Animating Black Futures

When official records within colonial systems fail to hold Black memory, something else must.

Dear MegAlice and the Centre of African Studies, SOAS are excited to present Animating Black Futures: Cultivating Speculative Literacy. This teach-in session will have a unique hybrid experience of in-person and virtual attendance. Information for in-person attendance can be found at the end of this event description.

Join us for a critical conversation on how animation and speculative storytelling can bring Black memory into motion beyond the archive.

We invite you into conversation with an original methodology, Animated Wake Work, to engage speculative animation as a living archive, pedagogical tool, and participatory protocol for reclaiming time as a site of liberation.

Anchored in Black American cultural logics and informed by Christina Sharpe’s concept of “the wake,” Animated Wake Work reframes rupture as a site of creative and pedagogical possibility. Drawing on Black speculative theory, autoethnography, animation studies, and diasporic spirituality and temporality, it synthesizes three key strategies: Deborah Whaley’s visual stacking, Tina Campt’s durational listening, and Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation.

Designed as an adaptable, community-oriented framework, we will collectively discover possibilities otherwise.

IMPORTANT NOTE ON LOCATION

This event will be a HYBRID teach-in. We will be hosting this teach-in both in-person and virtually. We will have a limited amount of tickets available for the in-person session hosted at SOAS, University of London

Main Building, SOAS, University of London
Room R201
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, WC1H 0XG
Doors open at 3pm, program begins at 3:30pm