When a friend forwarded this FB event, I was immediately intrigued - "Join us for a day of creative reflections on dis/appearance of black and brown women in American sci-fi narratives."
The engagement of black and brown people - and woment - in sci-fi was recent news to me. I first came across this "phenomenon" in a class on Afr-Am literature over the fall of 2016 - there I discovered Octavia Butler. Then, while I was roaming around in Philly in January, I popped into a book store and there I came upon a book called "Black Quantum Futurism: Space-Time Collapse I: From the Congo to the Carolinas."
This was getting curioser and curioser. I bought the book and then proceeded to attend a MLK Day celebration at my friend's house where I met a UPenn doctoral student who was researching black and brown artists who used sci-fi themes in their work. How cool was that - and how providential!
In the meanwhile, back in Boston, I chanced across this upcoming performance based on Octavia Butler's works - Parable of the Sower.
And in the meanwhile again, managed to make my way to the Boston Sci-Fi festival to take in an evening to take in an evening of shorts.
So this event coming after all the earlier providential encounters, as it were, was something that piqued my interest.
The evening, albeit one of the coldest in recent days, started out with 3 short cinematic pieces which had sci-fi themes and black and brown characters in them. First we say epsode 1 of the British serial The Misfits, following that with the Kenyan film Pumzi and ending with a film called Record/Play. The films were curated by Brookline High School teacher and filmmaker Thato Mwosa.
[One must mention here, as I came to know later, the evening was put together by wonderful musician Allyssa Jones of the 3050 Musical Group and writer Anika Arrington. More on them later.]
The films were of quite different, one from the other. The Misfits episode was very dramatic in its setting in a probation/corrections environment and the added "para-normality" was certainly a thriller, tho' not that much out of the ordinary. One would have to see further episodes so find out how that initial premise turns out. Pumzi was quite slickly produced - with appropriate space-suites, a controlling/controlled environment, state of the art computer interactions with "superiors"...but with a very real and down-to-earth problem - that of acute water-scarcity...
Record/Play dealt with some mind-bending ideas of space and time and very appropriately used the images of a cassette player/tape to think in terms of time - forward or reverse...
All in all a wonderful experience and a journey to different worlds and co-ordinates.
A discussion circle which followed - led by Anika Arrington, Allyssa Jones and Thato Mwosa - sought to understand how the presence/absence of people-of-color symbols in our lives, esp. in the field of popular entertainment and culture. Several interesting examples came up of what seeing a person of color in a TV show or in a movie meant to people - from Uhura in Star Trek to some icons on cereal boxes to Russell Peters from the comedy act...
[Maybe we could have brought in Wakanda...and even Coffy?]
All in all, a very enriching day - and along a very unique path!
The engagement of black and brown people - and woment - in sci-fi was recent news to me. I first came across this "phenomenon" in a class on Afr-Am literature over the fall of 2016 - there I discovered Octavia Butler. Then, while I was roaming around in Philly in January, I popped into a book store and there I came upon a book called "Black Quantum Futurism: Space-Time Collapse I: From the Congo to the Carolinas."
Space-Time Collapse is a new experimental writing and image series applying Black Quantum Futurism practices and theory to various space-time collapse phenomenon. This inaugural collection explores possible space-time narratives and temporal perspectives of enslaved Black African ancestors, pre- and post-liberation. The slave ships and plantations themselves are traversed by the visionaries as chronotopes containing layers of different times, imprinted by the experiences of the people held captive therein.
This was getting curioser and curioser. I bought the book and then proceeded to attend a MLK Day celebration at my friend's house where I met a UPenn doctoral student who was researching black and brown artists who used sci-fi themes in their work. How cool was that - and how providential!
In the meanwhile, back in Boston, I chanced across this upcoming performance based on Octavia Butler's works - Parable of the Sower.
And in the meanwhile again, managed to make my way to the Boston Sci-Fi festival to take in an evening to take in an evening of shorts.
So this event coming after all the earlier providential encounters, as it were, was something that piqued my interest.
The evening, albeit one of the coldest in recent days, started out with 3 short cinematic pieces which had sci-fi themes and black and brown characters in them. First we say epsode 1 of the British serial The Misfits, following that with the Kenyan film Pumzi and ending with a film called Record/Play. The films were curated by Brookline High School teacher and filmmaker Thato Mwosa.
[One must mention here, as I came to know later, the evening was put together by wonderful musician Allyssa Jones of the 3050 Musical Group and writer Anika Arrington. More on them later.]
The films were of quite different, one from the other. The Misfits episode was very dramatic in its setting in a probation/corrections environment and the added "para-normality" was certainly a thriller, tho' not that much out of the ordinary. One would have to see further episodes so find out how that initial premise turns out. Pumzi was quite slickly produced - with appropriate space-suites, a controlling/controlled environment, state of the art computer interactions with "superiors"...but with a very real and down-to-earth problem - that of acute water-scarcity...
Record/Play dealt with some mind-bending ideas of space and time and very appropriately used the images of a cassette player/tape to think in terms of time - forward or reverse...
All in all a wonderful experience and a journey to different worlds and co-ordinates.
A discussion circle which followed - led by Anika Arrington, Allyssa Jones and Thato Mwosa - sought to understand how the presence/absence of people-of-color symbols in our lives, esp. in the field of popular entertainment and culture. Several interesting examples came up of what seeing a person of color in a TV show or in a movie meant to people - from Uhura in Star Trek to some icons on cereal boxes to Russell Peters from the comedy act...
[Maybe we could have brought in Wakanda...and even Coffy?]
All in all, a very enriching day - and along a very unique path!
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