Today I received this information form my professor Dr.  Reynaldo Anderson and it amaze me, but it did not  shock me how we as a people had been treated and how things were stole from us. This also show how Caucasian see us as a people.

 This article were written by John Jennings and Dr. Reynaldo Anderson

In 1903 W.E.B. Dubois published his great work The Souls of Black Folk, drawing on the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, autobiography and history to make his argument in the era of Jim Crow and imperialism noting:  The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, the relation of the darker races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea (p. 18).  Two years later, Albert Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity that confirmed the relationship between space and time, postulating the laws of physics are invariant in all inertial systems and the speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers. Three years later between 1908 and 1910, Dubois would draw upon ideas from natural science, humanities and social science to write a speculative short fiction story The Princess Steel with characters like a black sociologist that invented a Mega-scope that could see across space and time, that would amplify his ideas to study the boundary of space-time creatively, “into a means for perceiving material history” (Brown & Rusert, p. 820, 2015). Later in the twentieth century Kwame Nkrumah and other leaders would organize the Bandung conference in 1955; a meeting for the Dark World that called for the de-occidentalization of the earth. The author Richard Wright, a conference attendee reported the ideas promoted and discussed them at length in his work The Color Curtain. This event would influence the imagination of activists like Claudia Jones, Malcolm X, Steve Biko, Thomas Sankara and others in pursuit of the liberation of the Dark World.

Although over the course of a generation many of these radical initiatives would be repressed or betrayed, the seeds for a black speculative movement that would challenge white racist normativity and black parochialism would be sown by creative intellectuals, mystics and artists like Sun Ra, Fela Kuti, George Clinton, Max Beauvoir, Octavia Butler, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Samuel Delaney, Jimi Hendrix, Jean Michel Basquiat and others too numerous to name. Finally, at the end of the twentieth century, scholars like Molefi Kete Asante, Audre Lorde, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Greg Tate, bell hooks, Cornel West and Tricia Rose catalogued the growing deterioration and anomie of black cultural production and dislocation in relation to the transition to a neoliberal multi-national political-economic matrix.  Furthermore, Anna Everett, Alondra Nelson, Alex Weheliye, Kali Tal and others, via an online forum during the early conceptual development of Afrofuturism, critiqued a global digital divide emerging that reflected technical, economic and social inequality that prevented Africa, its Diaspora, and other countries of the global south from attaining optimal growth or enhancement in political, economic, social or cultural capital.  However, during this time, on into the early 21st century several disparate strands or elements of a new creative Africanist matrix were emerging from previous seeds planted that are adopting speculative design and world-building, as well as a renewed radicalized socio-political stance, and Africanist TechGnosis and or the Social Physics of Blackness (the interface of African peoples, mytho-forms, technology, behavioral science, ethics and social world) as influences.

This manifesto assembles and recognizes the ideas developed between 2008 and 2015 that influenced the emergence of what we call the Black Speculative Art Movement or BSAM and the event; Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of The Black Imagination that established its existence. Moreover, this manifesto explores the question, "What is the responsibility of the black artist in the 21st century?" Within the Afrofuturist 2.0 frame of inquiry Tiffany Barber asserts:

“What is compelling about Afrofuturism is that it is historical in its gesture back to previous debates about social responsibility, radical politics, and black artistic production that surged during the Black Arts Movement or BAM of the 60s and 70s. But it rearticulates these debates and expands our understandings of blackness's multi-dimensionality, the good and the bad, the respectable and the undesirable.”

Not only are Afrofuturism 2.0 and the Black Speculative Arts Movement indebted to previous movements like BAM; but Negritude, The Harlem Renaissance, and other continental and diasporic African speculative movements.  Furthermore, it is a continuation of the historical behavior within the Veil to engage the ideas of Dubois, Wright, Everett and others to pierce the Color Line, the Color Curtain, and understand the Digital Divide in the face of the challenges of the 21st century.  For example, contemporary artists like Kapwani Kiwanga are now revisiting the ideas of Kwame Nkrumah to envision an Afro-Galactic future. Moreover, the goals of the Black Speculative Art Movement manifesto are structured as a pursuit or open sourced path of inquiry to transform the anomie or collapse in ethics and dystopia in the Diaspora and African communities that have been displaced by the collapse of space-time.

Between 2008 and 2015 several events occurred that would influence the emergence of BSAM such as, The Big Short or the global market collapse, The Big Sort or re-segregation of people by class, ethnicity or religion, the election of Barack Obama, racist reaction and collapse of the liberal post-racial project, the increased use of crowdfunding and other new technology to design creative projects, increasing environmental stress, the New Jim Crow, the New Scramble for Africa, the resurgence of Pan Africanism and outreach to the African Diaspora (now incorporated as the 6th zone) by the African Union, the state sanctioned deaths of black people and police brutality, and the current global black social protest response to (g)localized forms of injustice. Rather than a unified school of thought, BSAM is a loose umbrella term represented for different positions or basis of inquiry: Afrofuturism 2.0 (and its several Africanist manifestations i.e. Black Futurism, African Futurism, Afrofuturismo and Afrofuturista), Astro Blackness, Afro-Surrealism, Ethno Gothic, Black Digital Humanities, Black (Afro-future female or African Centered) Science Fiction, The Black Fantastic, Magical Realism, and The Esoteric. Although these positions may be incompatible in some instances they overlap around the term speculative and design; and interact around the nexus of technology and ethics.  Individuals or organizations whose work represents pillars of BSAM would include and are not limited to: Paschal B. Randolph, Toni Morrison, Sun Ra, Amiri Baraka,Tananarive Due, Ben Okri, Nnedi Okorafor, The Afrofuturist Affair, Samuel Delany, Max Beauvoir, Afrika Bambaataa, Jarita Holbrook, Ishmael Reed, Wanuri Kahiu, Andrea Hairston, Sylvester James Gates, Octavia Butler, Octavia’s Brood, Nalo Hopkinson, D. Scott Miller, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Steven Barnes, David A. Durham, N.K. Jemison, D. Denenge Akpem, Ytasha Womack, Kapwani Kiwanga, John Akomfrah, and Kodwo Eshun.

For example, in the occidental realm the epistemic boundaries of speculative design is limited largely to objects, how they mediate human experience and are primarily interpreted through ideas originating with the Frankfurt school of critical theory (a body of thought usually dismissive, in the case of Theodor Adorno, silent or Eurocentric in regards to black cultural knowledge production and performance).  Furthermore, this occidental approach limits the framework of the speculative to Western philosophy and science. For example, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (2013) argue in relation to speculative design only the present, probable, preferable, plausible and possible should be zones of concern noting:

Beyond this lies the zone of fantasy, an area we have little interest in. Fantasy exists in its own world, with few if any links to the world we live in…This is the world of fairy tales, goblins, superheroes, and space opera (p. 4). 

However, this approach eschews or avoids alternative speculative cultural worldviews and attempts to establish a system where Europe assumes the teacher position and all others as the receiver.   For example, there is a host of historical evidence that demonstrates, via the route of alchemy, magic is a gateway into the study of science.  In contrast to Dunn and Raby, Lewis Mumford (1934) previously noted:

Between fantasy and exact knowledge, between drama and technology, there is an intermediate station: that of magic. It was in magic that the general conquest of the external environment was decisively instituted.  For the magicians not only believed in marvels but audaciously sought to work them: by their straining after the exceptional, the natural philosophers who followed them were first given a clue to the regular (p. 36-37).

An Africanist example of this phenomenon is the work of Max Beauvoir, a trained biochemist and Voudou priest that synthesized these approaches in medical treatment as a healer and activist.  Furthermore, scholars like Nettrice Gaskins are demonstrating the possibilities of re-conceptualizing African Cosmograms as cultural tools to interact with digital technology, augmented space and augmented reality. Moreover, there are implications for culturally situated learning, STEAM, and holistic health.  Finally, writers like Nnedi Okorafor demonstrate in her novel Akata Witch the overlap or merger between magic and technology. Therefore, in contrast to the occidental speculative design approach, BSAM freely embraces the Africanist approach to speculative design and embraces earthly and unearthly intuitive aspects of Esoterica, Animism and Magical Realism as overlapping zones with other knowledge formations when formulating or conceptualizing theory and practice in relation to material reality. Due to the brevity of this manifesto we do not have the space to explore the global multifaceted dimensions of black art, however, we would be remiss if we did not look at an important argument that black artists in the West have been wrestling with for several generations in relation to politics.

The role of black artists in relation to politics has been debated for roughly the last 90 years. Prominent in these debates is W.E.B. Dubois’s Criteria for Negro Art published in 1926 that specifically focused on the politics of beauty, propaganda, and social recognition, and noted:

What do we want? What is the thing we are after? As it was phrased last night it had a certain truth. We want to be Americans, full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of other American citizens. But is that all? Do we want simply to be Americans? Once in a while through all of us there flashes some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of what America really is. We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans cannot. And seeing our country thus, are we satisfied with its present goals and ideals?

  WAKE UP MY PEOPLE!!!