Thread by @Ebonyteach

This was a follow-worthy Tweet. (Lots of thoughts about this.)

https://twitter.com/tadethompson/status/1047134416483622912

Honestly, this is why I spent time in #TheDarkFantastic examining the construction of race in the Western speculative imagination, and left Afrofuturism -- which I do value as a Black American, and a Diasporan -- alone.

There's been a lot of heat for (a few) African immigrants to the US for critiquing Black Panther, but I think that it's important for us to read what continental Africans have to say about it.

(And we have to listen to their refusal to be labeled with our constructs, too.)

Afrofuturism is liberatory from our perspective. But I agree that it's probably distinct from African futurism.

I didn't address the problem of location in #TheDarkFantastic because my mentors maintained that it was divisive. In the follow-up, whether it's an essay or a full book, I'll have enough raw material to wrestle with it. (Working title: Notes Toward a Black Fantastic.)

I did sneak in a section on "the problem of return" in the Gwen/Merlin chapter, thanks to Michelle Wright's Physics of Blackness. She writes powerfully about the challenges of the Middle Passage as epistemology.

Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return, & Michelle Commander's Afro-Atlantic Flight, helped me write through the problem of Diasporan Black girls trapped in the billion dollar Western fantastic imagination. But I understand this concern as distinct from Afrofutures.

And Zetta Elliott has been saying this in essays for over a decade -- it's challenging to worldbuild SFF for children & YAs using Black North America as the sole or primary basis of mythopoesis. Once you do, the industry doesn't always get it. (That's why Virginia's essential.)

I wish we had more words. (Part of the challenge is when we place all SFF production by artists/authors/creatives of African descent, or who are African, under a single umbrella. One has to ask if it's a big enough umbrella.)

I wear a t-shirt all over the country: "Detroit still exists." It's by a Black Detroit artist and I love it. Makes the point.

(But Africa -- all of it, every country & region -- actually exists too. Has implications for our needs as Diasporans to heal, to return, to imagine.)

More thoughts later, perhaps... #TwitterOff