Reading Room

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa
by: Adam Hochschild

Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the America
by: Richard Price

Sun-Ra : Traveling the Spaceways : the astro black and other solar myths
By: John Corbett, Terri Kapsalis, Anthony Elms

Wangechi Mutu: My Dirty Little Heaven
By: Okwui Enwezor

Beasts of the Southern Wild (dir. Benh Zeitlin)
2012

Gullah Gullah Island
Nick Jr.
1994 -1998

A fact that largely shapes my creation of Awa Land is that it is one of the few countries that has not be colonized. This manifestation of its history without the inclusion of Western colonialism is intentional and allowed for me to question why many fictional creations still work within a capitalistic and westernized form. This decision has informed how I developed their language, economic systems, their appearance and so forth. Therefore, for my reading room, I would like the discussion to be centered around the lasting generational effects of colonialism and its continued violence for Black and brown people; an explanation as to why Afrofuturism and imagined African countries like Awa Land exist to escape that.

King Leopold’s Ghost explains the atrocities colonialism has inflicted upon Africa specifically the Congo. Its inclusion is to remind that colonialism not only brought European and English languages and religions to indigenous populations but it also murdered, raped and enslaved many Africans.

Maroon Societies talks about rebel slave colonies in the Caribbean and America that were formed by escaped slaves. Usually they resided in hard to reach/live areas and developed their own societies while fighting against plantation owners. Popular colonies were found in Suriname and Jamaica, and to this day it is a pride of people to say they are descendants of maroons.

Sun-Ra talks about Sun Ra, the self-proclaimed visionary extraterrestrial of the Angel race, musician and huge proponent of Afrofuturism. Sun Ra claimed that he was an alien from Saturn with a mission on Earth to preach peach. Throughout his entire life he consistently denied any ties to his prior identity and upheld the narrative that he formed, an action that shows the power of being able to rewrite your own history when others have previously tried to tarnish it.

Wangechi Mutu is a multidisciplinary artist born in Kenya who also is involved in the Afrofuturism genre. According to the Guggenheim's description of her 2010 show of the same title, "Her examination of themes such as colonization, gender roles, consumerism, and ecology find their correspondence in artistic techniques that are demonstratively modest. Mutu recycles images of our world by cutting them out of books and magazines and assembling them anew."

Beasts of the Southern Wild, a 2012 film adapted from a play which focuses on a isolated community of Louisiana. According to Wikipedia, "The fictional island of the film, "Isle de Charles Doucet" known to its residents as the Bathtub, was inspired by several isolated and independent fishing communities threatened by erosion, hurricanes and rising sea levels in Louisiana's Terrebonne Parish, most notably the rapidly eroding Isle de Jean Charles."

Lastly I included the 1994 children's TV series Gullah Gullah Island, which has immensely shaped by upbringing. The show was centered around the Geechee/Gullah people on the Sea islands off the coast of Georgia, USA whom are descendants of enslaved Africans. However because of the island's isolation from the United States mainland, they have managed to preserve many of their West African traditions and speak an English-based creole language called Geechee. The show brought historical context to these community of people who are now rarely talked about and whom's community is at constant threat of America's neocolonialism.