Afrofuturistic Performativity

I felt an ever-present tension throughout the creative writing process. Even through Afrofuturism, where future possibilities can be created and imagined, I still found “ ‘home’ for Black U.S. Americans [to be] distorted yet omnipresent and imagined, with roots that may never be realized” (Harris, 2020, p. 284). I was able to create a world unscathed from systems of oppression, but colonialist residue still found its way within my work. That, however, is the story of the active rejection to accept the limitations and shackles of a campus through wearing headphones.

The story produces distorted affective pockets as the timeline of events is told a-temporally; this was done intentionally as:

“There are things that you do not presently understand, but you must believe me when I say order is not something that can be negotiated with. It cannot be bargained with. It cannot be bought. The universe is governed by laws that precede the creation of life on Mayim. It precedes you. It precedes me. There was only darkness when my eyes opened. Billions of years passed before I ever discovered a glimpse of light. A glimpse of hope.” – Inu (you’ll meet them in the data chapter).

The hope that is mentioned by Inu is just the glimpse of liberation that a person discovers that leads them down to further pursue it. I, and other students of color, find glimpses of hope through music, so I incorporated the records we consumed as focal points in the creative writing process of this project. There’s a distorting feeling that’s created through the combination of consuming music, media, and words on a page, but again, that is the story of experience that I, and others, have come to know at a predominantly white institution.

Ultimately, I turned to Afrofuturistic creative writing through performance ethnography to enact a postcolonial critique. Performance ethnography is a critical practice that champions the creative and artistic ways of knowing and expression of marginalized individuals, in disrupting institutional power structures (Conquergood, 2002). Esquibel & Mejia (2008) detail how this methodology begins with “desire to understand culture and know culture through the body” (Esquibel & Mejia, 2008, p. 41). When assessing the role of the body, performance creates a space where an individual can exist outside of their hegemonic character – an actor is an entity that exists outside of character; in short, our performance unshackles the bounds in which we can do or become (Esquibel & Mejia, 2008). Performance ethnography “is about seeing the constructed nature of our lives and then interrupting that seemingly stable process” (Warren, 2006, p. 318).

I used Afrofuturistic creative writing to to [re]tell the data assessed and gathered via performance ethnography. Afrofuturism is a ‘counter-imaginative’ culture that uses the four concepts of liberation, culture, time, and sci-fi/tech to challenge hegemonic systems in [re]imagining future possibilities (Asante & Pindi, 2020; Dery, 1994; Hanchey, 2020; Melzer, 2005; Pirker & Rahn, 2020; Wosmack, 2013). I created the world of Mayim to demonstrate the [re]configuration of experience and what it means to exist as a student of color at a predominately white institution. Additionally, I used vernacular technology to lean into the distortion I felt on campus, and I created Mayim to match it. Ultimately, the goal was to create a piece of writing that affectively creates the negative sensations of distortions felt as SOC walk campus.