Hello and welcome to the second session of Thinking Fictions, Topias and Inventions. Ben Woodard is with me here. Today we're going to discuss a panel discussion with Black Quantum Futurism, with Titich Womack and Machida Phillips who will be joining us very soon. The readings that we were discussing were the two Black Quantum Futurism, some essays from that texts, as well as the Afrofutur introduction that Yutis Rommack read, and Rashida has her own novel recurrence plot that I also added to the sections, as well as some other texts.
Before, I guess, getting to the... Before actually getting into the text, I want to just discuss some general logistics. So for this week, there's an application that I would like to try out. I'm going to give the link here. It's called video annotation. Don't worry about the... Hold on one second. That's not going to be... . .
. . . . But this... If everybody can be a part of... join this. I've got to figure out how we can, if I can add multiple numbers, common spaces. Once everybody adds it, I have to know your username, or it should just, your name, I should just be able to see that you logged in. But here I just want to output up, although we do have the archive, and I'll explain how you can watch the videos from the archive.
But here we can watch the videos and we can annotate the videos. So if anybody wants to add notes, it would be a good experiment. I want to try to use this software for the class. It's free. You can log in with the Gmail account. And then if you find that you want to annotate it by adding a note at a section of the video or something, then you can. If you don't, then I will also be sending out the instructions for the archive. But as soon as everybody can sign up for this, then I can have a group created with the videos and then I can just give everybody access to them.
That's just one small thing for logistics. Did anybody get through the readings? Did you guys get through the readings? At least some of the readings out of that PDF that I sent. Yeah. What does anybody have any general thought-half? OK, good. I always will give a little bit more than needed, but I always suggest what are the main ones to read. Because I'm not sure, like, with fiction, I'm not sure, like, people are going to get more out of certain things than I am. But do we have any general, does anybody else,
do we have any general thoughts about some of the things we're reading? Does anybody want to say anything about them or do they seem like a newer type of approach to speculative fiction or Afrofuturism? We need to review what Afrofuturism is. I just yeah but you're looking at on the there ok won't be afraid to on your
on screen yeah I'll unmute I'm I've heard heard of a afrofuturism before and I think names that you've got were helpful for me. Some maybe like references, yeah, some of that stuff was pretty helpful. And it was helpful to hear Rashida and or see, I guess, and Womack and what they had to say or like how they define Afrofuturism. Because usually, well for me being at art school, like usually Sun Ra comes up and then we spend like half an hour talking about him. We don't have time for anything else. So it's cool to have, like, more
specific links and names and stuff. So that was good for me in that way. Okay. Yeah, and Sun Ra of course comes up in the Black Horn on Futurism as well. There's, there's, what was his name? There is somebody in the group that is already writing on music. I just left out the music stuff for now. Yeah, and of course there's like a, there becomes like a very, what I know from the, from at least from Rashida's stuff, it's, there's a very vague overarching relationship
in what after-futurism might be when it comes to the music, the musicals when you have the punk genre, and some sort of like there's... So there's this scholar, Antonio Montiero, from Philadelphia, who has quite interesting thoughts on this in general, but mostly it's just to say that some guys much better than Parliament's point. But, yeah, I find that, like this sort of like quantum, the engagement of quantum theory inside of here is, I think, very new and interesting, which is why I wanted to bring it to the fore.
Does anybody get to watch the mundane or read the mundane Afrofuture manifesto? It was in the links. That's like another more recent sort of take on Afrofuturism, which is like more of a realist genre, not about space, not about the sun. So very, very distant from the sun law take. So I recommend checking that manifesto out, although it would be slightly different than the people that we talked to today. Where was that? There was a link to it?
Yeah, there should have been a link to the mundane manifesto, probably YouTube, in the references at the end of the PDF. Oh, okay, yeah, thanks. No, I haven't looked at it, but it sounds interesting. Yeah, there's an Artbound episode on YouTube. It's about an hour long where she reads it. And then they kind of discuss it. And she discusses it with other people and other after-future writers in California. And then there's the Manifesto, which is the Rizzo Manifesto, which has been just posted. It's kind of... It's pretty interesting. It's like to... I mean, It definitely holds on to the fact that Afrofuturism is more of a realist genre.
Even, I think, the most sci-fi aspects of it that comes out. But this is found to be quite interesting to take down the whole thing. Yeah, we did not It starts with, we did not originate in the cosmos The connection between Middle Passage and space travel Is tenuous at best Out of 534 space travelers 14 have been black An all black crew is unlikely Magic interstellar travel A wondrous communication grid Can lead to an illusion of outer space And cyberspace as egalitarian So it seems to be Very anti-utopian.
It's not technically dystopian, but it's... Aha, Rashida. Hi, Rashida. Hey, what's up? Give me one second, okay? I'm just trying to get set up. Alright, no problem. I'm on Atisha as well, so got a minute. Alright, cool. I recommend checking out that. It will be something that I will probably ask them to see what they think about it as
well. So I don't know, now because she's here, we wait for her to get ready. We should maybe take five minutes just to break so we don't end up in a halfway conversation. Well unless she is ready for us.
So yes, we'll be good to share notes. You can also use that video annotation software that I put if the notes correlate with things that we talked about as well. Also a way of doing the note sharing. Okay, so... Alright, so Tim signed up. Let me just see if...
How this works. Anyways, I'm interested. Hey. Hi, how are you? Good. All right, so Itisha, Itasha's in like Liverpool, so she wanted the link. I gave her the link. We'll see if she gets it. But we're going to go and we'll start with, we can start right in with you, actually. So I just like to, I'll just do a brief introduction, Rashida, of you, and then you can speak for just a little bit, and then we can just have like a discussion. Mostly about your project with Afrofuture Affair and Black Horn Futurism and how this will...
The things that I'm interested in is how it leads into practical application for you, maybe talk a little bit about the community project, things like this. But just a brief introduction. Here we have Rashida Phillips. She's a graduate of Temple University, School of Law. She holds many different hats. She's a proud mother. She works in housing laws, right? I believe, right? Legal for Housing. Yep. She's a science fiction writer. She is an organizer of Metropolarity. She's an organizer of After Future Affair.
She's been traveling a lot, giving a lot of talks recently, if anybody's following her. In recent collaboration with the After Future Affair, I believe she just got a community grant for one year to hold community futurisms, in which she'll be a Black Quantum Futurism African-Futurist at a local community engagement space in Philadelphia. So congratulations, by the way, on that grant. Thank you. I've seen Rashida Clark. She's an amazing person. I'm really happy for her to be here and to talk about her projects. So with that, just would like to pass it to her to let her speak just for a little bit about her work.
Sure. So hi, everybody. Thanks so much for having me. I'm not going to give a super formal presentation today, as Tony said, but just will talk a little bit about my work and some of the, I guess, theories I'm trying to ground it in. I started off, so as was said, I'm an attorney by day. I work at an organization called Community Legal Services. I am the managing attorney now, just recently became that, but I practice housing law. We represent low-income Philadelphians who are losing their homes due to eviction or other issues like maintenance and habitability and things like that, and we represent those people. And I've been working there since 2008, and prior to doing that, you know, I've always been a science
fiction writer. I've always loved sci-fi since I was a really young child and just found it to be a very imaginative place that could be used for testing out ideas and going other places, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, going through college, I started to notice as I took more classes, critical African-American studies classes and race classes and things like that, I became ever more aware that science fiction did not reflect me, or at least traditional mainstream science fiction didn't reflect me as a black woman. It didn't reflect the community that I was surrounding myself with and serving my serving. And so I wanted to, I rejected it for a while and
just stopped writing science fiction and stopped reading it. But then I found Octavia Butler, a friend when I was in law school, gave me a copy of Kindred. And, you know, that just really set me down another path around rethinking what science fiction could be used for, what my place and role as a black woman is in science fiction. And I've really just discovered this really amazing, rich world of black science fiction that has always been here. I would soon find out, but that has been, for various reasons, kept under, you know, I don't have to really go into the background of why we are not represented in mainstream science fiction and why we have to go and then do our own and make our own communities and make our own worlds.
Because, again, science fiction and speculative fiction is not just fiction. It is very much a tool. It is very much a language. It's culture. There's lots of things about it that can be used to organize and to think about our world and break it down in various ways. So anyway, after coming across Kindred, I started writing science fiction again. I was really inspired to start writing my own. And I've always been really deeply interested in time travel and time and philosophy of time. And so, you know, in my sort of spare time, I was learning about that and then started learning about quantum physics and like the sort of parallels between that because I was really thinking about time, how we could break it down, how we could really time travel, how we could other traditions of thought.
that engage time in a different way than sort of the linear time model which says that traveling backwards or forwards or traveling backwards in time at least creates a paradox and that it's you know impossible to travel forward into the future because it's not yet there and so i was really interested you know once i really learned the philosophy around time and the science around time and the background and the history of of that um i started looking to other traditions of time and other traditions of space and other traditions of how we not just time itself as this again as this separate physical entity but how we experience time psychologically and bodily and how it's really entrenched in our every everyday moment to moment sort of way of living in the
world and so I was interested in breaking that down and thinking about that and thinking about other ways of engaging with that, which, you know, that simultaneously was happening while I was starting to become more engaged with the Afrofuturism Black science fiction community. So all of those things sort of just paralleled and overlapped. And, you know, I've always been a lawyer all this time. And so all of these things just started crisscrossing and could not help but to overlap. And that led me to creating the Afrofuturist Affair. And so at the same time, I was writing my science fiction and started writing time travel science fiction and then started going, you know, wanting support around what I was writing in my own physical community,
because we have in Philadelphia, at least a very rich spoken word community. And I was, you know, I had a lot of friends in that community. And I was like, oh, this is such a supportive community for this type of creative output. And I wanted something similar for science fiction. And so I would go to sci-fi conventions and just literally be the only black person or only black woman there. And the hostility that I experienced there, I just didn't want to experience it again. And so I said, I'll create my own community. And so that's what led me to, excuse me one second. That's what led me to create the Afrofuturist Affair.
So that was back in 2011. It really was to start off, it started off as like just a one-off sort of event. I was going to have a charity and costume ball around the theme of Afrofuturism to get my friends who were creating Afrofuturistic work. And not calling it that because at that point it wasn't really a household term. like it's starting to become. It was really very underground. Like the first time I had heard the term actually was in 2011. And I wouldn't say actually it was underground. I would say it's more, it was more in academic circles. Like the term itself was coined by a white critic, critical writer named Mark Derry, who, you know, he's in academia and was in a circle of folks who were thinking about these things. Other black people who actually were thinking about it before
he coined the term, but he went and coined the term, whatever. But anyway, so not a lot of people were using that word, but when I first heard the term and before I even knew Mark Derry had coined it, it was very intuitive to me. And so I started the Afro Futures Affair really as a platform to share my own work and to feel comfortable sharing my own work around other like-minded people. And so it started off as one event, but then I started a blog around the event to promote the people who were going to be a part of it because it was a charity ball and I couldn't really afford to pay people, but I wanted to promote the concept of it. And so I started a Tumblr blog and the Tumblr blog got like popular for some reason. I think it was just the right time and place,
you know, really. And people thinking about these things and wanting community around it and wanting a place where, you know, visually things were, you know, happening that could connect you to the ideas and things like that. So I started posting more and more on the blog. And then the blog is honestly what led the Afrofuturist affair to become as big as it is now to where it's sort of an international brand, I guess. And we get called up to do all sorts of things regarding Afrofuturism. So I've been doing that for about five years, since 2011. But what led me to create the concept of black quantum futurism was wanting to push past afrofuturism really wanting to see what the next step was what what its next evolution was as a um as a practical tool not
just as a aesthetic or as a even as a culture or whatever as a community which is all fine and i love all of those things about afrofuturism but um i was really interested in deepening the sort of philosophy and ideas around it and the way i engage with afrofuturism as i said earlier is through the mechanism of time. And so, again, all of these things happening simultaneously around me exploring these ideas of other traditions of time, I then applied that to Afrofuturism to say, you know, Afrofuturism just totally engages with a different notion of time than the Western linear science fiction model or these other models of time. And so I really wanted to push past that idea and add quantum physics to it because I found a lot of parallels between these traditions of time that I was finding
in these indigenous African cultures and quantum physics. And so that's – and so I was – and what inspired me to write – so Black Quantum Futurism started off as an essay, and I was inspired to write that essay by actually an H.G. Wells essay speech that he gave called Something Future Something. And I was like, oh, shit, this is like a manifesto. I'm going to model this. He was looking into what's coming for the future. How do we engage with this notion of futurism? It's like this really banging essay. And so I need to write something similar around these ideas of quantum physics. Sorry, seven areas to predict the future?
You know, that might be the name of it. He has a couple of essays. There's like seven. Yeah, I'll look and I'll see if I can find it in my notebook. Okay. But yeah, so that's what inspired me to start thinking about how do I fuse these things I'm finding indigenous Africans, traditions of space time, which are super interesting with quantum physics, with Afrofuturism. and that's what black monofuturism essentially was, really just challenging this linear tradition, really embedding it. And also, like, this is the next wave. Like, quantum physics is the thing.
Like, this is what our world is moving into, you know. But it's very, I still think, inaccessible. I think it's still, you know, I read every day. I'm on the science blogs and news sites like phys.org. every single day there's a new story about some experiment they're doing in quantum physics like this is really the next wave of science and it's it's not the next wave I mean it's been the wave since 1926 or whatever but um you know in terms of how it's starting to embed itself in our world and in our everyday reality um I find a lot of things that are potent there um so that's what black quantum futurism was and then um I connected my partner more mother goddess um more mother who's a musician and artist and was helping me with a lot of the Afrofuturist affair stuff,
we started writing and creating zines together around these same topics. And, you know, there was just a natural resonance there. And she was also creating soundtracks for my stories, for my book. And so we just connected around these ideas and said, you know, we need to take it a step further. Like, there's not just one entry point for black quantum futurism. There's, you know, it has to work on many different levels for it to really take over as in terms of thinking about embedding that philosophical thought in our actions, you know, and then turning it into action and turning it into a lens for how we view the world. It needs to be presented in multiple forms. And so we have the music component to it that overlaps with our critical writing around futurism and time.
And we have visual components to it. And then we have our social practice aspect of it, which is the project that we are going to be doing in North Philadelphia. So I'll just talk briefly about that, and then I'll shut up. So we are going to be doing a socially engaged art project or social practice project, whatever you want to call it, around eminent domain and community memory. So in Philadelphia, right down the street from my house, they're doing eminent domain on 1,300 properties where the government, through the local housing authority, is empowering them to do this. And in doing so, they are moving 500 families, displacing 500, over 500 families, it's about 600 families the way it shakes out, to different parts of the city with the promise that they're going to redevelop this area and then eventually bring some of these people back.
But we know, you know, just my experience as a housing attorney and just the world and history has shown us that people do not come back, poor people, especially in the people and 90 percent of the people being affected by this are poor black people. And so our project is going to document this redevelopment process. myself as an attorney is going to plug into my work, just making sure that people are able to return if they were promised that. And also doing art and just really engaging with the community around the idea of Afrofuturism, the idea of preserving communal memory, the idea of creating future memory. And we're going to be doing that through workshops and oral history interviews and
various other things and we have a space that we're going to be doing out of that is located directly in front of the place where all of this is happening. So yeah, that's about it. Okay, thank you. I have a few questions, just a few follow-up questions, things that I thought of before you had joined us. But just a, I mean, the one, So the one you kind of answered, I was interested in your employment as temporality or time as sort of like an operator inside of your Black Quantum Futurism as a practice.
So the different practices have been these different engagements, right? So you've done different things like zines mixed with music, mixed with books, so they all have different... So in a sense, you're already mixing a bunch of different timelines and temporalities and things all at once into one piece, which I found was a very interesting way of promoting your work and to use your work. But the one thing I was interested in asking, and I guess this leads up to what you just finished with in your Community Futurisms project or the grant that you just received. Are you targeting, in a sense, are you targeting mostly youth projects
or is this going to be all different types of projects? And what are the practical elements that come from the work that you've done the past two years? What are some of the practical projects that you will do? Just maybe a little brief. Yeah, the project that will come out of Community Futurisms is not targeting any specific age. It's really targeting the community, and the community is not made up of just you. We have different things for everybody. That's not a tradition that we're just starting. the Afrofuturist Affair, in addition to doing events, we have developed a series of workshops that we present very widely to different groups of people.
So we've presented at high schools, we've presented at drug recovery centers, shelters, all sorts of things. And we've crafted the workshops to fit the audience specifically. And really, actually, I would say it doesn't even take that much crafting. I think a lot of the information we build it specifically to reach different levels of everything, you know, levels of literacy, levels of understanding. You know, because one thing I was I found in Afrofuturism that I still find is that it is it is still majorly inaccessible to the people whose ideas who who the who would benefit most from the ideas. When we're thinking about futurism, we're thinking about the future, we're thinking about people who normally don't have access to the future or to any decision-making power over what's to come in the future.
We're talking about poor people. We're talking about people who are oppressed. And, I mean, that's relative, definitely. But there's people who we can say, you know, have a little bit more – I hate this word privilege because it's overused a lot, but have more privilege. And I myself am one of those people. I have privilege. I have, you know, I have a full time job. I have a, you know, stable, stable life. I have a home. I have these things. And I still find Afrofuturism to be very empowering. But again, I find it to be inaccessible in that a lot of it lives online. A lot of it is still, you know, people who go to college or have access to information in these different ways. And not the people that I see coming into my office every day. You know, not the people who are losing their homes who can benefit from thinking about the future in the long term and thinking about expansive notions of the future or people whose whose temporalities have been, you know, oppressed.
And this, I guess, the best way to put it or have been limited, you know, and one thing that I talk about in my essays is that poor people live in a very narrow temporal band. their sense of presentism is different than other people who don't have to think about you know the next day or what's going to happen in the next day in the same way that a person who's about to lose their home or their children or you know their job has to think about time so I'm really interested in that and that's because that's my community that's the type of people that I'm dealing with and that I want to deal with these are people that I want to be part of my community. And so Afrofuturism and Black Pantam Futurism is aimed at that. And that's young, that's old, that's everybody is included in that vision of the community future because
these are the people who are being impacted by it. So, yeah. And then I can't remember, what was your second question? Well, no, I can lead into it, I guess, because in the text that I sent out to them, you mentioned that CP Time, right? The short, or the presentism. Also, I mean, I guess the privilege word, the academic word is now precarity. This is like the buzzword in the academic fields, precarity. To be less... But you have a... You actually do an interesting call at the end of it and you say, how can these different times be practiced?
You say, I don't mean we're going to go back and go back to the time of the ancestors, but how can we employ and instill these different times, including presentism, right? So sort of the, like, is this sort of like a, because from one perspective, it's an empowering time, Martin Luther King talks about this sort of temporality as well, and I mean there's an entire history of a bunch of people who talk about precarity as a positive until recently until neoliberalism or whatever, but so like the point of reenacting them or calling them
is the practical elements of employing them or how does being in the present or exploring presentism used or entangled within accelerated culture today or something where they might be left behind. or you might be left behind. Like what I think you're saying is that, I did hear you talk one time in Philadelphia recently, and when you were talking about this, it's like there, you know, with presentism, your ability to sort of see the long-distance future is not within your realm practically
because you're worried about tomorrow, which is what you just said. You're worried about your housing, your practical realm, things that people with privilege don't have to deal with. And a lot of times it seems to be like an oppressive time and a sort of negative time. So, but then in indigenous African cultures, when you're researching them, this sort of time is the time of the Hammonds diagram? Or the Hammonds diagram? Which book are you talking about? I'm trying to think. I'm screwing up the first and the second one, I think.
but there's a second, when you're talking about the sort of, you can find the Sepiore presentism in the ancient temporalities as well, right? but it seems to now to be very impressive within accelerating culture. So how do you, like, what are the, I don't know, what are the political moves of this sort of temporality? Is it to acknowledge? All right, sorry, go ahead. I think that's good enough for a question. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think what you're saying is, And what I was saying is that, yes, accelerated culture is moving ahead of these people.
And, you know, I think that's present or you see that in just everyday decision making, you know. And, you know, you have to recall that I'm like sort of speaking from this very, this perspective where I'm involved in this world every day, like the political legal world where I see like the city creates this 40 year plan, you know, for the next 40 years of the city. that really has no discussion whatsoever about the critical things happening in Philadelphia around poor people. Like we're the first, we're the largest poorest city in the country, major city in the country. You know, housing is abysmal here, you know, affordable housing and lots of other places. And so, you know, just that very simple thing of like the city is planning
long term for other people's futures and other people are not included in that decision making process and this the eminent domain process you know people who have lived in a community for 40 50 60 years have bought their purchased their homes you know and you come in 90 days and tell them you now have to leave you're now being uprooted from your community that you've been in all your life, neighbors that you've been next door to. And so how political and government time operates to the negative, to the detriment of poor people and people of color. That's basically what I'm talking about. In terms of tools, we're developing those tools.
And like I said, the tools operate from different mediums. like you brought up, you know, music is a tool, you know, so healing music, thinking about, like, my partner, more mother, does a sort of, like, timescape healing workshop, and she does, like, sound walks to, like, recover memories of, and sounds, and things of a particular space and time. In my book, I have a couple different tools that I use in workshops to think about, or to recenter this indigenous way of looking at events. So as I talked about, and as you just alluded to, CP time retains lots of elements of that ancient indigenous way of experiencing time, which is that
you, you know, when you arrive, that's when an event starts. And that's, that's often what we call CP time, like you're late, but being late in, in, in a, there's no concept of that. Like, there's no lateness because things don't start until all of the people arrive. Like that's when things started or it's not by the, you know, it's, it's these natural ways of viewing time, which is like by the setting of the sun, which is not just an exclusively, um, African indigenous tradition, of course, like it's a native tradition. It's a, um, even pre, um, you know, modernism European traditions of, of time look at natural time, of course, like, um, you know, But still, there's a difference. And some of that is environmental differences.
So I talk about briefly in one of my essays, I talk about how up until about 1600 or 1500 or so, time in European traditions was viewed as river. It was like flowing time. But in ancient African traditions, time is like walking. It's like pacing. And you can see this by the words that are used to represent time. So, you know, there's differences and there's similarities. And I think, like I said, no, we cannot just return back to that. It's, you know, for various reasons, but I think it can be reconciled. I think we don't have to just accept that this is the way things are, this is how the world moves through time, and say that's it. I very much know that people have different temporal experiences every single,
every moment. we're all having a different temporal experience as we speak, but we're all using the standard clock to bring ourselves together as a community. And so, like, can we create new standard clocks for each other? Can we create new standard clocks within our communities that's not the sort of standard mechanical or digital clock time that is oppressive for some of us, that doesn't work for a lot of us? You know, so those are the things that I'm thinking about. And I don't have all the answers or all the tools yet, but I do have some of them and some of them we know to work just by the feedback that we get from communities that we go into and do these workshops in. So like we were in Rhode Island the other week, for example, doing a DIY timescapes workshop and, you know, just the feedback and the things that people say.
And like we build, we do things like create quantum event maps, you know, based on these traditions of space time and quantum physics. and, you know, the things that people create and pull out of it, you know, I think it is effective. Some of these tools can be effective. And then just encouraging people to create their own tools. Like, you know, I can't tell you what is best for you. I can only tell you what works for me and hope that, you know, maybe it can work for you too. But we also very much encourage people to create their own temporal tools and to share with us what those are because, yeah, you know, we see it as a community thing. I don't know if that answers your question No it does it gets into a lot of things that I wanted to
that I'm just interested in bringing out in your work that maybe some people might not be familiar with things I'm very I respect a lot the practical elements that you take and you know a lot of and a lot of like the academic world or like the outside world the outside maybe the you know takes take there's not a lot of there's it's mostly stuck in theory so I like the pragmatic applications they're they you sort of they can start taking and even like the top of the I mean well Sun Ra definitely was very practical on me like in in what he was doing at the
time he had very much a practice but like maybe Delaney is like high theory aspects of Afrofuturism great author but like I the practical like he's he doesn't have like a practice other than his writing so I like that something exists outside of the world of the actual writing which I don't know not to say that one's better than the other I just this is one thing that really stuck out in the BQF mode that I found to be very, very interesting with the retrocurrents and the intimate histories. I like that you're inventing or just like you're starting to develop and really put out there
like a taxonomy or a vocabulary and of these modes to work with. I like the workshop elements that you're doing. So these are just the things I wanted to sort of get out quickly. And some of that stuff, it comes out of, so it started even prior to creating Black Quantum Futurism with my first book, Recurrence Plot. I have a lot of time travel techniques in there that I then developed, you know, it developed eventually into Black Quantum Futurism. So that predates it. But yeah, I've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. and like it's just really interesting to me. It's an interesting exercise mentally to sort of like create these things, but it's thought and it's definitely the practice too.
You know, so yes, I think oppressed people, they deserve it. Like they deserve something that's accessible theory, grounded in real theory and practice as well, you know, And so the audience for this stuff is definitely everybody and anybody, but it's definitely a specific audience in mind when writing these things, and it's an audience that does not normally have access to these ideas and practices for various reasons. Yeah, I think that's really what sets you apart as well from, like, most of the other groups and things, is like this practice element. So it's like something I really want to highlight as a form of like just massive respect
for what you're doing. And academia stuff, I mean, I have two degrees, two and a half degrees basically. And it's inaccessible to me even. Like a lot of the words that I hear, you know, maybe because I've been out of college for 10 years, but I'm like, I'm a practicing attorney. I should understand some of this stuff, but I actually don't. So, you know, it also drives my experience and makes me think about the various levels of accessibility and privilege. And it's a gray area. It's not just a one or the other. You know, even people with privilege lack access in some ways. And, like, another thing that, you know, like I lacked access to a supportive community when I was going to these, like, comic cons and things like that. And so access and privilege and benefit looks really different for people.
You know, it's all subjective experience. And so, yeah, I think about that stuff, too. Like, you can have a college degree and still find a lot of academic speak to be very inaccessible to you. All right, so this is probably, yeah, this is a question that I think needs, well, I would like to know your opinion on this. but like, so I mean, obviously Afrofuturism, Black Quantum Futurism is like an Afro-Discoric movement, right? So like, how do you engage with other cultures and with other races,
other people, and what are the ways in which you feel that what you're bringing can be not used in a way? I'm not saying that as an appropriation. I don't want to do an appropriate... So there's always a problem of white cultural, like Mark Derry or whatever, appropriating a conceptual reference from your work. So what are the ways in which there's a positive interaction or entanglement between Afrofuturism and other cultures? Because I know you work with all different types of people,
and a lot of people have been very supportive of your work. I don't know, Afrofutur, was Afrofutur now like Afro-diaspora? Like, event or no? Yes, but it was, so Afrofuturism now, which was a festival that happened in Rotterdam, Netherlands that I co-curated with an organization out there. The organization is white. Yeah, so we, yeah, yeah. We engage with other cultures, but it's not an intentional thing. It's just a result of being in a world with other people. I can't control who buys our books and I can't control who finds the material and finds it useful for them. I'm never going to be like,
oh, I'm only... To be honest, I'm not creating this for white people. It's created for a specific... Like I said, it's created for oppressed black people, basically. It is what it is. It's very much intentionally created for a specific community of people that, like I said, I'm in community with and that I come from and that my experiences have led to this creation of work and my experiences as, again, a community that I serve. That said, you know, I work with 49 other white people in my job. Like, they're the most awesome people I've ever, you know, some of the most awesome people I've ever met, and I greatly respect them. Some of the traditions that I'm drawing on are from white people. Like one of
my favorite philosophers is Henry Bergson. He's a fucking amazing, you know, and yeah, so I, but to be honest, I struggle with that. Like I struggle with white people having access to this work and appropriating it, black people having access to this work and appropriating it who are to have different privileges than I do. You know, I've run into quite a few incidents of people taking this work and reconfiguring it and trying to represent it differently and knowing that these, knowing I know these people and have that, they have bought my books, you know, just these sorts of things happen. So it's not a, it's not, it's not something that I can control and I try not to worry about it so much because what can I do? But keep creating more work and try,
I don't ever want to be at the point where my main concern or priority is branding and making sure that I maintain a brand and maintain this ownership or whatever over the work. I can only let it speak for itself and do what it's going to do out in the world. And I'm glad that it's having an impact. And I have to work with white people in other cultures because they have the access to things I need. Like, you know, I was recently in this Keywords for Radicals book that was published and I wrote the keyword for the word future. You know, the editing team, I haven't met them in person, but they're all white presenting at least. Like I would have not had this opportunity otherwise. Like, you know, I'm not going to turn it down because it's white people running it.
But, you know, I do. I'm very intentional in the writing itself that this is for this is a specific thing. I'm not shying away from the fact that I'm talking about black people. I'm talking about black time. I'm talking about slavery. I'm talking about black communities. I'm talking about poor, oppressed black people. Like, that's what it is. You know, you do what you want with that. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know if that answers the question. Like, I'm not closed off to working with other cultures, very obviously. But I do try my best to, when I'm creating these books or creating things, to work with black people who have not had opportunities. So, like, black women graphic designers. I'm really, really big on that. Like, if I'm going to work with somebody and it's not always possible like you know I the person who did the layout for
both the black quantum futurism books is a white man from from Europe um from from London um because I could not find anybody else to help me and I I did the layout for my uh first book recurrence plot and I cried like it took me like two months to do it because it was really hard um so you know I'm not you know but I do make very conscious efforts when I'm collaborating with people to collaborate with people who I know have not had the opportunities or don't get, you know, these opportunities. And to make it authentic through and through. Like, if I'm talking about Black people, I'm talking about Black temporality, I'm talking about Black communities, I want a Black person to design my cover. Like, it doesn't make sense for me to not have a Black person design my cover if that's what I'm talking about and that's what I am and that's who I am.
And that's, you know, the community that I'm trying to seek our collective liberation for. Like, it doesn't make sense for me to have a white man or white woman create this imagery that is so intense and so tied into the concept. Like, they're not going to understand what I'm doing. But that doesn't mean that they can't read it and try to empathize or whatever or find elements of it that makes sense to them. Because, like I said, some of these traditions overlap very much. And like I said, people like Henry Bergson, who was a white French philosopher in the early 1900s, like, you know, his thinking around this stuff or David Bohm, for example, his thinking around quantum physics and what that means psychologically and philosophically and metaphysically, I find to be very powerful.
and I definitely adopt some of those traditions in thinking about my work. So yeah, so if that answers your question, I'm not closed off to it, but my work is made for a very specific audience. I don't shy away from that. I don't shy away from working with people within my culture and within my community. Okay. Yeah, thank you. I guess I'll just have one question left and I want to open up to everybody else because there's a lot of other people here. but so the kind of this kind of like seminar workshop that we've been organizing is trying to we're looking at like we've been doing a project this is like a third installment of it but we're looking at like the agency of fiction or
the like last week we talked about fiction as like an operator on the future so like the ways in which fiction and the ways in which fiction can actually extend itself into reality and become reality in these sorts of like mythological or occult way. And I wanted to know like, you know, from a personal stance, you know, like how you found employing fiction to be, like how have you employed fiction in the sense of possible worlds or future or utopia or dystopia or any of these sorts of relations are what we're looking at.
So, I mean, from the readings, I can definitely understand it. And you're talking very historically about a lot of these temporalities. But how does specifically, because we haven't talked a lot about your own fictional work like in recurrence plots and stuff. So, like, how does the fictional aspects play into your practical elements? Is it, like, extension of memory or extension of, like, alternative histories? Or is it, like, propagation of the future? Or is it all these things? Yeah. To me, it's more extension of memory and imagination.
I think about you know as a child and I've been reading sci-fi since I was four or five how reality and fiction weren't two different things like they intruded into each other very regularly until I grew up and turned what eight or nine and then learned that there was this you know was taught that there was this very clear division between what's fiction and reality and so I just when I think about that I hearken back to that mindset of you know there is a very thin, if not even non-existent line between fiction and reality and what becomes reality out of what is imagined and what is fictional. And so, you know, or, you know, there's a million examples in science fiction of things that were imagined and science fictional that then became
reality or, you know, vice versa, or things that people have dreamed up, you know, like the structure of DNA came to him in the dream, you know, or things that Einstein dreamed that then became reality. Like, it's just, it's as simple as that. I don't take it beyond that. I just know that the division is one that is arbitrary. And I, for my own personal experiences, is speaking things into reality has been a very, very powerful. I hate that word powerful. It has been just a real thing. Like, you know, I was a teen mother. I had my kid at 14. And, you know, things that I spoke into reality about time,
about when things were going to happen, you know, once I gained consciousness around my ability to do that, you know, things happen, you know, things happen for me. And so that informs my notion of what's fictional and what's not fictional. What also informs my notion is just the scientific institution itself. You know, black people were experimented on for years. The fucking whole medical institution was established on experimentation on black bodies. And what is not science fictional about that? What doesn't continue to be science fictional about that? You know, about the ways that we're treated in these systems. you know, experimented on. So I talk about that a lot in Recurrence Plot. Like that's debate. That's really the major basis of the book is experimentation on black bodies and what happens.
But as well as there's some other things in there about suicide and about other just depression and PTSD and a lot. I see PTSD as time travel. I see that, you know, people get pulled back literally into these other temporalities or these other times or how memory can pull you back into a very bad or good place. So that's what I talk about in the book. So that's how I see it in terms of the division between science fiction and reality. It's arbitrary. I have to participate in that because I have to live in the real world and I have to be in community with other people. So I have to participate in this version of reality. But I look at, you know, again, that's the whole notion behind looking at different temporalities or alternative temporalities.
That is another entry point for, like, erasing that line, I guess, between fiction and reality. Because when you're engaging in different temporalities, it's like time travel in a sense, at least for me. So, yeah, that's where I see that division or lack thereof. It's a necessary one for participating in reality. Like I have to go to work every day at nine in order to have a job, in order to take care of my kid. Like that's that's reality. But after that 5 p.m. time ends, you know, the world is essentially mine. And, you know, I take full advantage of that in terms of my thought and practice and how I engage with the world. So if that answers the question. Great. I mean, really, I'm going to post in this chat. number four of Metropolarity's
heralds because I find this to be very I mean Metropolarity is a group you haven't really talked about but you're also a founding member of Metropolarity but I find this quote to be like very close to like what we're just discussing although it has the word power so yeah I would like to open it up briefly now to anybody else ask questions. Rashida, we don't want to keep your time too much, so we'll just have everybody ask a few more questions, and then we'll wrap up, if that's OK with you. Sure. So does anybody else in the group have a question for Rashida? If not, I've got hundreds of them.
I mean, I have kind of a, probably maybe a banal one, but what I'm kind of curious about in terms of... Because you mentioned the problem of trying to get these ideas of Afrofuturism or futurism in general to relate to people who are, you know, who have trouble seeing a future or, like, who don't see that kind of future as anything that's possible. And I wonder how that then relates at the same time that in the last couple years in particular, there's been more Afrofuturistic imagery appearing in pop culture so whether it's like the videos of Erykah Badu or whether it's you know just this last week I think or maybe two weeks
now you know the Black Panther is now in the Marvel is now in the Marvel films and so I just wonder how if that kind of use of those ideas if that's necessarily depoliticizing in a way that makes more work for you or how do you deal with that presentation of those ideas, however narrow it is or not? Yeah, that's a good question. It is frustrating for me sometimes. Sometimes it's a good thing, and sometimes I very much encourage that, I guess, because it's like different people are going to enter these things different ways. Like there's a place for everybody. There is a place for it in the mainstream as well.
But it does frustrate some of the, I think, deeper ideals, and it does, as you said, depoliticize it a bit. But, you know, I find that to be inevitable. You know, I just don't know that there's a way to prevent that. We're living in a global economy. We're living in the Internet age. You know, these things are just going to happen. And, you know, in some ways I've contributed to that. You know, definitely my blog, you know, there's a very noticeable – I won't say my blog itself was the catalyst for that, but it was a part of that. It was a part of the emergence of this idea into mainstream sort of consciousness as it's becoming. You know, and now, like, just this morning I see, like, Janelle Monae hashtagging Afrofuturism,
as she has been for a little bit. and she's pretty popular, as it were, in the mainstream. But I've been on Janelle Monae's vibe, calling her, thinking of her as an Afrofuturist even before I had language for it since my space days. So it's definitely very noticeable that it's becoming depoliticized in these ways. But I think, like I said, I think it's inevitable And I think that there's some positives to that. I think more people are going to have access to it. Like that little kid, little black boy, whatever, that's not going to, you know, necessarily go into a bookstore and find the black science fiction section is going to maybe see that Black Panther movie or whatever.
Like, you know, I think it's cool, but it does frustrate some of the efforts of it, yes. Okay. Yeah, so he's doing like a whole new series, right, of Black Panther series. Yeah, I think so. It was written as hard as the rest of the whole comments is. Yeah. You were going to have a follow-up then? Sorry. No, the other thing that I was wondering, which is a totally unrelated question, is have you encountered the work of Karen Barad much? Is that something that you've wanted to address in some way? I don't know that person. I'm sorry. Karen Barad is something you might be really interested in from the gender and material theory.
I mean, her theory of time is very close to you. She deals with quantum entanglements. And she's an interesting... But she's in the academic world. But she's quite interesting. I'll send you some of her work. Yeah, send me some stuff. You'll be interested in her work. So I think a lot of stuff, in a way, in a general way, can work into what you're discussing and stuff. Any other questions from the group? There's no bad questions here. I had a question. I think one of the readings that was provided, you had...
By the way, thanks for coming. Of course. It was very interesting. I took some notes. I think at some point, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there are like four sort of modes of time being presented, one being the present short-term time, so it says which consists of perception of timing or rhythm, you know, short-term intervals. The other one, the second one, is a sense of duration, like a sense of the past and maybe long-term memory. The third one is temporal perspective, so it's a little more philosophical, social, cultural constructions of the world, you know, how it kind of interprets your time experience. And then the fourth one I think you talked about was simultaneity and succession. And I was wondering if you could talk about maybe a little bit of the fourth one.
Is it like a dimension, like more of a dimensional view or experience of time, the simultaneity and succession? Is it more like how maybe Henry Bergson was talking about it? or is there something else altogether? Yeah, I definitely think that's where I was going with that. I don't know that I had an opportunity. It's from your occurrence plot. I think you actually are talking about Bergson's memory at that time. Yeah, sounds like. Right? Yeah, that's what it sounds like, yeah. Yeah, I don't know that I went too much into that, but that concept is not mine. That's definitely a Berkson concept of the simultaneously.
Yes. Cool. But did you have a specific question that you wanted to ask? Well, I think along the lines of, like, the practicality, would you, I guess maybe I'm forming this as I go, but, like, when you're applying it to people who are oppressed and who are stuck in that everyday mode of time where you're worried about the next bill or when people are going to take over your house. Is it when you are trying to, hopefully, I'm also interested in how that applies to communities of different sorts and whatnot. And do you see, I mean, this is maybe one model that I've seen here, but is getting people in touch
of a greater sense of time maybe or a way of seeing past the day-to-day, do you see that as strengthening maybe the fourth element a little more or is it like a combination of all four? Is it like a cognizance of being aware of different modes of time? In one of your stories when you were talking about going to a convention, I think, PTSD machine and all that. And it was cool. It's like you're outlining maybe all four of those through storytelling in a way. So it's not like theoretical, like here are the four modes of time, blah, blah, blah. But you're outlining a story which kind
of weaves through all of those in a way. So maybe my question would be, is a particular strategy to help people who aren't, you know, don't have the time to study theory, you know, who are oppressed day to day. Is it through storytelling perhaps? Or, I mean, I guess, would that be like another, I mean, it's obvious. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. I look at storytelling as one of the ways of doing that. Yeah, I think all of those, all four of those things operate at the same time. Like, I don't think you can isolate one. And yes, I think, yeah, at different times, one thing may become more emergent than the other, but I think all of those things are sort of operating at different times. And I think key is cognizance of that. Like, that's the first
step, I think, you know, just being aware even that people are experiencing time differently than you or that, you know, even our language is so time-based. Like, it's so time-based. Like, we don't even think about it. So I think the cognizance of that is the first step. And, you know, in writing these things, that's part of the tool, like writing the essay itself to like sort of uncover some of that stuff or writing the story for me is a tool. Like, so yes, storytelling, I think, is a hugely important tool in getting at that, those alternative or other subjective temporalities that people are experiencing. Yeah, and I think there's lots of different tools.
Like we could definitely like have a longer conversation about that. Cool. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. And yeah. And also I would say like in my work as a, as an attorney, I try to use that as a tool. Like you know, I try to manipulate the system and manipulate time. Like that's part of the work of, of, of an attorney, like delaying things or like, you know, getting a big thing that we get in court is a continuance. Like if there's a court date, we try to get it pushed back to a different time so that we have more time to prepare and get the client prepared or whatever. So, you know, everything is so time-based, right? So there's like a million ways to engage that and use that and advocate for people's personal temporalities, I guess, if you want to say. Yeah, yeah. Like a quick 10-second follow-up question would be like,
well, earlier you were talking about like you're looking to take things to another level, right, like past Afrofuturism and whatnot. Would one way of maybe taking it to the next level and thinking about the future, would it be anything involving a further intertwined kind of connectedness between your day job and these fictional stories? that you're presenting where it sounds like it's already happening, but with something like that, where the fictional space becomes more of a reality, even more.
Yeah, no, I'm definitely exploring that in many ways. Every day, yeah. I mean, part of the Community Futurism social practice project that we're doing doing is that it's an extension or a way of trying to make these things even more real and embedded in reality. I've started making sculptures of the PTSD machine. I want to actually create that machine. And I've started, I was in an art show recently that was really awesome called Octavia's Attic in San Francisco that had all these different time machines that supposedly came from Octavia Butler's attic. And so I created like a 1.0 version of the PTSD machine with a hood hairdryer.
And I put like a thing. So yes, I'm working on it. And like I said, the different ways that we like use music and use writing and use imagery. Also, if you go on like Vimeo, we have a Black Quantum Futurism Vimeo page that has a couple videos on it. And so I've made some what I call astrolabs, visual astrolab videos that are meant to hypnotize you. So yes, we're working on different ways of making, like you said, the elements of the book, taking it from fiction to reality and getting rid of that line. I guess, can I just ask a quick follow-up to that?
to leading in, because metropolitanity, I know it's definitely an outright metropolitan thing, but I think it gets taken over into the online aspect of Black Quantum Futurism, but, like, metropolitan has, like, a very um, you talk a lot about in the zines and stuff about meme culture and using memes. So I wanted to, like, ask if, like, the meme, in a way, is one of the, is one of, like, how are you, might be, or if you haven't quite yet used the meme in the Afrofuturism, or Afro, or Black, Quantum Futurism, how would that, if that could be one of the practice, practices of getting it sort of like, kind of, as a
way of maybe, like, accessing the virtual, or accessing the future, or creating a future, creating future through meme culture. Yeah, I actually do talk about memes a little bit. So in our non-locality, so we have a series of zines called, Kamei and I call it non-locality. In the second zine, I talk about memes, but I talk about it as language. Like I don't talk about it in the way of like the internet meme or the, even I think I talk about a little bit differently than what metropolarity is talking about even though it's kind of aligns itself in various ways but I talk about language as like the first meme as a reproduction of concepts and ideas and metaphors particularly and so yeah so I think
about language as being viral and what that what that means and how we can create new language that becomes memes that then builds the future. Because I think about, you just got to read the essay. I can send you a copy of the zine. But essentially what I'm saying is that metaphors are reality. Like when we're talking about metaphors and just the nature of metaphors themselves, they become memes and they spread out and they become solidified into reality. And so I think a meme or memes or thinking about memes in that way is a powerful or another alternative way of thinking about how we build the world through language. So, yeah, that's how I think about memes in Afrofuturism and Black Quantum Futurism,
if that makes sense. Okay. Yeah, because I kind of see it as also a similar operator as, like, this weird internet. In the internet world, it's sort of like a mythological agency. it sort of like propagates a future or propagates a future in the now or in the present yeah definitely alternative similar to a brand yeah are there any last questions before I let her go because she's been here for over an hour so I want to make sure I don't take up too much of her time cool well feel free like if you guys have other questions that come up, feel free to email me. I'll try to get back to you as soon as possible.
Yeah, and I want to, I mean, I only shared some of the essays, like just the stuff that Rashida did, and Itachi's going to join us, I think, next week. She couldn't make it, but her stuff. But, I mean, the newest book, which is FaceTime Collapse, is not e-book format, but it will be soon, I'm sure. But you can get all of her books. She has a store in V. You can get her books also packaged with the videos and the zines. You can buy the zines that have the music and videos. And her partner, Kamei or More Mother, is doing also things on her side. So those two people I kind of wanted to promote and support the group.
Their books are not expensive. They're totally accessible. The e-book on Amazon, the first one, is very accessible. And then Recurrence Plot also available there. And even though I only selected a section of Recurrence Plot, it's really important actually that you would get the whole book because of the form. Because the form of it is like a game. You can play it. She has these ways of you actually have to do nonlinear ways of navigating the text really interestingly. of forming her book. And, yeah, just keep following her work. And, yeah, I just wanted to thank you for your time, Rashida. Thanks for having me.
This was really fun. Very much appreciate it. And good luck with your projects. And I'll keep everybody in touch with what you're doing. Awesome. Thank you. Have a great weekend, guys. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Okay. That was Rashida. so I don't know she's quite I think quite an interesting lady in like the aspects of how she's doing things it's not just a she's not just a science fiction lady and just like the different aspects of the way she takes these ideas into different into different realms so I really like what I'd like to do is do like next week
is go through in more detail these readings. So if everybody can at least try by next week to get through, like, the bolded text in that PDF, then we can go and try to bring some notes so it can be more of a collaborative conversation. And then... So then we can go into more detail about the actual writing mechanisms. But for today, I just really wanted to get, like, a general sense of what she's doing. I think it's quite a useful project. And it has a lot of legs and it's just in its beginnings.
So the next book that she'll publish she self-publishes everything by the way but the next book that she'll publish will be from this It's the project that we were talking about today, the Community Futurism Project. So if anybody was interested in the practicalities of doing this, involving it in today's presence, that book will have a lot of relevance to you, I think. So that will be coming up. and we can talk a little bit more about the history of Afrofuturism next session in which I posted I put in the PDF at the end
some more historical hi Laura hello we just finished with Rashida she just left us but I was just saying because because I know there was one confusion with Laura we spoke on the sessions we were going to just update you Laura we're going to split it to have just the we had this panel with Rashida which I'll send you the link so you can watch it and discussing like the practical aspects of her project and then next week we'll meet and next week we'll meet to discuss the readings so if you could just try to get through the PDF of the bolded ones at least.
We'll go into a closer reading and try to take some notes and bring some notes to the course so we can all have a discussion. I'd like to get everybody at least to speak once about a text or a passage. And we can decide collectively as well if there's one text that we'd prefer to really go through. and Close to Read. And there we'll discuss also more of like we can go a little bit more into history of Afrofuturism. And like I said, in the end of the PDF, I added like some more historical, like the comments, which is like Du Bois' like most...
That's like, in the sense of the Utopian project, I wanted to add that one for like the sense of Afrofuture and Utopia. And then there's some more theoretical or an analytic text on Afrofuturism and race. And I added that, there's this documentary Invisible Universes or something that I added an infographic that came from her website. And that documentary is like a long 10-year project or something. She's been working on it. It's still not done. But that's a nice little timeline for other texts to read if you're interested. But I do recommend for extra things,
if this is a sort of field or genre or critical lens or whatever you want to call it that you're interested in, I would recommend checking out Rashida's other groups. So, Metropolarity is one of her groups, which is like not Afrofutures, Afrocentered, but it's like the pre-artistic group she created that deals with sci-fi as well, that Herald texts. I'll just put the quote in there again so she can see it. But this is like their manifesto, which I find to be quite interesting, and their uses of sci-fi. I find a lot of I find a lot of relation with the meme
with their understanding of memes and our looking at a filofiction or hyperstition and these sorts of things so that's a whole other sort of dialogue discussion but we're going to at this point sort of like wrap the official session early in order to to then do the rest of the session next week, which would mean that we would extend our seminar until June 11th. And if that's a problem, if June 11th is an issue for anybody, please let me know, and we can find a better day. Yeah, so I would open it up to anybody else
for any final comments about this session, and then we can talk about, we can have questions not like the general seminar or the seminar in general. Because I think one of the things that we might be lacking, which is what always is a problem with the online thing, with online courses, and well, Tal's here, so this is the thing Tal was talking to me about today was, or this week, was having some sort of like place to continually engage with the group. And he wants to explore using Slack, so I'm going to take him up on this. And we're gonna try to use a platform
instead of using classrooms, Konstantinos, like I said, we're gonna try to use Slack, which is, we can have, it will be consistent communication with the group. And then if somebody, so that way if somebody's on, I want to put out a short tutorial on how to use some of the software that we use so maybe like we can have some throughout the week if people are having a reading that they're interested in just so happens that somebody else from the course is on you guys can meet each other throughout the time that we're meeting. Try to see if this works. I don't know if people are going to take extra engagement but I know at least that I've had some people excited to see it and tell us happy about this.
I'll probably add two short texts to the PDF for next week, which will be one from Octavia Butler and one from Samuel Delaney, like the two key Afrofuture go-tos. And if people are interested, I have also the classic two journals that were on Afrofuturism. One's the science fiction journal, and the other one is Social Text that Alondra Nelson did, both on Afrofuturism. Alondra Nelson is probably the first academic actually to start to use the term. She was originally on a list.
But then we'll have, I hope next week we'll also, we can engage with Ytasha Womack, who's an artist and writer and filmmaker in Chicago. Currently she's traveling in Europe, so it's been quite difficult to get on her, but she really wanted to come today. Her book, which I've added a few of the chapters, is a pretty just simple rundown of Afrofuturism but kind of just gives a good history. And I think we'll be able to engage with her. She's also in the Black London Futurism text, so we'll be able to engage with her more. As well as maybe we should try to engage with the opposite, with the mundane Afrofuturism manifesto.
I'll put up all the texts in some kind of form and send it out to you guys so you guys can vote on, you can vote later on in the week like what texts you want to most talk about so we can narrow it. And yeah, so that would be the in order to end slightly early so we can have some more time for next week we'd end now. so there is no other than the two new texts that I'll send out we have readings for this week in that PDF form in quite a while because this one is not actually an ebook and I had to like scan the books
and then I tried to make them look as good as possible but some of it's kind of crappy I apologize Yeah, that would be all. I think I'll think with the only thing that Lore, the problem, took me a really long time to compile the book. With Lore, the only thing that is missing is that I'm going to, if anything can be, or if any, the way that I, There will be an archive page. I'll send that out as soon as I'm done with this session. But if everybody can sign up to this platform, I've tested it a bit.
It's quite interesting. And then what I need from you all is the email address that you signed up with it. Or actually, you know what I can do? is I will use the email addresses that I have from you and I'll invite you into the group. And Tim, just let me know the email that you used. And this application, I'll have all the archive up there and then you'll be able to watch it and then also you'll be able to annotate it. And I really want to use this as a new way of... Okay, Ashley, please just send me the email. Did you sign up with the email that I know? The Glasgow email or the Hotmail email? Either one just let me know. Perfect.
Thank you. The videos will be posted there right after each session, and then while you're watching them and reviewing them, load it with whatever notes, thoughts, citations, things that you might have. I think this will be a really good way of actually being able to use these again, and to also, like, I will also go through them and try to make some research-based citations so you could... Yeah, it's collective annotations, exactly. And now we'll be able to mark certain sections. So if you want to go to a section, I'll start trying to transcribe certain areas. So it'll be easier to go through a three-hour video. So yeah, this will be kind of the experiments
of a different way of collaboratively working together. Yeah, so that's it. So just ask you all if you had any follow-up questions. I'm sorry that I got the text to you late. That's why I'm sort of also offering this extra section. I hope that's okay with all of you. More time is always good. And especially because we do the... It's hard to do these sort of like in survey form. and we always want to get more into the text. So Slack is just a platform for...
Slack's a platform for a lot of people use it in project management, but it's it's a way of like it connects like the entire communication to with the team so they can be in communication with each other yeah so it'll be visible literally I'm going to edit as we speak to my group on video hands Let me find here. Loading it now.
Okay, now the second one is loaded. Okay, so you'll have both of them when you come in. And you can...it's really easy to program to use. And I'll invite you all as soon as I'm done. Yeah, it's a bit similar to IRC, but more slick and high-tech. It's like a common chat, so it's a way of doing it. We'll see if it works. This is through Telstra recommendation, and I'm trying to follow up with everybody's feedback, which would bring me to a point that if any of you have any feedback of what you would like this course to be that's not,
or what you expected this course to be that's not, please inform us, because I will always modify what we're doing to benefit the collective. This is all experimental methods. We're trying to figure out ways to do these things and do new things, things that aren't really talked about in these sessions. So the next session, yeah, I'll send... I'll try to send a preparatory email, but hopefully with the next session, since it will be based on readings we've had for two weeks, we can get more in-depth and get more people talking about it. And I think next week also we'll talk about, like, what we – I would like to have some kind of project or output from this course that we can all do together.
It might work in a lot of our skills, if that's interesting, or somebody could do whatever they want. But we can talk about that in the next session as well, like what kind of project we might be able to do or how we might be able to, I don't know, exploit these concepts of fiction in some way. One way is, yeah, so that's everything for me. I'll let you know if you have any questions, or let me know if you have any questions. Do you have any questions now or no? No, it's okay. Okay.
All right, well, thank you all for being here. Expect an email from me in the next hour. And, yeah, thank you. Ben, do you have anything? I know you have to go. Ben has meetings, and he just, he already did a talk today, talk today, which is why he's more quiet today. Well, no, it was last night when the event started at 10 and went until, like, 2 in the morning, so... Yeah. No, no, thanks, Tony, and thanks a lot for the PDF. It's super nice. And I know it's a pain in the ass to do that. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, but it was good today, and, yeah, I think next week maybe I'll post a link to a shorter... I know it's a lot of reading
already, but if there's a shorter piece of Karen Barad, because I was really surprised that, because there's like a lot there between Rashida's work and Barad's. Okay. Yeah, and I think that kind of, that'll feed in, especially maybe her piece on this kind of queer nature, that'll feed into next week. I mean, not next week, but the week after. Okay, perfect. Yeah, the nature's queer performativity. Yep. Send to people. All right, cool. Thank you, Ben. All right, so we'll end here, and thank you all for being here. See you next week. Of course, because the session is over, it doesn't mean that we can't continue conversation. That's what Slack hopefully will be for.
Slack, let me know about this. Does Slack have a documents organizer? sharing documents. Like, could we put, like, could people upload reference? Yeah, yeah, sort of thought. Okay, so we'll use this. We're gonna use Slack instead of, we usually use Classroom, but we're gonna use Slack just for an experiment during this session. And we'll upload all of our documents there. You guys also can upload your own things, your own references, as, you know, really in any way possible that it might involve your work. You know, I know Ashley's doing a lot of work in theory fiction, so a lot of the things that we've been discussing, you know,
I think relates heavily back to hyperstition and theory fiction and Reza's sense, so, you know, Ashley, feel free to pull, like, in your own research in that aspect so that we could be engaging with that might help you in your PhD work, you know, and that works for everybody. Alright, so thank you very much. See you.