Drawing on Freedom Dreams, Robin D. G. Kelley positions radical imagination as central to liberation, with freedom first envisioned beyond racial capitalism, colonialism, and state violence. For Kelley, music, literature, visual art, and performance are spaces for imagining alternative social relations, even as Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” shows how attachments to colonial or neoliberal fantasies can limit flourishing. Édouard Glissant’s “Poetics of Relation,” especially the rhizome and opacity, frames intermediality as a practice of connection and entanglement. Building on this relational framework, Derek Walcott and Achille Mbembe show how African and diasporic futures are imagined through hybridity, fragmentation, mobility, and planetary thinking beyond nationalist and colonial frameworks. Taken together, these thinkers position intermediality as both an aesthetic and political practice that reconfigures freedom, agency, and temporality in postcolonial contexts. The panel argues that African and diasporic artists increasingly work across literature, visual art, performance, digital media, and speculative worldmaking to challenge inherited narratives of history, identity, and belonging, make marginalized lives perceptible, and imagine new relational futures.
The session consists of three 15-minute papers, followed by a brief, 10-minute moderated discussion among the panelists, leading to the 15-minute open discussion. The papers are designed to build on one another, moving from artistic self-fashioning in the late colonial period, to queer reimaginings of history, to speculative digital futures, and finally to the intimate, everyday politics of material culture. Together, they demonstrate how African and African diasporic artists work across media to challenge inherited narratives of history and identity while imagining new forms of relation and freedom.
The first paper, Eva Ulrike Pirker’s “The New (World) Men: Conceptualisations of the Artistic Self in the Emerging Postcolony: Walcott – Mvusi – Locke,” establishes the panel’s historical and conceptual foundations. Focusing on Derek Walcott, Selby Mvusi, and Donald Locke, the paper explores how artists working across poetry, painting, sculpture, and design used intermedial practice to fashion new identities and possibilities for freedom in late colonial and early postcolonial contexts.
Building from questions of temporality, identity, and freedom into the realm of digital media, the next paper, Elizabeth Abena Osei’s “From Pawn to Game-Master: Gaming the System through Africanfuturism and Speculative Cartography,” examines how speculative worldmaking can produce new forms of agency. Focusing on Sankofa’s Cosmic Adansikro and its engagement with writers such as Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, Akwaeke Emezi, and Rivers Solomon, the paper explores how Africanfuturist game design and speculative cartography transform African subjects from objects of imperial systems into agents of worldmaking.
Finally, bringing these broader concerns with intermediality and futurity into the intimate realm of everyday material culture, the fourth paper, Gloria Ajami Makokha’s “Majina ya Khanga and the Intermedial Poetics of Freedom in African and Diasporic Contexts,” examines majina ya khanga as hybrid forms situated between orature, textile, visual culture, and performance. The paper shows how women in coastal Kenya use khanga inscriptions to negotiate identity, contest patriarchal authority, and imagine autonomy. Through practices of wearing, gifting, and display, majina ya khanga become embodied archives of freedom that connect past traditions with future-oriented imaginaries.
Taken together, the papers demonstrate that intermedial practices are central to how African and diasporic communities imagine freedom across time. Whether through painting, performance, gaming, or textiles, the papers collectively show that freedom is not simply represented in art, but actively produced through creative practices that reconfigure history, identity, and possibility.