I’ve gone on about Nnedi Okorafor before. Speculative fiction like Black Panther imagines an African world where its people have gone on ahead of us to create and invent. Without the west. Without colonialism. It’s a pretty powerful expression of the future _and_ the past. It asks Black people ‘What could we have been without colonialism? What _will_ we be?’ It doesn’t address white people at all.
It’s important to not only commemorate the past, but to imagine new futures. When we recognise traditional custodians of country in Australia, we recognise and pay respects to elders _past, present, and future_. We make it clear that a Black future continues on from a Black past and present.
For lindy hop, this means that we not only preserve the Black history of this dance, we recognise its Black present, and we recognise and pay respect to its Black _future_. It is profoundly racist and colonialist for white people to define the finishing point of a Black cultural practice. Lindy hop did not die, and it did not require a white revival or white future.
For me, as a white feminist, Africanfuturism offers ways of being human that are not defined by white patriarchy. It gives me hope.
