Afrofuturistic Noir

• In Event: Bloodlines on the Leaves: Afrofuturist Storyworlding at the Edge of the End of the World

Abstract

The first presentation sets the stage for participants to understand the genre and purpose of Afrofuturistic Noir as it applies to counterstorytelling. Oral traditions such as pláticas and testimonies have been central to disseminating knowledge in ways that align with the otherwise ways of being and knowing of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (Christian, 1987; Delgado Bernal, 1998, 2002). Central to Bloodlines is the refusal to produce knowledge on and responses to terror that discretely fit within the frame of “objective,” Eurocentric knowledge production (Smith, Yosso, and Solórzano, 2011; Solórzano and Yosso, 2002). In our counterstory, Victoria uses archival fragments, institutional documents, suicide data, and African cosmology to query Prof. Kiele’s absence as both loss and intentional abandonment. Within the scope of Afrofuturistic Noir, we resituate the structure of narration, blurring the states past, present, future to illustrate the endemic, enduring nature of antiblackness (Bell, 1992).

Author

• Kenjus T. Watson, American University