Here's a new podcast series that will provide you with a good primer on Afrofuturism. It was created as part of Carnegie Hall's Afrofuturism Festival from Spring 2022, is hosted by the festival's curators, and features writers, artists, scholars, and more exploring the history and present-day iterations and manifestations of Afrofuturism. — Read the rest

The BBC has published a long and welcome feature on Afrofuturism, the term coined by former Boing Boing guestblogger Mark Dery to describe (in the words of Steve Barnes) "science fiction, fantasy and horror created by or featuring the children of the African diaspora (people of African origin living outside of the continent)."

WEHO Times and Rolling Stone recently announced that Grace Jones would headline the Saturday lineup for the OUTLOUD WeHo (West Hollywood) Pride Music festival on June 2 and 4, 2023.

"Outloud is a show created for queer people in queer communities. It was born out of a need to support a struggling community of queer artists," Outloud founder and CEO Jeff Consoletti tells Rolling Stone. — Read the rest

"Black Speculative Art is a creative, aesthetic practice that integrates African diasporic worldviews with science or technology and seeks to interpret, engage, design or alter reality for the re-imagination of the past, the contested present, and to act as a catalyst for the future.

"All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God Is Change." —Octavia E. Butler

In just a few short weeks, Kindred, a novel by Octavia E. Butler published in 1979, will be released on Hulu as a T.V. — Read the rest

In the comic book, Laguardia, by "a writer of strange things" Nnedi Okorafor, the airport by the same name—now an intergalactic way-station that is STILL under construction—is the backdrop for an interstellar story of equality, community, and environmental justice.  — Read the rest

Coming this fall: a new 240-page book about the incredible album cover art of Sun Ra's Saturn Label. It's edited by Irwin Chusid and Chris Reisman, and published by Fantagraphics.

Drawn from private collections around the world, this is the first comprehensive collection of the Saturn label's printed record covers, along with hundreds of the best hand-designed, one-of-a-kind sleeves and disc labels decorated by Sun Ra and members of his Arkestra.

"Before Yesterday We Could Fly": An Afrofuturist Period Room is an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that, according to the museum, is "powered by Afrofuturism—a transdisciplinary creative mode that centers Black imagination, excellence, and self-determination—this construction is only one proposition for what might have been, had Seneca Village [a Black settlement destroyed to make way for Central Park in in 1857] been allowed to thrive into the present and beyond." — Read the rest

In the early 2000s, lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary, managed an internal side project to create an online Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction that would, in part, be fueled by submissions from SF fans themselves. — Read the rest

Pedro Bell, the visionary painter whose astonishing psychedelic art (and liner notes) appeared on numerous Funkadelic albums and shaped the P-Funk mythos, died on Tuesday at 69. Free your mind, and your ass will follow. From the New York Times:

"The artwork of Pedro Bell was an essential component of the alternately utopian and dystopian world of P-Funk, which placed African-American reality in the context of a science fiction future that was both scary and hopeful," (art curator Pan) Wendt said by email.

Samuel R "Chip" Delany is a science fiction pioneer: a brilliant literary stylist with dazzling ideas who was one of the field's first openly queer writers, and one of the first Black writers accepted into the field. He is one of the fathers of afrofuturism.

Adventures in New America is a full-cast serial drama from Night Vale Presents (previously), a piece of acerbic and engrossing afrofuturism in the form of a buddy comedy; Episode One (MP3) just dropped.

NAACP founder WEB Du Bois wasn't just a committed, effective activist for the rights of black people in America: he was also a prolific author of early 20th century science fiction and fantasy stories.

A Tribe Called Red bounce up and down as they play a ferocious remix of their track “Indigenous Power” made by Monterrey, Mexico based producer Javier Estrada, along with a stream of rap, dancehall, cumbia and miscellaneous unknown vicious styles. It’s a hip-hop party, it’s an “Electric Pow Wow”, to use the name of the group’s party night in Ottawa; it’s 21st century cosmopolitanism in full effect: a perfect example of the bringing together of worlds that is Global Bass.

I'm delighted to welcome Mark Dery as our guestblogger for the next two weeks. Mark is a cultural critic and author whose work I've enjoyed for almost twenty years. In my library, his books share a shelf with the best nonfiction by Ballard, Burroughs, and Eco. — Read the rest