Moving on the Wires: This Week’s News and Posts

Sorry I did not post for most of the week; I have a slight sprained wrist, so I had to slow down a bit on writing. But anyway, here is some news articles and written pieces from the week: *Martin Luther King in Science Fiction on i09 *”Playing a Minority Forecaster in search of Afrofuturism: […]

The My-Stery: The Ghost of AfroFuture…

Social Death, Wounded Transformations and The Hauntings of Prophetic Tradition : Tomorrow is Christmas and one story that came to mind in relation to afrofuturism, and especially after I watched Arthur Jafa’s Dreams Are Colder than Death, was Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the story’s ghosts of past, present and future. In the Western […]

Otherworldly Videos: S.A. Miller’s “Into the Darkness”

Happy Friday the 13th! While browsing the internet for Caribbean speculative film, I found Bajan (Barbadian) filmmaker channel and his apocalyptic film Into the Darkness. The film follows a young boy who is trying to survive amidst the threat of revenants — visible ghosts or animated corpses that were believed to return from the grave […]

Modern Griots: The Mighty Shadow’s Musical Jumbie

For an afrofuturist artist in jazz, you may think of Sun Ra, in funk, Parliament Funakdelic, and in reggae/dub, “Scratch” Lee Perry. But for calypso, it is probably singer The Mighty Shadow, or Shadow. Born Winston Anthony Bailey and originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Shadow is known for his 1974 mythic song “Bassman,” about a […]

Rewind: Ooh

Mary J. Blige’s “Ooh” I was trying to remember and was searching for this song for weeks; I finally found it! The video was always striking to me because it shows her confronting the different aspects of herself and the ghosts that haunt her.

Otherworldly Videos: The Haunting of Sound

As I work on my honors thesis about percussive and body politics of black music, specifically in hip-hop, the focus of my paper is forming as how sound in black culture has been used as a subversive tactic. Both James W. Perkinson’s Shamanism, Racism, and Hip Hop Culture: Essays on White Supremacy and Black Subversion […]