of Africa, the role of “real” Africans vs. African-American fantasies, the tension and/or limits of, say, Black Nationalism and pan-Africanism. From your 2.0 perspective, from a perspective rooted in Astro-Blackness, how do you frame or respond to such tensions and debates?

First of all, I am African-American and I don’t have fantasies about Africa. I have been dealing in the reality of Africa and the African Diaspora for some years now. Yes, you have some misinformed African-Americans and others in the Diaspora, and there are some misinformed Africans on the Continent. Second, after traveling around the world for much of the last decade lecturing on Black Futurity, I have reached the conclusion that the African diaspora and Black Africa have no friends. But, we do have interests that have to be attended to. So, time out for silly talk.

We must remember that this misinformed state on both sides of the Atlantic is due to an educational. historical, political-economic design of the White Atlantic and their allies who, in too many cases, instilled in Africans of the Diaspora a slave mentality and in continental Africans a colonized mentality. Leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey, Patrice Lumumba, and Claudia Jones have been working hard for generations to help Black people all over the world to overcome the psychological hindering and underdevelopment that was done to Black people by White Supremacy and the White Atlantic. No one has a problem with people of Jewish ancestry around the world supporting the country of Israel wherever they live.

Furthermore, NATO is a military organization that represents the political-economic strategic interests of the White Atlantic. There is a Nordic council founded in 1952 for societies in that region. There are Arab and Asian formations with international goals and aspirations. Therefore, it is logical for people of Black African descent to be interested in developing organizations and entities that focus on their international goals and aspirations. So, I would say the 2.0 development of Afrofuturism and Astro-Blackness, is analogous to the earlier development of pan-Africanism (an idea that started in the diaspora) that would later be adopted by the African continent when they established the O.A.U and later the African Union, which, by the way, formally recognized its diaspora as a sixth zone of the union. In the near future, the hope is that Afrofuturism 3.0 (or some other name) will emerge as African Union members or organizations refashion it for their own sensibilities, tastes, and strategic goals.

Finally, a more interesting exchange would be what can we learn from each other? For example, what can the African Diaspora learn from people like Wangari Maathai on environmental sustainability? Or, more importantly, what is the continent doing to defend itself? At the time of this writing there is no sub-Saharan African country with a military ranked in the top 40 in the world. In a multi-polar world, the strong prey on the weak and it’s shaping up to be a scenario similar to those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries where Black/African societies are impacted by Arab-centric jihadist elements from the north throughout the Maghreb region, Asian Tiger societies from the east (China is building a base in Africa), and the Western White Atlantic entities.

In closing, I would say people that entertain such arguments need to think bigger.

 

What do you think people are getting wrong about the film or about Afrofuturism as represented in the film?

It is too early to tell. Right now, people are generally critiquing from their own space of the chess board, and some people have problems with depth perception. Whether it’s through the analytical framework of Black feminism, Black Nationalist, Afro-pessimism, Afropolitan discourse, and so on, I would argue that people are generally trying to reposition themselves to be in the debate on Black futurity. They are reflexively doing what they have already been doing from their various traditions or practices, but some have been caught unprepared. At the end of the day, the Disney Company made a shrewd business decision and developed a new global market for Black super heroes. However, the film unexpectedly tapped into a global Black reservoir of desire and agency that is long standing and built and autonomously maintained in the cultural software of Africa and its diaspora.

So in light of your answer, say something about the place of the “Afro” in Afrofuturism and its relationship to “futurity.”

I would argue that “Afro” implies an orientation to the data or phenomena on Black futures. A few years ago, at an Astro-Blackness meeting at Loyola Marymount University, I said if there is no Africa in your Afrofuturism then you are not doing Afrofuturism, you are doing somebody else’s. This position makes it necessary to have an intellectual relationship or understanding with the Africana Studies tradition in the area of Afrocentricity and other formations.

Most impressive about your work is the insistence on making a movement rooted in imaginative expression speak to extant political movements in the Black world. What do you hope Black Panther can achieve in this context, or is it secondary to what’s already been going on?

Black Panther is amplifying a global dialogue about Black futurity that has primarily been the province of a small group of creatives, intellectuals, and academics for about two decades. As the masses are slowly being awakened to its existence, there will be mutations of the Afrofuturism project based upon marketing, locale, linguistic differences, and geopolitics.

 

The following is a syllabus/research guide on Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts and Criticism from Dr. Anderson.

 

Afrofuturism 2.0 syllabus

This course is designed to help students refine their theoretical approaches to the study of second wave Afrofuturism and the Black Speculative tradition, and to help sharpen and broaden their critical thinking and analytical faculties through a study of selected works. This course prepares students for the questions raised by the scholar Kodwo Eshun when he notes the need to study the conceptual framework of our cultural moment: What are the parameters of that moment, the edge of that framework? We will be examining more than just the works and their authors, but also the social, ethical, spiritual, political, and philosophical bases upon which the emerging field is being built.

 

Module 1: What is Afrofuturism?

Pfeiffer, J. (1975). Black American Speculative literature: A checklist. Extrapolation, 17(1), 35-43.

Sinker, Mark. (1992). Loving the Alien: Black Science Fiction. The Wire 96: 30–33.

Dery, M. (1994). Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. Flame wars: The discourse of cyberculture, 179-222.

Nelson, A. (2002). Afrofuturism: A special issue of social text. (Introduction)

Eshun, K. (2003). Further considerations of Afrofuturism. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(2), 287-302.

Elia, A. (2014). The Languages of Afrofuturism. Lingue e Linguaggi, 12, 83-96.

Anderson, R. Jones, C. (2015). Introduction: Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. Lexington Books.

Anderson, R. (2016). Afrofuturism 2.0 & The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Notes on a Manifesto. Obsidian, 42(1/2), 228.

 

Module 2: Metaphysics

Fisher, M. (2013). The metaphysics of crackle: Afrofuturism and hauntology. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 5(2), 42-55.

Van Veen, T. C. (2013). VESSELS OF TRANSFER: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Monáe. Dancecult: Journal of electronic dance music culture, 5(2).

Rollins, A. (2015). Afrofuturism and Our Old Ship of Zion: The Black Church in Post-Modernity. In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, 127.

Gaskins, N. R. (2016). The African Cosmogram Matrix in Contemporary Art and Culture. black theology, 14(1), 28-42.

Steinskog, E. (2018). Vibrations, Rhythm, and Cosmology. In Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies (pp. 109-138). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

 

Module 3: Aesthetics

David, M. (2007). Afrofuturism and post-soul possibility in Black popular music. African American Review, 41(4), 695-707.

Josephs, K. B. (2013). Beyond Geography, Past Time: Afrofuturism, The Rainmaker’s Mistake, and Caribbean Studies. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 17(2 (41)), 123-135.

Rambsy II, H. (2013). Beyond Keeping It Real: OutKast, the Funk Connection, and Afrofuturism. American Studies, 52(4), 205-216.

Anderson, R., & Jennings, J. (2014). Afrofuturism: The Digital Turn and the Visual Art of Kanye West. In The Cultural Impact of Kanye West (pp. 29-44). Palgrave Macmillan, New York.

Barber, T. (2015. Cyborg Grammar? Reading Wangechi Mutu’s Non je ne regrette rien through Kindred. Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, 3-25.

Nyawalo, M. (2016). Afro-futurism and the aesthetics of hope in Bekolo’s Les Saignantes and Kahiu’s Pumzi. Journal of the African Literature Association, 10(2), 209-221.

 

Module 4: Race & Theoretical and Applied Science

Eglash, R. (2002). Race, sex, and nerds: From black geeks to Asian American hipsters. Social Text, 20(2), 49-64.

Rusert, B. (2013). Delany’s Comet: Fugitive Science and the Speculative Imaginary of Emancipation. American Quarterly, 65(4), 799-829.

Gaskin, N. (2015). Afrofuturism on Web 3.0: Vernacular Cartography and Augmented Space. In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, 27-44.

Brooks, L. A. (2015). Playing a Minority Forecaster in Search of Afrofuturism: Where am I in this future Steward Brand?.  Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, 149.

Callus, P., & Potter, C. (2017). Michezo Video: Nairobi’s gamers and the developers who are promoting local content. Critical African Studies, 9(3), 302-326.

Luba, A. R. (2017). The Change Game: A Critical Game For Recognizing & Generating Alternative Futures.

Brooks, L. J. A., & Anderson, R. Student Visions of Multiple Urban Futures 2050. Envisioning futures for environmental and sustainability education, 385.

 

Module 5: Social Sciences and futurity

Yaszek, L. (2006). Afrofuturism, science fiction, and the history of the future. Socialism and Democracy, 20(3), 41-60.

DeIuliis, D., & Lohr, J. (2015). Rewriting the Narrative. Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, 167-84.

Guthrie, R. (2015). The Real Ghosts in the Machine: Afrofuturism and the Haunting of Racial Space in I, Robot and DETROPIA. In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. 45-60.

Elia, A. (2016). WEB Du Bois’s Proto-Afrofuturist Short Fiction: The Comet. Il Tolomeo, 18, 173-86.

 

Moduel 6: Critical theory and Method

Tal, K. (1996). The unbearable Whiteness of being: African American critical theory and cyberculture. Kali Tal Web site.

Mayer, R. (2000). “Africa As an Alien Future”: The Middle Passage, Afrofuturism, and Postcolonial Waterworlds. Amerikastudien/American Studies, 555-566.

Michael Tillotson and Serie McDougal (2013) Applied Africana Studies Journal of Black Studies Vol. 44, No. 1 pp. 101-113

Sunstrum, P.(2013). “Afro-mythology and African Futurism: The Politics of Imagining and Methodologies for Contemporary Creative Research Practices.” In Africa SF. Ed. Mark Bould. Paradoxa, no. 25: 113-29.

Ford, J. (2013). Cultivating citizenship as feeling: a conversation with three digital alchemists jillian ford, in conversation with L’Erin Alta-Devki, Moya Bailey, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 29(2).

Phillips, R. (2015). Black Quantum Futurism: Theory and Practice- Part One. In Black Quantum Futurism Theory& Practice, 11-30.

Whitted, Q. (2015). “To be African is to Merge Technology and Magic”: An Interview with Nnedi Okorafor. In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise Of Astro-Blackness, 207-213.

Anderson, R. (2015). Critical Afrofuturism: A case study in visual, rhetoric, sequential art, and post-apocalyptic Black identity. In Blacker the ink: Constructions of Black identity in comics and sequential art, 171-192.

 

Module 7: Criticisms that overlap Time and Space

Reichardt, U. (2000). Time and the African-American experience: The problem of chronocentrism. Amerikastudien/American Studies, 45(4), 465-484.

Okembe-Ra. N. (2015). The Implications of Africa-Centered Conceptions of Time & Space for Quantitative Theorizing: Limitations for paradigmatically-Bound Philosophical Meta-Assumptions. In Black Quantum Futurism Theory & Practice, 31-48.

Van Veen, t. (2015).  The Armageddon Effect: Afrofuturism and the Chronopolitics of Alien Nation. In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, 63-90.

Chude-Sokei, L. (2016). “A Caribbean Pre-Posthumanism.” In The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, 179-224.

Brooks, K. D., McGee, A., & Schoellman, S. (2016). Speculative Sankofarration: Haunting Black Women in Contemporary Horror Fiction. Obsidian, 42(1/2), 237.

 

Module 8: In conversation other cultural explorations of Futurity

Ramírez, C. S. (2008). Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 33(1), 185-194.

McLeod, K. (2013). Afro-Samurai: techno-Orientalism and contemporary hip hop. Popular Music, 32(2), 259-275.

Ritskes, E. (2017). Beyond and Against White Settler Colonialism in Palestine: Fugitive Futurities in Amir Nizar Zuabi’s “The Underground Ghetto City of Gaza”. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 17(1), 78-86.

 

Module 9: Black Women and futurity

Morris, S. M. (2013). Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, 40(3), 146-166.

Jones, E. (2015). Africana Women’s Science fiction and Narrative Medicine: Difference, Ethics, and Empathy.

TURMAN, A. (2015) An Afrofuturist Africana Womanist Affair. (Book Review)

Afrofuturism’s Musical Princess Janelle Monae: Psychedelic Sould Message Infused with a Sci-Fi Twist. In Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, 91-107

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.

 

Module 10: Black LGBTQ futurity

Muñoz, J. E. (2007). Cruising the toilet: LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, radical black traditions, and queer futurity. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13(2), 353-367.

Fawaz, R. (2012). Space, that Bottomless Pit: Planetary Exile and Metaphors of Belonging in American Afrofuturist Cinema. Callaloo, 35(4), 1103-1122.

Griffiths, T. M. (2015). Queer. Black Politics, Queer. Black Communities: Touching the Utopian Frame in Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. African American Review, 48(3), 305-317.

Jaime, K. (2017). “Chasing Rainbows” Black Cracker and Queer, Trans Afrofuturity. Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4(2), 208-218.

 

Module 11: Programmatic Spaces (Case Studies)

The AfroFuturist Affair – is a Philadelphia based grassroots community formed to celebrate, strengthen, and promote Afrofuturistic and Sci-Fi concepts and culture through creative events and creative writing.

BlackSpace- BlackSpace provides free Pan-African centered social entrepreneurship and digital media resources for local youth in Durham North Carolina.

The Center for Afrofuturist Studies – (CAS) is an initiative in Iowa City, Iowa to re-imagine new futures for marginalized peoples by generating safe work spaces for artists of color. The CAS hosts visiting artists and artists-in-residence and produces lectures, workshops, public forums, and exhibitions on the intersections of race, technology, and the diaspora.

Blacks to The Future- Located in Paris, France the collective focuses on collective experimentation through their transmedia platform with the belief that Africanity and Afrofuturism embody a humanistic perspective that all people can embrace.

Afrofutures_UK- Located in England is a connective made up of artists, writers, activists and academics interested in exploring the future black experience through multi-media and disruptive technologies.

Wildseeds- Wildseeds is a collective of feminists of color that uses speculative fiction as a resource for social change. Our work, steeped in Black feminist traditions of survival and healing, engages Octavia Butler and other speculative/sci-fi and fantastical authors.

Black Speculative Arts Movement- aka BSAM and BSAM-CANADA, is a yearlong, traveling Afrofuturism, comics, film, and art convention held at multiple universities, colleges, and venues in the United States and Canada.

 

Academic text book resources:

Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles Jones

Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies: Culture, Technology, and Things to Come by Erik Steinskog

Black Quantum Futurism: Theory & Practice (Volume 1) by Rasheedah Phillips

Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture by Ytasha Womack

The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, Futurism and the Speculative (Black Studies and Critical Thinking) by Sandra Jackson and Julie E. Moody-Freeman

More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction by Kodwo Eshun

 

Journals:

Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text by Alondra Nelson

Speculating Futures: Black Imagination & The Arts: Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora edited by Sheree Renee Thomas, Nisi Shawl, Isiah Lavender III, Krista Franklin

Special Issue on Afrofuturism: Vol 5, No 2 (2013): Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture. Edited by Tobias C. Van Veen

 

Literary Supplements:

Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora by Sheree Renée Thomas

Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond by Bill Campbell and Edward Austin Hall

Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown

Black Kirby: In Search of The MotherBoxx Connection art exhibition catalog By John Jennings and Jonathan Gayles

Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent by Reynaldo Anderson and John Jennings

AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers by Ivor W. Hartmann

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Futureland by Walter Mosely

Midnight Robber Nalo Hopkinson

Nova by Samuel Delaney

 

Black Studies Supplements:

The Demise of the Inhuman: Afrocentricity, Modernism and Postmodernism by Ana Monteiro-Ferreira

The Afrocentric Idea by Molefi Asanti

The Africa centered perspective of history and social sciences in the twenty-first century by C.T. Keto

Yurugu: An African-centered critique of European cultural thought and behavior. By Marimba Ani

The Souls of Black Folk. By W.E.B. Dubois

The Black Mise-en-Femme is a special collection of essays addressing contemporary film and television by women scholars who are personally invested in the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and nation in media.  The volume begins with Marquita’s Smith’s essay, “’Don’t Be a Martyr’: Kinship, Intimacy, and Carceral Care in Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere.” Smith aptly points out that in the current climate of mass incarceration narratives like DuVernay’s elevate an often-overlooked perspective.  In “Black Women Having It All: The Rise of Professional Women in African American Romance Films,” Maryann Erigha examines romantic comedies released after 2000 in which the new modern professional woman is now a stock protagonist.  Lynne Joyrich’s essay, “American Dreams and Demons: Television’s “Hollow” Histories and Fantasies of Race,” is part of an existing, but growing, body of scholarship that examines the functions of blackness in science fiction, horror, fantasy and supernatural worlds. In “Trending Topics: A Cultural Analysis of Being Mary Jane and Black Women’s Engagement on Twitter,” Felicia L. Harris and Loren S. Coleman look at the representation of young women in Black entertainment television. The volume closes with April Lundy’s reflections in her article “Caught Between a Thot and a Hard Place: The Politics of Black Female Sexuality at the Intersection of Cinema and Reality Television.” Lundy brings her experience as a former producer to this analysis of the representation of womanhood in television. This volume is theoretically informed enough for specialists yet accessible to lay readers. It is ideal for classroom use because it builds on existing cinema and media studies discourses by applying them to contemporary film, television, video, and social media. The Black Mise-en-Femme is bound to foster conversation, encourage criticality, and inspire readers to push conversation beyond existing boundaries.

Preview the issue here. For a limited time, you can download and read the introduction here and “Caught Between a Thot and a Hard Place: The Politics of Black Female Sexuality at the Intersection of Cinema and Reality Television” by April D. Lundy here.

To subscribe to volume 48, please go here. More information on upcoming issues in this volume and future ones can be found here. For a limited time, use the discount code RTBSDIS for 10% off a personal subscription. As they become available, individual copies are available for purchase in our online store.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Volume 47 is complete! Read the introduction to each issue below.

47.1 – Black Experimental Poetics

47.2 – After Madiba: Black Studies in South Africa

47.3 – Black Code

47.4 – General

The table of contents for each issue can be found here.

If you would like a full set of our limited 2017 print issues, subscribe before copies run out.* Each 4-issue volume is $37 USD (personal subscriptions only). Personal subscribers may use the discount code RTBSDIS for 10% off the subscription rate. Subscriptions also include digital access.

The first issue of our 2018 volume (48), The Black Mise-en-Femme (guest edited by Mia Mask), is scheduled for release in late January/early February. Subsequent issues for volume 48 include a tribute to Chokwe Lumumba, Black Liberation: From Political Thought to Political Power, and our general issue featuring an interview with Nigerian novelist Chinelo Okparanta, and more! Since print copies are limited, subscribe to volume 48 soon.

*Available volumes are for 2017 (47) and 2018 (48). To subscribe, you must contact subscriptions@tandf.co.uk and specify what volume you want. This late in the year, print copies for 2017 are limited and they may or may not be able to fulfill your request, or may only be able to offer digital access. You can also order individual print copies from current and past volumes here.

As The Black Scholar inches closer to celebrating 50 years of existence, the journal is proud to conclude our current volume on a high note. Organized as a general issue, Volume 47, Number 4 opens with a challenging and provocative introduction by TBS Editor-In-Chief, Louis Chude-Sokei, titled “Blackness As Method.” Noting the many different ways notions of “Blackness” have been and continue to be put into motion, the brief introduction also gestures to the methodological (and ideational) variation that constitutes the content of this particular volume and the contemporary state of Black intellectual ferment and cultural production in the country, more broadly. If, as Chude-Sokei points out, notions of blackness have become ubiquitous and multifarious, then the contributors of this volume epitomize the varied ways thinkers are approaching the study of Black lives.

In his essay on Lerone Bennett, E. James West harkens back to a previous decade that witnessed an explosion in appreciation of all things “Black”—the 1960s. West recalls the central role Lerone Bennett played in popularizing African-American history, while also reminding us that social movements—like Black Power and the current Movement for Black Lives—also play a part in rejuvenating a popular historical imagination and public inquisitiveness.

Chandra Ford’s “Notions of Blackness in the Context of HIV/Aids Disparities and Research” focuses our attention on the epistemic (and medical) problems produced by racism. Taking square aim at the field of Public Health, Ford argues that racism and distorted notions of blackness continue to impact the presuppositions and methods used to study HIV/AIDS.

In an essay that resides at the point where the public and private spheres overlap, Siobhan Brooks prods us to think about the symbolic meaning of marriage for Black queer women after DOMA. Continuing with the theme of “blackness as method,” Brooks asks how the racialized experiences of Black queer women has impacted their notion of marriage as a legal right and its desirability as a social right of passage.

The articles in volume 47, Number 4 round out with Nathaniel Nesmith’s interview with Frank Rich. Discussing the life and legacy of the late, great Pittsburgh playwright and author, August Wilson, Rich and Nesmith prompt us to consider if, in fact, it is the creative mind—that of the artist—who might be best suited to capture this thing called “blackness.”

The issue closes with a review essay and a solid selection of book reviews.

For a limited time, you can download and read Chude-Sokei’s introduction, “Blackness As Method,” and Brooks’ article, “Black on Black Love: Black Lesbian and Bisexual Women, Marriage, and Symbolic Meaning,” for free. You can also preview the contents of the issue here.

The cover of this issue was done by Delita Martin. See more of her amazing work here.

Information on personal subscriptions to TBS can be found here. For a limited time, use the discount code RTBSDIS for 10% off a personal subscription. As they become available, individual copies are available for purchase in our online store.

 

The below articles are free to download and read for varying lengths of time. Download while available and enjoy!

 

The Black Scholar Interviews James Baldwin (1973). Click on green PDF button.

An Interview with Dr. Robert D. Bullard (from 46.3, “Climate Justice: Blacks and Climate Change”)

Multiple articles from our first issue of 2017, “Black Experimental Poetics” (47.1) Click on articles with the green check box.

From “After Madiba: Black Studies in South Africa” (47.2)

• Introduction: Black Studies, South Africa, and the Mythology of Mandela 
• Beyond the Elder Statesman: Reflections on Teaching About Mandela and South Africa in Neo-liberal Times

From “Black Code” (47.3)

• Introduction, Wild Seed in the Machine
•  Black Scholars Matter: #BlkTwitterstorians Building a Digital Community

For limited access to more free archival content, keep an eye out for our virtual issues that come out 3-4 times a year. We expect the next issue sometime in fall. Finally, the introduction and one article from each issues are free to read during the entirety of the volume/year.

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to get updates. Subscribe and get both print and digital access to current volume. Use the discount code RTBSDIS for 10% off (personal subscriptions only).

 

 

The Black Scholar is proud to announce the release of “Black Code,” by guest editors Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal. Johnson and Neal have assembled a collective of digital soothsayers working on the margins of Black Studies, Afrofuturism, radical media, and the digital humanities. Black Code Studies is queer, femme, fugitive, and radical; as praxis and methodology, it waxes insurgent when the need arises. And in this moment, we are in need of Black digital insurgency, one attuned to racial scripts of the past even as it looks to future modes of Black thought and cultural production for inspiration. Barely scratching the surface, this issue welcomes new work and celebrates a Black digital fugitivity that has been present since the beginning of the internet. Our contributors include Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Lauren Cramer, Alessandra Raengo, Tara L. Conley, Ashleigh Wade, Aleia Brown, Joshua Crutchfield, Megan Driscoll, Ahmad Greene-Hayes, and Joy James, with an introduction from Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal, and cover art from John Jennings celebrating Octavia Butler’s iconic novel, Wild Seed.

For a limited time, download and read the introduction, “Wild Seed in the Machine,” and “Black Scholars Matter: #BlkTwitterstorians Building a Digital Community” by Aleia M. Brown & Joshua Crutchfield for free.

To receive both print and digital versions of this issue, subscribe to Volume 47. When you subscribe to Volume 47, you will also receive “After Madiba: Black Studies in South Africa,” “Black Experimental Poetics,” and our final issue of 2017.

“There are new metaphors, there are new sounds, there are new relations.”

In 1973, TBS interviewed James Baldwin. Through the month of September, we’re opening up our archives and giving readers the opportunity to download and read this incredible, relevant piece of history. Follow this link and click on the green PDF button to access free of charge.

 

One hundred years ago, in 1917, angry white residents tore through the Black neighborhood of East St. Louis setting fire to homes and assaulting passersby. Black community members armed themselves against the racial pogrom.

***

Fifty years ago, in 1967, police raided a “blind pig” in Detroit where a group had gathered to fete two GIs home from the war.  Local residents vandalized or looted over 2,000 stores the next five days, causing in excess of forty million dollars of damage.  159 additional American cities reacted similarly to their own municipal injustices that year.

***

Twenty-five years ago, in 1992, after a change of venue, a suburban Los Angeles jury acquitted the officers who brutalized Rodney King on videotape.  South Central residents took to the streets to protest this injustice, the memory of the light sentence of fifteen-year-old LaTasha Harlins’ killer, still fresh in their minds.

***

Three years ago, the Ferguson police permitted Michael Brown to lay uncovered in the street for over four hours. Enraged residents set a QuikTrip ablaze.

***

One year ago, two Baton Rouge officers kneeled on Alton Sterling, shooting him multiple times.

***

One year ago, a Minnesota patrolman shot Philando Castille, while his girlfriend filmed the encounter on Facebook Live.

***

Violence is an unrelenting hallmark of the Black American experience.  Kidnappings, savage beatings, summary executions, sexual assaults, massacres, and mass incarceration: the American state and its agents have continuously employed these corporal attacks as mechanisms for exerting social control over minority citizens. The year 2017 marks the gruesome anniversary of some of the most infamous events of anti-Black violence.  And while the human toll in each of these incidents is immeasurable, so too is the suffocating omnipresence of structural violence in the everyday lives of those who occupy the lowest tiers of racial, classed, gendered, and sexual hierarchies.

Throughout American history this nation has collectively bought into the “myth of innocence.”[1] Citizens hold their heads high as they engage in what is construed as constructive violence, including “opening” the frontier, the Revolutionary War, and agrarian uprisings. Simultaneously, those who employ corporal force beyond these sanctioned means are punished for engaging in destructive violence.[2] This binary allows Americans to exonerate those who use bodily harm for agreed upon public benefit and discipline those who do not conform to normative ideals and hierarchies. This is the paradox of violence throughout American history.  The public lauds force sanctioned by those in power. When the disenfranchised mobilize the same tactic, the public demonizes these actors for tearing apart the fabric of society; the lesson not to throw stones in glass houses, unheeded.

In 1969, appalled by the misinterpreted “explosion” of violence that occurred that decade, the United States government commissioned a study entitled The History of Violence in America.  Although the nation had been wracked with on-going war in South Asia, numerous political assassinations, and urban uprisings, historian Richard Hofstadter remarked in his own study “what is impressive to one who begins to learn about American violence is its extraordinary frequency, its sheer commonplaceness in our history.”[3] Or, as black militant H. Rap Brown asserted more plainly, “violence is as American as cherry pie.”[4]  Yet when marginalized citizens violently press back against unjust structures, as they did in the above examples, the country recoils in shock and dismay.

Defining violence seems straightforward: bodily harm inflicted by one human being upon another.  While this type of violence certainly predominates the Black experience, other more clandestine versions occur simultaneously.  John Galtung’s framing of the term captures the constant shadow of violence that creeps over the Black community, ranging beyond corporal terror.  Galtung broadens the definition of violence to include the “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs.”[5]  Central city divestment, environmental racism, stop-and-frisk policies, non-indictments, and political gerrymandering are high-profile examples, yet represent only a fraction of the structural violence that plagues the Black community. Taken as a whole, these unjust structures have often forced African Americans to pursue new, violent forms of redress that frame Blacks as both victims and agents of change. Through the strategic mobilization of violence, the oppressed amplify their demands after years of sanctioned agitation had borne no fruit.

This past week, sandwiched between the anniversaries of the Newark and Detroit uprisings, we reflect on the impact, legacy, and meaning of the 1967 urban revolts.  We must challenge and redefine the ways in which these events are recollected. By not doing so, erasure inflicts yet another wound. Violence does not incubate in a sterile petri dish.  It grows in the muck and filth of an imbalanced society.  The pattern that emerges is that cultural, state, political, gendered, racial, legal, and structural violence always precedes instances of collective response. Yet the dominant narratives focus on the barbarity of popular violence. How is it that the specter of violence employed by the marginalized is scarier than the structural violence perpetrated by the State?  Only a radical disruption of these narratives will allow our descendants to mark the passage of time not in the anniversaries of anti-Black violence but rather in the markers of our collective liberation.

Notes

[1] Ira M. Leonard and Christopher C. Leonard, “The Historiography of American Violence,” Homicide Studies 7: 2 (2003), 104.

[2]Richard Maxwell Brown, “Historical Patterns of Violence in America,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, The History of Violence in America (New Work: Bantam Books, 1969), 45.

[3] Richard Hofstadter, “Reflections on Violence in the United States,” Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 7.

[4] W.S. Tkweme, “H. Rap Brown,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds. African American Lives, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 107.

[5] Johan Galtung, “Kulturelle Gewalt” (1993) Vol. 43 Der Burger im Staat in Kathleen Ho “Structural Violence as a Human Rights Violation” (2007) Essex Human Rights Review  4: 2 (September 2007), 106.

 

Ashley M. Howard is a book reviews editor for TBS and an assistant professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

More than three years after the death of South Africa’s first democratic president, Nelson Mandela, this issue of The Black Scholar offers a rich set of perspectives on the state of studying blackness from and in South Africa today. Edited by Christopher Ouma, Litheko Modisane, and Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi, After Madiba takes as its point of genesis the facts and fiction that surround Mandela as the first leader of a democratic, post-apartheid/postcolonial South Africa and the ways in which these shaped and informed the transition years. Taken together, this issue offers reflections on the legacies, heritages, and intellectual traditions out of which Nelson Mandela arose, their futures, and the emerging fault lines of South Africa, post 1994. Such fault lines include but are not limited to: xenophobia, citizenship, the rainbow nation, humanism, and peace.

This issue also speaks to challenges to South Africa’s efforts to re-imagine itself into Africa, its diasporas, and the global order of late capitalism that largely stem from the ways in which it is invoked and imagined by the rest of the continent and its diasporas. The issue therefore takes seriously the project of South Africa after apartheid as produced through the intersection of various postcolonial temporalities—continental and diasporic. At the same time it considers the need for South Africa’s postcoloniality to be consciously read, not just in its distinctively late entry in relation to the continent or African diasporas, or the peculiarities of its “post-apartheid” categorizations, but also as already prefigured in the raced archives of the eras of colonialism, segregation and apartheid, and in the Black intellectual histories generated during these periods which resonate and reverberate in contemporary South Africa’s constructions of citizenship in relation to blackness.

Though not limited to these, this issue places at its center several questions: What does it mean to study Black cultures in or from South Africa today? What is the status of blackness as a category of social, political, or economic signification in the wake of Nelson Mandela? Finally, is there a need for a theory and practice in and of Black cultural studies in contemporary South Africa?

For a limited time, download and read the introduction, Black Studies, South Africa, and the Mythology of Mandela and Beyond the Elder Statesman: Reflections on Teaching About Mandela and South Africa in Neo-liberal Times for free. 

Preview the entire issue here.

Personal subscriptions to TBS‘s 4-issue volumes are $37. More information on institutional and personal subscriptions can be found here. Individual copies will be available to purchase in our online store soon.

*Each virtual issue collates some of the best writing from our archives, updated with new introductions written by prestigious scholars of black studies, and will be free to read and download for a limited time.*

Black theater and performance offer lenses into a range of Black spaces, experiences, and perspectives. Two TBS issues from 1979 and 1995 outline key priorities in studies of Black theater that have opened multiple and capacious trajectories for research and production. The ensuing collection attempts to capture the forms, archives, and methods of the field in its expected and idiosyncratic manifestations in TBS.

For the summer of 1979 Vévé Clark and Margaret Wilkerson edited Black Theater Traditions. A thorough and vibrant collection, this groundbreaking issue features scholars and scholar/artists who, as James V. Hatch asserts in the title of his entry with Krystyna Bakowski, “resuscitated” Black theater history. In a post-Civil Rights explosion of Black creativity, studies in Black theater accrued objects, methodologies, and repertoires that reflected Black Arts Movement priorities. Luminary scholars and practitioners in this issue lay a foundation that has supported the continued illumination of vernacular, everyday, working class experience alongside the poetics of Black performance and performativity in diverse venues. While acknowledging that scholarship, repertoires, and archives of Black performance offer revolutionary potential, contributors also amplify that potential to extend notions of theatrical practice to encompass practices of daily life. Vévé Clark and Amiri Baraka discuss his restaging of Langston Hughes’ revolutionary play Scottsboro, Limited, a topic that saw yet another landmark revival in a trenchant musical pageant in 2010 for a five-year run. Margaret Wilkerson argues that Black theatrical acts necessarily occur off the proscenium stage in community “event,” while also reviewing the productions and institution-building work of Black community theaters. Katherine Dunham and Vévé Clark emphasize diaspora and attune to an Africanist presence. John O’Neal and a posthumous offering by Lorraine Hansberry articulate the social and community goals of Black American theater. Rhett Jones, Ramona Bass, and George Bass consider the role of community and children in theatrical practice. Errol Hill attends to form and style rooted in Black experience while others characterize Black music and poetry as foundational to theatrical aesthetics rather than scripts, Aristotelian plotlines, and linearity characteristic of European theater. Performance, both on and off the stage, structures and transforms Black culture as well as social and personal experience. Scholars address technique, stagecraft, ritual, aesthetics, venue, audience, training, casting, and plays.

Articles in TBS’s 25^th Anniversary issue, Black Drama and Film (Spring 1995), emphasize ritual in Black drama as form, content, and significance. Scholars draw on oral, church, musical, and secular traditions and Africanist practice to illuminate ritual form and force. Contributions to this TBS issue invoke filmmaking and film content as trajectories of ritual form and explore film as a site for the performance of gender and culture. This issue includes an extensive index of films by Black women. The emphasis on ritual as performance form and history positions this commemorative celebratory issue of TBS to offer its continued support and blessing to black knowledge and freedom movements.

Beyond these issues, Black theater and performance research in TBS has illuminated practices and experiences of identity and instances of Black performative mastery. The fundamentally interdisciplinary research considers the work of performers, playwrights, plays, and performances to analyze race, diaspora, gender, identity, self-activity, and belonging. Performance offers a material and symbolic ground for the investigation of the ways Black people experience our lives and identities. Together these examples outline the critical force of performance as an analytic in Black Studies.

Stephanie Leigh Batiste
University of California, Santa Barbara

Articles are free to access through August 2017 and can be accessed here.