Black Pasts – Black Futures

This panel explores how Black artists have reimagined temporality and historiography through the twentieth century to today. The legacy of Transatlantic slavery poses distinct challenges to the historicity of the African diaspora in the so-called New World. Since the New Negro Renaissance, Black artists have variously sought to reconstruct Black histories and reclaim an African racial heritage in order to resist historical erasure and articulate a Black modern self-consciousness. However, these efforts often required artists to negotiate the traps of primitivism and racial authenticity. More recently, cultural movements such as Afrofuturism demonstrate how Black artists explore the intersection of technology and race to envision a liberated Black future. As an aesthetic and narrative framework, Afrofuturism has come to encompass the complex dynamic among the past, present, and future in Black expressive culture. These cultural experiments suggest that simple oppositions between past and future ignore the more complex ways that Black cultural practitioners challenge notions of progress and reimagine the historical continuum. To explore this complexity further, this panel asks: How do the dilemmas pertaining to the historical representation of enslavement complicate the reconciling of Black pasts and Black futures? How can reinventions of the past and tradition signal more expansive futures? How might a re-examination of experimental forms of Black historiography challenge dominant aesthetic and historical frameworks such as modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism?