Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Afrofuturism can be described as a politically-imaginative decolonial project that fuses fictions, fantasies, and folk traditions with technology to produce past-future narratives about being and belonging from a Black-centered framework (see e.g., Nelson, 2000; Womack, 2013). Using textual experience as an embodied interpretive approach, Durham explores the ways Erykah Badu and Missy Elliot use Afrofuturism to remap hip hop as the cultural landscape of the New South, and to conjure Black soul within and against technologies attempting to fix the fluidity and flexibility that defines the African diasporic body. Durham suggests the two southerners offer different visions of emancipated blackness that invite us to reimagine hip hop feminism and its past-future possibilities.

Aisha Durham is an Associate Professor of Communication with faculty affiliations in the Departments of Africana Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Humanities and Cultural Studies at the University of South Florida. She is a cultural critic who uses auto/ethnography, performance writing, and intersectional approaches refined in Black feminist thought to analyze representations of Black womanhood in hip-hop media. This scholarship contributes to an interdisciplinary field called Hip Hop Feminism. Recent research about Black womanhood is featured in The Crunk Feminist Collection, Media Activism in the Digital Age, and in her award-winning book, Home with Hip Hop Feminism: Performances in Communication and Culture. Durham’s cultural criticism has been featured in Aster(ix): A Journal of Literature, Art and Criticism, and in popular news and entertainment media sites, such as The New Yorker, Haaretz, Complex, and Ms. Magazine.

This event is organized by the Mellon Intersections Group on Global Blackness and Latinx Identity with support from the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, George A. Smathers Libraries, Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, Center for Latin American Studies, the Center for African American Studies and the UF chapter of Sigma Gamma Rho.