Welcome to Week 16 of the ZORA! Festival 2020-2021 Afrofuturism Course!

Please begin by reviewing About the Course for an introduction and orientation to the 2020-2021 Afrofuturism Syllabus, which bridges the organizing themes of the first two years of the five-year Afrofuturism Conference Cycle: "What is Afrofuturism?" and "What is the Sound of Afrofuturism?"

Note: Each week the course coordinator will release new content related to the conference themes. Content posted here will remain publicly accessible and may be incorporated into other courses, in part or in full, via links to this site. Suggested citation: French, Scot. Syllabus for ZORA! Festival Afrofuturism Course, University of Central Florida, Orlando, Fall 2020-Spring 2021. STARS, https://stars.library.ucf.edu/afrofuturism_syllabus_about/.

Conversations

In the Conversations segment we share resources featuring participants in the 2020-2021 ZORA! Festival Afrofuturism Conference.

This week’s featured Conversation is a keynote talk by Dr. Erik Steinskog, Associate Professor of Musicology in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and author of Afrofuturism and Black Sound Studies: Culture, Technology, and Things to Come (2017).

Dr. Steinskog presented the keynote talk, entitled "Speculative Sounds: Aural History, Sonic Fiction, and Afrofuturism," on January 29, 2021, as the morning session of Day 1 of the 2021 ZORA! Festival Academic Conference. The conference was was organized around the theme: "What is the Sound of Afrofuturism?"

The talk and Q&A session last about 90 minutes. Opening remarks for the conference begin about 0:05 minutes into the video. Dr. Julian Chambliss begins to introduce Dr. Steinskog about 10:50 minutes into the video, and Dr. Steinskog's talk begins about 17:24 minutes into the video.

You can find the keynote talk here.

References

Authors, artists, and works referenced in the talk include:

Films

• The "Data Thief" character in The Last Angel of History (1996)

Music

• George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic's 1974 album "Standing on the Verge of Getting it On"
• James Brown
• Sun Ra
• Jimi Hendrix
• Herbie Hancock
• Eddie Harris
• Children's songs recorded by Zora Neale Hurston during her 1935 fieldwork in Florida

Texts and Authors

• Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998)
• Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (1993)
• Salim Washington, "The Avenging Angel of Creation/Destruction: Black Music and the Afro-Technological in the Science Fiction of Henry Dumas and Samuel R. Delany," Journal of the Society for American Music 2, no. 2 (May 2008), 235-253
• Alondra Nelson, "Introduction: Future Texts," Social Text 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002), 97-113
• Greg Tate
• George Lewis
• Amari Bakara

Next week: Dr. Paul Ortiz, Keynote Speaker, 2021 ZORA! Festival Academic Conference, 1/30/2021.