Eller, i hvert fald et canadisk magasin.

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
Vol. 39, Spring 2018
Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures
https://www.utpjournals.press/toc/topia/39

Future Movements: Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures—An Introduction; tobias c. van Veen, Reynaldo Anderson

Vi skal vade lidt rundt i, at afrofuturisme kan defineres på mange måder. Og at alting ændrer sig over tid, også dette felt.

Afrofuturisme er dødsens alvorligt. Racisme er noget, folk dør af.

Hm. Blev “The Comet” først opdaget, da en akademiker så den? Jeg tror, der var et par andre indover også.

Whip My Hair: John Jennings on the Black Liberation Technology of TOPIA’s Cover; tobias c. van Veen

Forsiden på tidsskriftet er vist lavet af en tegneserieskaber. Så vi skal snakke tegneserier.

Reading Black Resistance through Afrofuturism: Notes on post-Apocalyptic Blackness and Black Rebel Cyborgs in Canada; Robyn Maynard

Abstract – Taking seriously the temporal aspects of Public Enemy’s assertion that since the advent of slavery, “Armageddon been-in-effect” for the African diaspora, this paper examines Canada’s black radical tradition through Afrofuturist methodologies that disrupt the linear progress narratives of modernity. As the project of modernity positions black life as outside of humanity, the black condition can be conceived of as cyborg: figured at once as machine, fungible commodity and monster. Yet despite the foundational, apocalyptic violence exerted upon the black Atlantic, subversion and resistance have also defined the black experience, embodied by those who refused, often at great risk, to fight against incorporation into the violent structures of the New World, working instead toward new ways of black becoming. These individuals have been described by Joy James and João Costa Vargas as “black rebel cyborgs.” Taking up Kodwo Eshun’s elaboration of “chronopolitics,” in which interventions in our pasts can help to rewrite new futures, this article examines flashpoints of black futurities elaborated by the history of black rebel cyborgs in Canada. This article does not undertake a comprehensive historical narrative, but seeks instead to explore subversive moments in the black rebel cyborg history of Canada, turning to the “runaway slave” and freedom seeker Marie-Josephe Angélique, accused of burning down Montreal’s Old Port in 1734; the resistance of black vigilance committees against slave catchers at the border in Chatham, Ontario, in 1858; and Haitian taxi drivers who organized against racism in 1980s Montreal. These flashpoints are explored alongside the Afrofuturist science fiction and speculative myths created by Drexciya, Kaie Kellough and others, with an emphasis toward infiltrating the past and the present with new black futurities.

Jeg er med på en forbindelse mellem slaveri og apokalypse. Men hvordan kommer vi derfra til sort = cyborg?

Artiklen starter med noget overordnet, teoretisk, før vi kommer til de konkrete eksempler fra Canada.

Som er konkrete, historiske eksempler. Annoncer, referater osv., der beskriver sortes kamp. Dog omtales der også noget, der lyder som sf: Navette.

Unenslaveable Rapture: Afrxfuturism and Diasporic Vertigo in Beyoncé’s Lemonade; Valorie D. Thomas

Abstract – Drawing from African diasporic cosmology, Beyoncé’s Lemonade pivots on the tension of black being and unbeing constructed through and situated in a global order structured by the production of antiblackness. While bowing to Afropessimism’s acknowledgement of the black unbeing produced by the precondition of antiblackness, and to the inescapability of social death and actual annihilation, I assert that Lemonade advances a black womanist aesthetic that articulates the complex effects of diasporic vertigo. Diasporic vertigo signals a fundamental effect of antiblackness that is at the same time the condition of its healing and resistance, calling forth the balancing forces of black femme resilience to counter its destabilizing effects. In this article, I formulate the concept of Afrxfuturism to explore Lemonade‘s investment in African-derived futurist cosmologies and the ethos of the crossroads that destabilizes polarizations of time, space, gender, and raced identity. In the place of black unbeing and erasure, Lemonade reflects and advances a black womanist Afrxfuturism that asserts Itutu, precision of self-expression and direction within instability. Conjuring balance in the maelstrom of antiblackness produces an Afrxfuturist aesthetic teeming with seeming paradoxes that can be best understood through the idiom of diasporic vertigo.

Omhyggelig gennemgang af nogle af symbolerne i Lemonade. Elsker sådan noget.

Hvis der er sf i Lemonade, så har jeg ikke opdaget det.

Black Mecha Is Built for This: Black Masculine Identity in Firedance and Afro Samurai; Alexander Dumas J. Brickler IV

Abstract – Through a reading of Steven Barnes’s science fiction (SF) novel Firedance (1994), this article investigates the allegorical character of the black cyborg through the motif of “black mecha.” Black mecha, I contend, proffers a means of investigating representations of trauma that haunts the origin of black masculine identity. Situating this motif in what I propose as the “prosthetic communities” of Afrofuturist fiction, I engage the concept of “AfroAsia” and deploy it as a methodological tool for inscribing blackness across ethnonationalist boundaries. Placing Firedance in conversation with the Japanese black anime series Afro Samurai (2007), I focus upon themes of masculine identity, rehabilitation, and return to sites of original trauma in the contestations of black mecha. Though the mechanized bodies in Afro Samurai and Firedance can be readily understood through the mecha conventions of technological conflict and control, the black mecha bodies of protagonists Afro and Aubry represent something more than the contest for antagonistic hierarchal domination and instead can be read as effecting a reconciliation, if only partial, of black male identity.

Et nyt ord, sankofarration.

En roman. Og en tegnefilm. Jeg kender ikke nogen af dem.

The Grapevine Telegraph “Jes Grew”: Sonic Materialism, Afrofuturism and Information Theory in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo; Myungsung Kim

Abstract – Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo situates the history of African American culture in the language of genetics, information theory, biocultural evolutionism and sonic/vibrant materialism. Reed’s motif of “Jes Grew,” as an evolving acoustic entity vibrant through radio technology, signifies a codified medium of information storage and transfer; it stores and transfers black cultural information in a viral form, articulating it to the physicality and orality of the antebellum grapevine telegraph. Such a biosonic construction of African American experience provides fertile terrain to explore the marginalization and rehabilitation of black ontological forces. By dramatizing the production and transmission of black tonality, Reed’s trope of “Jes Grew” signals vibrational forces that counteract Western, white cultural norms. Thus Mumbo Jumbo’s trope of the Jes Grew virus participates in, and advances, the aesthetic politics of Afrofuturism, in which Jes Grew’s bio-sonic effects enable us to contest the narrow humanism of Eurocentric biopolitics with an Afrofuturist sonic materialism. By the same token, the novel’s description of 1920s Harlem revolves around an epistemological framework of modern technoculture in which biological research becomes a textualization of nature and DNA becomes an information storage and transfer system. Mumbo Jumbo perceives the biological human body as an outcome of dynamic interactions in which information networks and social, cultural and biological relations are scripted in textual and coded platforms of sonic materialism.

Aha! Jes Grew. Just grew. Tidlig ragtime “voksede ligesom bare”.

Så … lyd og musik og sådan noget. I en science fiction-bog.

Minority Reports from 2054: Building Collective and Critical Forecasting Imaginaries via Afrofuturetypes and Game Jamming; Lonny J. Avi Brooks, Ian Pollock

Abstract – Imagined affordances reflect the imagined applications that users have for technology compared with what designers intend, including their own values and expectations that inform these imagined actions. For our purposes, imagined affordances enable black people in the diaspora to strive for affirmation within hostile environments that have accompanied slavery and its traumatic aftermath. This article presents pedagogical research in speculative black futurism, turning to our Minority Reports 2054 Game Jam, first held at California State University, East Bay in spring 2017, as a model for forecasting Afrofutures. In our forecasting pedagogy, we ask students from marginalized working-class communities to reimagine their social, media and digital spaces into the year 2054—the imagined year for the film Minority Report—thereby highlighting the “minority reports” of future visions too often ignored. We explain the forecasting processes developed for systematically imagining viable black futures by revisiting ancient black cultural rituals, such as the Brazilian adaptation of the African Kongo cosmogram. We also meld the latest methodological tools for scanning future trends to reposition them as “Afrofuturetypes” that trace past, present and future. Afrofuturetypes describe the building exercises of and outcomes via the Game Jam, whereby students create socially interactive games that aim to generate stories of 2054 with black futures in mind.

Det her er vist fremtidsforskning. Nej, det er udvikling af spil.

Det er som om, den her artikel ikke er redigeret helt færdig.

Ja. Get Out er vel egentlig også sf.

Flere nye ord. Så overvældet af nye ord.

The Thing from the Future er et spil, der blev hacket, så dets fremtidsprojektioner kunne inkludere sorte.

25 Years of Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Thought: Roundtable with Tiffany E. Barber, Reynaldo Anderson, Mark Dery, and Sheree Renée Thomas; Tiffany E. Barber

Tja. Det er en diskussion.

Destination Saturn: Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist Utopias in the Art of Stacey Robinson; tobias c. van Veen

SR laver vist tegneserier. Eller tegninger i den stil.

Black Panther!

Sun Ra skrev også digte.

Og så et interview, jeg ikke læste.