"Shine Your Eyes": Envisioning the Curricular and Pedagogical Possibilities of Africanfuturism

• In Event: Engaging Popular Culture as World-Making: The Everyday Practices of (Re)Storying Histories, Futures, and Positionalities

Abstract

Singer-songwriter FKA Twigs crooned “Never seen a hero like me in a sci-fi” (FKA twigs, 2019). This is not an unfamiliar sentiment among many diasporic Black women. Despite the presence of authors such as Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tanarive Due, the access to Black women-authored and -led science fiction was relatively inaccessible for Black women readers (Toliver, 2018). However, current popular culture trends have brought to the forefront Black speculative, Afrofuturist, and Africanfuturist genre and have produced an alternative contemporary landscape for diasporic Black girls and women to witness and envision themselves and their communities. Within this ever-expanding narrative plenitude (Nguyen, 2016), this paper aims to investigate the specifically pedagogical and curricular possibilities of introducing Africanfuturistic texts into secondary school classrooms. Containing this project’s focus to Africanfuturism permits me to center the narratives, experiences, and practices of indigenous Africans as well as first- and second-generation Africans outside of the continent.

In this 4-month long multimodal qualitative study, two lines of inquiry intersect to understand the implications of Africanfuturistic texts in secondary classrooms. First, there is data collection and analysis on the production of contemporary Africanfuturistic texts, including interviews from the authors; mapping of the books’ plotlines, character designs and design; mapping of trends in digital searches regarding the texts. These texts used were: Okorafor’s Akata Witch series, Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone series, and Amayo’s Daughter of Nri series. Second, to process the potential of these texts as an 2nd gen African American, current secondary school educator, and a scholar devoted to the speculative, it was pivotal to engage and interrogate my personal and professional attachments to this genre. Thus, I enacted a self-study, which produced data such as read-aloud recordings, field notes, journal writing, and marginalia. The data offers multiple perspectives to view how this show emerges, floats, and settles within its audience. Coupling textual analysis with a case study provides a comparative peek into the authors’ ideas and motives driving the texts’ engine and the texts’ reception. In this way, the inquiry explores the texts and their afterlives upon dissemination and circulation.

Engaging with this inquiry offers a launching pad into pedagogical and curricular potential of these genres in secondary classrooms. Africanfuturism centers the “lived experiences, traditions, spiritualities and stories” of Africans, while also featuring an Africa “that has a stake in national, global, and universal affairs” (Author 2, 2022). These texts also simultaneously critique problematic texts that have reified damage- and trauma-centered iterations of the continent and its peoples. Lastly, this inquiry widens the scope of culturally responsive and sustaining practices by attending to the nuances of contemporary and future cultural identities and experiences. This project is a process of (re)membering (Dillard, 2012) and re-learning of truths and possibilities. These speculative Africanfuturistic texts are more than mirrors, windows, and doors; the introduction of these texts into classroom may be able to upend what has been taken for granted as normal and dare us to (re)turn to a place of imagining and enacting greater.

Author

• Oluwaseun Animashaun, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Presenting Author