African Futures and Urban Imaginaries

Image Credit: Granville Carroll 

Imagination, Creativity and African Future Making

This dynamic interdisciplinary panel composed of artists, writers and intellectuals explore the roles that arts and the imagination play in envisioning global futures. Focusing on African-centered perspectives of worldmaking and non-Western futures, specifically in the context of urban spaces, this panel conversation investigates the intersections of fiction and creative endeavors for questioning, critiquing and re-envisioning developmental paradigms associated with modern metropolitan geographies. By placing an emphasis on indigenous and non-Western knowledge systems as vehicles for sustainable ecological and cultural futures, the panel will deliberate how different creative mediums can deepen African agency in re-imagining future cities.

Participants:

​​Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. W.W. Norton will publish her debut short story collection, Ghostroots, in early 2024 and her debut novel, The Suicide Mothers, in 2025. She was a 2022 MacDowell fellow and is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Granta, ZYZZYVA, Tor.com, American Short Fiction and One Story.

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano. Her debut short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky, Spring 2023) was selected for the 2021 UPK New Poetry & Prose Series. Her novel manuscript in progress was selected by George R.R. Martin’s team for the Worldbuilder Scholarship. She is pursuing her MFA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where she teaches in the Writing Program and earned her BA at Cornell University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers Workshop and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Workshop for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in the World Fantasy Award winning anthology Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2021 and the NAACP award-nominated anthology African Risen. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in F&SF, Lightspeed, Tor.com, FANTASY Magazine, Columbia Journal and Fiyah Literary Magazine.

Granville Carroll is a visual artist, educator at Arizona State University, and Afrofuturist working with digital technology, poetry and alternative processes to reshape the world. Carroll’s artwork explores photographic representation and vision to understand the process of existence and interpretation. Simultaneously, he explores and expands ideas around racial blackness to encompass spatial blackness, temporal blackness and spiritual blackness. Carroll highlights the imaginative qualities of the human mind through world building and storytelling to discover new futures and states of being. At the core of his practice is the investigation into metaphysics and the ontology of self and the universe.

Jenna N. Hanchey is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric & Critical/Cultural Studies at Arizona State University. She uses decolonial and anti-racist theory to examine Western aid and development initiatives in Africa and how such future trajectories are resisted and reimagined in the continent. In addition to studying Africanfuturism, she also writes speculative fiction herself. Her stories have been published in Nature, Daily Science Fiction, Martian Magazine, Wyngraf and Medusa Tales, among other venues. She is a member of the Locus-award winning Codex Writer’s Forum and an Associate Member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. Her first book, The Center Cannot Hold: Decolonial Possibility in the Collapse of a Tanzanian NGO, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in August 2023. 

Isaac Joslin is Assistant Professor of French at Arizona State University. He has a background in French and Continental philosophy and earned his PhD in 2010 from the University of Minnesota, focusing on colonial and postcolonial francophone African literatures, cinemas and cultures. He has lived extensively in Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa and has traveled for research to Senegal, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Rwanda and Burundi and has taught a variety of courses on Francophone literatures and cultures. His research interests include aesthetics and theories of representation, theories of cultural hybridity, ecocriticism, Afrofuturism and pedagogical approaches for teaching African literatures and cultures. He has published scholarly articles in numerous academic journals and his monograph entitled Afrofuturisms: Ecology, Humanity and Francophone Cultural Expressions is forthcoming in April 2023 from Ohio University Press.