Space
Afrofuturism values expansive and liberated communities of practice that promote freedom.
Terrestrial Space
Perhaps most frequently associated with the great expanses of oceans and sky, Afrofuturist movements have also given rise to the speculative cities, reclaimed monuments, and transformed landscapes and communities that are the focus of this panel. This panel was part of the Claiming Space Symposium organized by the Smithsonian.
Mapping Black Imaginaries and Geographies
Mapping Black Imaginaries and Geographies (MAPPING BIG) is a public humanities project inspired by Black Digital Humanities ideology and aligned with the emerging field of Afrofuturism.
Borrowing from the writing of Afrofuturism, thinkers such as Alondra Nelson, who argues for Afrofuturism as a framework to understand black knowledge production and action across multiple fields of expression, and Reynaldo Anderson, who argues that social media shaped the network form of 21st-century interpretation of Afrofuturism, this project seeks to explore black spaces and ideologies that shape them.
Historic black towns and settlements were engines of speculation that offered African Americans a space to imagine future progress.
Today, the legacy of communities such as Eatonville, Florida continues to inspire contemporary activism.
Dr. Julian Chambliss discusses the Afrofuturism as a space of recovery in this curator talk for Beyond the Black Panther: Visions of Afrofuturism in American Comics, a virtual exhibition at the MSU Museum.
