I spent much of my Saturday at the Nine Worlds convention in Hammersmith, the first time I’ve ever been actually able to make it though not the first time I’ve heard of it. It’s been touted as one of the most inclusive geek events in the UK and for myself, I think that’s definitely the case, or at least from what I saw.
So wherefore my attendance? Well, I was on a panel titled ‘Where Next for AfroFuturism’, a panel I’d been invited to by Chella Ramanan from BAME in Games who I knew from January’s Afrotech Fest. A lot of – in fact all of – my recent talks have been on tech and inclusive design so it was nice getting to chat about AfroFuturism to a new audience.
It started a few years ago, with a conversation I had with my then-boyfriend, a Senegalese agronomist, first about peanuts and then about slavery. He lived in the Sine-Saloum region of Senegal, a four-hour drive from where I lived in the capital, Dakar. I was writing about the history of peanut agriculture, Sine-Saloum’s main crop, so I was often there.
A succinct yet useful resource. I’m taking a break from my research at the moment due to work, convention and further study, but there’s a lot more coming up in the near future, I promise you that!
For centuries, humans have invented ingenious devices to replace lost limbs. Here we have a gallery of some of the most cutting-edge prosthetics from years past — comparable to today’s bionic arms. What’s fascinating is that these historic devices weren’t just about limb replacement, but also enhancement.
The revolution will not be cited. It will not have a bibliography, or a title page. The revolution will never happen in the seclusion of the ivory tower built by racist, sexist, and classist institutions. Professional academic researchers in the…
One of the reasons I started my research into what I call the African cyborg, that is, the physical and metaphysical union of person and machine, was precisely for this reason. How we imagine our pasts shapes not only our futures, but the methods we use to shape our futures, i.e., our activism.
From one of my favourite researchers in the field, Peter Schmidt, who’s been pretty influential for me starting in my research on pre-colonial African technologies.
