Cheryl Dunye begins her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman with this quote. This assertion is important to me both as an artist and an academic who lacks the mooring of a traditional heritage. I often approach theatre scholarship as an outsider looking into the traditions of more fixed cultures. For this reason, I found a scholarly home in Afrofuturism, a largely African American cultural aesthetic which fills the void of Black erasure from history and intergenerational trauma with imagination.

Blending technology, the esoteric, and non-Western knowledge and belief systems, Afrofuturists build traditions and myths for the Black diaspora out of their absence, borrowing from both ancient history and science fiction to create a lexicon of Black excellence, and giving Blackness a secure position in the future. My dissertation at Goldsmiths was called Remixing the Body: Performances of Gender in Afrofuturistic Art, which attempted to use Afrofuturistic conventions as a model for deconstructing the gender binary.

I have continued my research as the Goldsmiths Theatre and Performance Department’s Black and Global Majority Associate Researcher (2021-22). In the upcoming year I intend to publish a graphic novel that puts my study into practice, imagining a sci-fi future past gender.

Afrodiasporic artists across the planet are consulting what they know about their blackness, their history, their projections for the future, and what is missing therein, leading us all to experience our place in the present in a new way. With this new territory come bursts of excitement and inspiration, alongside occasional floods of dread and disappointment at the amount of work there is left to be done. Both of these responses are part of the journey towards sustainable liberation.