- The analytical mind can explain the world around us but the creative mind can help create our future.

Today's guest explores the power of Afrofuturism and comic books.

The expression of creativity in the midst of pandemic and the way we think about and process history as a society.

He's Dr. Julien Chambliss this week on Story in the Public Square.

(bright upbeat music) Hello, and welcome to a Story in the Public Square where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

Joining me from his home in Rhode Island is my friend and cohost, G. Wayne Miller of the Providence Journal.

Each week, we talk about big issues with great guests, authors, journalists, artists and more, to make sense of the stories that shape public life in the United States today.

This week we're joined by Dr. Julien Chambliss, a multitalented scholar, author, podcaster, curator.

He's also a member of the department of English at Michigan State University, where he joins us today.

Julien, it's great to see you again.

- Thanks for having me again.

- Well, so a lot has happened in the world and in your career since we were here, well, not here, but together, I guess about four years ago, and we want to talk about that, but let's talk first about the $3 million grant Michigan State University has from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, to explore creativity in the time of COVID.

I understand that this involves art, gardening, and social media videos.

Tell us about it.

- Well, this is a project that was funded through the Just Futures Initiative at Mellon.

This was a project that originated with my colleagues, Natalie Phillips and Nancy DeJoy.

Natalie is always in the department of English.

Nancy is in Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures, WRAC.

They both noticed as we were going into lockdown as the pandemic started how much the creativity had help to shape how students were responding in that rapid transitions and living online and trying to complete classes and doing things online.

And so when this call for the grant came, they used an already sort of established set of surveys that have been developed in the Digital Humanities & Literary Cognition lab which is founded by Natalie and sort of situated in the English department.

And Nancy came on as an expert on surveys and they really sort of think about, is there a way we can sort of explore how creativity is a tool for everyday people to respond to the stresses of the pandemic?

and with Just Futures call, it really envisioned a massive collect call for creative works from everyday people to see how the ideas and and traumas and experiences associated with the pandemic were sparking different kind of creative outlets.

And this is important to recognize, this is not about necessarily artists per se, but everyday people and they're turning towards different kinds of creative activity, being gardening, being making TikTok videos, be it scrapbooking, be it dancing, what are they doing in this very dynamic, very historic time to cope with the traumas and the experience and the reality of a pandemic?

And ultimately our goal is to circulate this call all around the world and bring to a kinda digital repository a collection that represents what people want to give us and also to do a physical show here and in several places around the country that reflect what we collect.

- So you, you said you put out a global call, how many respondents, how many people did you hear from?

What numbers are we were talking about?

- Well, actually we're very early in the process.

So the actual grant process was in the summer.

We found out at the end of last year and really our grant period, it starts this year and runs to 2023.

And so we're really at the beginning of the process of sending out the call.

And so what we're doing right now is actually fine tuning that survey, that online document and also thinking about different sort of good faith alterations.

So paper surveys, for instance, or translate the survey into different languages that we'll do in the next year and send out and that's sort of like series of cycles of collecting.

So we haven't actually sent it out yet.

So you're actually talking to me as we had a meeting just yesterday about what are some of the sort of feedback we received from community members and scholars about those sort of early versions of this already they've seen.

And as we put those sort of that feedback into practice, you'll start to see us sending out messages and asking people, yes, please participate in this project.

And this will be going on for really the rest of the year.

So I can't project how many objects we might collect but there's an assumption here, there'll be more than one.

Gotta be meaningful, that's all.

- Julien, if someone in our audience had something they wanted to to contribute to the body of creativity that you're collecting, is there a way that they can do that?

- Yeah, what they can do is go on the web and go to our Digital Humanities & Literary Cognition Lab website and there'll be a page there when the project goes live, where people can click and take the survey and upload their material.

It's important to recognize that at least in this particular process, there is this sort of digital submission in that initial stage.

And as I say, like we sorta recognized we're gonna have to make these sort of good faith modifications for people who don't necessarily have digital access to like say, you wanna do a paper submission, how are we gonna work those things out?

But our initial goal is to sort of circulate this sort of digital survey and the Digital Humanities & Literary Cognition Lab, the DHLC at Michigan State University.

That's the place that you can go and find out about it.

And don't worry, there will be lots of social media that we're going to put in a place around the project and call different calls that we'll be putting out via different social platforms.

And hopefully, when we do this, I'll definitely make sure to tag you guys and let you know that we're live taking in submissions.

But we wanna be as respectful as possible about the willingness of people to participate.

And that's why we're being careful in terms of making sure that the format and the wording and the language that we're using is appropriate and signals of people, our commitment to taking a serious their stories and understanding the different experiences in a very dynamic moment in global history.

- If we can just step back for a second from the actual goods of the project and just talk for a minute, just even from your own experience about what creativity has meant for you in the context of the pandemic.

- Well, you know, I think it's a really dynamic moment to think about how different kinds of creative outlets have allowed people to respond to really systemic injustice or institutional failures.

I think about this in that context of speculative work, a lot of my work sort of touches on things like Afrofuturism.

So you see a lot of those narratives, both historical and contemporary being referenced as people try to understand what's happening in terms of the pandemic and how institutions like the government are sort of systemic imbalance within that sort of capitalist society, how they're affecting people in different ways.

And you can see it in on platforms like TikTok, you can see it in social media, you can see it in public art.

You can see it in lots of different ways that people understand and are using different kinds of creative outlets to make clear their feelings about the moment.

And so this is one of the things that makes the potentialities around this project so impactful, is the ability for people who are doing many different kinds of things to make their feeling about this experience clear and to recognize also that what they're thinking, what they're doing, what they're feeling, corresponds to other people both in their community, but also perhaps around the world.

- So you're also a force behind Mapping the Sonic Imagination and A Past Unremembered: The Transformative Legacy of the Black Speculative Imagination.

They explore Afrofuturism.

So for those in our audience who may not know what that is, break that down for us.

I found this very intriguing and exciting actually.

- So Afrofuturism of course, is black speculative movement that has gained a lot of attention.

When we think sort of current moment, the success of "The Black Panther" in 2018, brought the idea of Afrofuturism to the public mind.

Sometimes Afrofuturism it very simply sort of brought about as feature oriented narratives involving African-Americans in space or in other kind of speculative landscapes.

But I like to think about Afrofuturism and what motivates those exhibitions that you referenced, is Afrofuturism is really the the intersection between black speculative, practice and liberation ideas.

I always try to describe it to students as, intersection between speculation and liberation and how does that play itself out in multiple spheres of knowledge and information and practice that bring African-Americans to the center.

So Afrofuturism, in its original definition which was quoted by Mark Derry in 1994, really puts a lot of emphasis on signification associated with like technologically enhanced futures like cyborgs, people in space, but Afrofuturism as a philosophy that's developed since then really encompasses the consideration of the black path, the black president and the black future.

And it kind of epistemology of transformation and liberation that is advocating for a different set of beliefs, practices and structures that protect, nurture and promote a better future.

- So if you go on the website, there is a page that talks about legacy which is not speculative imagination in the future, it's the past, how is that intwined with this concept?

- So when we think about speculation, I like to point out to students and to the public, whenever a person of color has been alive, especially in the context of the Western hemisphere, they have dreamed of a better future.

So in that context, there is a long history of people of African descent, especially in the Western context, dreaming for structures and imagining structures and working towards structures that are more free, that nurture and protect that advocate for equality.

This is an important element of the black contribution to the American Democratic project.

We think about the idea of black people in slave, working actively to abolish slavery, once free those former slaves, those remain working actively to help reconstruct the country and advocate for democracy.

And even the sort of like law and civil rights movements that emerged in the post reconstruction period, where African-Americans are pushed out of the public sphere and then worked very diligently over generations to establish themselves in a public sphere and make sure that citizenship lives up to the ideologies that are associated with it.

These are all legacies that we can associate with a black speculative practice.

In a practical sense, this is often I point people towards early literary works that are written by African-Americans, they're in fact, offering up critiques of the political system, imagining freedom and imagining different ways to achieve freedom.

People like Martin Robison Delany, who was a contemporary of Frederick Douglas, who wrote "Blake; or The Huts of America", which imagines a hemispheric slave revolt or someone like Sutton Griggs, who's writing in 1890s in response to things like the leopard spot and the rise of scientific racism and the lost cosmetology, who writes "Imperium in Imperio".

Or even someone like Pauline Hopkins, who in "Of One Blood", really opposite of what is essentially a proto Wakanda, where she has a character find out that they're the the heir to a hidden African kingdom and Ethiopia.

So there's a legacy here of black people imagining a future in the context of literary art and artistic production, often in opposition to the regressive political landscape that they're living in.

- And you have some great creative talents involved here.

And I wanted to mention just two of them, Chuck Brown, he's written for the "The Punisher" and "Black Panther".

And The Gibbs sisters, talk about these two people or these three people in particular but also just in general, how you got such a really, an all-star cast and people contributing.

- Yeah, I wanna clarify, because we're talking about actually a couple of different exhibitions.

So one exhibition, which one that you referenced Mapping the Sonic Imagination, A Past Unremembered, is actually at the Zora Neale Hurston Museum in Florida which is part of my work curating Zora Neale Hurston arts and festival of arts and humanities.

And that is those particular installations.

One is sort of looking at the path and once we're looking at sound.

And the one you just referenced is Beyond Black Panther visions of Afrofuturism in American comics, which is actually exhibit curated at the MSU museum.

And so in that installation Beyond Black Panther, these are comics that I've curated.

This is an online exhibit.

And the goal here was, again we think about the origins of Afrofuturism.

What'd the original definition that was offered by a cultural critic, Mark Derry.

While he's coming up with this definition of Afrofuturism, he's actually referencing comics.

He's using comics as one of the examples of black speculative practice, at the top his writing in 1994.

And he uses specifically Milestone Comics.

And when people talk about Afrofuturism, scholars and critics and curators a lot, they tend to leave out comics even though it's in the very origin narrative of the term.

And with this exhibit, I sought to again, think about this longer history of black speculative practice and connected to a longer history of black comic production and point and say, "Hey, this is an example of that black speculative practice we associate with Afrofuturism in comic form."

So in that regard, there's a long history, often unknown a black comic production.

And some of the people that you mentioned, Chuck Brown, who is a writer who helped create the comic "Bitter Root" which is the Eisner award winning comic.

He just finished a limited series called "On the Stump."

Both of these are of speculative work that dig deeply into questions of race, representation, power politics.

I pick his comic in part to sort of talk about a recurring set of themes that are associated with Afrofuturism, Beyond a Black Panther, as an exhibit is really built around recurring themes.

So the themes of like a black path like a legacy, metaphysics community, gender these are things that unify when you see Afrofuturism in different spheres and different spaces let you know that this is Afrofuturism.

I'm always very, very careful to explain to students, just because it sees a black person in space doesn't mean necessarily that is Afrofuturism.

And that's important to me because like in the sort of a simplistic sort of description would be like, well, if you see a black person, that space is Afrofuturist.

And there's a way where that logic makes sense because a lot of the narrative of future that frame the 20th century tended to omit people of color.

Think about the sort of sci fi imagery of the 1950s, very difficult, or at all for you see, black people in that.

Usually not until 1960, do you get this really popular expression of black people in space, and that's Aurora on Star Trek.

Which is sort of like watershed moment.

And so what would it bringing in searching for these comics in the show Beyond the Black Panther, I'm looking very specifically at examples of black comic curators producing comics that are sort of fitting within a framework graph of futurism.

So The Gibbs sisters with the invention of E. J. Whitaker, which is a common book that they wrote, very much inspired by a legacy of black invention.

They visited Tuskegee university, the lead character E. J. Whitaker is a female inventor, who invented many things, Androids, Wind Ships.

I mean like this, her father, her guardian is a professor at Tuskegee and she's been on the flying machine and adventure ensues.

The Gibbs sisters have a background in animation, sort of creative writing and such.

They've done multiple comments, but this particular comic I really felt represented an expression of Afrofuturism both in terms of like it's sort of black feminist or feminists sort of focus, one of the elements that that finds Afrofuturism emphasis on intersectionality.

So protecting women and promoting understanding of both race and gender oppression is very important.

And so these are the things that sort of coming together in a very complicated way and doing it through popular culture expression.

Even Chuck Brown's work, I think is very very cognizant of the nature of community and the ways that oppress people have to react and act in a political sphere to promote democracy and be educated on how the system operates.

- Hey, Julien, the last time we saw you I think it was 2017, which was, if I remember right, "Black Panther" was not in theaters yet.

And that film has had just sort of a a really remarkable cultural impact.

Keep, talk to us a little bit about the impact of that film.

- Well, "Black Panther" was a blockbuster that did a number of things that were incredible at the time.

This was the part of Marvel Cinematic Universe, which, a "Black Panther" is the first little black superhero not the first African-American superhero but the first black superhero.

And in creating that now they introduced the character of course, in the American civil war.

but Ryan Coogler and the creative team behind "Black Panther", created a film that captured a kind of diversity and depth of the African diaspora.

It's a pastiche.

Like when you watching Wakanda, when you're seeing black Panther, you're seeing a myriad sort of cultural references from across the African continent brought together into a mystical place that recognizes at some level the devastating effect the premise recognizes, the devastating effect of white imperialism.

What would have happened if white people had not invaded Africa and plunder it in and created all this destruction.

And that regional idea that's in the original comic itself is sort of made real and really speaks to, again, what we kinda Intuit from our understanding of a longer history of knowledge that's been erased in terms of Africa as a as a space of progress that was excluded from the the premise of sort of civilization in many ways.

And when "Black Panther", instead of this sort of Eurocentric framework, we get an Afrocentric framework and a framework that speaks directly to alternative form where there are more positive depictions of black knowledge.

There are more positive depiction of like a black, a segue.

There are more positive sort of like narratives around community and equity.

There's critiques of black men you can get, you can make the idea of a King in the most advanced country in the world.

And it's a little bit complicated but the idea that black progress and black knowledge and black aesthetic black beauty are valuable, they're real.

This is a transformative thing in many ways in the nature of popular culture especially the visual culture of the United States.

In many cases in the entire West, there has not been a lot of space here.

And in comics in particular, when you look at "Black Panther" as a historical marker, this is again the first blacks to be hero, but in many ways this was a decided break from a legacy of visual culture that demeaned and stereotyped and created a kinda negative way around blackness and visual culture and that reflected the broader culture.

And so in "Black Panther" you see that sort of cinematic moment in 2018, that's very similar to the print moment in 1966 when they introduced the character with Jack Kirby's art where even Jack Kirby, he knows the sort of jungle with techno, get a Kirby crackle to create like sort of a fantastic world that at that time was not imaginable for most white people.

They could not imagine a technologically advanced African world.

But again, I'm in point out when you go back and look at black people producing literary work they often imagined technologically advanced African worlds.

- So you also read podcasts or which begs the question.

When do you sleep?

You have sober face, that you're doing, but you're a podcast.

Talk about the appeal in that medium.

And I don't think, go ahead.

- Julien and you got about 45 seconds.

- Well, I approach podcasting as a public scholarship in Denver.

And the reason that I started my first podcast was it was every time God's confess was to try to capture the public intellectual narrative attached to the Zora Neale Hurston festival.

You have people drawn to the ideology and ideas represented by Hurston.

And also the ideology represented by the first incorporated African American town in a sort of liberation, freedom aesthetic associated with that.

And so it's always a public scholarship framework that's driving a podcast.

Be it every time, got a professor reframe the history or the graphic possibilities of this podcast.

And all of this I do alone, by the way, in all I do alone.

- Well, Julien, the work with your collaborators is remarkable.

Thank you so much for being us.

He's Dr. Julien Chambliss, that's all the time we have this week But if you want to know more about Story in the Public Square, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org.

(bright upbeat music) We can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again, next time, for more Story in the Public Square.

(gentle guitar music)