Afrofuturism and Womanist phenomenology as resistance,resilience,and Black joy!

Abstract

Something happens when women of Spirit gather. It is a phenomenon complexly interwoven within the culture, history, and the depth of lived experiences of individual women within collective space. The legacy of Womanist scholars made this phenomenon a reality for nearly four generations of theologians, scholars, preachers, philosophers, and social transformers who breached the academy only to find anti-Black racism, sexism, homophobia, or other institutional nihilisms that negate the complex ontological intersectional essence of Black Women. In this article, I propose the deployment of Womanist phenomenology to examine and explicate the significance and importance of the work of Womanist scholarship, the engaged praxis of Black quantum futurism, and the speculative imagination carved in visionary futures as a pathway beyond the foundation of “the house that Alice built” and the Gardens of the Womanist foremothers to constructive world-building with concern for “survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.” I contend that taking a decidedly Womanist Futurist approach that utilizes intellectual visioning and the imagining of a remade world can lay future pathways that lead from “the house that Alice built” to forge new communities of care and liminal spaces of restoration. The approach of Womanist quantum futures simultaneously acts to dismantle and disrupt ongoing systems of oppression in the present day while forging new imagined futures and liminal spaces of joy in the now. The vision and task are hefty, what Prathia Hall called a “Sankofa Vision,” but it is the work our soul must do; it is, in the words of Katie Geneva Cannon, “the work my soul must do.”