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 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 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. By taking this approach, this project recognizes that contemporary activism networks mirror the formal and informal systems created by African-Americans throughout the U.S. experience. 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 of these black spaces. Mapping BIG is an ongoing project that in practice will bring together a number of mini-projects that seek to explore the contours of the black imaginary. I’m grateful that I had a chance to talk about this project at the University of Kansas Digital Humanities Forum in 2019. You can watch my keynote below.
Conversations on the meaning and practice of Afrofuturism
Given the dynamic changes inspired by the Afrofuturism, there is a vital need to document this movement in a systematic way. Working with Vincent Voice Library, Voices of the Black Imaginary is a unique oral history archive derived from interviews with scholars and creatives engaged with Afrofuturism. While Afrofuturism offers a way to rethink the place of race, art, science, and design in society, the motivations, experiences, and viewpoints of people doing it are diverse. This oral history project gives us a chance to think about black speculative practice and Afrodiasporic experience by talking with those people driving the movement.
Beyond the Black Panther: Vision of Afrofuturism in American Comics
Most people are familiar with Marvel's Black Panther, and some are aware of its connections to Afrofuturism, a framework to understand how the black imagination manifests visions of freedom. In this virtual exhibition, I utilize a thematic framework inspired by Afrofuturism to explore Aesthetics, Feminism, Metaphysics, Science, and Community. These ideas can be seen across a variety of contemporary Black comics highlighting a concern with black futurity central to the black imaginary.
More Beyond the Black Panther compansion site offers a deeper dive into content from the exhibition.
Planet Deep South Colloquium: Speculative Cultural Production and Africanisms in the American Black South (2016)
Tuskegee Universe
The idea of the Tuskegee Universe grows from the spatial relations that are evident when you examine the black communities that developed after Reconstruction in the South. The Black Social World in Central offered intriguing connections between black communities. Many of these connection were filtered through organizations and activism facilitated by Booker T. Washington. In Cities Imagined, Walter Greason and I presented a set of primary documents that highlight the creation of community and economic empowerment linked to Booker T. Washington. Before the project's publication, I created a visual primer for students using the Negro Year Book (NYB) from 1916 to map some information on black communities. Educating a wider black public about the state of blackness on a global scale was a goal for NYB. Led by Monroe Work, the founding director of the Department of Records and Research at the Tuskegee Institute, the assessment of the black experience in the NYB was a vital wellspring of information for black Americans and the only source of consistent information on subjects like lynching and economic development of African Americans. The Washington approach to separation and cooperation in the early 20th century offered a vision of empowerment to many rural black Americans. What my examination Hannibal Square and Eatonville make clear to me is a vision of black citizenship shaped by a context of black property owners choosing paths of separation, or collaborative partnership are essential to take into account.
A Tuskegee Universe StoryMap
StoryMapJS is a free tool developed by Knight Lab to help tell a story over time and across space. This map is based on the network of connection related to Booker T. Washington’s vocational education activism.
From the Air: Eatonville and Hannibal Square
Linked through geography and history Eatonville and Winter Park Florida represent two visions of African American autonomy pursued in the late nineteenth century. While Eatonville’s importance as one of the first incorporated black municipalities in the United States is clear, its fame is a direct result of Zora Neale Hurston. Hurston’s work featured Eatonville and as a result it lives in the public imagination as an example of black freedom. In contrast, the historic black neighborhood of Hannibal Square in Winter Park is virtually unknown outside the region. Yet, as an example of biracial political cooperation in the 1880s and 1890s, the town and its model of black-white allyship says much about the aspirations and limitations of political imagination in the United States. I commissioned this aerial footage to focus on the gentrification pressure each community faces.
Black Towns: Engines of Imagination
Eatonville is one of the historic communities that persists as an example of independent and self determination championed by Booker T. Washington’s philosophy. While Washington’s activism could not overcome the realities of political violence in the early twentieth century, any examination of Eatonville and other historic black towns like it, highlight how the vision continues to shape these communities. These short videos highlight experience engaging with the community.