In the Search of Our "Sister Futures": Rethinking Racialized Gendered Futures in "Afronauts"

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Ten
  In Roundtable Session: Reimagining Futures: Culture and Literacy (Table 3)

Abstract

This paper offers space to engage narratives of anti-progress, pushback on science and its centrality to knowledge production, and use of technology to think beyond western hierarchies of human, space, and temporality in relation to worlding and curriculum. This paper utilizes critical analysis of the science fiction film, Afronauts (2014), as the object by which three flashpoints of our flashpoint epistemology shine through: Narratives of imagining and the future, Necropolitics through the Black female body, and the production of knowledge. Using an endarkened feminist practice, we think in dialogue with the film, analyzing moments of disruptions of interconnectedness of our situated knowledge of Blackness which allow space to explore Black futurisms in relation to histories of colonization, slavery,and artificial intelligence.

Authors

• Cynthia Simekha, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Kandyce A. Amie, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author