We Need Diverse books-Afrofuturism: How Long 'til Black Future Month?
Help me give my students literature they are asking for, expanding the diversity of our selections and more Afrofuturism with powerful novels and short story collections by highly acclaimed, award-winning writers N.K. Jemison and Tochi Onyebuchi.
At the end of the last day of our class in June, a student approached me to express appreciation for how much he learned and shared how deeply Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man resonated with him–he had never read anything like it. His words led me to create a project exploring Afrofuturism for the purpose of not only expanding my classroom library but intentionally historicizing the texts. In her piece “AFROFUTURISM: ITS ORIGINS, PRESENT, AND FUTURE,” Ericka Hardison explains, “The Harlem Renaissance was an Afrofuturistic movement. The creation of jazz, hip-hop, punk and funk are all spectrums of how Afrofuturism uses sounds to reflect the connections between our ancestors and the future.”
When we embarked on a unit exploring Afrofuturism literature, art, and music last month, students' energy and enthusiasm was absolutely awesome.
After reading the introduction to Patrice Caldwell's short story collection A Phoenix First Must Burn: Sixteen Stories of Black Girl Magic, one student approached me and asked to borrow it that day. Two more students checked out the other copies for preparing their culminating presentations in the style of "5 Reasons Why" (this text/author matters). When three students checked out N.K. Jemison's novel The Fifth Season, they immediately asked for more Jemison. One student delivered an incredible multi-media presentation about the power and beauty of Afrofuturism that incorporated literary interpretation of multiple texts, tracing her journey as a reader, and concluded with her performance of a moving original song.
Reading imaginative literature by diverse authors serves as a portal through which students can realize new possibilities, perspectives, and the power of authoring their futures.
As Ericka Hardison asserts, “There’s room in publishing and the literary world for Afrofuturism, Astro-Blackness, and any other genre Black people on this planet want to create.”
More than half of students from low‑income households
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