The Space of the Black Imaginary

Creating a coherent framework to understand black space is not a simple task. My umbrella for think about these activities is called Mapping Black Imaginaries and Geographies (MAPPING BIG). Mapping BIG is a public humanities project inspired by Black Digital Humanities ideology and aligned with Afrofuturism. Borrowing from the writing of Afrofuturist thinkers such as Alondra Nelson, who argues for Afrofuturism as a framework to understand black knowledge production and action across multiple fields of expression or Reynaldo Anderson, who argues that social media is shaping the 21st-century interpretation of Afrofuturism, Mapping BIG is my attempt to recover the origins and chart the impact of black spaces and ideologies that shape them. By taking this approach, I recognize that contemporary activism networks mirror the formal and informal systems created by African-Americans since coming to the western hemisphere. The key to the project is to utilize a digital methodology to break down barriers of geography and chronology by mapping, visualizing, and cataloging the production across space. In this keynote, I outline some of these ideas.