Seminar ”Thinking the Unthought of Blackness: Black Queer Studies Across the Expressive Arts” (October 16, 2025)

  • Rocío Cobo-Piñero: Transfuturism: Alternative Futures and Black Atlantic Utopias
  • Organised by: Uppsala University

Description of the activity

Both an artistic aesthetic and a framework for critical theory, Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction, Afrocentricity and magic realism with non-Western beliefs (Womack 2013, 9). Amber Johnson (2019) takes the concept a step further to look at how trans identities and bodily transitions across, between, within, and beyond binaries can expand the boundaries of Afrofuturism, and labels this critical embodiment Transfuturism. I also use the prefix “trans” to underscore the transmedia quality of the collective project, which also incorporates musical and visual arts. I draw on narrative and visual examples of transfuturist modes of representation as forms of political intervention and resistance.