The White Fantastic Imagination explains about how in speculative fiction black people are depicted as being invisible. It says how the media has excluded blacks believing that black lives did not matter in the past, doesn’t matter now and will not matter in the future. Even speculative fictions are dominated by white people, where the main heroes are always white. It is as if their existence is forcefully faded. Even now I can only recall two sci-fi movie which had black lead characters: Cat Woman and Hancock. Among hundred’s of speculative fictions out there the number of sci-fi movies led by actors of colour is immensely outnumbered. Hence, white supremacy exists or in other terms in the speaker’s own words: White Fantastic Imagination still exists.
I solely believe that we have come to the age of neutral colour system but every now and then I hear stories about white supremism in the media and I can’t help but imagine that we are still a creature that is unable to see through people’s skin colour.
In another reading, the author of the article Black Quantum Futurism talks about how there are multiple ways to see time. It talks about how time and space is manipulated as per one’s imagination. This article led me to think about how the world of today would look like if the marginalized groups could look into and alter the future. This approach of modifying time and space came from quantum physics, futurist traditions, and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space. We can move backwards from future to present, we can throw all of our sadness and pains in the future and see how things will turn out in the present. In western culture, time is definitely separated into three categories: past, present and future, where each succeeding moment is affected by its proceeding moment. However, the author in Black Quantum Futurism explains that in the ancient African culture there is some tradition where time flows backwards toward us from the future. In the writer’s own words “In general, an indigenous African time consciousness has a backwards linearity, in that when events occur, they immediately move backward towards Zamani, or macrotime. ”
It is interesting how the author states that we can manipulate time to our preferability; to construct a desired future.
