All right, and welcome to our third session of Thinking Fictions. This is an extended session from our second one. Because Yatesha Womack was not able to join us the first session, she was in a no Wi-Fi zone. So today we will have her about five minutes joining us, about ten minutes. She wants to talk about her new film, I think, a little bit that she's working on, Black Star City. A little bit about her dance therapy, which I'll see what she has to say about that, and then we will discuss with her. She knows the text that I've shared with you all.
So the thoughts on navigating the time warp of horrors and riding the DNA strands of resilience out of the black quantum futurism text, the first one we've done, and then her well-known book on Afrofuturism. So to get a sense of, I mean, so just to kind of talk, the last session we had was, and it might have been lack of being able to help prepare people well enough on my end. I apologize for that. But this one, if anybody, like, I don't want to take up all of the time asking
the questions or keeping the conversation, but I will if there's silence. I will just try to fill the silence, but if you all have questions or comments, or if you feel like you don't want to interrupt, it's awkward to interrupt, then put something in the chat saying that you have a question, and then we can get everybody in. Because my goal for this session, just so everybody knows, is that the main goal is to get everybody talking in this session. So it's not just me blabbing. So this is why I think I wanted to re-approach the text the second week, giving us more time to read and stuff. I know that we have some
people on the Slack that have already started talking about some ideas. I don't believe Tal's here, is Tal here yet? Oh yeah, yes. And, um, so we can talk, but basically the way we'll structure the session will be, we'll do this interview with, or this Q&A with, talk to Womack, and then take a short break, each of us maybe 10, 15, maybe 10, 15 in a break for everybody to kind of relax on that and think about that, and then we'll explore the PDF in some ways, people that have prepared
things or have thought about things in the text, and we'll try to have discussions with everybody. And then hopefully next week we can continue and formalize this a little bit better. So there's not much of an introduction to give on this aspect except for there is, which I posted in the Slack, a later, there's like a more recent work that Ms. Womack's been working on called The Post Black, which I think is going to be an interesting thing to talk about with her. I have the Kindle version which I can share with you guys. I'll
share with you during our break. This is just a little general points about post black. Trying to think about the different aspects of our culture today, post race, post black, post-black, this kind of stuff, ideas. I don't know how many people are familiar with that. The other Lowe said that I thought was really good was this. She writes for the Institute of Emerging, or the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. I thought this article was also very good by her.
So these are things maybe to check out after the fact, if you're so interested in her work. A lot of times, from what I know from her work, is she uses hyperfuturism as a way of rethinking the cultural boundaries, and also as a form of she does many talks, but one of the ways that she does it is as a form of creative empowerment. Another concept I think is very interesting that I might try to get in with her, or might try to integrate with her. Did everybody read at least the essay that she wrote in the Black Quantum Futurism text?
So at least we're caught up. Okay, good. It was very short, so a few pages. Anybody find...so, anybody have any comments on how it might be different from where Shida's work are the same or any general comments about the text before we get in and discuss with her? So if we go to page, I think it's page 60, I don't know what page it is in the PDF.
It's the one, two, three, on the PDF. So here when she discusses word power, I found that this was actually... Okay, well, Rashida's text we can talk about later. Yeah, word power. So in our interview with Rashida, she was talking about the... When I asked her a question about meme culture, she was talking about the power of language. So in the power that... in the forms of metaphor and how metaphor sort of, in a way, in a weird, they take a little bit of an extension, but in a weird, hyper-positional way, it becomes real in its employment and its use and its performativity.
And so I just found that these two word power sections here were quite interesting, and I just wanted to pull out this section. I mean, I just like the opening section of this word power here. I believe that words have power. I believe that words as vibrations have their own energy. Maybe something there. I believe that if enough people use these words with the same intent and the same vibration, every time a person uses the word, whether they want to or not, they will instantly connect to the consciousness of this word, the intent behind this word, a consciousness created by all the emotions associated with the words over the space-time continuum.
So, in a weird, like, so this is, if anybody's familiar with sort of like the quantum entanglement aspects or what quantum entanglement is. She's, this is, to me this is like a recognition of words as being entangled in this way, as transcending space and time. Isn't that also similar to descriptions of how magic works? Or as poetic systems, as sort of magical systems. So is she using, is she referring to
quantum physics as a way of explaining a magical system? Because I know she's said somewhere that one of the unique features of Afrofuturism as opposed to science fiction is that it incorporates mysticism. so is this what we're do you know what I mean is she using quantum physics to account for how magical systems can function I would be interested in actually discussing perhaps that with her if we look at the PDF in the Afrofuturism there's a section where she's discussing like the specific like gender aspects of Afrofuturism, how with women
in Afrofuturism, how they're more prone to using magical aspects and fantastical aspects, as opposed to other things in science fiction. So this might be exactly what you're alluding to, or a different section of what you're alluding to. But that's... Yeah, I can't for sure say what exactly she's saying here, but I think she is, but if we go down a little closer, she is bringing in, you know, obviously the religious aspects and the performative aspects of ritual a little bit down in the paragraph. Others rely on ancient prayers or affirmations with words of empowerment to elevate their
consciousness and reshape their worlds. But the same power in words applies even when one is speaking negatively or if a person is speaking words with dire emotional charges. They will experience emotions that are not their own. They will identify with a trauma that is not their trauma. So yeah, it has this mystical aspect, and she is bringing it into the power of narrative, the power of The Power of Language, which I found was kind of interesting. There's a really good... We mentioned last time, and I wanted to find a good... I mean, there are the two books that Karen Barad did, but if people don't want to read the entire book...
I'm finding it right now quickly. She did a keynote at Duke, I think last year, at the Feminist Studies Conference, which is actually really, I don't know, two years ago. There's a good engagement with her work and how quantum entanglements works on multiple levels and how it works and how matter matters on multiple levels, like how a matter of fact or a matter of language or a matter of material, physical matter,
all are not one and the same. They all have effects. So in a way that you could read quite similarly the way that she's discussing how these words have this sort of power, this power with the use of vibrations. I mean, to me, just to try to make analogies directly to quantum theory, with vibrations, you have obviously Alexander Bell, his first experiment, and how he discovered the bell curve by attaching two, by attaching a wire to a piano across into another room with another
piano, found that as he played the keys on one piano it vibrates on the other. So you have this sort of like vibration across space connection. This is, of course in quantum we have to go further, but this is just kind of like a way of visualizing or thinking about how it might work. But with the quantum entanglements, what's interesting about the quantum entanglements is even after the connection is severed or even after one of the particles has died and particles has died and gone away, it still communicates with this. So this is how, this is one of the interesting things about including the quantum theory
into this Afrofuturist science fictional sort of domain, because it does, it has this interesting way of playing with causality and temporality, time travel, and all those things. Yeah, and then she goes into the power of words, which might be more culturally or emotionally or emotionally bound? I mean, obviously she's in Word Power 2. She asks us to do an experiment, right? Do an experiment. Say the word race. How do you feel? Do you feel a weighted heaviness
in your heart? Are the images that come to you historic symbols of violence? So do images and thoughts have anything to do with the present? Now say the word ethnicity. Does Does the word feel lighter than when you use the word race? Do you have images of fun foods or great moments in culture? The word ethnicity does not have the same conscious emotions as the word race. Granted, race and ethnicity evoke different concepts with respect to definition, but the point of the essence is to note the level of agency one has when using one word versus another. So does anybody have any thoughts on this specific passage?
If not, it might just be my interest. What about in the text at large, is there anything else to let people jump into a different section of this work? Is there anything that we might want to discuss before she joins? I don't know if it's a different section, but just in terms of the idea of words taking
on meaning from across the space, I guess I had a wondering about whether words could be imbued with meaning from the future? And what's the, I suppose, responsibility to start shaping that meaning today? OK, so this is interesting in a few ways, I guess. Well, I don't know. To me, I'm immediately going to this text in Beyond Biopolitics that I really like to talk about.
That is Parisi and Steve Goodman text. And I will find it and share it with you. It's on ARG. But generally, I think this might be, sorry if this is slightly tangential, but they're discussing the sort of waves of cybernetics, and in this they're talking about this new, they're trying to define this new third wave, cybernetics post, you know, so the first wave is, the first wave is Cold War when we're trying to predict Russia's attack, right, so we're trying to predict the future, and we're trying to prevent the future from happening. Second thing that happens is the second wave comes in, and inside of the second wave, they realize that they can actually control humans.
So they turn this system onto themselves, and so instead of preventing the future, they're controlling actions in the present. So the second wave of cybernetics happens in this way. In order to sort of, yes, in order to potentially lead us to these interactions. Ah, you're just... That's right. Yes. Hi, Itosha. Can we come back to this? Yeah, great. I'll find a text here. Yeah, some of the things. Let's see if Natasha is with us.
Ms. Womack? Hello. How are you? Hello. Hi, how are you? Hey, I'm great. How's it going? Pretty good. Are you back in the U.S. now? Yeah, I'm back here. My apologies for missing everybody last week. That was so bizarre. Not being able to get a signal where I was. Yeah. So, I guess, just briefly, what were you presenting last week?
Were you doing presentations? Like, you were doing talks? Yes. Were they having you talk on, were you doing film talks, or were you doing work on post-black or Afrofuture? Well, it was the Wow, Writing on the Wall Festival. And it's a month-long festival in Liverpool, and, you know, they have kind of a host of events kind of engaging the community in writing. So they might have poets, performance poets, you know different author lectures, etc. And I was a part of Afrofuturism Day where I was a part of this panel and we just sort of generally talked about Afrofuturism, kind of specifically
race as a technology. That became a big part of the conversation. And after that they had other presentations, other presenters. And then a guy named Jerry Dahmer, who was a part of, oh gee, what was the name of the group? The Specials. It's kind of a UK ska group from the early 80s. He DJed an event, so how about that? Nice. Grateful. Thanks. So out of that panel on race and technology, what was the most important thing that you
took away from that conversation was? If you could share one thing that came from that. Oh, sure. Well, what was kind of fascinating, I know Liverpool has an interesting history, particularly when it comes to people of African descent because it was the commerce economic center for the transatlantic slave trade during the latter part of the 17th and the 18th century. And they have a museum about the transatlantic slave trade and so forth. One of the things I didn't quite realize in my familiarity with the trade itself was that the exact same boats that transported Africans to North and South America was also the exact
same boat that brought in the cotton, the sugar and so forth into Europe. And those boats were financed and owned in many cases by people out of Liverpool. So a lot of our modern debt system and so forth was kind of created based around that, right? And so, you know, it's kind of people making money in two ways, the selling of people and the selling of this product. And so you have all these warehouses around the dock where it would hold the cotton, the sugar, et cetera, et cetera, and kind of fueled a lot of the, what would later become the industrial age in Europe. So with that as a backdrop, right, so you have many people in the panel were from the UK, some were somewhat familiar with the history, but being there spatially had sort of a different
impact when you're having this conversation about Afrofuturism, looking at the future. And so one of the big takeaways with respect to race being a technology, which you kind of mention in the book was that race was very much a creation. And it was the idea of a person being what we now call black or white was created to justify the transatlantic slave trade. So that categorization system did not exist prior to that trade existing. And so spatially to be in a place that was at one point the economic commerce center of it all. And then to think about how there's this before and after moment, right? Where
as a global society in many ways we're still wrestling with the aftermath of creating societies where a big part of the economics was based around enslavement and to some degree colonialism, right? And race was created to be able to justify having this process. This whole idea of who's human, who's not so human, the power imbalances that we now associate with color, et cetera. So while you might have had serfs and some degree of bondsmen prior to the actual transatlantic slave trade, it wasn't based specifically on color, and it wasn't hereditary
in the sense where it was passed down and passed down and passed down. All of that was created to maintain a particular economic framework. So that just reiterated how race was very much a creation. So now we're in this time where we're, you know, there's a lot of identity politics and we're very much identifying ourselves. And, you know, not to negate some of the outgrowths of things that took place with respect to, you know, the racial divisions, but the categories themselves were created. And for many people, that's empowering, right? To think about these categories being created in Afrofuturism then becomes like a way of getting people to think beyond that creation to connecting with a certain
universality, which for many people is just sort of fascinating because we're so locked into that mindset. You know, I was going to just, I was going to jump in here because right before you joined, we were discussing in your text that you did for Black Quantum Futurism, the space time collapse issue, we were discussing the word power sections and so that in a way when you're talking about creation of these categories, so Catherine had a question about speculating about how, like, because we were talking, you were, in the text you were talking about how it reconnects to past consciousnesses or different consciousnesses. And then what we just were about to engage with was Catherine's question about future,
like how do we, how could this be used as a way of generating a future scenario? So I think what you're doing, I just wanted to touch on, to bring back to where we were, is like that this, what you're talking about, the creation of categories for universality, could be a lot like, it could, it does in a way answer what she was talking about right before you joined. So I just wanted to kind of like interrupt you for a second just to see if you could back to your text on word power and maybe express it. Oh, sure. Sure. It's kind of funny because I think being in Liverpool, you know, this
panel that I'm on, we're talking about Afrofuturism, and we spent an unusual amount of time talking about the transatlantic slave trade, right, on a panel that's designed to talk about Afrofuturism. So when you talk about word power and then just things in the ether, right, why are we talking so much about the transatlantic slave trade? Well, in part because we're in the economic commerce center for that space. And some of the energy from that space is still in the air, right? Right? So, and so by connecting to certain words, you thereby almost become, to some degree, I don't want to say it's total time travel because we didn't become dystopian. But by talking about using some of these words, we're now invoking a scenario in a time that none of us had necessarily experienced. Right?
So my background is as a, I grew up in the new thought metaphysics philosophy. And, you know, the short way of explaining that is if you think about books like The Secret or The Power, and, you know, they talk about positive thinking, you know, word choice and that sort of thing. I grew up in a philosophy that very much emphasized that. that. And you know the thought is that words have energy and those words have energy because of the intent behind it. But I did do some reading and I kind of mentioned this in the essay that how people use words over time, you are in some way connecting to that when you use those same words, right? Or that same energy or emotion behind it. And I think if
If you're talking about moments that can be somewhat traumatic, you can take on the energy of that, even if you didn't experience it, even if it's not where you are physically. I just think that that can kind of happen. And that's not to say you don't talk about certain things, but it's to say that how particular words have been used over time, there's an energy associated with that, which, you know, in some philosophies they would say becomes its own space of existence. So depending on your state of consciousness, you know, when you're constantly using these words, you kind of hyperlink to that. When people talk about, say, using words in a religious sense, right, or a spiritual sense,
if they want to say, you know, some spiritual thoughts, you know, if you're a Christian, for example, They might say, well, just say the word of Jesus if you're in a certain situation where you're kind of troubled, right? Just say that particular name. Well, why are they saying say that name? In some ways, people over several hundred years in saying that name give that name a certain kind of power and a certain sort of energy. that you can separate that from the man who existed, but just the belief around what that saying that name could do, a person takes that on energetically. But then there's other things where you can sort of argue that same point.
And I guess what becomes interesting to me is there's the word, there's how the word's sort of been used, And then there's maybe how the word was originally used. And all of these are three different consciousnesses. But depending on your particular state of where you are, how you express your mood, what you're thinking about, in my opinion, you can kind of hyperlink yourself to those emotions, those feelings that are associated with that. Okay. So now how do you feel about, like, so they have this energy to them. So if I'm thinking energy, okay, so let me ask, actually, Laura, you want to, she has
a question here. She's following what you say about the words as hyperlink to different spaces, but can we understand them as space themselves, the words? Like, can we understand? I think so. I think you can. You know, I think the words, the phrases, the emotions, the time that they embody can become its own space. I don't know if some of you have been in experiences where people, maybe they're talking about something that happened to them when they were 10 years old. It could have been somewhat traumatic. and as they're talking about it, you know, it's almost as if now they're 10 years old
again, right? And they can't get off of that particular subject matter. And you might try to switch the subject and do some other things and all of a sudden everything in life becomes a manifestation around what happened when they were 10 years old, right? And it's not to negate what took place, but it's almost as if these particular traumas have its own space of existence. And that could be evoked through particular words. You know, someone can be having a happy day and, you know, and someone's around them who's speaking sort of negatively about something and then all of a sudden the people around them are cranky too, right? So this sort of transference of energy, I think, can be connected to individuals,
and it can be connected to other times. And I just find it sort of interesting. In fact, there was a study recently, and this is a slightly different dynamic, but it goes into this notion of DNA memory. And they were talking about Holocaust victims, you know, who, people who were descendants of Holocaust victims who still had a certain kind of guilt around the Holocaust. And, you know, they hadn't experienced it. Their parents hadn't. Maybe even their grandparents hadn't. And the question became, was this a sort of trauma that was passed down, right? Which isn't to say if something's passed down, you know, all is lost and you can never move forward again. But it is to an interesting point around
conditioning, right? And moving past a certain space of trauma. And so for me, Afrofuturism, this whole idea of thinking about the future, helps to break past some of these traumas. So in addition to Afrofuturism being this kind of artistic aesthetic with cool music and interesting space tropes, there's also this dynamic of using Afrofuturism as healing, right? Or it being kind of this therapeutic experience to either contemplate the future or think about the future or experientially to, you know, dance to the music or get into a certain kind of vibe and space where you're looking to non-linear,
linear, you're looking to maybe intuition as a way, as a viable form of informing you around who you are as a person and sort of embracing that to in some cases move fast trauma because to some degree a lot of the situations around the creation of race has created a certain kind of trauma for many people on all sides of the equation, right? And this whole notion of how we categorize ourselves and separate ourselves has formed a means of disconnecting us from who we really are. Because we're dealing with tropes and identities that are sort of being placed upon us.
and then negotiating with what that means and then trying to push past and state who we are or to negate these definitions that are placed upon us. And some of that has to do with some of this categorization process. And I'm using the word categorization lightly because it's a little more weighted in terms of what these categories mean. and how they were created or how they are enforced and how people actually take that on. So Afrofuturism, in the way that I talk about it and in terms of using the imagination, is also very much a portal of healing around race as a technology.
And it's not just healing for people of African descent, it's healing, generally speaking. And I think that it can apply to a host of identities. Okay. And this is where, this is maybe where, like, the post-black comes in, like, after you've done the Afrofuture research? Or, where, like... Where did that book come from? You know, it's so funny. I wrote Post Black before I wrote Afrofuturism. So the first book that I worked on was a book called Beats, Rhymes, and Life, What We Love and Hate About Hip Hop.
and the book was an anthology, I co-edited it, and essentially, you know, I evolved. My identity, my college identity was very much connected to hip-hop in one sense, but I had a lot of issues with it for the same time because of some of the misogyny, some of the stereotypes, some of the hyper-consumer culture. And although on the one hand you wanted to champion the aesthetic because it was, you know, it was about youth culture, there was empowerment, there was this, you know, this ability to, the power of the spoken word, right? And the ability to tell certain narratives.
On the other hand, there was a lot of hijacking with the commercialism of it and the promotion of arrangers' various stereotypes, you know, under the guise of just wanting to make money. And that was pushed more or less by the artists themselves, but in some ways very much by the companies that brought these artists on and their desire to literally look at hip-hop as how the suburbs perceives urban street life, right? And so all of that to say, you know, that was probably the beginning of looking at myself being described as a person who was part of a hip-hop generation.
and then wanting to say, hey, wait a minute, but I have other insights into this identity that I don't feel are really being articulated, right? And the book sort of dealt with those issues by writers who were very much a part of a lot of the hip-hop literary culture of the time. And after that, I did the book Post Black. And I did the book Pulse Black in some ways out of frustration of working with, in some cases, publications that targeted black audiences. And there was a very narrow idea around who black people were, what they're interested in, what they want to read about. and some of the stories that I would pitch,
you know, one of the public kids I worked with, you know, they thought that, wow, you know, these are very well-meaning, interesting little stories, but all of this is niche and has nothing to do, very little to do with mainstream black culture. When the reality was that prior to Barack Obama becoming president, there was, you know, a great diversity and a lot of shifts happening within black culture that weren't totally being recognized. And Obama becoming president sort of brought a lot of that to the forefront. And it just had to do with narratives and being a person who was part of Gen X and Gen Y. And there was a big generation gap, particularly at the time amongst people of African descent in the country.
You know, this perception that you had the civil rights generation And then you had like these ingrates who came after them, totally not taking advantage of hard fought fights, right? And just sort of a generalization. But I talked about other aspects of the culture that weren't being discussed in the context of mainstream black life at the time. And again, this is a year or so before I wrote this book around the time Barack Obama announced his presidency, and it came out around the time, or finished writing it around the time that he became president. It was an interesting backdrop for writing it.
But a lot of the ideas were basically a result of people saying things like, you know, saying, oh, well, all black people are, you know, they're either Muslim or they're Baptist, you know, Christians. Oh, no, you know, there's other people who have other faiths and philosophies. And people are like, oh, they want to act like that's such a marginalized experience and not something that you should be worried about. Or if you talk about the fact that you've had, you know, in some cases, second, third generation people of African descent who were college graduates, right?
So when people want to say, oh, black people aren't going to college, you want to say, well, you know, you have a couple generations in various spaces here. And these things shift culture. or the, you know, looking at the transgender issue or the, you know, gay, lesbian, you know, bisexual, transgender piece and that being a part of the culture. And, you know, depending on, you know, various times and spaces, like, no, no, no, or even if you just talk about immigrants who are African immigrants, and that kind of reshaping how you think about black American culture. So there's not just this narrative of people moving from the South to the North through the Great Migration, right? There's other narratives around where people are coming from and who they are and how you connect with them.
So the post-black notion had more to do with not, hey, let's stop using the term black, right? But it really pointed to the concept that there was sort of a narrow identity around what black people did, how they lived, what they thought about. and in some cases a certain political identity, which in some cases people negotiated around embracing for the sake of progress, right? But on the other hand, you had all these changes within the culture which just sort of expanded this notion of who people of African descent really were in the country. And ultimately, you know, at the time I was saying,
If we, you know, if in the past, you know, 50 years, people have experienced more general freedoms because of their access to citizenship here in the country, that's going to transform the culture and how people experience themselves. And because a lot of the racial breakdown is a result of limitation, right, and not having access. So in some cases the whole definition of the cult was around not having access. So if suddenly people had access, that's going to change how they express individually and thus transforms the culture. And that's kind of where I was going with that particular book, for people to look at these points of change
and really to be able to use them to engage and help these organizations and help some of these publications, but also for people who didn't always fall into some of these narrow definitions of blackness at the time to then see themselves and not feel like they weren't, I don't want to say not a part of the culture, but to feel like they were on the sidelines of things or their stories not being told or feeling like they had to take on a story that wasn't their story just so that they could be viewed as being part of the culture. and so my exploration of that ultimately led to me writing the book Afrofuturism because after I wrote that book you know I met Professor Deninge Akbem who teaches Afrofuturism she told me she
was teaching Afrofuturism and when I asked her about that and had conversations about that one I recognized that I was an Afrofuturist and didn't know I was an Afrofuturist and a lot of the ideas around black culture, the imagination, technology, were ideas I had very much engaged in in high school and college. But I knew that there were people who had never heard the term before who very much connected to the same ideas. So the creation of the book came out of that. But if you look at all the books sequentially, they're really identity quest. It's this larger identity quest of not wanting to embrace culture, sure, but not wanting
to deal with certain kinds of limitations associated with any sort of identity. And so, taking it back personally, I think because I came out of this kind of new thought metaphysics philosophy, I very much always felt empowered. And when you go into situations and people try to negotiate that sense of empowerment and then talk as if culture does not lend itself to you feeling empowered, these become like weird identities, right? It's like, well, I don't connect with that. I've been a person of African descent my entire life. I connect with the sense of resilience that's come out of the history. Some of the traumatic things that people have experienced in sort of these separations around race,
I don't think it's... I connect to the space of resilience without being pulled down by some of those dynamics, right? Or feeling like I have to define myself constantly in that context, which isn't to negate it. And that becomes the big conversation to talk about embracing an identity beyond certain kinds of traumas without negating that those things took place and that you don't want them to ever take place again. So some people are very much in a space to embrace that and some people it's a little more difficult to do so. and you know the changing times and various things that take place
can for some be reminders of why they should not view themselves in an empowered space right and to me to view yourself as being unempowered when so many people did so much to create a sense of empowerment is a conundrum I think Matthew has a question that was a follow-up from within your response. Matt, do you want to ask the question or do you want me to do it? Or yeah, do you want me to do it? I don't know what the or sure meant.
Okay. Okay. Alright, so Matthew's question is, could you talk about the idea of cultural implosion in the black culture? Maybe why there is... Cultural. The cultural implosion in the black culture. Maybe why there is an urgency to redefine itself, etc., in the ways that you're talking about in, like, post-black. Okay. Well, I... Oh, go ahead. No, I was just going to reiterate, but go ahead. Well, I think a couple things. Black identity, and I'll just talk about it in the context of being in the United States, right?
Maybe North America to a general extent. There's always been an identity quest, right? since people, I mean, after the Civil War, prior to the Civil War, there's always this kind of space of people wanting to state who they are, and looking at how to build on whatever freedoms they had at the time, right? So that concept isn't necessarily new. I mean, even the term black itself, you know, evolved out of the black power movement to move from words like colored and negro to the use of the word black. And people embrace the word black specifically because black used to be a slur. To call someone black was offensive prior to the black power
movement. It was seen as a diss. It was seen as a, you know, you could get in a fight for calling somebody black because no one wanted to be black. You see what I'm saying? So the the Black Power movement and claiming things like your hair texture, claiming art, claiming skin color, claiming the beauties of these things, and then creating a whole artistic aesthetic to reflect that was an identity quest, right? And so moving into the new millennium, of course, I think just lent itself to more of an identity quest because of increased freedoms and changes in culture.
You know, so you're after the civil rights movement. While there still are challenges, people have way more room to express themselves. They have opportunities around education. They're able to live in places that they weren't able to live in before. In some cases, buy things they weren't able to buy before. And then too, there's this rush of information around African culture and global culture, so a lot of lost histories are then documented and people are able to connect to some of their histories and their ancestry. Then on top of that, you start having these DNA tests that pop up, right? So if people are descendants
of the transatlantic slave trade, they have no idea where they came from, that at least gives them a clue or some idea. And there's some controversy around DNA tests, but at least it gives some sort of framework. And for some people, they can think, well, if people don't know where they come from, why is that such a big deal? But within African American culture, North and South American black cultures, that kind is a big deal, you know, because they're, you know, this having this weird history where people were brought to this country and then to some degree treated like aliens, right? And having to, you know, literally negotiate or in some cases fight for freedoms, you know,
then when the dust clears, people want to know, how did I get here in the first place? or what was life like before that. And Afrofuturism, because it claims, it very much claims a vision for the future, but it also reclaims these past identities and does a mix-mash around what works best moving forward. One of the things that separates Afrofuturism from maybe more traditional notions of science fiction is kind of this perspective around time, which is why I think the work that Rashid is doing around black quantum futurism is so exciting. And, you know, I'm a big champion of her theory around that
because in a lot of African cultures, you know, before colonialism, there was this sense that the future and the past and the present are all one. And so, you know, sometimes people refer to this Sankofa bird, and it's a bird that's looking at its tail, and it's this whole notion of a cyclical nature in time. And when you look at a lot of images in Afrofuturism, they can be somewhat disorienting because you can't tell whether it's the future or whether it's the past. So with respect to the question, you know, what's lending itself to this sense of urgency? There was always a sense of urgency, but I think now, because of the technologies that
people have to, one, be able to claim their ancestry and, two, be able to tell their stories and be able to connect digitally, it seems like it's on fast forward. And then, two, I have to say that the fact that you have President Barack Obama, who's been president for two terms and him being an African-American person, at one point that was seen as the impossible dream, right? That was seen as, to have a black president was seen as a mark of a certain kind of utopia. And it was a certain kind of utopia, or at least a vision for the future that some people did not think would ever happen based on the history of the country itself. So for us to be in a space where we're moving, we experience
that and then to be moving beyond that very much makes people feel as if, whoa, we're really in the future. It's not always articulated that way. But I think subconsciously between our technologies and then in his presidency in particular, there is a sense of, whoa, now we're in the future. So now what? What is this future going to look like? And that's why we have so many just, you know, studies around future and futurology and so forth because the story of the future that's been sold to us is not making as much sense. Or in some cases, people feel as if, well, we're in that space, so now what?
This can't be it. This can't be the height of our advancement of human beings and we just sort of maintain. There has to be another vision for the future. And I think that's lending people to do identity quest and then to, you know, want to look at Afrofuturism. And then other, you know, indigenous cultures and groups around what were their ideas about the future before we had sort of this neocolonial or neoliberalism kind of dictated future that we experienced. Thank you.
I find this temporal motive and dimension very interesting. And also in the presentation I had this feeling that time is a recurring theme and I think It acts as a resistance to an eschaton or a telos, we could say, imposed from the top. If we think about it, most totalitarian regimes have a certain relation to time, either by totally occupying it or by totally deserting it and thus leaving no future. So I guess this could be called something like time invention or time creation or even
in the plural, I guess. Well, it's an interesting contemplation when you look at time because the modern perspective on time is very much based around it being linear. So to talk about it as being nonlinear radically shifts our identity and our perspectives of who we are. You know, certain things are supposed to be fixed. Space, time. So to then say, well, these things are not fixed or these things are just a matter of perspective to some degree or time changes. Well, I mean, Einstein said this, you know, time changes based kind of on where you literally are, where you're standing. You're distance away from land to some extent. And I'm totally botching the theory.
But, I mean, I think the point being that because we just accept that time is what it is, we don't realize that that's, in some cases, a very colonial-based narrative around what time is, as you said, so that you don't feel you have a future or it's being dictated by someone else. and I thought that Rashida's whole contemplation around slave time and this whole idea of people moving from one perspective of time physically then going through this kind of atrocity and then moving into a completely different reasoning around time you know how that can impact someone
psychologically and that's beyond just the physical and the other human horrors that people were dealing with. And then to then create worlds based around a certain idea of what time is and there not being a real reality behind that. That's just sort of incredible to contemplate. I think, you know, I'm sure just for many of you just sitting there Just thinking about that really makes you want to look at other aspects of your life. Well, what other things have people told me were basic frameworks that I just kind of bought into that aren't real?
If time isn't real. We're running around trying to get somewhere on time. If you're not on time, you don't get the job. There's a whole host of labels that you're given when you're not on time. And then you say, well, what's on time? One of the criticisms, when people in the U.S., they go to countries in the Caribbean or they go to certain countries on the African continent or other places and they go and they order food and it takes two and a half hours, right? come to them when they come to them. And they're just like, what is going on here? You know, there's supposed to be this hop-to-it mentality
around service. But the thought is, no, there's another understanding around time. You know, meetings. And some of you have experienced this. I mean, you know, they tell you these things in certain places, certain countries you go into, if someone says they're meeting at 1 o'clock, it could be 1 o'clock, it could not be 1 o'clock. And you make adjustments around that accordingly. But I think that what it points to is that there are other ideas around time, and yet people are still sort of wrestling with this, well, with the notions of time that here in the States we have to work with.
and yet you have resistance around that but that resistance makes you a problem or it or in some cases it becomes you can't do business or make money if you don't buy into these concepts of time I'm that's that's pretty heavy it so arm Yeah, so one of the questions, this is kind of going to backtrack a little bit back to where we, like inside of your response there, one of the things we were discussing also
back, we were discussing the word power sections a lot before you joined, but we were discussing the relationship to that and sort of this is something that actually one of our students brought up. We were talking about the relationship with magic, magic and elements and how they might play differently in Afrofuturism or even in specifically the female dominated literature literature of Afrofuturism, which I think you do mention. You actually, you mention in your Afrofuturism book when you're talking about the use of gender. Yes.
And so I wanted to, like, in response to maybe, like, the, I'm sure you're aware of the mundane Afrofuturist manifesto. Are you? So in response to the mundane Afrofuturist manifesto that sort of like intends to drop these sorts of tropes as boring and useless at this point, what it seems like they're kind of saying, like once it gets boring just drop it, even their own manifesto. is the sort of power that you find in like you know like Nettie's work, your own work, like with the relationship between magic and maybe talk a little bit about wood power,
I'm trying to just not go straight back to what we were talking about. Okay, yeah sure, well you know one of the other things that separates Afrofuturism from other sci-fi narratives is the fact that it embraces mysticism. And it doesn't just embrace mysticism in the literature, but people who sort of philosophically are connected to Afrofuturism engage a lot of kind of mystical based philosophies as well. And I think, again, it points to identity. You know, seeing oneself as being, you know, part of the universe, seeing oneself as having a cosmic identity. You know, you look at someone like Asun Ra, who had this narrative of being
from another planet and being sent here to Earth to transform the world through music. And whether he was using that more metaphorically or it helped him to create a space where he could give rise to other kind of music that, you know, in his mind, Henry, that in his mind he wouldn't have created if he thought of himself as being from Birmingham. I mean, we can talk about that, right? But more than anything, it's about I have an identity that is beyond being human. And feeling like this sort of connection to having a cosmic identity or this very universal identity is where his strength lies. And that's a thread that runs
through a lot of cultures of African descent to some degree or another, whether it's interpreted as being specifically religious or whether it's interpreted as being more spiritual or whether it's interpreted as being just having a grander sense of self that is also connected to, that doesn't dehumanize people and, you know, makes people feel like they're a part of a universe. They have a certain individual exploration, but there's also a harmonious relationship with the people around them. I think that a lot of the resilience that I like to reference around Afrofuturism or just within the culture itself is very much tied to some of these notions of mysticism in one way or the other.
Right. With respect to just the literature itself and, you know, the mundane Afrofuturism, you know, manifesto. What I gathered from the person who wrote it was that they wanted to read kind of, you know, this grounded explorations of how people of African descent were going to live in the future on Earth. right? Like forget taking it to space, forget adding these other sorts of powers. They just had a need to read that kind of literature. And that's a preference and that's fine, right? I mean, I don't think Afrofuturism means that you can't write that sort of literature. I would certainly put a lot of that in the canon as well.
But that to me is more of an individual preference in terms of what it is you want to read. It's not statement as to how all black people should think about space in the future. Because again, we're talking about the imagination. And Afrofuturism is a reminder of not allowing one's imagination to be hijacked, right? Not allowing one's imagination to be either, you know, dictated by other kinds of tropes are dictated by other ideas of how one should think about themselves. So for someone to say, well, Natasha, you can only think about people of your culture
in this very grounded way in your fiction, or else it doesn't have the same sort of validity. Well, that's an attempt to hijack the imagination, right? But, you know, if I want to write about space fairies and talk about how transformative that is, that's very much my prerogative to do so. And it is for everyone else. But these are the sorts of things that people have tried to, you know, that certain elements have tried to shape within culture. What can black people think about, right? You can think about how to get up every day. you can think about how to make money every day. But, oh, don't think about these intellectually sophisticated things, right?
Or don't think about fantasy because your world is so rooted in this terrible reality that you need to dedicate every second of the day to trying to get out of that rather than looking to fantasy when the reality is that fantasy inspires. Right? But when you talk about mysticism, or even magic to some degree, I mean, these are things that many people see as real. It's funny, there's a particular scholar who's very much a musical scholar, very much a pioneer around Afrofuturism, not calling it Afrofuturism.
and he was a protege of Sun Ra. And when I was talking to him about Afrofuturism as inspiring the imagination, his thing was you don't have to inspire the imagination because these things are real. It's about accepting who you are and what's really happening. So all of these magical stories to him were not magical stories. They're happening. Right? so he's like why does one have to imagine anything when all of these these narratives about people coming from other planets and alternate dimensions and other realities are real why would you have to imagine that and I thought that was an interesting point of contemplation
because that's the point from which he chooses to operate based on how he lives his life he's very connected to astrology and astronomy as these sort of fixed points around how you live your life and connects it to the ancient world and how the ancient worlds, many of the ancient worlds were dictated by astronomy and astrology, right? Or their specific type of astrology. And we see this when we're looking at all these markers of the sun rising or the summer solstice. And, you know, you keep thinking, why do they keep marking the solstice and the winter solstice? And a lot of our modern day religions and holidays are extrapolations of people in the ancient world sort of celebrating these things.
But there is also a cosmology around it. So this particular gentleman very much saw these things as real, right? And lived a life as it being real. Now, I am not going to say that these things are not real, but I think engaging with it through the idea of the imagination can give it a sort of, I don't want to say practical usage, but for some people, imagining things is the only way for them to connect to a larger reality of who they truly are. so if you're in a situation and you're imagining yourself as a superhero imagining yourself as a superhero could get someone through feeling like they're empowered
if they're being beat up everyday in school and they connect with some superhero, some comic book hero and they feel like gee I really am somebody, I can make a difference that little spark of inspiration can give them the strength to tell the people beating them up, hey, stop hitting me, or they hit them back, and they hit them back, and then they're never teased and taunted again, right? That moment of inspiration helped them move forward. Now, if that was inspired from some sort of comic book or something, then that is what it is. But it inspired them to remember who they truly are, which is at the heart of it an empowered person. You have a choice about what goes on in your life.
You don't have to let somebody keep smacking you in the head all day long. That is not a fixed state of existence. So I just feel like the imagination is very much a space of empowerment to bring people to really looking at not just self-expression, but to their true talents, no, to their true abilities. There's Adrienne Marie Brown, who's an Afrofuturist and who was one of the co-editors of Octavius Brude. She does a lot of activism work. And I quoted her in the Afrofuturism book
because she works with kind of these contemplations around the future to help kids or even help activists get out of feeling like a sense of hopelessness. If they're working on these issues, they're in the trenches, they can feel like you're never going to resolve it, well, they need a space of hope. And playing with their imagination does that. But playing with their imagination also connects to another reality of a space of empowerment. So if people feel unempowered, imagining a space of empowerment reminds them or can help them connect to their own empowerment. And that's why it's so important for many people of African descent to be able to see
images of themselves, people who are within their culture, be empowered, right? And some people can think, well, gee, why do you need all these images all day long? Well, why don't you see these images? I mean, obviously we see more than you did, say, 50 years ago. But the whole narrative around what images are celebrated was created intentionally to help shape society around what's accepted, what's not, who's human, who isn't, whose culture is valued, what's not. Like, this was not an accident. that for the first blockbuster film in Hollywood was Birth of a Nation.
And afterwards, many of the films that were championed had all-white cast. Or they specifically just cast black people as maids. And it wasn't because black people were only maids. Maids or butlers are there for comic relief. there was an intentionality behind that about wanting to create a certain system of order so the black arts movement of the 60s and a host of other movements were about creating empowered images and the NAACP one of their biggest fights was always trying to change images in Hollywood because of the impact of images in the Afrofuturism book, I talk about Martin Luther King, you know, convincing Nicole Nichols
to, or Michelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek when she wanted to quit. Because he said, your image is helping people. And it's not just helping people of African descent, it's helping all kinds of people who subconsciously don't realize that they're being taught that people of Africa in the center are not supposed to be in the future, right? And ultimately, she later went on to recruit a host of astronauts. She recruited a lot of the first women astronauts, recruited a lot of women into NASA, and then Mae Jemison, who was the first black American astronaut, points to, you know, the character Uhura on Star Trek as part of her inspiration for going into space. So there is a tangible relationship
between the imaginative, right, which is Uhura on a show called Star Trek about some people flying all over the universe, and reality, you know, and there's that point of inspiration. So, and you can get into, you know, who needs to be inspired and who doesn't need to be inspired, right? Some people, maybe they don't need to rely on images as much. You know, maybe they have, you know, certain images around them or they have a certain relationship to their culture and heritage where that's not as significant. Maybe they're very much surrounded by them, right? But other people, they rely on that. I mean, when I was at the WOW Festival, one of the presenters, his first name is John. I can't remember his last name, but he has this character called
Afro superhero and he has this traveling comic book exhibit. And the exhibit is really kind of his evolution into comics. Not to mention he has some really cool Green Lantern books and Black Panther books and, you know, a host of others, right? And he was pretty much talking about, he was a guy whose parents were from the Caribbean. He grew up in the UK and he talked about how going to the United States or being connected to a lot of black American culture in the form of looking at Muhammad Ali or looking at going to like a Jackson's concert. All of these things gave him a new idea around who he was. And he was so excited because these were like exciting images around a culture that he was a part of. And it just meant so much to him.
And we're talking about looking at Muhammad Ali and the Jacksons, right? And the whole world was paying attention to the two of them, but for him it meant so much more. And he felt like his collection of these comic books and wanting to really collect a lot of black superheroes was a way of him kind of becoming his own superhero. You know, it was a way of him connecting to his own empowered identity. And he needed these images because where he was in the UK, the place where he grew up, he didn't see any of this. You know, he didn't see enriched black culture. He didn't see diverse black culture. He didn't see, I guess beyond his parents and maybe a handful of other people, empowered black people who were in the context of a rich and diverse culture. And when he came to the United States going
to various places, he would see these things. He's looking for these books and he needed these comic books and all of this shaped his identity. And to some degree, you could say, well gee this guy's identity is shaped around comic books you know this guy's identity you know as he sees a jackson concert his life has changed well that's how dire the state is sometimes for various people where they interpret the absence of images of people within their culture as a statement of their culture not being valued. I don't know if it's always easy to interpret if you're in a situation where you might feel
like your culture is valued in mainstream or to some extent you see other people who fall within your culture in various mainstream situations. important it is for people who don't see those images to actually see them. And they hold on to one scene and one film and it'll mean everything. So in that sense media is important because it shapes story. But again it's important. Narratives about people of color aren't just important to people of color, they're also important to everyone because it's about us connecting with who we really are and not limiting our self-expression or our own personal inquiries
based off of the identities or the cultures that are placed upon us or the narratives about what our culture is to us as well. All right. That's a great response. You all look so contemplative. I hope I'm helping here. No, no, no, no. I'm just taking it all in now. And then there's also two temporal things happening. You're speaking and then everybody chats and adds things while you speak so they mark points, questions and comments, which you can follow if you don't have the chat up. If you move your mouse, there's an icon on the top left of the end.
There's a blue box. It'll pull up the chat because everybody's making comments as well. So then while you're speaking, they're noting different things as well, quoting from texts. Oh, that's awesome. I'll go back and look at it. I see it here. Oh, got it. There you go. Oh, wow, you guys are saying things. It is a weird thing to jump into, but in order of respect, it happens on the sidelines, so then we go back and we can get to it. Some people don't have microphones today.
Okay. No, that's totally cool. I mean, this is all amazing. I'm glad to be a part of the experience. Give me one second. Let me turn my air conditioning on. Hold on. Yeah, it's hot. It's hot. Yeah, it's so funny. Like, you know, Chicago goes from frozen to hell, and so now we're in our hell space. And I had to turn the air on. So let me ask you about your upcoming projects or your recent projects that you're doing. You're a filmmaker, so I know you're working on a film. We talked briefly about that.
Yeah, and so people can, like, keep up with your work and stuff. So we can post those. You can actually post any links in the chat yourself while you talk so people can grab them as well. But I wanted to give you space to talk about what you're doing now. Yeah, sure. I'm working on a film called Bar Star City. which is a sci-fi Afrofuturist film about a Southside bar in Chicago that's a portal to another world. And I like to say it's like Cheers meets Parliament Funkadelic. And it deals kind of with multidimensionality and this intersection between, I would say, time and love and memory.
and has a cast of interesting characters. Probably many bars have a cast of interesting characters, but this one goes a little cosmic in terms of what people are really into. So that's a project I'm excited about. We've been working on it, and we're going to get that underway a little later this year. and ideally the project will be out next year, maybe the later part of 2017. There's been a lot of interest and a lot of curiosity about it and we have some prequel stories posted on the website, barstarcity.com, which I posted the link to.
So that's one project. Another thing that I'm doing, I, along with a guy named Kari B, are going to be launching these Afrofuturism kind of dance therapy classes. And we're calling it Release. We're actually starting it later this week here in Chicago. And it kicks off this Friday. And essentially, you know, wanting to use dance, the music of Afrofuturism to really get people moving and to, yeah, just to kind of connect with their bodies and to and to connect to a greater sense of self through freestyle dance. So I grew up as a dancer. It's a big part of how I express myself. And, you know, I teach dance on occasion.
But I just, I think I took for granted as a dancer that everyone dances and everyone just loves dancing. And even if they're not dancing at parties, they're dancing in a room by themselves. And then, you know, as you mature, you know, you realize, no, everybody's not dancing. And a lot of people feel really uncomfortable trying to move. And the thought of someone looking at them or the thought of moving certain body parts. And yet, music and dance, to me, can be so transformative. You don't have to be this trained dancer and, you know, you don't even have to be incredibly rhythmic necessarily. But the point is just to move, to feel comfortable moving. and that releases a lot of stress, tension, trauma in some ways. And so that's a program that we're launching
and we're going to be doing in various places throughout the city and, you know, throughout the country too to, you know, get people shaking and moving a bit and feeling, you know, connected. And I see that very much as an expression around Afrofuturism because of the music we're using and because of the valuing of kind of these nonlinear modes of reasoning. There's a lot of intelligence around dance. You know, sometimes people ask me, they say, well, what's your relationship between being a dancer and a writer? And sometimes I would, you know, initially I have no idea whatsoever. I would think that maybe the dance was a way of connecting with my body and then the writing very much keeps you in your head.
But then when I really, really thought about it, I felt like dancing and being, I felt like dance and the patterns and the rhythms and the way you interpret really complicated beats also helps you to identify patterns very quickly. They can be, you know, societal patterns through which one navigates. It can be patterns, kind of intuitive patterns to kind of give you a sense of what's going on in a room in any given moment. and I just felt like there was that dancing to very much open up a lot of gateways to people's strengths, strengths that they might be unaware that they have.
So that's one of my big projects, really looking at Afrofuturism through dance. That, Bar Star City, the Rayla 2212 book, which many of you are familiar with, the second book in that series, Rayla 2213, launched about two months ago. And that's a series that follows a woman who's a war strategist on a former Earth colony. And she had to find these missing astronauts who got stuck in space and time trying to travel using their mind. And, you know, again, I guess I'm, you know, it looks, I'm a person who explores identity. And so it goes into this concept of her, who is she really? You know, as she goes into these other lifetimes, these other dimensions and wrestling with what all of that really means.
So those are my projects in a nutshell. And I have to say, you know, I'm really delighted that all of you are engaging in these subject matters around Afrofuturism, around the time element and the identity and so forth, because I just think it speaks to a desire for people on our planet to really have a different understanding of what the heck is really going on, to feel more empowered about who we are and to feel like there is a sense of agency in creating the kind of world that kind of celebrates our humanity or our cosmic identities even, right?
And so to me it's exciting to have these conversations and to be talking to you and see that you're legitimately looking at how to integrate these things into your frameworks, you know, and how to function around it or, you know, how to live balanced lives, engaging with these ideas and in some ways to push it forward. So I think that that's remarkable, and I think it's very much a sign of the times. I think, yeah, I think so as well. I think there are many different, like, I could rather point to a few interviews I've watched of you where you've been asked these questions,
but there are many different ways you can discuss the neoliberal agenda and how this has brought up the aspects of temporality and these things and how the whole Afrofuturism 2.0 aspect of the sort of genealogy between the race, the color line in Du Bois and then the color, whether it's the color curtain and Richard Wright, and then now the digital divide, navigating digital divide and access and these sorts of things. Like, hopefully these platforms can make a more, I don't know, make a more open aspect of being able to do it. I mean, anybody can run a Hangout,
which is nice and collectively, like, collectively get with many people across many different times. We have a few people from Paris, or a few people, like three people from France in the group, a few people from California right now, one from Scotland. We have Greece, Chicago, Cleveland, so we're all over the place right now. We're all different times, which is kind of interesting. Oh, awesome. Yeah. It's even, like, on a practical level, it's happening. Ah, Berlin. Oh, Beirut. She's in Beirut. All right. somebody Matthews deliver in Chicago all right it that is so when I live in Chicago Southside Southside all day
it yeah I live in shadow all right so we have a very cool at I think I don't like we have we've had you for quite a long time which I don't want you too much your time but I really appreciate you being here I think there's like two, well there's a bunch of questions, but if I can just kind of navigate through them. I think, Ashley, do you want to maybe ask what you were getting? My question is sort of an addendum to Tim's question, so I don't know if he wants to go first. Tim? Hi. Yeah. Can you hear me? Yep. Yeah. Hi, Tim. Hi, hi, how's it going? Yeah, thanks for everything you just said.
It's very encouraging and informative and exciting and stimulating at the same time. I connected to what you were saying, and it reminded me also of what Rashida was talking about last week in terms of the connection to cyclical time in African culture. And just let me kind of think about a little bit how you or we are thinking about time and thinking of if we indeed do, and I say we, you know, as like a non-black person, but interested in Afrofuturism and the way of thinking, like, yeah, if we take this cyclical time literally, you know, and just trying to imagine like how far, you know, one can go or whatnot, and if we take this kind of cyclical relationship to time, you know,
knowing that our capitalist culture does operate on a linear scale more or less right now. But if we think of it where the past, present, and future in its totality, if we were to take it really, really far and where everything is one time, and not that this is the only way to think about time, but if that was since we're talking about it, then is it valid, is it still relevant kind of endeavor to speculate about the future, and to think about the future, if the future, past, and present are all one anyway, or is it maybe more a different way of looking at, not so much the future, but maybe it's as hard because you can't escape the future
if we're still living in calendrical time, so to speak, because there's still aspects of it. And just kind of trying to imagine even further beyond that. if even the idea further is like a linear kind of concept, I guess, I'm afraid. But I guess I'm just trying to tease out maybe like are there different ways of in the future? But again, that's also linear. But are there ways of speculating about alternative reality which isn't totally based on a linear future? I guess maybe it's like a simple way where... Well, I explore a lot of those ideas in the Rayla 2212 book, just with the journey of the character. In one respect, she's, like I said, she's on this planet 200 years into the future, a former Earth colony.
So she has to travel to other times on Earth. So she goes to 11th century East Africa. She goes to 1970s Washington, D.C., America. she goes to future Earth, which would be 2212 Chicago. But then she also goes into these alternate reality spaces, right? There's a question about even her own past. And the second book, Rayla, 2213, looks into this whole water dimension. You know, it kind of explores this concept of mermaids and the subconscious in the water and these other pathways through water.
And in some cases, alternate dimensions. And at least in the case of the Rayla character, it becomes in your present, right? What is your focus? What is your space of reality? so and I'm thinking just for us kind of you know walking around here trying to figure it all out what we contemplate becomes present right what we connect to becomes present so if you're contemplating an imaginative future that becomes present for you you will start to live think and operate out of the sense that this future you imagine is real, which then makes it present, right? If you're contemplating or connecting to something
in the past, then your contemplation makes that present. And I think that's sort of where this whole future, past, and present thing all being at the same time kind of anchors down into, which is what are you making of your reality now, right? So for example, the Rayla character at one point was under the impression that she had been asleep from the time she was 9 or 10 to the time she was 21. Then later she realized that she had this whole other life that she was completely unaware of until she had to go back to the physical
space where she lived this other life. So, bringing that to all of us sitting here today, if you thought that, you know, I'm trying to think of something that wouldn't be so sensitive. You know, if we were under the impression that, you know, I believe I was born and raised in Chicago, right? I believe I was born in Chicago. You know, I have a hospital name, I have all concept. Now, if I then find out that I was really born in Afghanistan, and the first two years of my life were in Afghanistan, and that the people who raised me were another group of people and then I met my parents later, that's going to change, that exploration of that time is going to change how I view myself in the present. Despite the fact that
I have little awareness of that, right? If I find out my great great great grandfather was the King of England, right? My contemplations around that are going to transform how I perceive myself today. So whether it's imaginative, whether I'm working with real information, you know, all of these things are going to somehow shape how I see myself. You know, I'm going to be thinking about all the glories of being a descendant of a certain kind of royalty or whatever I associate with that, and that will transform how I act. Then I I will then recast how I perceive my life and re-explain it all through the fact that I'm the descendant of a king of England.
You see what I mean? So these contemplations, imaginative or real or mythical, transform your present. The thing with history though is our idea about history is often myth. There's a certain narrative we buy into. When many of us were born, if we talk to our parents about that experience, they have a certain story as to how that came about. My family has a story, it was cold outside, they had to rush through the snow. Okay, so that's the story I'll be telling for like the next hundred years about my birth. But that's a myth.
There were a bunch of other things that happened, right? There's other things that took place. Maybe my dad went outside and shoveled the slum. Maybe my mom had conversations with other women in the hospital. There were other things that happened, none of which is a part of the story. All I know is the story that they tell me. you know, but that, and even if I went and researched certain facts about things that were going on in that particular hospital that day and accurately contextualize it and find it all interesting, but I'm still picking up a point of logic to create a story. So as human beings we think in stories. So the story of the past is as weighted as the non-experienced story of the future if we default into making it a story. So the question becomes, you can
change your story, right? A lot of history that we've been taught is a story, you know, it's not necessarily even a real story. It's a story based on some facts, some that aren't. and we accept it as a fact, right? So in that way, it gives the perceived future and the perceived past the same amount of weight. So then the question becomes, how do you perceive your today? How do you perceive your present? And I think that's where the power around this future, past, present being the same thing becomes a statement around agency. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, thanks for the question.
Oh, thank you. That's great. So I guess the final question, I'll pass to Ashley for the follow-up. Do you want to follow-up and maybe change slightly the response? Yeah, no, my question was just going to be a slightly different take on Tim's question. There's a famous, sort of infamous physicist called Max Tegmark, who's famous for arguing that time is completely illusory. I think he says life or like the linear conception of time that we live in is like a movie, but space-time is more like the DVD, so it's static and unchanging. So I'm wondering if your conception or the Afrofuturist conception
generally of time as being secular implies that you consider time to be completely illusory? And if so, how do you understand change to be possible in that? I mean, where does the agency come from? Right. That's a good question. Well, here's something that's sort of interesting. So you go to this whole metaphysics philosophy or this new thought philosophy, right? And what I've come to understand and I've written about more recently is the particular founder of the institute that I came through, you know, was a woman, an African-American woman, who was one of the first students at one of the major New Thought schools here in the U.S.
And what I've come to understand, or how I now perceive things, she had a majority black congregation. Many of the people who were in her affiliate churches were mostly people of African descent. And I now realize that her perspective on teaching these things was claim your true identity. And in so claiming your true identity, you live a life that reflects your true identity instead of the ones that people are placing upon you. So in the way that she would talk about your true identity, and her name was, you know, Johnny Coleman. She founded a place called Christ Universal Temple. Your true identity would be this spiritual identity, right? But we can say, you can use the word the spiritual identity to talk about this larger cosmic identity.
You know, and a cosmic identity in space-time. And literally the language that they use is similar to the language, well, it's the same language that you just shared with us. which was, you know, things taking place, our 3D dimensional reality is a manifestation of our own creation, right? The real reality is this larger cosmic identity. The real reality, and what you were saying with the person that you mentioned, is this space time. the things that we're creating here in this three-dimensional are just manifestations of us appearing as human
in this reality to function, right? So all of these things that we're sort of functioning around, time, someone saying time is illusory, well, I would say based on some of the things that we've been talking about, time as we talk about it is. It's a measurement of the infinite. It's like looking at the ruler as the item that's being measured. That's how we function around time. So how does one deal with that? I think a recognition of it fundamentally transforms your thought process, right? If you start embracing that, if you start connecting with your own ideas and your intuition around,
well, when do I actually do things? What works best for me? Does it work best for me to, in theory, start working at 8 a.m., or is it better for me to start working in the evenings? That's a little more mundane. But I think it goes into when is the right right exactly But it does get into this idea of I think What we're getting into is nonlinear reasoning right Valuing nonlinear thought which then means you're valuing intuition And I think there are schools of thought There are different schools of thought in the ancient world
that had more language around that, and there was more of an embracing of that than there is today. I mean, we're kind of there. We talk about various things, but we still function out of, generally speaking, out of linear logic and reasoning as being the most important. And if you look at certain metaphysical philosophies, the linear line of reasoning is associated with masculinity. or the masculine aspect of humanity. And sort of this dominance of masculinity in our world in part could be, you know, related to this valuing of logic as we understand it.
But probably the large reality in other schools of thought point to this is your ability to think logically is just as valuable as your ability to function intuitively. Both of these are gateways for information. One, the intuition connects you maybe to the past and to the emotions and to other lifetimes and to this so-called ether. And this logic and reasoning helps you very much in functioning in the present and in making certain decisions in the now. But both of those are important. And, you know, as a society, I think that's equally as important. So yes, when he says there is no time, the way we define time, no it isn't.
We're looking at the ruler. We're looking at the measurements of time as time. We're looking at the clock as time, and that's not what it is. Or in some spaces, we're looking at when we think we were physically born on this planet, and when we think we physically are no longer on these planets, as statements of our existence. which it not isn't necessarily if you're thinking in terms of you know life being everlasting then it would imply that you're then living in some other dimension or in some other frequency or something right so um so yeah if time is infinite and you know i'm speaking now i'm going in you know putting my metaphysics hat on you know and then life is infinite and it's really
just about points of reflection and certain energies, then yeah, everything that we're functioning in right now, we're creating. We created this notion of time. And I'm saying we because at some point we're all collectively buying into it, right? We're buying into these notions of race. We're buying into these notions of humans being more important than animals. we're buying into this idea of what success is, we're buying into this whole story of what life is, right? I mean, if life is everlasting, you know, and you're on these other dimensions and we just view life as what we're experiencing here, how would it change our life to view
ourselves as being larger than that? You know, then maybe we could be like really purposeful in another kind of way. It's interesting. Someone just said something about being caught in someone else's dream. Yeah. You know, when we sit in a building, we're sitting in a building that someone else dreamed up and created. You know, they decided what door we were going to walk into, what doors we were going to exit. They decided where the kitchen would be. They decided all of these things, and we just sort of walk into the building and act as if it's always been there. so the first step in the agency you know it's like when you work with little kids and you're sitting there and you're saying things like I was working with this group of kids and I talk about this sometimes and they lived on the west side of Chicago
and they were a chatty group of kids but when I'm talking about Afrofuturism they had all these questions and finally at the end they were like wait a minute so we can imagine our own future We can change the things around them. You know, I was trying to get them to say, oh, what would you like to see in the future? And, you know, they're basically saying, well, we don't want to see violence. And we don't want to see violence. You know, every kid in the room, they want to see violence. And they were describing, it was all variations of the same answer. I'm expecting them to talk about spaceships and, you know, wanting to go to Mars or at least a really cool job that they wanted. And they're all sitting there talking about how they don't want to see violence. And at some point I literally had to say, okay, you're telling me what you don't want to see.
Tell me what it is that you do want to see. Because the reality is, despite some of the violence they may or may not have seen, they don't experience violence 24 hours in a day. They're sitting in a classroom having conversations, right? So when they go home, generally speaking, every second of every moment of the day, they're not witnessing some violent act. And that's just reality. Even if someone was in a highly violent situation, every moment of every day is not violent. So you're taking this one aspect and now you're using it to define everything and you're clouding it to the point where you can't even see what you're actually experiencing.
So I kind of have to work backwards and say, okay, well, okay, what does it feel like? If you can't tell me, what does it look like when people aren't violent? You know, they described people playing, people speaking to one another. It's like, what kind of things do you do when you don't want to have violence? And they talked about that. And then I said, well, how does that feel? And they talked about how it felt. And once we got past all of that, which was like an hour, then they could actually talk about, wait a second, I can change the things around me? it took that long and these are like 10 year olds you know you would think 10 year olds would be a little more imaginative now they're ridiculously imaginative but I couldn't even get to them talking about that because we had to get past this violence which they then extrapolated
or they expanded to define their entire space and it wasn't their entire space so rewinding to this whole sense of creating something It's not to negate that there was some violence in the area where they were. It's not to negate that. But it is to say that we take one aspect of our life and then we want to use that and define it as our identity. And we're doing that in a space that we very much create. So when I was giving the example about being in the house and someone builds the house and we live in the house and we act like the house has been here forever, the reality is someone did create that. Someone created the chair that we're all sitting in. There was a thought process around that. We just sit in it. I think our world in three dimensionality
to some degree is a reflection of that. Maybe to some degree metaphorically, even the Adam and Eve's story points to that, you know, of this creation of a world around you, right? And I just think that that's something to remember when we just start accepting things as fact or accepting things as always going to exist, that these systems we operate in were created to benefit something specifically. And your reaction, your revelation that it is not this permanent state of existence is thereby revolutionary and therefore creates
the agency. So the agency comes from recognizing that it's created. Because if you can create something, you can dismantle it. That's why the creation of race is so interesting. If somebody created that, then you can dismantle it. So, would that maybe be one way of distinguishing fiction and illusion, the difference with fiction, fiction is an illusion that's been exposed, does that make sense? Right. Or is that illusion is a fiction that you have to be revealed as a fiction? Very much so, I mean, exactly. Exactly. Because people buy into these illusions for a reason. And it gives them a sense of
stability. It gives them a sense of safety. And to some degree, it might give them a sense of not feeling like they need agency. You know, they're very okay with just going along as things are. And, you know, hey, you tell me the three steps to follow. And if I follow these three things, I can live a life that keeps me content based off of the illusion that's sort of been sold. And if it's an agreed upon illusion, it's an agreed upon illusion, right? But realizing that it's a creation is beneficial to someone who wants to have another experience. And unfortunately, everybody doesn't want to have a different experience. I mean, I think that's where it gets tough sometimes when you talk about change
and transformation, even for people who might be complaining about something. You know, they kind of don't really want to have agency. Agency over your life and actually being able to create the future for some people is just as scary. It's scarier than having a future or life be dictated to you. You know, because it's this whole learning curve of figuring out who you are to even function in this new space that agency requires that one would have to operate from. It's kind of like moving from being a 9 to 5 employee to becoming an entrepreneur. Two totally thought processes. It's not to deny that working 9 to 5 you don't have your own sense of agency while you navigate through it, but it's not the same as a person
who starts their own business and has to create the money that's going to feed them every day. They're just two different sorts of shifts, and I'm not valuing one over the other, but I would just compare that shift to being in a space of not having agency and complaining about not having agency and choosing to buy into the illusion, even if it's uncomfortable, and a person who steps out of that illusion. to experience the world that they want to experience. Okay, great. We have a little thing. I don't know if you're familiar with the French philosopher,
but that trapped in the dream that came up. Tal actually quoted it verbatim, which is if you're trapped in the dream of the other, you're fucked. And then... Yeah. Yeah. And then a lot to the relation of what Catherine posted here. I just wanted to note that Rashida Phelps text from her... That's from the... Right. No, I'm looking at it here. yeah, are we psychologically bound to time and space and we believe that time moves forward, that we are in motion through space, change
must exist the ego process, stillness creates motion change, temporality yeah, I mean, it could be a dynamic around the ego, right because the ego fights to protect itself you know, the ego is about having a certain state of existence, and metaphysics are a new thought, they talk about this process of chemicalization. So when you're trying to change your life, right, and you're thinking positively and you're an optimistic person, maybe you weren't so much before, but now you're starting to try to change those things. And then at some point, someone hits a road where it seems like all this craziness is taking place. And their talents around their ability to think positively, maybe some of the things
they would do, the affirmations, the stating a positive statement, it seems like all of a sudden it's not working. And then there's this temptation to default into thinking negatively, being critical, going back to the old ways of thought. But if you kind of hang in there, you move past the chemicalization process. And then there's this space of euphoria where one is able to have another sense of agency, where they're kind of rooted into a deeper understanding of who they are as a person. The ego is about preservation of self. And sometimes it's preservation of an old identity, right?
And so that process that I just described was about, that chemicalization process was about trying to maintain an old identity. I would compare some of the things happening in U.S. politics today with the rise of, or the space of Donald Trump, for example, as a relative chemicalization process, right? in that the nation's moving in one direction, that all of a sudden you have all of these things that had been unapproved, these thought processes, you know, sexism, racism, homophobia, all kinds of things, you know, classism, all sorts of things that we as a society have said,
this is wrong. And then you have someone coming to leadership in a party who doesn't quite feel that way, and doubles down on that. And to me, it's like a national chemicalization process. It's like, look, you know, America, if you are who you say you are, if we really are moving on a different path, then we've got to double down and move past this into this new world that we have to live. You know, our country cannot function under the notion of these divides. I mean, we already had a civil war. You spoke earlier about the color line. W.E.B. Du Bois said that that was going to be the story of the 20th century.
Now here we are in the early 21st century. It's like, look, we've had an African American president who ended notions of exceptionalism, white exceptionalism, I would say, indefinitely. So you can no longer say that black people aren't smart or empowered, right? Regardless of what you might think about as politics, Al, you feel that's – you certainly can't say that, right? So you know, come on now. As a nation, we have to dig down and say, you know, what is it we really want for our society? You know, do we believe everyone's equal or do you not? Okay, if you don't believe that everyone's supposed to have access, then, I mean, that's a belief system that is no longer going to serve us.
And I'm just talking in terms of the United States, but, you know, it can apply in a lot of other situations, too. I would say that that's a chemicalization process. Can we change our destinies? Yes, we can change our destinies. But I would say, especially if we're in situations where our destiny is being told to us. You know, there's an expectation around how you're supposed to live your life. You're supposed to, you know, if you're staying on the straight and narrow, you're supposed to at some point get married. You're supposed to have kids. You're supposed to get some sort of education. You're supposed to get a house. You're supposed to make a certain amount of money, save for retirement. I mean, that's a destiny that's sort of sold. And if you get to that point, you're considered lucky if you kind of hit all those markers, right?
It's like, wow, that's a successful person. Well, it's been conditioned for us, but it's also something that we've bought into. And so, Catherine, you know, yes, when you're mentioning these things, you're 1,000% correct. These are structures, social constructs, identities. They're all overlapping, and they're all very much invested in making people feel, I don't know if it, well, sometimes it almost looks like it's about making people feel insecure so that they become consummate consumers. You know, it's kind of like our beauty industry is in part based off the fact that people don't think they're attractive
and that you have to constantly fix yourself up. You have to do something. You have to buy makeup. You have to buy the hair products. You've got to buy this. You've got to buy that. And at least one of the thoughts in feminism is the beauty industry is based off of creating insecurities amongst women. Otherwise, they won't buy these things. Well, that probably applies to a lot of things in our life. If you don't feel that you have to, I mean, some women feel so pressured to have children or to be married by a certain point, despite the fact we're in the 21st century. And they feel like failures if they don't. They could be millionaires, they could be dynamic at their jobs, but if they don't have these things, they failed. Where is that coming from? That's
a story created by someone else, other people bought into, that they are now embracing. So that's a narrative. That's a structure someone else created that is facilitating a certain kind of insecurity. And I wonder if a lot of these modes of functioning, patriarchy, homophobia, time, these notions of time, these notions of reality, you know, linear thinking or bus, all of these things sort of, they seem like they're working together to create a certain kind of world, and there are people who benefit from us buying into these things.
One way or another, there are advantages that various individuals, probably monetarily, probably in terms of with respect to power, gain by having the rest of the world running around in circles trying to navigate these systems that make us forever feel like we're behind. And that is what we're ultimately trying to rip apart as we move forward in this society because it's not making any sense. I'm not saying it made sense 200 years ago and now we're just realizing it doesn't make sense, but maybe because we have collectively all of us are able to meet and we're talking, we're in different parts of the world,
So we're able to really say, okay, this really is not making sense right now. And there's a way to create opportunity and change. So going back to where did the agency come from, the agency would have to come from this larger sense of self and the recognition that these things are creations. That's where the agency has to come from. and the resilience has to come from human history and the fact that people were in all kinds of unusual, unbearable situations and they survived and made it through. That's where the inspiration can come from because sometimes some of these contemplations just make people feel bad. They're like, oh, forget it.
Let me just drink my coffee and keep my head to the ground and not do anything. and I had friends like that in college. They would break down all these issues. They were Afrofuturists, not familiar with the word at the time and some of them just became disheartened. That's in part why I wrote the book too, thinking about these friends who were breaking down many of the ideas we're talking about today and not knowing what to do about it. And they weren't artists and they weren't total activists, maybe a little bit, activists in mind but but not in terms of being community organizers, and just weren't really sure what to do with this information or where it played, and felt alone. So the Afrofuturism book is very much for people who felt that way as well, to see that
no, you're part of a larger community, just like we're all part of a larger community wrestling with these issues and wanting to express ourselves and make a transformation as a result. So I just think, so, you know, I appreciate the things that you're asking, you know, and the recognition of these creations because the recognition that something is created gives you power because then you see yourself as a creator. Thanks very much. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Oh, you know what? If you guys have questions or anything, I'll give you my email. You know, if there's something.
Thank you. Thanks, Matthew. Yeah, if there's something you guys want to say. Thanks, Tim. If there's something that you want to, you know, some thoughts, something that came to you, something, anything, you know, feel free to let me know if you have a question or anything. You know, I'll get it back to you because, like I said, I really appreciate that you are looking at these experiences. Oh, and for the person who was here from Beirut, my cousin was just there at a wedding, which probably doesn't mean you know my cousin or the person who got married, but I just felt like there was a little connection there. Well, just to give you a real quick before we let you go,
background about the project is we're just we're trying to explore different speculative techniques of fiction and engaging with different philosophical critiques on such things and even like massive speculative philosophical modes of thinking and trying to think about the ways in which fiction well the ways in which fiction becomes real all can actually manifest reality, thinking about it as a political position, like you said about empowerment, you know, one way is like, one of the general research questions is like with the general loss of hope of change, of which I think a lot of millennials, people
nowadays are in a state of, for many reasons, how fiction can be used as a way of binding, effectively binding people together towards commitment towards maybe movement or a reconfiguration of the left politics, things like this. So we're trying to engage it as a love of fiction, love of reading, and love of speculative fiction in general, but also thinking about it in which practices might be useful, which ones can we engage with and stuff. So the Black Quantum Futurism, the Afrofuturism has been of interest. This, specifically this group of seminars that we're running are on trying to bring to light non-white, non-male, non-Western thinking into the mix.
So it's generally when you create sort of like these sorts of, like obviously Afrofuturism is touching on this right from the beginning, but I mean when you think about these sorts of futures, they're like holistically white, male-dominated sort of speculations. So yeah, sort of a way of engaging in different aspects. So like next week we'll read Chinese science fiction and talk about the three-body problem is the book we're going to read. And then we'll talk about it because this is like thinking about the world in which mechanical laws are impossible. And so how do you speculate change time agency in the world
in which you can't predict what might happen the next time, what might happen in the next seconds? Because everything is completely in a chaotic world. So yeah, it's just like exploring different worlds from different points of view and seeing if we can come to terms with some sort of, I don't know, engaging with these different forms of fiction as like an operator, I guess. So that's just a little general, but I should have probably given you that beforehand, but we had a long discussion. So, but yes, thank you very much. Is this a, everybody thank Natasha Womack for coming. She's a renowned filmmaker, choreographer, novelist, speaker, many other things.
Runs two, the Eye of Futurism is the main website that you're still running. Right. Yes. Is the post-black experience still going? Or is that? I haven't updated it in a minute. Maybe I should go back and start posting more. But if you want to look at the other interviews that are on there, I'll just put it up here, postblackexperience.com. And then the Rayla book, too. All right, great. Yeah, so thanks again. This has been so awesome. No, thank you. I appreciate it. I really appreciate it. We'll keep in touch. Hopefully we'll be able to collaborate in the future.
I'll be in touch with you about that Cleveland event hopefully soon. Okay, yeah. Just let me know how I can support you. Alright, well thank you very much. Alright, thanks. Have a great one. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye-bye. So, shall we take a 10 minute break? She was very generous with her time. We talked about her being on 30 minutes. She stayed an hour and a half. No, a little over an hour. So let's take 10, 15 minutes, and then we can discuss...
Perhaps we've exhausted now after two sessions the black quantum futurism, afrofuturism, but we can discuss a little bit about how we might... I mean, if anybody has prepared passages, we can talk about it. We can discuss how we might continue to talk about it through Slack. And then also, I want to pick up back on what I was talking about with the biopolitics. So let's meet back in 10 minutes. I have it after whatever time you guys have. So 10 minutes from now, we'll meet back up. Okay? Okay.
Not sure he will make it back in time. Give everybody a second to come back. back. So yeah, those two, so the last two weeks we had two, I think, quite different versions of Afrofuturism, although both kind of hone in on the identity issues in Afrofuturism and more so Yatasha Womacks is more post-structuralist, I think, aspects of deconstructing identity,
whereas Rashida's is more leaning towards closer to her black power identity politics. I find this a little to be one of them there are others who critique this Tony Montanaro who is a Du Bois scholar at Temple University uses this as a main critique of Afrofuturism so it's just like general connections I'm making between the two of them And then I find that Rashida's project perhaps is more political and practical, whereas Natasha's
is more aesthetic and artistic. This is just a comparative, not to say that any better or less are good than the other. But, I mean, regardless, the, I think, the uses in this, in the quantum futurism aspects of temporality work on an aesthetic level, even if you don't really understand the quantum theory of quantum mechanics level. I mean, this is also happening in contemporary fiction in general,
not just in futurist or science fiction texts. You have Don DeLillo's work, DeLillo writes, what is it, Quantum Entanglements in the Future or something, and a few other fictional works that are trying to introduce the quantum theory. But gauging from that, Like, what, like, so we've had a lot, I mean, we've had much on the Afrofuturism aspects, like defining it, seeing where it goes, what does it do, what is its form of temporality, what is its approach to temporality, space and time, its approach to color, history, all these things. So I don't really want to kind of keep going and reviewing those things.
but like pull and try to go further and to take this further into the next sessions, like how much more of the quantum theory aspects do we want to go into? Because Ben actually reminded me that it's not the three-body problem we go on next week. We go into queer futurity and queer utopia in the next section. And there we could find, we could do a link with our current readings, and we can read two short texts by Karen Barad, which I could add if everybody is interested in adding in the more theoretical aspects of the readings.
Since we focused a lot on the fiction, like the first session, we focused a lot on the theory or the philosophy. The past two sessions we were focusing a lot on just the general speculative fiction genre of Afrofuturism, or black speculative fiction. I kind of wanted to introduce back more philosophy and stuff. So, okay great. We have one that we'd like to do broad. Okay cool. There are two texts that I really would like to read. If anybody has any further suggestions we could do that but but to that I work that I micro laro I have didn't we can go back to Laura's loans
I have a 3 texts but I've not been published in English that I think would be useful we so I have to like do some changing Yes. Always keep mixing the fiction in. So next session we will read, like, Samuel Delaney, we'll read Octavia Butler, and we'll read a few other things. But I want to incorporate some more of the broad stuff and some things that might not be directly talking about fiction, but where we can extend them.
So one thing that I want to show is, let me just upload it here to the chat, is this text that I find really interesting. Let me upload it, sorry. And this text. Alright, so they're uploading. They will come up on the chat. You probably will have to ask me for...
I'll upload them to Slack though as well. So this first one, Quantum Entanglements and Ontological Relations of Inheritance, I think is like a perfect segue into, from where we were talking about into the next one. Also has this aspect of ontology, which is something we have yet to talk about, which is another form of temporal discontinuity outside of science fiction, but this is her approaching it as a critique, a deconstruction of Derrida's ontology and thinking about it in a materialist way. I think it's a remarkable text, very interesting.
I don't think it's that long. The other text is a supplemental reading if people are more interested in her work. And it's a text that she did about a feminist approach to teaching quantum physics. And there is this last citation from Burana that I would give as the Duke keynote that she did. This is Duke University. This is Duke University, which is here, which is where she kind of does performative aspects of quantum theory in general, and kind of goes between queer and feminist practices. That would be the three broad texts.
Ben will come back and actually, he's gonna provide more texts to me on Sunday, And by Monday night, I will have another large PDF, probably, with citations and references for you guys for the next session. But yeah, I would like to get into reading some of these things. A lot of REL stuff I can add as supplemental readings. Also, would be willing to set up an extra Hangout event sometime during the week that we could find. We could, like Slack allows us to do polls and stuff. So I might start polling people for interests. You know, it is hard to negotiate between the many
different diverse levels of people's skills and everything. Yeah. So just ask me for the permission, and then I'll give you permission. The one really annoying thing about this. You can post it and then it won't on the app. As soon as it comes up in my email, I will give you all permission. I'm going to post it in the Slack as well, I guess, because it will be easier for everybody to access there.
reading the PDF through the Slack application, we can also collectively annotate PDFs. It would really give us a good understanding throughout the week of where people are and what they're finding interesting. And we can all start side discussions, because we can't get everything, everything, obviously, within these two hours to go very quickly. And we can't have, like, sometimes the conversation is not, you know, it comes a few days later or something like that. Is everyone here on Slack? I think most everybody is on Slack, yes. So before we, before I get into this, before I share, before I get into this thing that
I was talking about with Catherine. Does anybody have any last comments on the Afrofuturism text? Not to say that we can't ever re-approach it, but we can do it in the Slack. Everybody's fine with that. Then we can move to this sort of tangent that I was planning to discuss with Catherine's question earlier. Okay. So there is a text, which I'm going to also just post to Slack, because it will be easier. It's called Mnemonic Control by Parisi and Goodman.
So I was talking about it. They kind of just basically are talking about the waves of cybernetics. And the question that was asked by Catherine was like, how might we use this to speculate into the future or design a future? Well, so what I immediately thought of was this third wave cybernetics that they sort of are outlining here. And they say that, and I'm going to pull it up, I'm going to read the actual text, but But they read in hyperstition in this, which is another reason why I wanted to bring it up because I know Axley's work is dealing a lot with hyperstition. But they give the example of branding, which I think is really interesting.
So third wave cybernetics is actually the control and the actual creation of the virtual or the future, virtual and the wisdom terms. So they give the example of branding and how branding gives this sort of temporal effect. You sort of create something that's fictional, something that doesn't exist like a logo that people are effectively connected to, that feel some sort of fictional connection to the past in which it never existed but you're effectively related to the past. And then a brand is built in a way in which it generates a future act or a future, a future form based on the way that you sort of market the brand.
So in, I mean if you want to think of it in dystopian terms, that's a form of, you know, beyond biopolitical control. They also talk about in the hyperstitional aspects on this text as like how might we hijack these sorts of functions and use them to our benefit. So I think the text, I mean, that's like a really, really short and reductive, like, a summary of this text. But if... So it's kind of like a post-situation sort of day-torn moment kind of thing?
Yeah. And then you talk about the way they're hijacking. Yeah. Yeah. In a way, it's about a hijack. So in hyperstitional terms, they have this sort of occult or secrets or even like this sort of... It's a hacking. Yeah, it's a hacking. But I mean, their analysis in the text is about sort of how branding is used as a new form of control. So contemporary branding, page 173, contemporary branding culture for example sets out to distribute
memory implants which provide the recipient with the sense of the already enjoyed encouraging repeated consumption, a repetition of memory that the recipient hasn't had. The operation of power through branding seeks to remodel long-term memory via a kind of time anomaly. when it occupies the shortest possible time spans is a parasite on the dynamic of short-term intuition, the coexistence of the past, present, future, ceaselessly affecting long-term memory by instigating movement in the neurophysiological plasticity of the brain. Branding potentiates long-term memories through the stirring of new synaptic connections, re-routing memories that are immediately familiar. Long-term memories are continuously reassembled in non-linear
combinations by the immediacy of short-term memory. Thus, branding attempts to create a collectively felt aura that induces loyalty through repetition. Of course, loyalty to a brand, the agency of the virtual corporate body, is simultaneously a mode of addiction. Branding installs a web of associations and generates loops of libidinal investment. like it's sort of like this this aspect of this aspect of branding as a function of hyperstitial futurity or memory control but really it's about like also about the extension of cybernetic theory into being able to actually
invent the future and critique of memory as always being synthetic also comes up in this text various things I think it's a really good text it would be quite useful for maybe it would be useful for you maybe for me it turned out to be one of the best ways to kind of describe hyperstition to people that don't want to get into all the occult-y things you know I like the accomplished I do too some people don't want to go through like the 49 different gods sometimes fair enough to explain tarot style games
or like you know so this comes to be a very good example of being able to sort of explain it in a pedestrian way pedestrian way text is very good I stumbled across it a little bit ago. When you read it out there, it reminded me in a really strange way of a sort of pop thesis a friend of mine has about... They used to have... Didn't you go to university in Glasgow briefly? Yeah. Yeah, well, during Queen Margaret Union, they used to have these cheesy pop nights, and they would sort of use them to integrate undergraduate students, basically, and his thesis was that at these nights, they always play pop songs that were popular maybe five years ago,
so that the new cohort of students always have this sort of fake shared sense of identity based around their recognition of the same songs that they were listening to five years ago, which is, I don't know, I thought I had a strange sort of parallel with what you were saying, this sort of retroactive feedback loop. Oh, yeah. And then again, like the UK culture pop music, they're very invested in their 90s musical tastes. So I mean, like, even this is where ontology comes in, and like Mark Fisher talks about it best, right? like this is where like the mourning of the rave culture of the UK and the dub culture
and... You're talking about burial. Yeah, burial being the priming zone. So yeah, so anyways, Catherine, so this might be a text that might interest you as well. This is one way of sort of like a way of branding itself as being a way of forming categories, concepts, words, things like that in order to create or invent a future. There are other ways. This is just a way to jump for. Is there any other Berard texts, if you have read Karen's work, that you would like to read or discuss? No? Yes? Maybe.
Always post it to the Slack. That'll be the easiest way for everybody to access. And we could, because I would like to make, I want to make this as most collective as possible. It's very, it's quite difficult sometimes. What am I missing now? Yeah, so I will have the text to you guys by Monday. I'll tell you which ones we're gonna definitely read. I think next week there is no guest, so it will just be a session with us, so we will... Well, there may be a guest. We're still waiting for a confirmation. Matthew, it's in the Slack now, which might be easier to access.
Those of you who do not have access to the video annotation software, the two and will be three, app archives, send me an email. Let me know what email you're using. Which ones you don't have, we'll try to do it. If not, I will just give you a different way of accessing the videos. And yeah, I do a lot of promotional videos as well. Promotional videos and like pseudo-propagandist videos for, you know, like community videos.
I just had to do this horrible one. for the R where at the RNC the Republican National Convention coming in so I had to do these edit this no three body will be two weeks from now or for I got a little three body problems also largest text so I want to give the most time for that so I'll probably start beating section as we as we go but any idea is horrible community project that was basically fictionalizing what urban what urban community would say to the Republicans I when it's yeah it will go live soon actually so I'll link it to you and I'm gonna remix it
I'm gonna make better version so I was unable to pick the bird like what I was I wasn't I had no choice in what we were allowed to use but some of the content I have is really good but cheek the the our producer cut all the good stuff. All the real stuff. Like, you know, problems with young women and 20-year-old men who don't care what age you are in their environment. I mean, yeah, just a lot of things. It's a very violent area locally, and there's like 130 murders recently, like 30 in a month.
So it's like, that's what this whole thing's about. It's about the 17-year-old girl who did this march during February. sort of about like she did this march that was about black you know February is the month for black awareness but it was also about all these people that they've sort of lost really really quickly so you're also doing a thing on your Instagram, okay, cool yeah the project that it was it's not my project but I'm editing one of the videos, but it's called Fixers. It's not something that is great. I shouldn't
say that, but she won't see this. I can show you the... I'm trying to find the project. It's just like a local gallery. Anyways, it's called Fixers. If you look up Fixers Cleveland, If you look up Fixers Cleveland, it will come up. All right, sorry for that tangent. Yeah, so, yeah, let's, I don't think we will have a guest, so we will definitely be doing, finally, collective reading. Try to like mix, I'm trying, This seminar I'm trying to blend in with Q&As with people that are reading and the theory and the fiction.
So this next session, I will try to get all of you to volunteer for at least one section or one text, and then prepare five to 10 minutes just to cut. Thank you, Matthew. Five to 10 minutes just to get us started on a conversation, and then we'll discuss it. And hopefully I'll try to structure it more ahead of time so we can all prepare, because we won't be doing this sort of Q&A session. And I did receive feedback from some of you, which I'm trying to implement, one being Slack from Tal and certain things. And then Tim was very interested in trying
to get something that we could all work on together, like a piece of text. So this is why I'm trying to use the Slack annotation. Like the Slack is a drafting place. But when we're in the classroom, we can actually go to there and read. And then we can all kind of like annotate. We can all be there to see everything. So please send me whatever critiques you have or things that you would like to be added in. We have three more weeks of these sessions. and we will be done with this one. But we have some, I think, some texts that we won't be able to get in that I would be willing to have extra sessions for,
like the Laravel stuff. When we read Three Body Problem, it's really related to Melisu's work, which Catherine and Toma already read it with us, but we should read the new Melisu, which is very short, extra science fiction kind of text. So I will post something on the Slack this week with some general times, and we can all vote on times. And so maybe this week we do some LAREL reading, and then next week we do, or the week of the extra, or the three-body problem, we can do the extra picture and stuff. Kind of just small . You guys don't have to be there if you don't want to. We just try to organize it. And please, if Slack has a Hangout app as well,
so if two of you or three of you are on and talking and you wanna talk in person, just use the, you can use the integration with the Hangouts app. Let's integrate it into Slack. It's quite, I think it starts to become intuitive to learn, but if you need any help with using Slack, let me know. This is all just kind of, I guess, ending, or paper pushing kind of aspects. Nothing interesting, but I think necessary to talk about. So, yeah, Tal's the expert at Slack. Also, Tal, do you have any suggestions for how we might organize it to best use in this way?
for the seminar, since it's usually like a productivity and team building, corporate team building kind of thing. Okay, let me know. Okay, so that would be everything. Does anybody have any final questions or comments before we end the session? No, okay. Well, thank you all for being here. Next week, get into the reading. I guess you guys can start on the broad reading. Now I'll send out the PDF by Monday. Thank you all.