Imagination (Black Creative Worlds: Week Two)
"How do we know if we are dreaming our own or others' transplanted dreams?" 36
Black Creative Worlds is a community offering of notes, readings, and curriculum from my convening of Black Creative Worlds (a bit.ly/JHUBlackWorld seminar) in Spring 2025. Newsletters come out on Mondays from now through April with material for free and paid subscribers under the paywall jump. The full schedule is here.
For more on the Black World, including past seminar schedules and an essay about the Black World Seminar by Dr. Nathan Connolly visit: bit.ly/JHUBlackWorld.
….but for Black Creative Worlds, I am not sure where I would be this Monday.
This one week felt like ten years and had the destructive force of fifty. We knew it would be brutal.
But smarter people than me have said the future is not yet written. And spending those two hours last week sitting in peace and community with others committed to practicing new worlds steadied me. Working on this newsletter series for you, dear reader, gives me a soft place to turn my attention and an oyster knife to sharpen for the work that has been, that is, and that will be.
One of the things to do on the “things you can do that aren’t organizing” list being circulated by folks like Mariame Kaba is organize study groups, book clubs, and other space where folks can think, digest, and struggle with the information together. The attention industry thrives on the shock and awe. But we have a superpower of our own.
We create imagination spaces.
This Week We Are Reading:
Ruha Benjamin, Imagination: A Manifesto (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024).
“What is Abolition?,” Andrea Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (La Vergne: AK Press, 2023).
Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab: https://www.thejustdatalab.com/
Discussion Questions
Benjamin, riffing a bit on Thomas Berry, writes “the historical mission of our time” requires "an honest reckoning with the existing stratification of humanity as a starting point for any reinvention.” (43) Is this an alignment with Ritchie’s descriptions of abolition?
Thomas Berry is describing a necessary move from "Homo economicus" to "Homo cooperativus." Benjamin cites Sylvia Wynter’s formations of Man1 and Man 2, as well as posthumanism. Who or what is the human we should be imagining if s/t/he/y are none of these?
What does Benjamin mean by the eugenic imagination? How does it differ from what she proposes as “the solidaristic imagination”? What does a solidaristic imagination look like in practice?
Ritchie writes: "Far from ignoring violence, abolition requires us to come face to face with violence, to stop delegating responsibility for it to cops acting as violence workers, and to devote our attention and resources to preventing, interrupting, and transforming the conditions that produce violence and the people who enact it." (53) What are strategies you, your community, your institutions/organizations are doing to come “face to face” with violence in an abolitionist way?
"Harrell cautions that when computer scientists rely on their own limited intuitions to design systems, rather than engage theories that show how identities are "enacted, contextual, imaginative, and infrastructural," they are likely to perpetuate patterns of discrimination and disenfranchisement." (67) How do we fight those who have limited imaginations, eugenic imaginations? Convince them different? Laws? Ignore them? No wrong answers.
Limited imaginations are building rockets to space, video games, and robot dogs that erase, police, subjugate the many for the few. There’s a Black Studies genealogy from slaves to minstrels to robots (see Chude-Sokei reading below). The Just Data Lab and Being (see below) might be examples of the opposite. Is it possible to reverse engineer an Afrofuturist tale of people and machines that gets us towards the next world? Can the robot’s tools dismantle the robot’s house—or free it?
Longtermism connects the dots from neoliberalism to colonialism to slavery and Discovery. At the same time, it is clear we won’t all make it through the other side of this world ending. It feels impossible to square the circle and stay human. And yet we must. Are there lessons abolition might hold for how to reckon with these hard facts?
Did Benjamin add something new, change or resolve your mind about AI?
Which life are you willing to live: "life as property or life as poetry"? (110)
Try out one of the promots Benjamin offers in the final chapter!
Suggested Readings
Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome Beacon Press, 2016).
Alexis De Veaux, JesusDevil: The Parables (AK Press, 2023).
Ruha Benjamin, “Perhaps a Lot of Our Future Is Behind Us,” Urban Omnibus, January 16, 2025, https://urbanomnibus.net/2025/01/perhaps-a-lot-of-our-future-is-behind-us/.
Yarimar Bonilla and Naomi Klein, “The Trauma Doctrine: A Conversation Between Yarimar Bonilla and Naomi Klein,” in Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, ed. Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón, 2019, 21–37.
Water the Roots Zine: https://ourtranstruth.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Water-the-Roots-Zine-1.pdf
Marisa Parham, “Breaking, Dancing, Making in the Machine: Notes on .Break .Dance,” Sx Archipelagos, no. 2 (July 10, 2019), https://doi.org/10.7916/archipelagos-xn3y-vj19.
Sylvia Wynter. “1492: A New World View,” in Race, discourse, and the origin of the Americas: A new world view, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, 5–57. 1995).
Eleni Agapis, “Toolkit for Cooperative, Collective, & Collaborative Cultural Work,” accessed January 26, 2025, https://toolkit.press/introduction.html.
adrienne maree brown, “Working Families Mass Call Jan 23, Notes – Adrienne Maree Brown,” accessed January 26, 2025, https://adriennemareebrown.net/2025/01/24/working-families-mass-call-jan-23-notes/.
Fiona Barnett et al., “QueerOS: A User’s Manual,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Lauren Klein and Matthew Gold, vol. 19 (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=11961495101989078851&hl=en&oi=scholarr.
Bill Chappell, “The Vatican Repudiates ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’ Which Was Used to Justify Colonialism,” NPR, March 30, 2023, sec. Religion, https://www.npr.org/2023/03/30/1167056438/vatican-doctrine-of-discovery-colonialism-indigenous.
Kelly Hayes, “A Brutal Beginning: Orienting Ourselves Amid the Shock and Awe,” Organizing My Thoughts, January 21, 2025, https://organizingmythoughts.org/a-brutal-beginning-orienting-ourselves-amid-the-shock-and-awe/.
“Black Haunts in the Anthropocene,” Notebook (blog), January 27, 2014, http://mp285.com/nb/black-anthropocene/.
LaKendrick Richardson, “A Black Belt-Ocene: Anti-Black Racism and Reimagining the Anthropocene,” Radical History Review 2023, no. 145 (January 1, 2023): 104–23, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063795.
Daelena Tinnin-Gadson, “‘I Saw Things I Imagined’ Poetic and Geographic Audacity in Solange Knowles’s When I Get Home,” Southern Cultures, December 11, 2024, https://www.southerncultures.org/article/i-saw-things-i-imagined/.
Kim Gallon, “Synthetic Data and Health Equity,” accessed January 27, 2025, https://just-tech.ssrc.org/field-reviews/synthetic-data-and-health-equity/.
Being, the Digital Griot: https://beingthedigitalgriot.com/
