 Everyone, so glad you can make it. Welcome to New America NYC at Civic Hall. I'm Pearson Holtz, and I have the pleasure of working with the Future Tens team. For those of you who are not familiar with Future Tens, it is a partnership between Arizona State, New America, and Slate. So we're very excited. And at Future Tens, we explore emerging technologies and society, and we ultimately aim to be a citizen's guide to the future. Today we're excited to focus on at our future above. A vibrant, artistic, and cultural movement that provides a unique perspective, a black perspective, for examining the politics, aesthetics, and cultural aspects of science and technology. So before we get started, we would like to personally thank our partners at 67 Orange Street in Harlem, who will be providing a signature cocktail for us after the event. So join us for the reception. It will be fun. And also, we're currently broadcasting online right now. There's live stream. So if you have a question during the Q&A portion, you are ultimately consenting to be recorded. So please keep that in mind. So we have dynamic speakers this evening, and here to kick off the conversation is our moderator, Ayesha Harris, who is the culture writer at Slate. So kick it off, Ayesha. Welcome. Thanks for coming out. I'm super excited to discuss this topic. I will introduce our amazing guests this evening. To my right, we have Natasha Womack. She's a filmmaker and the author of African Futurism, the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture, and also of the multi-media series RELAT 2212, about RELAT and mathilmatic, a rebel strategist and third-generation citizen of planning hope. In the middle here, we have Wale Oyejide. Did I film something? Yes, I think. Wale is the designer and creator of the fashion brand, Kerry Jones, as well as a writer, a former attorney, and a courting artist and producer. And all the way on the far right is Michael G. Bennett. He's an associate professor at Arizona State University School for the Future of Innovation in Society, the Center of Science and Imagination, and the Risk Innovation Lab, as well as a lecturer in the Standard Gay O'Connor College of Humanity. So to keep this off, Natasha, since you wrote an entire book about African Futurism and kind of the history of it, I would love if you could kind of let the audience know that everyone watching kind of give an overview of what it's about, and also tell us a little bit about how you became an African Futurist. Sure. Well, one, thank you for inviting me here to stand from really enthusiastic. African Futurism is a way of looking at possible futures for ultimate realities through a black cultural lens. It's the intersection of black culture, technology, the imagination, liberation, and I always add mysticism. It differs from traditional science fiction. One, in that it uses the future, the past and the present as one, it really engages the feminine aspect of consciousness and looks at intuition and feelings as a source of knowledge that's as valuable as saying, well, thank you. And it also addresses or looks at race as a technology. That's the time it's been reviewed. There's a lot of engagement around nature as well. And it's highly intersectional. So it's seamless and has a very fluid perspective that's very nonlinear. So I think that a lot of people see themselves as having futures. And in your book, you describe what kind of a tragedy is like, African Futurism. Right. Who are those folks? Well, yes. If there was like a foundation of sorts in this community, and you would reference Octavia Butler, you would reference a sub-rock, and then a George Clinton, you can't really be around. So can you talk a little bit about, like, how you found yourself within African Futurism? Because it seems like a very personal sort of getting into the women sort of, because of a personal, not a decision, but you have to kind of create that space. That's a big part of it, is creating space to get to that. So how did you come to that? Well, I think that for a lot of people, we get to the question, and then over time, you discover the answer, you know, with most things. And for me, with Afrofuturism, I discovered that I was always an Afrofuturist, and I just did not know the term, or didn't know the prison through which to really look at it. As a kid, I liked science. I liked history. But, you know, history and science, I'm supposed to be living to be a marriage, right? I'm supposed to be a math person, I'm supposed to be a science person, I'm supposed to be a leading person. So, you know, there's a lot of judgments around that. But ultimately, when I went to college at Clark Atlanta University, and that's someone who was talking about what we now call Afrofuturism. And over time, I've really met a lot of people who are engaged with these ideas, who they were looking at, sound, and the imagination, and technology, and music, and culture. They wanted to see themselves in the future. They wanted to claim their relationship to science from a cultural perspective, in terms of those who contributed in the past, or overlooked. And really wanted to engage these ideas for self-vibration, for social change, and felt that it could be very transformative. So, as I discovered, more people who were very much engaged in this, I started to find the type of Afrofuturism. And that really helped narrow my focus. It's very much, I would say, a journey of self-discovery kind of takes over. But like that, much like the music that we call Afrofuturism, you know, the vibrations just get to you, and you're like, oh man, where am I? Well, I would say Afrofuturism is very much that same place. Michael, one of the places you work is the science of imagination. What does that mean? And how does that apply to your use and experience with Afrofuturism? Because Afrofuturism is always about imagination and thinking outside of the box. And I'm curious how that applies to people. So, this is really a direct wisdom all the time. It's going to be in my mouth if it's in the process. So, the center for science and the imagination is, you're going to the first part of your question. It's really focused on a series of projects, a range of projects created, but they all come out to this notion that there's still a lot of work to be done at this intersection of science and science communication. The public, there is publicers, as well as back and forth, more back and forth on our action of more transmission of traffic and whatever you want to call it, between conventional science communities and aesthetic or artistic communities. And so, to put some light on that so we can live more concrete on one of the central programs, the formal programs that's underway at CSI, as we call it, out of ASU right now. It's concerned with the upcoming bicentennial of Frankenstein, the novel. And so, a series of publicly facing engagements that range in terms of actors participating in it. The range from museums to practicing scientists to social sciences to lawyers like myself are all gathering around this novel and more importantly, the central concepts behind it to explore what it might actually lead into innovative and practically by definition controversial work inside of the world and present in the future. As far as my own engagement with that for future is at, in some ways, if you go over what's happening now to a time at the CSI, there have been a series of moments, a series of works, a series of events here that have been really critical to folks who apply initially discovering that I didn't immediately associate with what that real future is and what perhaps it is that are not encouraged yet, but Samuel Delighting, of course, is a major figure for that real future as a personal aid. Along with probably comic books from the 1980s and the old movies that I can read these days his writings are so profound and it's through him that his writings that I came across and continued to come across most of the years that are central in the 19th century as a political one that I want to call it. Well, your, you do a ton of stuff. You have Curie Jones, your fashion line, you also have an exhibition. Is it, it's our Africa, that? Yeah, Africa 2080 it's basically an ongoing series of work. You want to kind of depict the staff of cities over the years in the future. Yeah, so I don't, there, I think there were some, Yeah, there were some images in the other room up there, but just to describe a little bit, there's a series of digital, digital images, and each one is a different city from Africa. And you are in it and also a different people. Yeah, it's super narcissistic, but for anyone who does fashion, if you've ever seen Kanye West, this is us. Yes, it's very time-consuming. But it's about us, first and foremost. But for me it was the idea that all of what we do, and I think at the base level, what we do all this year is storytelling and some form together. So for any of us who ever watched Star Trek or Star Wars or anything with people with funny ears and as a kid, many of us saw ourselves, both the series of those on the screen, until it's natural when you go on to tell stories of your own, you're going to eject pieces of your heritage, pieces of your culture, pieces of yourself into it. So for me, ultimately, if I'm telling stories and full tales about my people, we're going to end up representing the way we look and the way we feel. So when I thought to convey images of different places in Africa, to use your content with numerous different continents, sorry, cultures and countries, then it's very natural to say, well, well, well, what would be the place that things like this in Nairobi look like in the future? I was supposed to think about the kind of stairs we'll be in for the future that we see on television that tends to not reflect a wide variety of cultures, even though they seem to be at the base level. It's not as broad as it could be. So. And those, your images, there's, I think in at least most of them, there's hovering kind of like drones and space aircraft, and you have text underneath them as well. Let's see. For the whole, for the entire thing at the beginning before the actual, and you can find one on this website, he writes, the following is an ongoing series of stories that scrutinize aspects of present-day African society and attempt to telegraph the ripple effects in the far-flung future, which I feel like in many ways encapsulates kind of what Afro-futurism is about, which is kind of, and many people have said this, it's taking, it's from the future, it's from the past, it's from the present. And I just, could you tease out a little more like control your background instead of how you sort of came across that within the work of control? I think generally we think that science fiction tends to be all over the nature. So if you think about Star Trek and the Star Wars they're stories about these cultures a long time ago and they got too far away or far in the future, but they're ultimately telling stories about us. So you watch Star Trek and you have your first interagency kiss on national television but that's allowed to happen because it's all this futuristic land that allows us to kind of lean to each other on a person-level interlife. So for me, oftentimes when you flip through the newspapers on the rare occasions when they come to the continent of Africa, it tends to be doom, gloom, grizzly, it makes sure you're not making this your world for that few terrorist attacks. Well, these things do happen and they do exist, but a lot of my work is intended to kind of convey a more full picture of life, not only on a continent but specifically in Nigeria which is where I'm from. So when I tell these stories, whether they be in the presence of nature or shot into the future, it's always the idea of kind of telling them what's happening now but with a wider scope with a more human scope. So when there is brutality, sickness, violence, you're still getting into the perspective of real people with actual emotions and connections. You're not getting these like faceless crime people who are disposable who use as puppets. You're not getting a story about the first black who dies in the film because they are. Again, if you die first, get a family pride about it. So that's... Ultimately we're using stories as an eagle to kind of tell you about us and who we are and what film could make sense. So out of futurism has pretty much existed for a very long time. So I'm curious if there's anything you can kind of notice. I mean, it could be other factors as well as just like time happens and history happens but like, is there like a very hard difference between a full out of futurism and what's out of futurism after? Well, I can say one of the reasons I love the book Afrofuturism was because a lot of people were engaging with these ideas but they felt like they were very much alone. They were by themselves. They felt isolated. They were, you know, thin and a friend and they're talking about metaphysics, you know, under a rock somewhere and they felt as if they shared these with the larger public or larger black culture that there would be this mass rejection. So it was just this concept that people couldn't connect with themselves. That's why I wrote the book but when I look back to the time when Afrofuturism and the time it emerged, I think for many people engaged with those ideas. It was a way of sharing and in trying to wrap their mind around some of these concepts and really develop the language around it. So when you look at Dr. Alondra Nelson who put together the first out of futurism, Listern and a lot of their early writing to, you know, regretting the others, they were really, they were really trying to synergize and to find a language to articulate how these different concepts intersected. But you have to think about it. You're talking about you're looking at music, to technical culture and you're trying to match that with actual science and you're trying to connect that to, you know, the history or the contributions that Africans and indigenous cultures have made to technology and they're trying to loop that back to the future. I mean, so it could feel as if you're all over the map. And I remember when I spoke with my friend in college who was talking about what we now call Afrofuturism. My first question was well, what is this? I said, what is your foundation? What is this philosophy? Because I came up in a, we thought metaphysics tradition which is very foundational if you have a thing that you do it. So I'm like, okay, so give me a scholar give me a philosophy or a point of view and he couldn't name that. Now he was familiar with other kinds of metaphysics and various terminologies but when it came to identifying Afrofuturism he didn't know that word. And so for some people they don't always have the courage to kind of fight the fight and step out there and be the lone wolf and talk about these subjects publicly. They can feel a little rejected but once there's this, it's established that look, no, there's a community but beyond there being a community there's a lineage there's a history of it and you can connect with all of these people in the past who engage with these same ideas for people of color in particular it's very empowering to feel like they're not an anomaly and that this perspective is rooted in the, rooted in our understanding of humanity and it's rooted in our own culture. In a strictly calendar based sense I'd say there's there's certainly several differences like a before and after a corner of the term several different dimensions and change within what we recognize as Afrofuturism but one of the most important of them it's the only one that I mentioned and I don't talk too much about it is that I think that the concepts, the fundamental concepts behind the term have become much more relevant in the early in the 90s I certainly thought probably once a week that I was living in a science-facial environment just randomly randomly stopped happening in the world and that brings the rate at which I sense that now is probably five times a day. Can we expand a little bit about that because I do think it is important to discuss how we can apply this to today and how it manifests itself in everything that's happening. Sure, sure. So I wouldn't be so bold as to try and defy Afrofuturism but I am bold enough to say that companies and their functional aspects the thing is that many of the artworks, the activities, the individuals that we associate with the term that many of them want to do and one of those things is characterizing various aspects of Black subjectivity history of Black folk in this country or around the world that's fundamentally a science-fictional so a classic way in which that's done is to say take a kind of radical religious history perspective on the Atlantic slave trade and to say that in addition to the conventional interpretation of it as being this economic and ultimately obviously fundamentally racist event you can also understand it as a kind of an alien abduction item to run with this metaphor of alien abduction and kind of open up two science-sictional concepts two science-sictional neologisms two science-sictional tropes of various types many aspects of contemporary Black existence and so that honestly is a really personal attractive aspect of Afrofuturism it's one that I've said a long time ago it's one that I felt pretty regularly before I had an idea of what the term meant and again to run around I feel with increasing frequency now when we look around at the state of the world whether we're talking about assaults on the biosphere whether we're talking about police brutality which is a chronic issue of these days or gun violence by the way I'm speaking about violence to all the people out there live stream land folks in Paris, folks in San Bernardino folks in Chicago folks in Staten Island thoughts good wishes and vibes go out too I wish I could say more than that but coming back to the main point many aspects of what's going on now often times get captured under this term of the Anthropocene especially the ecological damage of the assault on the biosphere fundamental notion there being that humans now are having such a profound impact on the globe, on the planet in the same way that we might talk about the Jurassic which is being the one dominated by reptiles we can now talk about this period that we're in being dominated by human activities but to run with a science fiction thing just a bit further I would say for those of us that are interested in various ways committed to Afrofuturist thought it was my call that could really say a fundamentally horrific for many, many folks that are black in this country and around the world it's a fundamentally horrific period that has been for a long time I think that's why I might be an imagination part of Afrofuturism because it's about imagination and transform your circumstances to be able to see something beyond what happens to be in front of you and therefore connect with that and almost project yourself into that experience by seeing it first and moving past a certain projected reality just to chime in on that sorry just to chime in on that a piece that should be appended to what I just said is that as Martin Sinker who wrote Afrofuturistically before Derrick Daly in my few years as he has suggested one of the things that's so interesting about black American approaches to as I called it the Cthulhu scene is that there's a radically most tragically visionary approach to the apocalyptic life it's not defeatist Sinker says in effect that that's a bulk of black culture is post apocalyptic but only by necessity it's as a result of what's happened and it moves on from that in a strange kind of way again tragically visionary way it embraces apocalypses because there is no choice really you have to apply your imagination to create new things given the strictly way of everything so from an African perspective much of the stories and incidents told of the continent of Africa to the rest of the world have a very stark particular picture you said more African people immediately conveyed certain interests but at large it didn't even matter so what we do in storytelling whether it be precipitated or in the African pictures to clean is the idea of kind of reclaiming your narrative and telling you stories so that people won't tell it to you or for you and telling you stories so that you can then have a basis to live your life for atonement so instead of having somebody in Hollywood telling an African it's like what are we going to be like we can then have people who are from there who are living and understanding who can kind of convey what they believe so that we're basically reclaiming the image of what has become a force of power I'm curious, I mean this is a few years back but what did you think of Disturbed Mind in terms of did you see Disturbed Mind? Yes, so awesome film pretty problematic, addiction to medrians so that stands as me because I am one really attractive looking film so it's kind of a different point but the inspiration just came out of this interesting film and I'm sure it's amazing because I love his work and I did that similar I just didn't have interest in seeing it because I heard this from a lot of different Africans as well it's just that we had this fatigue of suffering so while there is a degree of negativity and violence and I'm sure it's a different factor at a certain point you just get tired of seeing people needlessly slaughtering each other without much else so that's what I haven't seen in the film so it's not fair for me to completely tide it but there's a degree of like I've seen it so I know that people felt similar to Montauro as a slave without having seen it and so it kind of made me like I saw it on the film but when we submission came out I was thinking that people would be really insulting regardless of how great this film is it's a whole story I was thinking too when it comes to Afrofuturism I think one of the things that excites people about it is that it triggers the sense of agency and your ability to tell a story but also your ability to really connect to a narrative that's not stoic sometimes the way black the black culture narrative to share is that it's kind of this online struggle of sorts and there's a truth to that there's total truth to that but I think another perspective is looking at the incredible resilience and out of that resilience comes a sense of optimism that then gives you a level of agency and so there's kind of this realism that's always placed upon us in our storytelling as if we're supposed to talk about a specific thing in a specific way and if you don't have this kind of foreign arc to it then you are not adequately capturing the the story of our cultures but when you step into the creative world and the realm of the imagination not to mention things that have actually happened you can't create your own story so there's just this concept that our imaginations can be hijacked because as people of African descent was supposed to tell a particular kind of narrative when we could dream of anything we want to dream of and have a sense of agency in our real world but as well as in our own creative lives and it's that creativity that has helped us to transform our experiences and facilitate a level of forget the survival but flourishing in unusual times for white sometimes it seems like people of color especially black people that's a lot of the arc whether it's half of the futureism or not it's the idea of hope and not focusing or even not not focusing but not dwelling too much on the struggle so how is that half of the futureism different say than something that is not that is equally as hopeful and sort of resilient example Kendrick Lamar is alright that's a very powerful hopeful resilient song I wouldn't classify it as half of the futureism is it just solely the technology aspect or the science fiction aspect or is there more than half that kind of separates the science fiction aspect but I think it Afrofuturism takes it to space it takes it in some cases to the supernatural maybe come flip sides in the same form so it doesn't have to be purely rooted in the here and now where there's a sense of limitation in the three dimensional realm there's always this understanding that there's rewarding in the three dimensional realm and whether you're talking about the physical reality of actually being in space or you're talking about other worlds generally speaking there's always this connection to that sense of self and this larger identity so you aren't just a human being you can be a universal being that's kind of three dimensional space and in some Afrofuturism constantly reminds us of that whereas other Americans that may talk about hope and aspiration that's not what you're saying so Chris the student you encountered Afrofuturism in college right or you became aware that it was actually I didn't I heard the term Afrofuturism really more in recent years I don't remember hearing the term in college where it actually stuck okay let's put it that way and did you guys also kind of encounter it in or younger I remember using the term on EPF and up in Parisville about going where it came from so it's one of those things that works in the back of your head and it's like these are going to sound awesome it's a trick to position if you're not used to seeing so it's attractive and it has it sounds cool because it is so I think there's one of those things that's going to make sense I asked this question because I'm interested in knowing how like is Afrofuturism a movement or a concept that is accessible to everyone regardless of what their education is what their background is because a lot of it is resiliency and hope and I feel like if a lot of people are not as educated if they are really in poverty it might be more difficult for them to access that part of their imagination and wanting to find that space and create that space and you guys are kind of within that is it a mixture of different types of people within Afrofuturism and recent I find that generally speaking regardless of background it's just a matter of what you reference as a connecting point if you say George Quinn if you say a John Coltrane some people access it very much through music and they go exactly what you're talking about without having to use any special language to give a big description I found that many people it's interesting because sometimes we talk about Afrofuturism like this higher thought process if only educated people can discuss it when it very much is rooted within so many people and they express and they connect with it very easily you don't need to spell it out because it's in their soul it's a part of their imagination it's a part of their experience so we're using certain terminology to really codify it but in terms of people connecting with it they know exactly what you're talking about they've experienced that level of transformation that level of liberation sometimes through music or through dance or through contemplation they see themselves as being larger than the spaces that they're in and when it's shared that hey this is something we can talk about publicly their game you can totally surprise about who connects and why they connect and you're just asking the right question and they're more knowledgeable than anyone you could imagine because it's just a matter of asking the right question it seems to me that as is the case with so many vinyl artistic moves I guess is one way to describe some of the things that happened some of the awesomeness of Afrofuturism with so many activities in that category there's a wide spectrum of application so perhaps someone who is struggling to put food on the table on a weekly or daily basis might not be reading the theoretical writings of someone like homeboy shooting maybe they are maybe they're not but maybe they are seeing the video for Missalia as you relatively WTF video which is profoundly Afrofuturist and you can get a hyper compressed sense of some of the things that we're talking about here by seeing by hearing certain recordings maybe then by hearing very short poems if someone is really skilled maybe by reading or tweeting by the way I hope they're tweeting so I've learned very quickly even years ago with making music the idea of owning what you create is futile and the fools earned so if you make something you put up with the world you have no control over who appreciates it nor should you so when you have a genre like whether you have a future about you're going to make it whoever feels like the next to it and you ultimately have no right or I believe you have no right to say you can't relate to that because you didn't experience the same way I did you didn't grow up the way I did so for me it's ultimately it's almost like opening this whole new hallway into a library that everyone is ready to access and the most people didn't know was there so in the sense I see people like us as gatekeepers when people were in front of the doorways and look at their other stories and check out and they're just this whole and complete and diverse as all of those that you've been supposed to perform so it's just kind of opening the spectrum to life and experience through as a result you mentioned Star Wars a couple of times here we've also talked a little bit about how one aspect of us features them is the body, the black body being sort of an alien not of this planet the other and since Lupita Nyong'o has been cast in Star Wars there's been a bit of a sort of controversy some people are kind of upset by the fact that she's playing in the first place because like I think she's the only main black female character in the movie that we know of and first of all she's gorgeous and she's going to be motion capture so I don't know what I'm going to see with the face so a lot of people are upset about that I'm curious because part of Afrofuturism is kind of embracing the alien who's claiming it what do you guys think of people being upset about this and are you here for that I have to say that I can't talk about it without saying it but do you think do you think people are jumping out of her representation you are like a weakness right I'm kind of waiting to see but I do understand that people are they get very excited about representation as we should because that's sort of the holy grail I want to see images of people on the continent are advocating the same in the future I want to see that image I don't want to imply I don't want to see a metaphor I'm an alien and I'm supposed to say oh that's my story I'm going to actually see people who look like me because why should I not so it's the whole idea that people are this is just a concept, it's not a concept it's a reality an attempt to erase people from the future so you erase from the past you erase from the future and then you're sort of hovering for someone to write a story with your complexion so I don't like that lack of agency at all so I understand how important representation is and I just have to give a little shameless love I am doing a movie called Our Star City which I wrote and directed which I am writing or excuse me I haven't and we'll direct and I'm shooting our movie next year and it's about engaging stories of people of color that are in the future or in the here and now very space bound and all of that showing just how easily we connect to a lot of these concepts and it was very intentional and most of the people are people over African descent and that was done so because that means something you know it could indicate some message so I understand why people would be credible we all do there's other projects we command where they put masculine people and pull their hair back so we can tell you know just all this this color these are predators sort of like they look like dreads but you know this is a plot guide and they love it I mean I mean maybe I wouldn't do too much but I know these little things that we look at we're like oh Dark Vader we love Dark Vader why would you think so John and he had a black exterior I mean really you're a holy monster I love you because you choke people in a distance that's a useful skill because I thought Karris had a stone and had lost it and he found it and you know these are like things and I'm like yeah he took it to the start so I think we live in a culture of a professional needless average of people literally every day there's something to be very upset about and I think that there's oftentimes some justification but my perspective on that is to do with what you did is if you're upset about not seeing the video make a film we live in a culture of like everybody's phone can record YouTube is there I would walk into Ralph Lawrence and not see things that represented me so I'd start a mentor I'm not finding means like huge success because the idea literally had you in this room to create what you want to see the world and you had JJ Abrams or George Lucas or Roger Pink so it's horrible write your story and make your film if we all do that there wouldn't be much to complain about I'm not sure we have to see the film because in a sense to respond to your question in a sense we've already seen it and this is the same kind of response that at least a certain slice of the view of the population and largely people of color had the majority arrived why do you have this person who is disabled in a certain kind of way many of the comments were the same thing with Michael Dolan as warm basically the coolest character on the program have to be hidden behind all of this stuff on his forehead and I'd receive a hairline and so forth it's a verenial kind of critique that I don't want to I don't want to dismiss out of hand because I didn't do politics so first of all they're seriously taking seriously but I do think oftentimes that kind of name or that kind of critique of science fiction it can be a bit too serious it can be a bit too serious again this is pop culture it's an era of pop culture as well I need to adjust in my opinion now for the future and then there's instances of these types of moments that are just hilarious right so the reboot that was from Black Doctor for example I thought it was hilarious what they did with the Doctor the Black Doctor who is people now by show of hands the reboot so it's back in born again right so now I guess 10 years exactly so 10 years or so ago a reboot of it and most were short there are a bunch of clones that are sylons now and they're limited number of them in some ways quasi and more and their consciousness loads to a giant ship and another version of their cells essentially their physical bodies stored in large numbers each one of these instances in sylons stored in large numbers on the ship waiting to be uploaded with a consciousness whenever the one that's walking around is killed and there's one that's on the left and he's a Doctor killed over and over and over again like so far in the storyline it's almost like a joke exactly so whereas with the red shirt and the original Star Trek series people like Duke can only be killed once right and then you get upset this Duke just gets killed over and over and over again and he can't read anything I kept watching and I still watch you should too I think we're going to open it up to a few questions from the audience Racism in Afrofuturism where the black experience of subjectivity is placed at the center I asked because earlier this week's series was in the news because she was asked to define the word bitch and one of the definitions was parentheses of black slave and parentheses of a woman so we discovered our AI is racist so I was wondering if you guys could speak to that at all given the centering of the black experience but also this notion of racism as a topic to be explored not just in an allegorical sense but as a visceral reality I think that's a big aspect of a lot of the Afrofuturist works when I was talking about Afrofuturism different from traditional science in many ways one of those forums was and looking at race as this technology and with it being a technology it's this deconstruction of ugliness or it's this narrative of this post-apocalyptic story and kind of framing things in that way to be able to step outside of it because I think one of the things that makes one of the many things that makes racism a little tough is that we see it as something that's always existed forever and ever when the whole notion of even being black or white were created to justify the transatlantic slave trade so these categorization systems the power and balance that we urge for that that we've been breaking out of did not always exist and so when you talk about race as a technology and it's a constant reminder of that and there are other sociological frameworks that people use to talk about race but for me when you say it's a technology it instantly reminds you that it's created and it's created for a specific reason if it's created for a reason it's a technology it can be dismantled and when you look at it in that way I think it can be very transformative but yeah there are a number of works that you know visual art music literature that explores it in that way but just as critical race theory there are a number of essays that really hone in on that thought concept you especially said the Nigerian gentleman do you see a role of Yoruba Orisha culture as a blueprint to our Afro-Futurist in terms of artwork and writing and just basic side I see it as an opportunity to so all of us come from different cultures each of these cultures has a lot of major myths and so with respect from it just being an untagged resource so people who are either of Yoruba Nigerian descent know about this so people who are just kind of plugged into that background know about it but for me it's just the whole big avenue of storytelling the whole new mythos to for lack of a better term to exploit and to tell stories with and I think that's never a bad thing there's actually a short that's out where the Orleesias are heroes and the comic book as well I'm curious considering African-American culture in particular America and how religious it is on Christian it intends to be what role religion plays in Afro-Futurism I'd say that the mysticism is a big aspect of Afro-Futurism so there's a lot of conversation where people are either talking about spirituality generally speaking or they're referencing a lot of African traditional religions or African derived religions a lot of native aspects of spirituality and kind of looking at Christianity as well Islam and so forth and kind of looking at perspectives that connect people to a higher sense of self so there's a lot of you'll see a lot of spirituality in Afro-Futurist writings which also makes it very different from traditional science fiction because spirituality of that larger sense of self is not always openly integrated but you'll see it and probably almost even the majority of the works some level of spirituality One of the most interesting ways in which I see really theological concepts at play Afro-Futurist thought goes again to Apocalypse because it's a really interesting kind of tension and traffic between a kind of conventional or traditional Judeo-Christian notion that is wrapped up with revelations by the stormers towards the end to the New Testament more or less Apocalypse and the catastrophic sense the world is destroyed it's the end of time etc the tension between that and Apocalypse and the etymological sense as you look at the history of the construction of the world it's really going towards an indication of the time in which things transform so much so radically that after after whatever happens there is a deep need for a complete readjustment a completely new set of eyes are needed a deep sense of what academics might call interpretation of necessity arrives and in that kind of space it becomes really kind of interesting that's something that Samuel Delaney talks about at Laney Hello Kai Great panel and you just talked about how racism technology so I think if racism is turned into very new technology you can apply and as a software developer I kind of see it coming out of waves like ok racism 1.0 racism 2.0 so how can Afrofuturism sort of phase it out finally because software has a death period when finally a new technology takes form so racism in technology can be seen after futurism must also be a technology that conveys racism out so I think what we need to kind of keep in mind is just human nature is will but always kind of be what it is so before colonialism and in the present day in my country specifically there were divisions amongst the people there but majority of this country was put together by the English and was a forced situation where numerous ethnicities were forced to become countrymen essentially so you can imagine the negative feelings that arise when you're forced to become neighbors and share resources with somebody who is like a moral enemy of yours beyond the skin cover it's about I don't like you as all you are so when you speak of racism that's absolutely a reality and a constant technology if you will that we need to work on but as human beings we will always find a reason to divide each other that's kind of the question that we need to look at I mean if you take this step further people who do both violence against that are attacking people who are within proximity and people who look like each other so often times awful racism is a horrible deal that conflicts America it's not the sole thing that haunts us it's us this is a bit of a follow up to the religion question perhaps in that certainly the aesthetic elements of Sun Ra's foundational role in Afrofuturism is pretty much beyond question I'm wondering how much attention has been paid from like the theoretical standpoint to sort of like specifically his utopian vision which does have like very strong spiritual and political and activist dimensions to it but you actually like look at what he was saying while he was playing the book of music Sure there's been a number of workshops and more recently a conference that was at University of Chicago that specifically centered around Sun Ra and the mythology around resistance cultural resistance and Thomas Stanley was one of the speakers there he wrote a autobiography of local Sun Ra and he talked about Sun Ra as being very much apolitical in the sense that he thinks the actions that he took he did the contents of politics but he was apolitical in that he was very much about universalism and celebrated your cosmic identity and everyone has a cosmic identity and wanted to really hyperlink people to that state of existence so Sun Ra is more now than ever viewed in the context as a philosopher he always was but now it's being actively discussed There are series of the theoretical and conceptual dimensions of Sun Ra and theorization around Sun Ra there are series of interesting pieces including dissertations that have been written in the last five years so we're going to point it towards that I have a question I think we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier the classes are then black culture something that plays into the community very often and it's something that we rarely talk about and the black community should be moving forward does Afrofuturism touch upon that anyway the division between the educated black men and women and the women in the projects is that a topic that's ever touched upon in Afrofuturism? Thank you guys it's very much about universalism there's anti-racism, anti-classism anti-sexism anti-anything that doesn't allow people to express themselves and so but I can't think of a work that specifically deals with classism from an intercultural perspective which doesn't mean there's not only that it doesn't exist I just can't think of one so I think another partial answer is that you could certainly make links between some of the fundamental works that are associated with Afrofuturism and class analysis in one way or another and one that comes to mind immediately or multiple ones that come to mind immediately the science fictional story is that W. E. Du Bois wrote because as soon as you are on that terrain then not only are you talking about the very notions that we associate with Du Boisian thought and double consciousness you're also on the terrain of the talented 10th right and so there's a an acknowledgement of class fracturing in the black community through this concept but also a kind of social political mandate there to act on it and the moral obligation is indicated there too because he's often talking about the responsibilities of black folk and the Western armies but kind of struggling to think of a work that increases it directly right, not great, not class specifically in a cultural context like I can think of class well if I go to Grail of 2012 when you look at the formation of this new planet that was a former Earth satellite class emerges despite the fact that it was utopian and people didn't want to have class so race doesn't exist as we understand it today but there's this idea of who is here first and you know who really original architects and so there's a sense of class that emerges out of that and I think that kind of goes back to your human nature point that you had mentioned before about there being a desire about some people to always try to create some sense of separation so that concludes our conversation but you guys can actually join us in other words to all of us outside and have some practice thank you