#black futures

[thesagittarianmind]

[brooklynmuseum]

“Black Futures is not designed to be a comprehensive document. Blackness is infinite—a single book cannot attempt to contain the multitudes and multiverse. This is just one manifestation of a project that spans millennia.”

Black Futures, edited by Jenna Wortham and Kimberly Drew, and featuring over 100 contributors on Black art, writing, and creativity is an exhibition in itself. Find it in the #BkMShop.

🔗 http://bit.ly/bkmshop

[anniekoh]

Digital Black Feminism by Catherine Knight Steele (2021)

Black women are at the forefront of some of this century’s most important discussions about technology: trolling, online harassment, algorithmic bias, and influencer culture. But, Catherine Knight Steele argues that Black women’s relationship to technology began long before the advent of Twitter or Instagram. To truly “listen to Black women,” Steele points to the history of Black feminist technoculture in the United States and its ability to decenter white supremacy and patriarchy in a conversation about the future of technology. Using the virtual beauty shop as a metaphor, Digital Black Feminism walks readers through the technical skill, communicative expertise, and entrepreneurial acumen of Black women’s labor—born of survival strategies and economic necessity—both on and offline. Positioning Black women at the center of our discourse about the past, present, and future of technology, Steele offers a through-line from the writing of early twentieth-century Black women to the bloggers and social media mavens of the twenty-first century. She makes connections among the letters, news articles, and essays of Black feminist writers of the past and a digital archive of blog posts, tweets, and Instagram stories of some of the most well-known Black feminist writers of our time. Linking narratives and existing literature about Black women’s technology use in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century, Digital Black Feminism traverses the bounds between historical and archival analysis and empirical internet studies, forcing a reconciliation between fields and methods that are not always in conversation.  As the work of Black feminist writers now reaches its widest audience online, Steele offers both hopefulness and caution on the implications of Black feminism becoming a digital product.

Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction by Sami Schalk (2018)

In Bodyminds Reimagined Sami Schalk traces how black women’s speculative fiction complicates the understanding of bodyminds—the intertwinement of the mental and the physical—in the context of race, gender, and (dis)ability. Bridging black feminist theory with disability studies, Schalk demonstrates that this genre’s political potential lies in the authors’ creation of bodyminds that transcend reality’s limitations. She reads (dis)ability in neo-slavery narratives by Octavia Butler (Kindred) and Phyllis Alesia Perry (Stigmata) not only as representing the literal injuries suffered under slavery, but also as a metaphor for the legacy of racial violence. The fantasy worlds in works by N. K.Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson—where werewolves have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and blind demons can see magic—destabilize social categories and definitions of the human, calling into question the very nature of identity. In these texts, as well as in Butler’s Parable series, able-mindedness and able-bodiedness are socially constructed and upheld through racial and gendered norms. Outlining (dis)ability’s centrality to speculative fiction, Schalk shows how these works open new social possibilities while changing conceptualizations of identity and oppression through non-realist contexts.”

The cover art is by Tahir Carl Karmali.

Read and listen to interviews with Dr. Schalk about the book:

Black Perspectives Blog Interview

Black Agenda Report New Book Forum Interview

New Books Network Podcast Interview

Imagine Otherwise Podcast Interview

[x-prodigy]

I know some of you guys don't have Twitter so I wanted to share this!

[thingsreadinthedark]

Aspirational BHM/BFM Reads!!!

Yo readers! So it’s BLACK HISTORY MONTH or BLACK FUTURES MONTH (however you’d like to describe it) and you know generally I enjoy keeping my reads to my community, this month gives me a chance to be even more intentional about my explorations..

This month I want to read more about history yes, but I also want to read about Black women in the here and now living their best full lives. Hence Taraji’s Around the Way Girl. I’d love to finally maybe get through Sister Outsider, a book that I have struggled to read, over and over because there’s so much outward and subtext that I get drowned in it reading it and never make it it up for air.. so many of the other books are on my reading list and I may not get through them all in February, they’re gonna get read!

I’d also love to join the a reading group exploring bell hooks and more James Baldwin! BFM is upon us we can all do our part to expose ourselves to some of the best that BLACK culture has been sharing!

[unflwr]

Today we move through fear.

Today we smize through anguish.

Today we laugh through adversity.

Today we hold and are held.

Today we are.

And what will be will be.

[whilereadingandwalking]

Black Futures, edited by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, is a spectacular book full of art, essays, conversations, photos, lyrics, poetry, and more, on what it is to be Black today. It is a work that's meant to be used as a starting point, and it worked—I dove into Instagram and Twitter afterwards, following a wide list of artists and thought leaders. The book presented a wide range of ideas and perspectives, and opened my mind, challenging me, to many new questions and frameworks with which I can now view the world around me.

[essayists-collective]

Black Futures 🙌🏿 @wool-and-light 🧡