Show notes assembled by Emilie Amrein

Aisha Shillingford is the artistic director of Intelligent Mischief and the Wakanda Dream Lab. She is a visual artist, author, and cultural strategist, originally from Trinidad and Tobago. She is the co-author of Contending for Dreamspace and co-editor of Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Re-Imaging Gender in Wakanda.

adrienne maree brown is the author of Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, and We Will Not Cancel Us; she is the co-editor of Octavia's Brood, a collection of speculative stories written by community organizers, activists, and cultural workers, inspired by the work of Octavia Butler.

Toshi Reagon is a composer and musician, who with her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, co-wrote the opera Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower. Toshi facilitated the song circle at the Emergent Strategy immersion described by Aisha in this episode.

Bernice Johnson Reagon is a scholar, singer/songleader, and activist. She was one of the original Freedom Singers who traveled around the South with SNCC, registering Black voters during the Civil Rights Movement. She founded Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973.

Often referred to as the “grand dame of science fiction,” Octavia E. Butler is the author of Parable of the Sower, Kindred, and Wild Seed.

In this episode and in her own work, Aisha makes reference to the concept of Black utopias and the Afro-futurist movement. These are large topics with long histories worthy of deep inquiry. In my own research, I was excited to find this new book by Jayna Brown and the subsequent article from Yes magazine that may be a good starting point for a deeper dive into these topics. - EA

ABSTRACT: In Black Utopias Jayna Brown takes up the concept of utopia as a way of exploring alternative states of being, doing, and imagining in Black culture. Musical, literary, and mystic practices become utopian enclaves in which Black people engage in modes of creative worldmaking. Brown explores the lives and work of Black women mystics Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, musicians Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and the work of speculative fiction writers Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler as they decenter and destabilize the human, radically refusing liberal humanist ideas of subjectivity and species. Brown demonstrates that engaging in utopian practices Black subjects imagine and manifest new genres of existence and forms of collectivity. For Brown, utopia consists of those moments in the here and now when those excluded from the category human jump into other onto-epistemological realms. Black people—untethered from the hope of rights, recognition, or redress—celebrate themselves as elements in a cosmic effluvium.

You can read the introduction to this book here.  

Brown, J. (2021). Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. Durham; London: Duke University Press.

Quoting scholar Mark Dery's 1993 essay "Black to the Future," Jonita Davis offers the following definition of Afro-futurism: “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.”

Davis continues, "This subgenre of science fiction is one where Black artists can tell stories of their limited past, intertwined their complex present to see a different future. That future is often more hopeful or at least one wherein we exist as more than junkies, thugs, or the help. Thus, it’s no coincidence that work labeled 'Afrofuturist' includes themes of utopianism and liberation in their depictions of the future. As such, it transcends categories, from literature to music to film and visual arts."

Check out the full article for additional context.