The Data Record
In a recent presentation, I reflected on the impact of the data record on our understanding of Afrofuturism. In part, my argument was that Zora Neale Hurston should be considered as an Afrofuturist and to what extent her work can be situated as a jumping-off point for projects in our contemporary moment of Afrofuturist engagement.
Putting Zora Neale Hurston in the “Future Industry”
An epistemology ecology called Mapping Black Imaginaries and Geographies (Mapping BIG) shapes my view of Zora Neale Hurston’s work. Mapping BIG is inspired by my own work at the intersections of Black Digital Humanities and Afrofuturism. In this framework, those elements of foresight/prediction (fictional media, technological projection, market prediction, and technoculture) we know well are re-aligned using critical and creative tools to view the African diaspora in a new light.
MAPPING BIG is my way of demonstrating how digital humanities recovery of information can be a crucial foundation for the discovery of black knowledge. This approach reflects the reality of an institutional record shaped by racism but takes into account the ways contemporary digital humanities scholars are seeking to recover the experience of people of color through their work. You can read about some of these projects in my book Reframing Digital Humanities, but also in this list of DH projects. Hurston’s interdisciplinary places her in the position to be a key figure to understand the evolution of blackness in the American experience. I say this because we can draw clear parallels between Hurston’s work and contemporary critical race/DH studies.
Left: From “Wild Seed in the Machine” Introduction to Black Codes Studies Volume 47, Issue 3 by Mark Anthony Neal and Jessica Marie Johnson. Right: From Kodwo Eshun’s “Further Consideration of Afrofuturism” (2003).
Scholars such as Jessica Marie Johnson and Mark Anthony Neal have already called our attention to the need to question how knowledge production can be linked to institutional practice. Black Studies and Black Digital Humanities share a concern that we should see alternative forms to understand black knowledge production. As Kodwo Eshun stresses in his writings on Afrofuturism these projects of creation are crucial. The work of black scholars, artists, and activists creates tools that act as an intervention antiblack practice. In this light, Zora Neale Hurston’s work offers an important pathway to follow. She was a leading voice in an era of black activism against systemic racism, yet her worldview clearly placed her at odds with the leading voices of the black community. I think there is little argument that sexism and classism shaped reactions to her. Yet, I think we can also consider how what she did was a legacy of a future-oriented black counterpublic practice learned in Eatonville, Florida.
Eatonville was the subject of Hurston’s work, but it was also an incubator of ideology that shaped how she understood the aims of black progress. At its founding, Eatonville was offered as a “solution” to the race problem. The nature of this solution, self-sufficiency, was not new when the town was founded, but as arguably the first incorporated black township in the United States, it crystalized an ideology of material citizenship clearly envisioned by former slaves after the Civil War. While the materiality in this context can be rejected in hindsight, we should be mindful of the ideological spectrum that shape black response to white racism. Black people actively worked to counter white racism with various tools. Hurston’s experience growing up in Eatonville, captures how the material citizenship model often linked to Booker T. Washington’s industrial education model found support among the black community. The distance between the ideology articulated by Washington and the actions on the ground in Eatonville are worth careful consideration. While Washington is the center of a “machine” the motivations of those men and women at the local level were defined by communal goals around safety, prosperity and stability, especially in light of the traumas of slavery. In that model, Eatonville and other all black towns were a creative solution to system antiblackness. They allowed black people to create future world free from the negative influence of white people.
Hurston’s was a product of this future vision and her conservatism might be better understood as counter-future practice born of legacy of critical-creative thinking designed to resist white ideology. If so, her choices as a scholar are a roadmap to particular kind of black thought. The system that gave rise to her worldview was hyperlocal, rooted in community and the meaning making articulated by black people. Her work cataloging these community captures the organic knowledge system they created and used. Oral history and folklore is logical extension of system that replicates through person to person communication. While the framework does not ignore the work done by noted scholars, I really seek to consider how the organic system of knowledge production, replication, and dissemination might be seen and better integrated into our formulation of the future industry. In the end, a black future industry offers important ways for us to intercede structure and promote a better and safer tomorrow.
