Fourteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

This presentation will explore how speculative narratives often dubbed “Afro-futurist” are particularly important in this historical moment. As equatorial lands in Africa become increasingly uninhabitable due to climate change, spurring massive population migrations, and inner-city spaces in America are rapidly gentrified, the fate of the exiled is either ignored entirely or is typically portrayed in mainstream media as nothing more than a pawn in the global political competition between globalist and nationalist/fascist forces. Speculative narratives such as those crafted by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson and Muthoni Kiarie and the Cuban artists profiled in Rachel Price’s “Planet/Cuba” present important revisions to this mainstream narrative. Valuing the future of displaced black populations in both hemispheres and in urban and rural spaces, these narratives imagine the margins. The presenter himself is completing a novel the plot of which turns on one boy’s star-crossed confrontation with the environmental dirty secrets of the San Fransisco Bay Area.