Continuing the Conversation around Afrofuturism: The Black Fantastic Bibliography Project
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 2021-05-21

Clarissa West-White (Bethune-Cookman University) and Seretha D. Williams (Augusta University)

Maryemma Graham’s Project on the History of Black Writing (1983), Marcia Chatelain’s Ferguson Syllabus (2014), Keisha Blain, et. al.’s Charleston Syllabus (2015), Candice Benbow’s Lemonade Syllabus (2016), Christen Smith’s Cite Black Women (2017), and Stephanie Evans’s The Black Women’s Studies Booklist (2018) inform the praxis and purpose of Third Stone Journal’s Black Fantastic Bibliography Project. The aforementioned digital projects engage with and challenge historical modes of knowledge production and create opportunities for scholars, practitioners, enthusiasts, and activists to come together in community. The syllabus, for example, responds to an event and connects an audience to a broader conversation that informs or influences the event. The syllabus contextualizes an event, and in that respect, the Black Fantastic Bibliography Project builds upon the conversation by annotating the cultural artifacts associated with an event or historical moment.

The Black Panther film is the nexus between the what could be and the what could have been of Black futurity. Afrofuturism and its incarnations is reflective and invested in recovery and reclamation. The bibliography, then, is a technology for recovering Black artifacts and resituating those artifacts alongside contemporary entries in an attempt to define what we mean by Afrofuturism, African-futurism, and other modes of the Black Fantastic. While curated lists are integral to decentering canonical ethnocentrism and paternalism, we propose that by inviting practitioners, activists, enthusiasts, and scholars to annotate our living list of Black Fantastic artifacts we disrupt and even circumvent the academy. Furthermore, the curated list is freely available to the public as are the published entries.

In this presentation, we will discuss our efforts to curate a list of artifacts that contain characteristics of the Black Fantastic, to recruit annotaters, and to cultivate an intellectual hub for the consideration of Black Futurity. Additionally, we will argue that the annotated bibliography remains an important research technology to use in tandem with digital search tools. Annotated bibliographies can be extensive and exhaustive in their coverage of topics and they can provide a synthesis of information in ways that databases cannot. The Black Fantastic Bibliography Project aims to bridge and fill gaps in our understanding of Afrofuturism.


For more information about the 2021 Global DH Symposium visit msuglobaldh.org.