This post has four parts.
Audiofuturism: coming soon to a planet near you. Context for this image will have to wait for Part II.
I also Did The Thing where I draw the Hemingses’ family tree, because we’re reading Clotel in my Afam Lit course, and we got to listen to Countee Cullen reading his poetry on Spotify so we could get into some real talk about Locke’s aesthetic idealism & Du Bois’s stance on propaganda in the Harlem Renaissance class. But click through to see how it all comes together…
Aren’t you dying to know what prompted this? No, just me? Only I am that much of a huge nerd? OK.
Past is Prologue
My erstwhile mentor (although: does a mentor ever stop being a mentor? nah) was scholar-in-residence for the Greater Philadelphia Women’s Studies Consortium. Duchess Harris, JD, PhD, was my undergraduate advisor and mentor in the Mellon Mays fellowship program at Macalester. Her presentation, “Teaching in the Era of Black Lives Matter,” explained how she went from teaching undergrads who didn’t know quite enough about civil rights law and U.S. history to authoring a series of middle grades books about these topics.
Duchess Harris, JD, PhD
with colleagues: Alden Young (left), Duchess & me (center), and Mary Ebeling (right)
Once Mellon, always Mellon!
ACLA.
Look at this academia
In L.A. (at UCLA, to be precise) I got to take part in a seminar convened by Maia Gil’Adi and Justin Mann–newly-minted doctors of American Studies from George Washington University–as part of the American Comparative Literature Association conference. The seminar, “‘New Ways of Doing Things’: Speculative Fiction, Identity, and World-Making,” dealt with a wonderful variety of SF texts, some of them radically different from the canon formations in the genre, that posit alternative ways of thinking and doing speculation, memory, and futurity. I was really jazzed about the possibilities for Afrofuturism & Indigenous futures in the mix. Here go some tweets about it.
https://twitter.com/prof_carrington/status/979745501162520576
https://twitter.com/prof_carrington/status/979747725888471040
https://twitter.com/prof_carrington/status/979752885180186631
https://twitter.com/prof_carrington/status/979754656673939457
I stay livetweeting…
https://twitter.com/prof_carrington/status/980112743029096448
https://twitter.com/prof_carrington/status/980477941413920768
https://twitter.com/prof_carrington/status/979853905864478720
I also had to take a minute to be extra.
https://twitter.com/prof_carrington/status/979882530999431168
The innovators referenced above are Sam Ginsburg & Rae Wyse. They’re doing good work, look out for them.
This was the second time I joined a conference at the invitation of these young scholars. It’s an honor and a privilege.
Maia Gil’Adi
John Ribó
I love the format of ACLA. I’ll definitely be back. It was also totally rad to catch up with some colleagues from all corners of the globe.
Black Spain! Jeffrey Coleman (left), Robert Reid-Pharr (right)
Camden & Spectres
At the invitation of Zara Wilkinson, I got invited to speak on a panel at Camden Comic-Con! Guess what the topic was? OK, first, check who the panelists were: Walter Greason & Mahdi Ibn-Ziyad.
You already know: the panel was Watching Wakanda! It was sweet– a small but cool audience made for a truly lively conversation and enabled us to really get into what we know/love/question about Black Panther, now that we’re all clear that Black Americans are dual citizens of Wakanda.
Might I add that Camden Comic-Con is a good look? I love the neighborly vibe of local/regional events like this. I hope to see it reproduced in Queers & Comics in the future, but with the best parts about the small scale: less pressure to sell, more opportunity for in-depth dialogue and casual glad-handing.
Nicely done, Rutgers-Camden!
I got some quality tees and a Pokémon-themed souvenir for the dog. Because of course.
https://twitter.com/prof_carrington/status/985200544993239040
https://twitter.com/prof_carrington/status/985201922566246400
It was rad. How rad? Well, let me show you this dragonfruit smoothie.
It’s so pink! Fuschia, even!
Oh yeah: also, this happened…
Meanwhile, MFA student Nick moderates a Q&A with Chip Delany. Unrelated event, while Camden Comic-Con is going on, because apparently Rutgers-Camden is not playing with y’all!
Real talk
Yes, I am geeked that Chip posted to my Facebook, but let’s focus on the content! I’ve met Chip a couple times, and what I really appreciate about his presence is how intellectually curious he encourages everyone in the room to be, and how genuine his responses to questions–even those he’s heard before–are. To paraphrase something a wise man once said, science fiction writers don’t try to predict the future; they try to prevent it.
Be A Warrior
Now, I love me some T’Challa, but when you mix that Negro with that L’Engle… I mean, what? Oh right, A Wrinkle in Time. In consultation with the good people at my school’s center for University & Community partnerships, we decided to make the movie the focal point of a public program that would draw in parents and young people in the neighborhood.
It turns out giving away free movie tickets totally works! And when the time came to have a little panel discussion about the movie and its significance, it was only right to broaden out the theme enough to draw in some very engaged people of different ages from the community.
Look how rad my colleagues are
In every city where I’ve lived, I like having nice neighbors. Especially when my neighbors Black folks who get their lives to superhero and fantasy narratives. That’s who I’m checking for, any place I go; can you blame me?
Warriors: Janine Spruill, Ariell Johnson, (your blogger), and my esteemed colleague Vincent Williams!
- Janine Spruill is the founder of Lil Filmmakers, Inc. Don’t let the Lil fool you.
- Ariell Johnson is proprietor of Amalgam Comics & Coffeehouse, the one and only!
- (You know me.)
- Dr. Vincent Williams is my colleague on the faculty in English at Drexel and co-founder of Micheaux Mission, a podcast in the Black Tribbles universe. Check out one of their latest endeavors in the mission to review Every Black Movie Ever, Attack the Block, starring my inspiration John Boyega.
That was Tuesday. I was at it again Wednesday, and I had an incredible weekend, but I wasn’t able to travel by tesseract. So that recap will have to wait for the next episode…