Afrofuturism began as a concept coined by scholar Mark Dery in 1993. It was his way of grouping ideas regarding how Black people used the technology of stories to deal with racial oppression, disrupted history, and the challenge of moving into a positive future. In recent years, we have seen an explosion of interest from various fields around the critical making space that we call Afrofuturism. Black scholars and makers have taken this term and pushed it into places we never thought it would be. Black speculative fiction has moved from the fringes to the center. Mainstream institutions like Carnegie Hall, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Lincoln Center, and The Smithsonian have all put a great deal of time, money and effort into lavish exhibitions and productions centered around Black creativity, politics and culture. In this lecture, John Jennings will explore the major themes in the Afrofuturism movement, track the timeline of its growth, and posit future possibilities around this vibrant and ever-changing way of seeing the world. 

Registration opens on March 12, 2025.
 

John Jennings is a professor, award-winning author, graphic novelist, curator, Harvard Fellow, New York Times Bestseller, 2018 Eisner Winner, and all-around champion of Black culture.  

As Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside (UCR), Jennings examines the visual culture of race in various media forms including film, illustrated fiction, and comics and graphic novels. He is also the director of Abrams ComicArts imprint Megascope, which publishes graphic novels focused on the experiences of people of color. His research interests include the visual culture of Hip Hop, Afrofuturism and politics, Visual Literacy, Horror, and the EthnoGothic, and Speculative Design and its applications to visual rhetoric. 

Jennings is co-editor of the 2016 Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (Rutgers) and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem. He is co-founder and organizer of the MLK NorCal’s Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco and also SOL-CON: The Brown and Black Comix Expo at the Ohio State University. His upcoming book is My Superhero is Black, written with Angélique Roché, illuminates some of the most important Black creators and characters through Marvel Comics history.