Moving on the Wires: Remapping the Black Atlantic Conference, Futurology the Musical, Black Radical Imagination Film, Octavia City …

*Still looking for an artist to do design a logo for my blog. For more information, click here. *Remapping the Black Atlantic: (Re)Writings of Race and Space Conference is taking place at DePaul University in Chicago from April 12-14. The theme centers on expanding and remapping Paul Gilroy’s work on the Black Atlantic. *In New […]

Moving on the Wires: Africa Now, Spider Stories, Steamfunk!, Peoples Science…

*Tonight at 6:30pm, live podcast for “African Women and Girl Storytellers in the Digital Age.” *This weekend at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre, Blitz the Ambassador, Nneka, Freshlyground, The Soil and Lokua Kanza will be performing at Africa Now! I will be there at Saturday’s concert. * Kickstarter campaign for animated series, Spider Stories, pilot. Here is […]

Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth: Phantom Limb, Octavia Butler’s “Kindred,” and Tiphanie Yanique’s “How to Escape from a Leper Colony”

In Octavia Butler’s time-traveling fantasy Kindred, the novel begins with the main character, Dana, losing her arm. Even without the ending, that is an unusual way to begin a story. Similarly, Tiphanie Yanique‘s mythic/mystical/religious storytelling in her short story collection How to Escape from a Leper Colony, includes in the title story, a character named […]

Otherworldly Videos: Alien Bodies Conference

Below are videos of the conversations and lectures from the Alien Bodies Conference that took place in February: Keynote with Alondra Nelson

The My-Stery: Slaughterhouse Five, Dead Presidents, War and PTSD, Pyschotrauma of Carnage, and The Escapist Fantasy

After reading Kurt Vonnegut’s famous and controversial novel, Slaughterhouse Five, one of the other works that came to mind was Dead Presidents, starring Larenz Tate. Besides both works detailing veterans with PTSD, previously related to shell shock at that time, after witnessing the terror of war, they both tie together the psychotrauma of witnessing that […]

Modern Griots Review: Kenya Wright’s “Fire Baptized”

Towns named after on Santeria gods and goddesses in Miami. Supernaturals forced to live in caged cities and branded with symbols. A city of fairies, vampires, trolls, shapeshifters, witches, mermaids, and pixies as pets. A love triangle and a romance between college revolutionaries who are fighting against social system hierarchy. A serial killer detective story. […]

Otherworldly Videos: Hip-Hop and Science Fiction

Ethiopian-American rapper Gabriel Teodros of group Copperwire, gives a speech about hip-hop, media corporations and technology, activism, and afrofuturism. Some of the quotable parts from it:

Modern Griots Reviews: Séan L. Young’s The Mystical Gathering Series

Popular culture is filled with worlds of wizards, witches and mystic superhero characters likes that of Harry Potter. But while audiences are excited by the fantasy of those worlds, real life communities of witches either go unnoticed or are demonized as satanic. And even in the fiction, rarely do we get a super-witch character who […]

Modern Griots Recap: The Outsider in Science Fiction Panel

I am one who likes to believe in synchronicity and having watched a National Geographic documentary a few days ago called, “When Aliens Attack,” this panel at the Museum of the Moving Image happened at the right time. What does our encounters and representations of the outsider or “alien” reveal about our psyches? On Sunday, […]

The My-Stery: Haunted by the Record Part 2 – Rethinking Time Travel

Last week, I read a post about time travel in Black Nerds Network. While we have not reached physical time travel yet and I am not sure I would want that, let’s consider mental and spiritual time travel. The imagination is probably our first vehicle of time travel. Through media, art, artifacts, symbols, stories, traditions, […]