Restorying Black Place Relations through Afrofuturist Art

• In Event: Rhythms of Resistance: Black Aesthetics, Sensorial Literacies, and the Architecture of Educational Liberation

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: This paper explores how Afrofuturist art functions as a pedagogical tool for restorying Black place relations and reimagining environmental education through a Black diasporic worldview. Through case studies of kee mabin’s An Otherworldly Existence and Antoine Williams’ Black Fusionist Society, the paper addresses how speculative art disrupts dominant environmental narratives and invites more just ecological futures. I argue that Afrofuturist aesthetics and storytelling offer a speculative method to teach, theorize, and dream place beyond settler colonial time, Western environmental rationalism, and exclusionary curricular frameworks.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework: Grounded in Afrofuturism, and Black Time-Space, this paper engages restorying as a methodology rooted in Black diasporic epistemologies that center imagination, memory, and refusal. Afrofuturism here operates not simply as aesthetic, but as a Black method of place-making and pedagogical refusal that critiques environmental injustice while conjuring alternate worldviews grounded in survival, relation, and Black aliveness.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry: This study uses visual, digital, and spatial analysis as its primary mode of inquiry. I analyze two mixed media exhibits—mabin’s An Otherworldly Existence and Williams’ Black Fusionist Society—as speculative pedagogical texts. Both are examined for how they reconfigure temporality, spatiality, and ecological relationships through Black diasporic aesthetics. Through close visual reading, narrative analysis, and engagement with artist statements and exhibition texts, I examine how these works create pedagogical encounters that resist dominant environmental education and propose speculative futures centered in Black community, ecology, and futurity.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials: The case studies for this article are kee mabin’s An Otherworldly Existence and Antoine Williams’ Black Fusionist Society. These are visual and digital Afrofuturist art exhibits that are hosted at the Chicago Conservatory (mabin) and digitally based in Wilmington, NC (Williams).

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view: Both exhibits interrupt antiblack logics and Western temporalities and spatial logics of environmental education. mabin’s collage installation presents an otherworldly experience where Black Chicago environmentalisms are intertwined with African Diasporic stories to refigure place. Williams’ exhibit resurrects the Wilmington 1898 coup through mythic beings and digital interfaces that collapse linear time, illuminating both historical violence and speculative repair. These works not only critique environmental injustice, but actively restory Black geographies through community art, ritual, and speculative design. As pedagogical tools, they encourage educators and students to imagine otherwise, grounding environmental learning in Black worldmaking, ancestral knowledge, and refusal of extractive logics. Thus, speculative art thus becomes both curriculum and pedagogy.

Scientific or scholarly significance: This paper contributes to scholarship on Black education, environmental education, and Black speculative methods. It extends the field by illustrating how Afrofuturist art enacts “curriculum-as-restorying” and engages students in reimagining the environment beyond settler colonial frameworks. By incorporating Black aesthetics, mythology, and futurity into environmental learning, these works open up new pedagogical possibilities for ecological justice. This study urges educators to move beyond inclusion or multiculturalism toward speculative, place-based pedagogies grounded in Black life and survival. In doing so, it affirms Afrofuturist art as critical pedagogy for imagining and enacting more liberatory futures.

Author

• Maya Revell, University of Oregon