Talk by Ytasha Womack
We need to look past our current circumstances to build a better world. Imagination. Creativity.
In a world filled with AI, the ability to dream is one of our most powerful tools. I’ve learned the most about dreaming from afuturism, from authors like Octavia Butler, Dr. Ruha Benjamin, Tricia Hersey and Ytasha Womack. In this video, Womack defines afrofuturism as follows:
"Afrofuturism is a way of looking at the future and alternate realities through a Black cultural lens. Black cultural lens means the people of the African continent in addition to the Diaspora, the Americas, Europe, etc. It is an artistic aesthetic, but also a kind of method of self-liberation or self-healing. It can be part of critical race theory and in other respects its an epistemology as well. It intersects the imagination, technology, Black culture, liberation, and mysticism. As an artistic aesthetic it bridges literature, music, visual arts, film, and dance. As a mode of self-healing and self-liberation, it's the use of imagination that is most significant because it helps people to transform their circumstances. Imagining oneself in the future creates agency and it's significant because historically people of African descent were not always incorporated into many of the storylines about the future."
Afrofuturism is a framework that shows us the power of dreaming. It is a creative tradition that invites us to imagine beyond racism, capitalism, and colonialism, to imagine futures that are healing, liberatory, and rooted in care.
In the midst of a world that feels like it’s crumbling around us, I can feel how dreaming gives me hope and helps me heal. It lets me jump over the overwhelming set of hurdles I see in front of me. It gets me out of my head and lets me look past the dread and despair I feel when I I read the news. I sit and I dream of a better world. Sometimes it feels like just a coping mechanism. It’s easier to live in our dreams and to escape this reality. But, spending time in our DreamSpace (Hersey), allows us to break through this despair and start to build a foundation for something better. Every future is built on a dream. Every big company, or country, or idea that we had never heard of before started as someone’s dream. The big dreamers always sound ‘crazy’ at first. How could we imagine something so different than the world we live in? Because we must.