Early Black Futures | Dr. Brigitte Fielder

808 Commonwealth Avenue,Brookline MA 02446

24 March, 2022

Description

Lecture by Dr. Brigitte Fielder ,writer, researcher, and associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison Boston University's English Department, African American Studies Program, and American & New England Studies Program Presents Early Black Futures: Old Technology, Hopeful Speculation, and Childhood Dreams Lecture by Dr. Brigitte Fielder, University of Wisconsin-Madison Open to the BU Community In person & Live Streamed to the General Public Location: The Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground , FLR 104, 808 Commonwealth Avenue, Brookline, MA 02446 Live Stream: After registering you will receive the link to the live stream, save it in your "Bookmarks" for easy reference. Both Black literary and emancipation efforts contributed to a project of imagining and producing early Black futures. This talk treats the intertwining of the literary and the technological, exploring Black literature that takes up forms of “old” technology and speculation to consider Black children – as readers and thinkers in the Black future that Black speculation would produce. When we consider print technologies among the larger scope of Black technoculture and theological discourse and intergenerational address alongside other notions of the speculative, we can understand early Black community and literary address as a form of (proto)Afrofuturism. I especially treat Black literature that evokes and addresses Black children, who writers acknowledged as part of their communities, among their potential readers, and as would-be beneficiaries of their work. Reading the child in early Black techno-speculation, we see the future’s hopeful imagining and production.