Introduction
Like a lot of science fiction and fantasy, a lot of worldbuilding must happen in the first chapter. For this project it was primarily establishing the timeline, political dynamics, and technology which of course are intertwined with each other. All of my worldbuilding was driven by three assumptions about the world: that the right wing turn in global politics kept going post-Trump (which might be a wrong assumption to make about the world given recent events), the mainstreaming of decolonial Black/African politics, and the creation of "magical" technology in the 2030's. Those three assumptions about the timeline is what I used to construct the world and everything else revolves around those circumstances. Below I discuss some of the works and concepts that formed the core of this first chapter, and consequently, the backbone of the book itself.
Annotated Bibliography/Influences for the Chapter
Chapter Quote: Black Skin, White Mask by Franz Fanon
“...The police and the military ensure the colonized are kept under close scrutiny and contained by rifle butts and napalm. We have seen how the government’s agent uses a language of pure violence. The agent does not alleviate oppression or mask domination. He displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcer and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized.”
This quote for me encapsulated the reality of not only the fictional US of 2038 but also the US of 2023. Many Americans fail to understand the US as a settler colonial state that was born out of invasion, slavery, and genocide. Our imagination of colonialism always exists either south of us or across the oceans. Using this quote meant to describe the colonial policing people like Fanon experienced in Algeria to instead describe policing in Buffalo, NY USA forces us to question whether that perspective is valid. Part of "getting" the story is peeling back the facade of liberalness that the US puts up and seeing the naked violence that lurks just underneath.
African/Black Internationalism
- From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International since the Age of Revolution edited by Michael O West, William G Martin, and Fanon Che Wilkins
- Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom by Keisha Blain
- The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonisation, 1945-1960 by John Munro
These three books are some of the main influences I used in my construction of the political imagination of my characters. These books show how African people in the US and elsewhere have always thought internationally about their struggles against white supremacy, settler colonialism, franchise colonialism, and capitalism. Especially considering the latter two books, we see how global crises and political shifts impacted the way African people engaged each other, using these crises as crucibles to develop transnational networks of resistance. More contemporarily we see this with the Black Lives Matter movement that almost immediately spread beyond US borders and brought together many localized movements and rebellions to share knowledge and resources. With those things in mind I imagined the right wing turn in the United States during the 2020s and 30s that created the environment we see in Chapter 1 would also force African Americans to withdraw from settler nationalist logics and lean more on decolonial and transnational ways of understanding their place in the world. This is why unlike today, a rustbelt city like Buffalo in 2038 is hosting a huge African Liberation Day march because for these folks the connection between the creation of the African Federation and themselves is self-evident.
Pan-Africanism
- Africa Must Unite by Kwame Nkrumah
As a Pan-Africanist, specifically Nkrumah-Toureist, the inclusion and prominence of Pan-Africanism in the political life of the characters and world is probably the strongest piece of wish fulfillment in the narrative. Acknowledging that, I wanted to use this work to at least partially explore how Black political life in the US could/would change if we more fully took on a Pan-Africanist politic. Pan-Africanism goes beyond the transnationalism/internationalism described above to consider identity and belonging beyond the settler state’s definitions. For the story, I wanted to show how Pan-Africanist perspectives such as “we are a stolen people on stolen land” impacts how people think about themselves. Some of these things including widespread celebration of Juneteenth, the use of Coota as a self-identifier (which I discuss in more detail below), and the the creation of the African Federation that will become more important to the story later on. Like a lot of the other topics in this chapter guide I will revisit this discussion but Nkrumah is a great place to start getting an overview of Pan-Africanism.
Protest Policing
- Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States edited by Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré, Alana Yu-lan Price, and Alicia Garza (Foreword)
- “Protesting While Black? The Differential Policing of American Activism, 1960 to 1990.” by Christian Davenport, Sarah A. Soule, and David A. Armstrong (Published 2011 in American Sociological Review 76(1):152–78)
I’ll first point out a big component of how I imagine policing in the future is influenced by the existence of HUDs and cheap drone technology, which I cover in the next section. Considering separately the social conditions that require the use of these technologies, I drew heavily on both the current rebellion against police violence and the longer histories of police violence against colonized people and protesters. Considering the existence of police as the vanguard of the settler state’s grip on power it stands to reason that their priority in any situation is control. The way the police decide to not respect the permit they granted to the protesters and escalating the situation unnecessarily are hallmarks of police interactions with protesters, especially Black ones. People often think that police are overstepping their authority when in reality terrorizing people is the entire point. The law simply exists to give it an air of legitimacy and an excuse to abuse while feeling morally superior. This theme of police terror is something that will be revisited often in this story. But the pieces above give great context into the nature of policing and the history of police interactions with Black protest movements.
Technology
Being someone who is deeply in love with science fiction as a genre (though I have many critiques about how people write it), one of the first things I thought about was the technologies that would develop in this kind of world. It is both easy and hard to imagine technological futures so this part of the worldbuilding unlike the much of the political/social content involves much more straight guessing. You see two main technologies show up in this chapter, heads-up displays (HUDs) and drones. In the case of HUDs I would credit the Flash Forward podcast by Rose Eveleth for sparking my initial fascination with the social implication of body modifications and body implants. As for drones, the already increasing use of them in policing activities in US cities influenced my inclusion of them in the story structure.
Stray Thoughts
Use of “Coota” in place of Black/African American
The main characters in the story are part of a generation of African Americans who have taken on a more decolonial and Pan-Africanist politic and perspective. I wanted to play with that a bit more beyond their stated political views and think about identity. African American as an identifier for those descendant from Africans enslaved in the United States has always struck me a weird reification of the ownership settlers think they have over us. I decided that I wanted to experiment with a different identifier that would upend that relationship. I decided on Coota/Cootuh, which is the Krio/Gullah word for turtle. It’s a reference to Turtle Island, the term that the Seneca nation (and other Haudenosaunee nations) as well as other nations in the Great Lakes region refer to the continent of North America. It’s a way for Africans living in the US to locate ourselves by signaling where we live and whose land we’re on using an African originated language. Throughout the story there will be more spaces where you can see how the characters engage in denaturalizing the American settler state using language like this.
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