Afrofantastic Is Here: Building a Space for Black Futures

For several years, Afrofantastic.com has been one of the places where I think publicly about Afrofuturism, Black speculative practice, comics, history, technology, and the possibilities embedded in Black cultural production.

I have increasingly come to understand Afrofuturism not simply as a category of science fiction or an aesthetic associated with images of Black people in the future. I understand it as a way of recognizing a much longer tradition of Black speculative practice: the ways Black people have imagined, built, represented, and struggled toward worlds beyond the limitations imposed upon them.

That distinction matters.

Black communities have always had to imagine possibilities that did not yet exist. Freedom itself had to be imagined under slavery. Black citizenship had to be imagined when the institutions of the United States denied it. Communities such as Eatonville, Florida, transformed ideas about autonomy into actual places. Musicians transformed technologies into new sonic worlds. Writers and artists created alternative histories and futures. Comics made Black speculative worlds visible. Digital tools now allow us to recover, connect, map, and reinterpret many of those histories.

These practices are connected by a deceptively simple proposition: imagining another world can be part of the work of making one.

That proposition has increasingly become central to my research.

From Afrofuturism to Black Speculative Practice

My work moves across comics, digital humanities, museums, Black history, sound, and public humanities. On the surface, these subjects can appear disconnected. I increasingly see them as parts of the same intellectual project.

That project asks what happens when we treat Black imagination as evidence.

A comic book can tell us something about freedom. A techno record can document an imagined relationship between Black people, machines, and the city. A historic Black town can embody a theory of collective possibility. An oral history can preserve forms of knowledge absent from institutional archives. A digital map can expose relationships that conventional historical narratives obscure.

This is one reason I have described Afrofuturism as existing at the intersection of speculation and liberation inspired by Black people. That formulation shifts our attention from predicting the future toward examining the practices through which people imagine alternatives to the present. My public discussion of this approach has similarly emphasized Afrofuturism as a transformative practice rather than simply a futuristic aesthetic.

Mapping the Black Imaginary

Much of this work now takes place through Mapping Black Imaginaries and Geographies, or Mapping BIG.

Mapping BIG is a public humanities framework inspired by Black Digital Humanities and Afrofuturism. At its center is an interest in the relationship between Black spaces and the ideas that shape them.

That framework brings together projects that might otherwise seem separate.

Voices of the Black Imaginary uses oral histories with scholars and creatives to document how people understand and produce Afrofuturism and Black speculative practice. My work on historic Black towns considers places such as Eatonville as spaces where Black communities translated ideas of autonomy, education, governance, and collective possibility into material form.

Afrofantastic as a Public Notebook

This is where Afrofantastic comes in.

I want Afrofantastic.com to function less like a conventional academic website and more like a public notebook for thinking about Black futures.

Some posts will begin with history. Others may begin with a comic book, an exhibition, a record, an archive, a technological controversy, or something happening in the news. Sometimes the question will be explicitly about Afrofuturism. At other times, Afrofuturism will provide the method rather than the subject.

Increasingly, I am interested in what happens when we apply Black speculative thinking to questions that appear firmly rooted in the present.

What does Afrofuturism tell us about artificial intelligence?

What does Detroit techno teach us about technology and urban life?

What can historic Black towns teach us about community infrastructure?

How might comics function as archives of political imagination?

What happens when museums collect not simply objects associated with Black history but objects that document Black efforts to imagine freedom?

These questions reflect an idea guiding my current curatorial work: futurity is something people do. It appears through organizing, publishing, singing, coding, designing, performing, archiving, gathering, and worldbuilding.

The Archive and the Future

There is another reason for this project.

Archives are never neutral descriptions of the past. What gets collected, cataloged, digitized, and made searchable influences what later generations understand as historically significant.

That makes recovering Black cultural production inseparable from imagining Black futures.

My interest in digital humanities has therefore increasingly centered on creating public-facing, open-access projects capable of making Black histories and cultural networks more visible. As I have written elsewhere in describing this research trajectory, digital projects focused on Black spaces can become tools for bringing humanities scholarship into consequential civic conversations. Chambliss Context

But recovery is only the beginning.

The more interesting question may be: What can we build with what we recover?

That is the question Afrofantastic will continue to explore.

Welcome to Afrofantastic

So, Afrofantastic is here—or perhaps more accurately, it is becoming.

I imagine this space as an ongoing experiment connecting scholarship, public humanities, critical making, and cultural criticism. It will move between the nineteenth century and tomorrow; between Eatonville and Detroit; between comics and archives; between museums and digital platforms.

The subject connecting those journeys is the Black imaginary.

Because Black history is filled not only with accounts of what happened.

It is also filled with evidence of people imagining what could happen next.

And those imagined possibilities remain resources for building the future.