Exciting news out of NPR on the comic book-inspired film world: “Marvel’s ‘black panther’ isn’t just a black super hero”?
Here is a key moment in the piece: “Not only could Black Panther stay true to its sci-fi narrative roots, but with the full power of the Marvel hype machine, it could easily become the first truly mainstream Afrofuturist film.”
Check out the article through the link below.
I was struck by the difference in the class’s reading experiences, in the most material of ways, based on the choice to read Anne Anlin Cheng’s Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface in an online, purchased, or borrowed library version. Each of these options afforded or took away from the relationship between the book’s form & meaning, function and structure (perhaps of particular interest in relation to Modernism’s guiding dictum, “form follows function”). This made me think that you all might enjoy the following article about new possibilities being forged in the area of book publishing and the ways that the very notion of what it means to “read” are being stretched.
Understanding Samuel Delany’s 1976 sci-fi tale Trouble on Triton as a prequel to his 1979 fantasy tale, Tales of Nevèrÿon is a bit of a convoluted task in that it requires the reader to defamiliarize the notion of “pre” (as in prequel) from the notion of a strictly chronologically determine before and after; Nevèrÿon is set at the dawn of a seemingly ancient civilization, while Triton chronicles the socio-political landscape of the populated moon Triton which is at war with Earth – along with other worlds and moons – in the future year of 2112. This defamiliarization, of course, can easily be seen to be in league with Delany’s rather didactic yet critically useful project to defamiliarize and question gender constructions, sex and race as fixed biological concepts or realities, and language as a system of communication. Furthermore, we might see the palindromical setting of 2112 as representative or symbolic of the idea that something, even time, might be the same front to back and back to front.
Delany takes on what are arguably rather abstract epistemological issues related to time and language in both books; he achieves this by interlocking structure – including syntax & punctuation and the non-chronological seriality of the books – with content – direct discussion of language as closed and limited but also fruitful and constructive – in a clever and multi-valenced way.
However, he also touches on the perhaps more easily understood issue of currency-based versus barter and credit economies. Putting the discussion of the relative merits of money usage on Earth versus those of the pure use of credit on Triton (Triton 151-2) in conversation with Old Venn’s assessment of the shift from a barter to a money economy in Nevèrÿon (Nevèrÿon 82-84) provides a critique of each of these systems in relation to social welfare, quality of life, (gendered) structures of economic power, fairness and vulnerability, and governmental power. This intertextual conversation suggests that the barter system is the one which, comparatively,
fosters: the most equality, particularly in relation to gender; passion on the part of craftspeople for their craft rather than for money; a more healthy relationship between time, labor, and product; better interpersonal and familial relationships; and a stronger social contract and sense of trust among community members.
The power point below is part of a presentation in which I explore the intersections between Dr. Mae Jemison, Afrofuturism, and the Utopian Program.
Mae Jemison, Afrofuturism & the Utopian Program
It also provides a kind of blueprint for a highly scalable (both in terms of academic level and time) potential multimedia workshop or unit within a larger course; this course would be a way to introduce people to:
o the historical relationship between NASA and Civil Rights & desegregation
o Some central ideas about Utopia, written by a few major theorists
o Afrofuturism (exciting!) as a concept and practice
o The ways in which Afrofuturists claim Mae Jemison – someone with a Utopian program, the 100 Year Starship – while situating, either overtly or by more subtle implication, that claim within a longer history of black musical production utilizing the trope of (space) travel as a mode of emancipation, be it mental or material/physical.
I would very much welcome thoughts, comments, and responses!