What Does a Black Liberation Future Look Like?
by Erin Sharkey & Junauda Petrus
To catalyze their editorial work with Mn Artists, Free Black Dirt hosted a dinner and curated conversation on the topics of Afrofuturism, healing, prison abolition and transformation. A video by Adja Gildersleve captures the highlights.
When we first visited the James J. Hill House on Summit Hill in St. Paul, it was the leather wallpaper in the dining room that stopped us. The walls were covered with the rippled skin of an animal—no, dozens of animals. The tour guide said that Hill had imported the hide from the U.S.…
More
Black Men on the Moon
by Maya Beck
Maya Beck charts a lineage of black trailblazers, from John Coltrane to Kid Cudi to her own father, examining the particular loneliness that arises when cultural innovators reach the outer limits of expectation, convention, and community knowledge.
My father lives in the middle of a desert. If you walk a couple of blocks, jump a fence, take the sidewalk until there is no more sidewalk, you can easily end up surrounded by nothing but faded shrubbery and dust.…
More
Colonel Guion S. Bluford Jr. Photo courtesy US Air Force.
When the Problematic Fuels Your Creative Drive
by S.D. Chrismon
Writer S.D. Chrismon considers how to relate to problematic media representations of Black characters—from Black Mirror to Gone with the Wind—and asks how to reenvision pop culture lineages in order to craft new Afrofuturist narratives.
As a Black/Biracial woman in America, my writing is uniquely informed by my positionality in the world. My writing is informed by my privileges and my politic.…
More
"'Gone With The Wind (1939) - Vivien Leigh & Hattie McDaniel" by Rossano aka Bud Care is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Frankenstein AF
by Senah Yeboah-Sampong
Senah Yeboah-Sampong delivers a fresh reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein through a contemporary Afrofuturist lens, considering how bodies come to be read as monsters out of fragility and fear.
Someone, or something, took the life of a young boy from a well-to-do family. The only suspect was the victim’s housekeeper, Justine.…
More
"'La Créature de Frankenstein' by KLAT @ Plainpalais @ Geneva" by Guilhem Vellut is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Imagination Blueprint, Liberation Technologies: A Conversation with Free Black Dirt
by Erin Sharkey & Junauda Petrus
Mn Artists welcomes Free Black Dirt as the guest editors of our editorial platform.
Free Black Dirt was born serendipitously in a community college LGBTQ literature class in 2001, when two nerdy Black girls connected for the first time.…
More
Free Black Dirt. Photo: Sarah White/Fotos for Barcelona Photography.
Anti-Ethnography: The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets
by Megan Gette
Following a program of indigenous filmmakers curated by Adam and Zack Khalil, poet M.J. Gette chews on violence in ethnography, embodiment in archive, manipulation in documentary, and positionality in language.
Still from The Violence of a Civilization Without Secrets, Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys (2017).…
More
A body / a sign : On Black subjectivity / interiority / finding tenderness: beyond political meaningfulness
by Mara Duvra
Through voice and matter, artist-writer Mara Duvra considers possibilities for black subjectivity beyond the representation of otherness, making manifest calm, interiority, and gestures of tenderness.
In order to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings made an excess … over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await…
More
