Shrines for the Familiar: Radical World Building through Collective Dreaming and Art, a keynote at Franklin & Marshall College
Image Credit: Office of Communications, Franklin & Marshall College
“Shrines for the Familiar: Radical World Building through Collective Dreaming”, Keynote by Alisha B Wormsley for “Imagining African and African-diaspora Futures”, a joint conference in Africana Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies
March 25, 2023
Franklin & Marshall College
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Sponsored by the Central Pennsylvania Consortium
The programs in Africana Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, Dickinson College, and Gettysburg College invite proposals from students, scholars, and teachers for the 2023 Central Pennsylvania Consortium conference on "Imagining African and African-diaspora Futures."
Border emergencies, humanitarian catastrophes, climate crises, a global pandemic, reassertions of patriarchy, sexual and reproductive violence, and racial unrest are defining features of our present. Africa, as “one of the most vulnerable continents due to its high exposure and low adaptive capacity" (IPCC), is particularly susceptible to climate-driven food insecurity, with the attendant political uncertainty, gendered economic hardships, and female-majority migration movements. The African diaspora faces similar challenges due to unequal access to health care, housing, education, career opportunities, to policing, and the racist, gendered, and heteronormative ideologies that underpin these discriminatory practices.
In the face of these crises, what futures can be imagined for Africa and the African diaspora? We think about the concept of futurity in dialogue with Black feminist artist Alisha B. Wormsley whose work boldly insists that “there are Black people in the future” while imagining “safe places for Black people to exist abundantly on this planet and beyond.” So too are we inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s notion of a “politics of hope” animated by the human “capacity to aspire” (2013) as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s invitation to infuse a “utopian function” in Queer criticism (2009).