BEFORE YESTERDAY

WE COULD FLY:
AN AFROFUTURIST
PERIOD ROOM

INTRODUCTION BY IAN ALTEVEER,

HANNAH BEACHLER, AND SARAH LAWRENCE

ESSAY BY MICHELLE D. COMMANDER

GRAPHIC NOVELLA BY JOHN JENNINGS

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

Reprint of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Front cover: Roberto Lugo (American, born The Metropolitan Museum of Art endeav-
Bulletin (Winter 2022) 1981), Queen Abolition, 2021. Digital illus- ors to respect copyright in a manner
tration. Courtesy the artist, commissioned consistent with its nonprofit educational
This publication is issued in conjunction by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2021. mission. If you believe any material has
with the exhibition Before Yesterday We been included in this publication improp-
Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, on Inside front cover: detail of Njideka erly, please contact the Publications and
view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Akunyili Crosby (Nigerian and American, Editorial Department.
New York, from November 5, 2021. born Enugu, 1983), Thriving and Potential,
Displaced (Again and Again and . . . ), 2021. All rights reserved. No part of this publica-
The exhibition is made possible by the Inkjet print on vinyl, dimensions variable. tion may be reproduced or transmitted
Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation and the Courtesy the artist, Victoria Miro, London, in any form or by any means, electronic
Director’s Fund. and David Zwirner, New York; commis- or mechanical, including photocopying,
sioned by The Metropolitan Museum of recording, or any information storage and
Additional support is provided by Art, New York, 2021. retrieval system, without permission in
Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne and writing from the publishers.
the Terra Foundation for American Art. Back cover and pages 40–47: John
Jennings (American, born 1970), Protocol Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is avail-
The Metropolitan’s quarterly Bulletin and Response, 2021. Graphic novella. able from the Library of Congress.
program is supported in part by Comissioned by The Metropolitan
the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund for Museum of Art, 2021. ISBN: 978-1-58839-745-4
The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
­established by the cofounder of Photographs of works in The Met col- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Reader’s Digest. lection are by the Imaging Department, 1000 Fifth Avenue
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, unless New York, New York 10028
Copyright © 2022 by The Metropolitan otherwise noted. Additional photography metmuseum.org
Museum of Art, New York credits: Front cover: courtesy the artist,
commissioned by The Metropolitan
Published by The Metropolitan Museum Museum of Art, 2021. Title page: © 2021
of Art, New York Njideka Akunyili Crosby; courtesy the
Mark Polizzotti, Publisher and Editor in Chief artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner
Peter Antony, Associate Publisher for (photo by Jeff McLane). Figs. 1, 2, 4, 8:
Production image © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Michael Sittenfeld, Associate Publisher Fig. 3: © Katrín Sigurðardóttir; image
for Editorial © Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fig. 5:
image © Metropolitan Museum of Art
Editor of the Bulletin: Dale Tucker (photo by Hyla Skopitz). Fig. 6: NYC
Production by Paul Booth Archaeological Repository, The Nan A.
Designed by Jon Key Rothschild Research Center, NYC
Image acquisitions and permissions by Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Elizabeth De Mase Figs. 7, 13: image © Metropolitan Museum
Bibliographic editing by Penny Jones of Art (photo by Anna-Marie Kellen). Fig. 9:
image © Metropolitan Museum of Art
Typeset in Bianco Serif and Tiempos Text (photo by Peter Zeray). Fig. 10: © Cyrus
by Matt Mayerchak Kabiru, courtesy SMAC Gallery (photo
Separations by Professional Graphics, Inc., by Kennedy Amungo). Fig. 11: courtesy
Rockford, Illinois Wexler Gallery (photo by Julia Lehman
Printed and bound by Mittera, Parsippany, Photography). Fig. 12: courtesy the artist
New Jersey and Chapter NY, New York (photo by
Dario Lasagni). Figs. 14, 16: The New
York Public Library Digital Collections.
Figs. 15, 25: image © Metropolitan
Museum of Art (photo by Eugenia Burnett
Tinsley). Figs. 17–24: NYC Archaeological
Repository, The Nan A. Rothschild
Research Center, NYC Landmarks
Preservation Commission.
 DIRECTOR’S NOTE
The Met’s renowned period rooms present a wealth Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and the hard work
of remarkable objects, architecture, and evocative of many other colleagues at The Met who helped us
displays. They also embody a complex relationship imagine, develop, design, and build this ­incredible
between history and authenticity that occasionally space, which represents a true Museum-wide
calls for reinterpretation and intervention. Before collaboration.
Yesterday We Could Fly is a newly constructed space In keeping with the collaborative ethos of
that examines the present and future rather than Afrofuturist creative practice, the curatorial team
offering a filtered perspective on the past. In doing engaged numerous intellectual partners to infuse
so, it affords us an important opportunity to begin the installation with additional ideas. In October
new, necessary conversations and illuminate stories 2020, we convened a group of artists, curators, film-
that have yet to be told within our walls. Furnished makers, and scholars to discuss the proposed room,
with a wide range of works from The Met collection— and in January 2021 the curatorial team invited The
from Bamileke beadwork and nineteenth-century Met community to contribute their voices, bring-
American ceramics to contemporary art and design— ing insights from multiple perspectives across the
the installation is centered around generations of Museum. One such partner was John Jennings,
Black creativity as interpreted through the speculative an author, graphic novelist, curator, and Professor
lens of Afrofuturism, as the authors discuss in this of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of
Bulletin. It features numerous collaborations with California at Riverside. His short graphic novella
contemporary artists, including recent ­acquisitions Protocol and Response, which was specially commis-
and works commissioned specifically for the space, sioned and appears at the back of this Bulletin (or the
demonstrating our continued commitment to ­engaging front, depending on which way you read it), ani-
with and supporting extraordinary artists of our time. mates some of the works on display and the guiding
This project, which pushes the ­boundaries thoughts behind them. Through this groundbreaking
of what a period room can be, would not have been issue of the Bulletin and the dynamic new installation
possible without Hannah Beachler, Lead Curator it accompanies, we hope to start what will become
and Designer, who worked in brilliant partner- a lasting conversation about the reimagined period
ship with The Met’s Sarah E. Lawrence, Iris and room, in this case one powered by Afrofuturism and
B. Gerald Cantor Curator in Charge of the Department a space untethered by time.
of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and We are deeply grateful to the donors who
Ian Alteveer, Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in the supported the installation, including the Hobson/
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. Lucas Family Foundation, the Director’s Fund at
Michelle D. Commander, Consulting Curator and The Met, Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne, and the
Associate Director and Curator of the Lapidus Center Terra Foundation for American Art. This Bulletin is
for the Historical Analysis of Transatlantic Slavery supported in part by the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund
at New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, established by
Research in Black Culture, was a vital partner and the cofounder of Reader’s Digest.
lent her voice to the exhibition’s interpretation and
to the essay in this Bulletin. We also acknowledge the Max Hollein
invaluable assistance of Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie, Marina Kellen French Director
Research Associate in the Department of European The Metropolitan Museum of Art
 BEFORE YESTERDAY WE COULD FLY:
ENVISIONING AN
AFROFUTURIST PERIOD ROOM
AT THE MET
Ian Alteveer, Hannah Beachler,
and Sarah Lawrence

The period rooms within The Metropolitan Museum

of Art encompass a range of curatorial approaches
as well as different subjects and eras, from a first-
century b.c. Roman bedroom to a twentieth-century
living area designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. These
rooms, and the roles they play in a global institution
such as The Met, have come under particular scrutiny
in recent years, questioned for their near singular
focus on the domestic interiors of an affluent, pre-
dominantly white, and Eurocentric culture.1
A period room entices its audience in a way
that is different from the approach taken in other
galleries. Visitors prompted to imagine themselves
as inhabitants of these evocative interiors often find
their curiosity intensified by the inaccessibility of
the setting, typically in the form of physical barri-
ers. Ironically, this forbidden entry invites a kind of
provocation in which audiences engage imaginatively
with period rooms by projecting themselves into the
constructed spaces. One characteristic period room
at The Met, for example, conjures an eighteenth-
century French interior where we seem to intrude on
the aftermath of an interrupted card game (fig. 1).
This intimate French tableau, like every
period room, is a fiction: a creative assemblage of

4
1. Room from a hotel in the Cours d’Albert, Bordeaux, ca. 1780s.
Carving attributed to Barthélemy Cabirol (1732–​1786). Pine, painted
and carved, with various furnishings. The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York; Gift of Mrs. Herbert N. Straus, 1943 (43.158.1)

5
2. View of the exhibition Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and
Furniture in the Eighteenth Century, 2004

6
 furnishings and objects that were never together in
the same room at the same time. The compelling
engagement of the viewer’s imagination — ​and thus
the success of the period room as an immersive expe-
rience — ​depends on the invisibility of the curator’s
work and on a veneer of authenticity. Yet to create a
period room requires, paradoxically, an interpretive
curatorial act: a plausible, instructive proposition
of historical re-creation.2
In recent decades, curators have taken a
variety of approaches in the reconsideration of what
might be possible within The Met’s period rooms.
3. View of the exhibition Katrín Sigurðardóttir at The Met: For the 2004 exhibition Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion
Boiseries, 2010–11
and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century, manne-
quins in period dress enacted suggestive narratives
within the French eighteenth-century interiors of The
Wrightsman Galleries (fig. 2), an attempt to enhance
the filmic, stage-like aspect of those theatrical
spaces. Katrín Sigurðardóttir’s installation Boiseries
(2010–11) distilled and abstracted the same spaces
to explore the sense of disorientation and curiosity
felt in the contemplation of the period rooms (fig. 3).
More recently, Maira and Alex Kalman’s installation
Sara Berman’s Closet (2017) was juxtaposed provoca-
tively with the Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room,
positing the significance of even the most mundane
domestic space (fig. 4). The Met has also staged
performances of dance, opera, and theater within its
historic interiors and period rooms, exploiting the
immersive experience of these spaces and critiquing
the embedded issues of privileged access.
In 2021, The Met’s newest room considers
domestic lives previously omitted from the scope of
the Museum’s period displays: the home of an African
American family based on the historical settlement of
Seneca Village, a vibrant, predominantly Black com-
munity that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century
just a few hundred yards west of The Met’s current
location (fig. 5). Seneca Village thrived from the 1820s
until 1857, when the city used a process of eminent

4. View of Alex and Maira Kalman’s installation Sara Berman’s

domain to raze the site and create Central Park.3
Closet, 2015, as exhibited at The Met in 2017 This period room imagines a different future for the

7
 residents of Seneca Village. Through its furnishings,
art, and spatial organization, the installation repre-
sents a domestic interior that is only one proposition
for what might have been, had the settlement been
allowed to thrive into the present and beyond.
Before Yesterday We Could Fly pushes the
boundaries of what a period room can accomplish.
Beginning with the premise of a historical fiction — ​
informed by deep research into the past — ​this
curatorial collaboration creates a domestic space
that can only be imagined: a history that has been
5. View of the Seneca Village site in Central Park, 2021 erased, linked to a future that must be envisioned.
The “period” of this room also manifests a complex-
ity that scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman has often
addressed with regard to the difficult and continual
legacy of slavery and its consequential aftermath:
“[A] way of thinking about the afterlife of slavery
in regard to how we inhabit historical time is the
sense of temporal entanglement, where the past,
the present, and the future are not discrete and cut
off from one another . . . that we live the simultane-
ity of that entanglement.” 4 This period room is thus a
vehicle through which visitors are invited to recollect
a disrupted past and reclaim an alternate future.
In order to envision what might have been if
Seneca Village had not been destroyed, the curatorial
team behind Before Yesterday We Could Fly turned
6. Floral-printed pearlware body/rim shard, 1800–1840. to the speculative creative mode of Afrofuturism.
Ceramic. New York City Archaeological Repository ​
This term, coined by the critic Mark Dery in 1994,
(CV-058: 23, 43, 152)
describes a range of aesthetic and philosophical prac-
tices, from the visionary artistry of musicians such
as Sun Ra to the novels of the science-fiction writer
Samuel R. Delany. In subsequent decades, the under-
standing and application of Afrofuturism expanded
from speculative literature into design and the visual
arts in order to describe work that imagines a differ-
ent present and future, but one that always centers
Black agency, self-determination, and creative libera-
tion.5 As curator Naima J. Keith describes in an essay
for the 2013 exhibition The Shadows Took Shape at the

7. Installation view of Before Yesterday We Could Fly:

Studio Museum in Harlem, which she coorganized
An Afrofuturist Period Room, 2021 with Zoé Whitley, “Artists working within this rubric

8
9
8. Thomas W. Commeraw (active 1796–​1819). Jar, 1796–​1819.
Stoneware, H. 9 ½ in. (24.1 cm), Diam. 6 ¾ in. (17.1 cm). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rogers Fund, 1918
(18.95.13)

9. Ceremonial palm-wine vessel, 19th–​20th century. Cameroon,

Grassfields region. Gourd, glass beads, cloth, cane, and wood,
H. 30 ¼ in. (76.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
Purchase, Gifts in memory of Bryce Holcombe, 1986 (1986.336a, b)

10
10. Cyrus Kabiru (Kenyan, born 1984). Miyale Ya Blue, 2020. Steel not only critique the present-day dilemmas of people
and found objects, 23 ⅝ × 25 ⅝ × 5 ⅞ in. (60 × 65 × 15 cm).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Purchase, Wendy
of color through historical fiction, fantasy, and magic
Fisher Gift, 2021 (2021.282) realism, but also revise, interrogate, and reexamine
actual historical events.” 6
The challenge of forging this space as a site of
remembrance, but also as a vision of what might be,
required exploring a nineteenth-century past whose
surviving physical presence is limited. An excava-
tion at the site of Seneca Village in 2011 nonetheless
uncovered a surprising amount of material, including
a large cache of ceramic potsherds (fig. 6). From these
remains, the archaeological team pieced together a
convincing vision of what family life and traditions
may have been. As they report in their published
findings, “just as in so many other communities, for
Seneca Village, displacement and eviction had drastic
consequences. . . . Because the visual is so important

11
 to memory, the erasure of such places from the land-
scape silences them.” 7 This obliteration, as Michelle
Commander discusses in her essay in this Bulletin,
gives rise to oceanic waves of consequence that crash
continuously into the present. Our informed specula-
tion about the past, together with an ingenious design
for the future by Hannah Beachler, thus provides
both a visionary leap forward and a radical counter-
point to so much historical oblivion.
The material manifestation of temporal fluid-
ity within The Met’s new Afrofuturist period room is
realized through the open plan of a house (figs. 7, 13).
The vernacular structure of a nineteenth-century
wooden kitchen connects a sleek modernist frame to
the futurist living room. These two spaces are inhab-
ited concurrently, not sequentially — ​one centered
around a brick hearth, the other by a five-sided televi-
sion — ​and each is the focus of familial congregation,
storytelling, and innovation. Both the hearth and
the television are vehicles of transportation, whether
alchemical or technological in spirit.
The rooms are furnished with a kaleidoscope
of objects from The Met collection to suggest the resi-
dents’ care and guardianship of the past, present, and
future. These include eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century glass, metalwork, and ceramics (fig. 8);
Sub-Saharan African devotional works that represent
the spiritual traditions of the residents’ ancestors
from across the Atlantic (fig. 9); and visionary new
additions to the Museum’s collection by artists
and designers of the African Diaspora (figs. 10–12).
Arrayed within the house, these artworks enliven the
room with centuries of accumulated history, tradi-
tion, knowledge, and invention.
This spectral structure and all the treasures
within it inhabit a gallery clad with a spectacular,
repeating design by artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby
(see illustration on inside front cover). To represent
the rich history layered upon the site and create a
11. Roberto Lugo (American, born 1981). Digable Underground, dynamic scaffolding for her composition, Akunyili
2021. Glazed stoneware, enamel paint, and luster, 19 ½ × 13 × 10 in.
(49.5 × 33 × 25.4 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;
Crosby combined photographic images from both
Purchase, The Kay Unger Family Foundation Gift, 2021 (2021.256a–c) sides of the Atlantic alongside relevant archival

12
13
12. Tourmaline (American, born 1983). Morning Cloak, 2020.
Dye sublimation print, 30 ½ × 30 in. (77.5 × 76.2 cm).
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Purchase,
Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, 2021 (2021.272)

14
imagery, such as an 1856 map of Seneca Village and
ambrotypes of nineteenth-century Black New Yorkers
like the Lyons family, who owned land there. She then
evoked the lushness of the village’s sylvan locale — ​its
verdant landscape and self-sustaining agriculture — ​
by overlaying a rich foliate design derived from the
okra plant. Imported to the Americas from Africa
through the brutal Middle Passage alongside millions
of enslaved people, okra is valued for its nourish-
ing green seed pods and cherished for its resilience
and adaptability. Here, on a distant shore, it thrives
against all odds, symbolizing so much of what was
never lost and what waits to be uncovered, just
beneath the surface.

1. Two notable exceptions are the Astor Chinese Garden Court and
the Damascus Room. 2. For recent discussions, see, for example,
Jeremy Aynsley, “The Modern Period Room—​A Contradiction
in Terms?” in The Modern Period Room: The Construction of the
Exhibited Interior 1870–1950, edited by Penny Sparke, Brenda
Martin, and Trevor Keeble (London and New York: Routledge,
2006), pp. 8–​30; John Harris, Moving Rooms: The Trade in
Architectural Salvages (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2007); and Deborah L. Krohn, “Perfecting the Past: Period
Rooms between Disneyland and the White Box,” in The Museum
in the Cultural Sciences: Collecting, Displaying, and Interpreting
Material Culture in the Twentieth Century, edited by Peter N.
Miller (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2021), pp. 209–​16.
3. Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the
3.
People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1992), pp. 59–​60, 66–​73. 4. Thora Siemsen and Saidiya
Hartman, “On Working with Archives: An Interview with Writer
Saidiya Hartman [April 18, 2018],” in The Creative Independent
(Brooklyn, N.Y., 2021); https://thecreativeindependent.com/people​
/saidiya​-hartman-on-working-with-archives/. 5. Mark Dery, “Black
to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and
Tricia Rose,” in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited
by Mark Dery (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 179–
222. 6. Naima J. Keith, “Looking for the Invisible,” in The Shadows
Took Shape, by Naima J. Keith et al., exh. cat. (New York: Studio
Museum in Harlem, 2013), p. 13. 7. Diana diZerega Wall, Nan A.
Rothschild, and Meredith B. Linn, “Constructing Identity in Seneca
Village,” in Archaeology of Identity and Dissonance: Contexts for a
Brave New World, edited by Diane F. George and Bernice Kurchin
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019), p. 175.

15
16
17
 PAST/PRESENT/FUTURE:
SPECULATIVE WORLDS AND
THE PROMISES OF FLIGHT
Michelle D. Commander

Many of the people were captured for Slavery.

The ones that could fly shed their wings. They
couldn’t take their wings across the water on
the slave ships. Too crowded, don’t you know.
The folks were full of misery, then. Got sick
with the up and down of the sea. So they forgot
about flyin when they could no longer breathe
the sweet scent of Africa. Say the people who
could fly kept their power, although they shed
their wings. They kept their secret magic in
the land of slavery. They looked the same as
the other people from Africa who had been
coming over, who had dark skin. Say you
couldn’t tell anymore one who could fly from
one who couldn’t.

— ​Virginia Hamilton, The People Could Fly:

American Black Folktales (1985)

It is July 12, 1787. Just off the West African coast, slave
ship crewmembers and tradesmen observe the scene
as hundreds of African captives are taken to the bowels
of the ships Hope and Industry.1 Every once in a while,
the sensory excesses stop passersby in their tracks,
though the scene is not exactly unusual. The trade in
13 (previous spread). Installation view of Before Yesterday We Could
Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, 2021

14. Plan of the slave ship Brooks, 1896. The New York Public Library
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell
Hutson Research and Reference Division (b11668687)

19
 human beings has been a feature of the region for well
over a century now. At the moment, it is the persistent,
haunting chorale of frightened women, children, and
men who are chained together in preparation for a
fateful voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. The men who
lead these unfortunate souls through dusty pathways
hush the weeping human cargo, striking those who do
not move as they are instructed. The weather is sticky,
hot, and humid. A stench fills what little air there is,
the result of the captives’ weeks-long languishing wait
in dingy, dank dungeons where bodily fluids and sick-
ness passed between them and there was little air to
breathe (fig. 14).
The captives’ condition says more about the
enslavers than about the enslaved, who had effec-
tively, if temporarily, been stripped of their bodily
autonomy. And now, they would suffer for several
weeks more, packed together tightly most of the time,
a community established in bodily, psychic, and
spatial trauma. Some of the African captives looked
into the eyes of others in recognition of their mutual
miseries, tendering something like a knowing smile.
Women cared for the youngest among them, singing
lullabies whose lyrics promised sweet dreams and
the freedom of not-too-distant tomorrows. Others
still covertly planned rebellion under the cover of
darkness, forging alliances and a sense of community
despite the enormity of their suffering.
On this same day, thousands of miles away in
America, delegates have gathered for the Constitutional
Convention in Philadelphia to debate components of
the draft Constitution. Today’s subject is the use of
population numbers to apportion representatives to
each state. Three-fifths of a state’s enslaved popula-
tion would be counted. The practice did not afford
enslaved people rights as citizens but acknowledged
their existence as property in order to increase white
political might. The Southern planter class now had
further incentive to participate in the lucrative trade,
as they could increase their population exponentially
by engaging indirectly or directly in the trade as
slaveholders, merchants, and tradesmen.

20
 In a few short months, the British Parliament,
having been made aware of the unmentionable
conditions aboard slave ships, will continue their
deliberations about mandating new regulations,
including those intended to make the slave trade
more humane by relieving overcrowding during the
transportation of captives across the Middle Passage,
the route commonly taken from West Africa to the
Americas. They will develop a formula for determin-
ing how to ship human beings more benevolently on
slave ships. First, the space occupied by each would
need to meet certain guidelines:

That it shall not be lawful for any master,

or other person taking or having the charge
or command of any British ship or vessel
whatever, which shall clear out from any
port of this kingdom . . . to have on board, at
any one time, or to convey, carry, bring, or
transport slaves from the coast of Africa to any
parts beyond sea, in any such ship or vessel,
in any greater number than in the proportion
of five such slaves for every three tons of the
burthen of such ship or vessel, over and above
the said burthen of such ship or vessel, so far
as the said ship or vessel shall not exceed two
hundred and one tons . . . That if there shall be,
in any such ship or vessel, any more than two
fifth parts of the slaves who shall be children,
and who shall not exceed four feet four inches
in height, then every five such children (over
and above the aforesaid proportion of two
fifths) shall be deemed and taken to be equal
to four of the said slaves within the true intent
and meaning of this act.2

Myriad calculations such as these eighteenth-century

formulations animated political debates over space,
race, speculative futures, and property as Americans
and Europeans expanded their slavery and coloni-
zation efforts across the Atlantic world. Although
these guidelines were championed by activists and

21
 anti-slavery-minded lawmakers and viewed as prog-
ress toward abolition, such rhetoric makes clear to
present-day readers of the law the fact that the barba-
rism of the slave trade was, in effect, quite ordinary.
The numerical directives are expressed in a detached
manner, the rationale for the needed regulations
summarized without sufficient emotion or care.
In his 1751 book Observations Concerning the
Increase of Mankind, the scientist, philosopher, and
statesman Benjamin Franklin outlined his vision for
the building of a world in which whiteness reigns:

[T]he Number of purely white People in the

World is proportionably [sic] very small. . . .
I could wish their Numbers were increased.
And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our
Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so
making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter
Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or
Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior
Beings, darken its People? Why increase the
15. Cover of Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly (1985), by
Leo and Diane Dillon Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America,
where we have so fair an Opportunity,
by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of
increasing the lovely White and Red? But
perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my
Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural
to Mankind.3

Franklin’s discussion is an expression of his desire for

a speculative white future, one that could be made
only via continued massacres, greed, dehumaniza-
tion, and land dispossession. The literary and cultural
historian ​​Saidiya Hartman quite soberly explains how
such early white nationalist thought and its attendant
institutions mark the contemporary moment: “If
slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black
America, it is not because of an antiquarian obses-
sion with bygone days or the burden of a too-long
memory, but because black lives are still imperiled
and devalued by a racial calculus and a political
arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is

22
the afterlife of slavery — ​skewed life chances, limited
access to health and education, premature death,
incarceration, and impoverishment.” 4 Indeed, this
was the world America’s founding fathers deliberately
calculated.
Back on the slave ships Hope and Industry,
the once-free Africans now advance into a temporal
void, slipping beyond the horizon. Detached from
kith and kin and disconnected from the bountiful
lands and cultures on and with which they had been
raised, the captives are en route to futures uncertain.
The experiences endured by coming generations
would be marked by one terror after another, with
the incessant regulation of Black people’s move-
ment, barbaric violations of their bodies, and the
intentional refusal to recognize them as full citizens
becoming mundane features of life for them in the
so-called New World. They will find it necessary to
collectively dream up new and increasingly radical
ways of subverting the future that enslavers intended
for them.

Speculative Flights

speculate (verb):
1. to engage in thought or reflection; meditate (often
followed by on, upon, or a clause).
2. to indulge in conjectural thought.
3. to engage in any business transaction involving
considerable risk or the chance of large gains,
especially to buy and sell commodities, stocks,
etc., in the expectation of a quick or very
large profit.5

Before yesterday, we could fly.

In the titular story from Virginia Hamilton’s
children’s collection The People Could Fly: American
Black Folktales, the author’s retelling of the Flying
African myth holds that some African captives shed
their literal wings, which would not fit into the slave
ships, but still maintained the ability to fly, while
others lost the skill (fig. 15). As the narrator explains,

23
 “you couldn’t tell anymore one who could fly from
one who couldn’t,” suggesting that those who could
fly used their ability only when necessary. At the end
of the tale, enslaved people tire of the backbreaking
work and ceaseless brutality of enslavers and over-
seers, electing collectively to fly away from the
plantation. When the enslaved man Toby is threat-
ened with the slave driver’s whip and his enslaver’s
gun, he laughs and chants a signal to those among
them who could fly, singing, “Buba yali . . . buba
tambe.” And they flew:

Old and young who were called slaves and

could fly joined hands. Say like they would
ring-sing. But they didn’t shuffle in a circle.
They didn’t sing. They rose on the air. They
flew in a flock that was black against the
heavenly blue. Black crows or black shadows.
It didn’t matter, they went so high. Way above
the plantation, way over the slavery land.
Say they flew away to Free-dom.

And the old man, old Toby, flew behind them,

takin care of them. He wasn’t cryin. He wasn’t
laughin. He was the seer. His gaze fell on the
plantation where the slaves who could not fly
waited. “Take us with you!” Their looks spoke
it but they were afraid to shout it. Toby couldn’t
take them with him. Hadn’t the time to teach
them to fly. They must wait for a chance to run.
“Goodie-bye!” the old man called Toby spoke
to them, poor souls! And he was flyin gone.6

Those who remained were not without hope. They

could self-liberate. Flight was a mindset, one that
could be activated by remaining still and strategic
or through movements away from the plantation:
by foot, train, and other modes of transport. The
historian Edward Baptist notes that enslaved people
were keenly aware that taking control of their own
mobility would be key to survival: “Enslaved people
recognized that the slavery they were experiencing

24
was shaped by the ability of whites to move African
Americans’ bodies wherever they wanted. Forced
migration created markets that allowed whites to
extract profit from human beings. It brought about
a kind of isolation that permitted enslavers to use
torture to extract new kinds of labor.” 7 Circumstances
demanded that enslaved people continue to live
speculatively to counter the kinds of financial invest-
ments and institutions that had forced them to exist
in such a cruel, precarious state.
Numerous stories from across the Atlantic
world recall the Flying Africans, or those African
captives who jumped from slave ships in hopes
of returning to their homelands. Other narratives
recount the flights of enslaved people who were
bound to plantations in the New World, such as the
story retold in Drums and Shadows by the informant
Priscilla McCullough, from Darien, Georgia: “Duh
slabes wuz out in duh fiel wukin. All ub a sudden dey
git tuhgedduh an staht tuh moob roun in a ring. Roun
dey go fastuhnfastuh. Den one by one dey riz up an
take wing an fly lak a bud.” 8 The enslaved people in
McCullough’s version moved collectively: first in a
circular fashion, recalling a religious ring shout, in
which participants sing and move about in a circle,
shuffling their feet and quietly affirming the circu-
itousness of African diasporic time. As they shuffled,
they picked up speed. And then, one by one, the
Flying Africans ascended instinctively into the air,
choreographed like birds in murmuration. By reject-
ing the bleak futures that awaited them, enslaved
people used flight to take back control of their bodies,
alerting speculators in slavery that their investments
in human property were risky at best. It was not just
the financial returns that were uncertain; enslaved
Africans and their descendants would not lie prone.
Indeed, they turned the idea of speculation upside
down, detaching the act of speculating from eco-
nomics and placing it into a radical epistemology for
living life. For the enslaved, speculation’s conjectural
question of “what if” left open infinite possibilities
for living under plantation slavery and/or in flight.

25
16. Egbert L. Viele (1825–1902). Map of the Lands Included in the
Central Park, from a Topographical Survey, 1856. The New York
Public Library, Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division
(b14019804)

26
 In Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns
and the Black Fantastic (2017), I wrote about the
philosophy that undergirds and continues to inform
psychic and physical flights and patterns of Black
migration: “Speculation became a subversive way
of life for Black Americans, who were determined to
self-actualize, forge communities, and experience
pleasure on their own terms. Afro-speculation as a
modality for living is conjectural and conditional;
the evidentiary matters not. Afro-speculation is
an investment in the unseen and precarious; it is a
gamble. It is the belief in the possibility of the estab-
lishment of new, utopic realities outside of dominant
society despite the lack of proof that Black social life
is conceivable.” 9 For the community-minded, Black
speculative postures elide the individualistic tenden-
cies of capitalism, centering instead the liberation
of the collective.
With these realities in mind, enslaved people
across the Atlantic world took flight in a number of
ways, imagining existence anew. They believed that
life would become more livable if they could imagine
the possibilities beyond their current circum­stances.
Even in religious worship, references to flight, freedom,
home, and heaven took on ­multiple meanings, as
enslaved people found respite in psycho­logi­­cally
existing on a different plane as they negotiated the
world. In the United States, some ran away from
plantations, following the North Star, which they
believed would guide them to freedom. In societies
in the Caribbean and South America, fugitives from
slavery and freepersons built self-sustaining maroon
and quilombo communities — ​sometimes alongside
Indigenous people — ​to fortify the strength of their
encampments in mountains and swamps. Others took
flight by strategizing dynamic forms of resistance and
rebellion with members of the kinship networks they
had built aboard slave ships and in the plantations to
which they were sold and in which they labored. And
as states slowly abolished slavery, formerly enslaved
people established settlements with one another,
making new lives in their freer existence.

27
 While the torturous passage across the
Atlantic and into the New World had greatly altered
African captives’ relation to water, it also reconfigured
enslaved peoples’ relation to land. Stolen from their
loved ones, captive Africans would never see their
homelands again. They were rendered the property
of others and in the eyes of their enslavers had lost a
measure of control over their own persons. Enslaved
Africans were moved from place to place at their
enslavers’ will, their homeland and New World loved
ones be damned. From slave ship to auction block,
from plantation to plantation, from rural outpost to
growing city, Africans in America contended with leg-
islative policies and intentionally drawn geographies
that aimed to monitor, restrict, and regulate their
movements by law and by force.

Seneca Village: Imminence, Eminence,

Immanence
The destruction of the peace and existence of a
thriving Black community is, and always was, immi-
nent. In 2011, Columbia University’s Institute for
the Exploration of Seneca Village History collabo-
rated with the Central Park Conservancy to begin
an archaeological excavation of Seneca Village, a
thriving community that was razed to make way for
New York City’s Central Park in 1857 (fig. 16). Long
forgotten in public memory until recent years, Seneca
Village was situated approximately from 82nd to 89th
Streets between 7th and 8th Avenues. The commu-
nity began to take shape in 1825, shortly after John
and Elizabeth Whitehead subdivided and sold several
parcels of their land to African American individu-
als and to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion
Church, which needed the land to construct a burial
ground. In the first twenty years of its existence,
Seneca Village was almost exclusively a Black com-
munity populated by those who wanted to escape
overcrowded, unsafe, and overtly racist neighbor-
hoods in Lower Manhattan. In Seneca Village, they

17. Perfume bottle, ca. 1850s. Frosted glass, H. 2 in. (5 cm). New York
could imagine the possibility for much brighter
City Archaeological Repository (GV-503: 23) futures, even if it was a less-developed area. With the

28
 devastation brought about by the Irish potato famine,
immigrants arrived, bringing new residents to Seneca
Village in the 1840s. A small German community
existed there as well.
Seneca Village was likely an enclave in which
its inhabitants could move about freely, find joy,
and breathe. Although New York State abolished
slavery in 1827, the conditions for Black Americans
remained precarious. The passage of the Fugitive
Slave Act of 1850, which encoded into law the right
of enslavers to reclaim any enslaved property that
escaped to a free state, exacerbated an already highly
dangerous situation for the city’s Black population,
18. Shard from a “watch-spring” jar or jug, mid-18th century–​1815.
Salt-glazed stoneware. New York City Archaeological Repository
particularly affecting the mobility of women and
(CV-020: 168) children, who were under the very real threat of being
kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South. In an
1836 pamphlet describing the dangers that existed in
New York, the Black abolitionist and activist David
Ruggles cautioned,

My depressed countrymen, we are all liable;

your wives and children are at the mercy of
merciless kidnappers. We have no protection
in law, because the legislators withhold justice.
We must no longer depend on the interposition
of Manumission or Anti-Slavery Societies,
in the hope of peaceable and just protection;
where such outrages are committed, peace and
justice cannot dwell. While we are subject to
be thus inhumanly practised upon, no man
is safe; we must look to our own safety and
protection from kidnappers; remembering that
“self-defence is the first law of nature.” 10

Given this level of uncertainty, a settlement like

Seneca Village would have afforded this group of
renters, landowners, and immigrants a sense of safety
and relief from the stresses of everyday discrimina-
tion: a spatial and psychic buffer from the everyday
dangers that existed in other parts of Manhattan.
It was particularly devastating for the com-
munity, then, when the city began the process of

29
 invoking eminent domain in order to take owner-
ship of land for the creation of a large municipal
park that, it was envisioned, would compare with or
exceed in beauty and extravagance the public green
spaces found in Europe. Eminent domain laws permit
governments to reclaim land for public use, offering
landowners arbitrary amounts of cash in exchange for
their property. Over the course of American history,
eminent domain processes have disrupted and upset
Black communities to establish parks, more expen-
19. Escutcheon, 19th century. Salt-glazed stoneware and copper sive housing developments, interstate roads, and
alloy, L. 2 in. (5 cm). New York City Archaeological Repository
other infrastructure projects that often perpetuate
(S-051: 70)
inequality. These processes can be controversial, and
landowners tend to fight for the rights to their plots in
the courts, with governmental entities often charac-
terizing the communities in question as bastions of
criminality and/or filthy blights on developing cities
and towns. An 1856 New-York Daily Times article, for
instance, described Seneca Village as “a neat little
settlement . . . [that] present[s] a pleasing contrast in
their habits and the appearance of their dwellings to
the Celtic [Irish] occupants . . . in the lower part of the
Park. . . . If some of the hogs, goats, and other inmates
of the shanties in this vicinity do not die of the yellow
fever this Summer, it will only be because Death
himself hesitates to enter such dirty hovels.” 11
Other publications irreverently used racial
and ethnic epithets to describe Seneca Village resi-
dents, creating a false narrative about the “need”
to clean up the place — ​all in the service of rational-
izing the city’s plans to take over the land. By the
1870s, J. F. Richmond’s New York and Its Institutions,
1609–​1873: The Bright Side of New York was already
celebrating the spectacular features of Central Park,
in particular the amount of recreational space com-
pared to that of the European parks from which the
city had drawn its initial inspiration, and for ascend-
ing into modernity in the European ways that city
officials had so admired. In Richmond’s narrative
about the extravagances within the park’s construc-
tion, he describes Seneca Village and the surrounding
settlements as “perhaps the most broken of the

30
 island, and considered by many irredeemable.” 12 The
biased representations that almost always accompany
uses of eminent domain, then, can have long-lasting
ramifications, as they reify notions that Black and
immigrant spaces ought to be policed, surveilled, and
held under the constant threat of sanction.
What Black oral histories and memories
had held over time, and what the 2011 archaeologi-
cal project proved, is that Seneca Village was a very
established community. The fragments unearthed
during the archaeological dig revealed that the
properties were a mix of wood-frame homes, some
with barns and sheds in the rear. While some of the
descriptors regarding a lack of development and
sensory excesses of the community might have been
partially true, given that there was pollution pro-
duced by local tanneries and a bone-boiling factory in
the area, what the media intentionally papered over
in the nineteenth century is that Seneca Village was
nonetheless quite a diverse and promising commu-
nity. Its residents belonged to vigilance committees
and anti-slavery organizations, all of which agitated
for rights and provided care for the City’s Black com-
munity. By 1855, Seneca Village was also an overall
rarity in New York, in that approximately half of
its residents owned their property and many of its
landowners had the right to vote. The unearthed
layers surveyed at the Seneca Village site contained
evidence of lives fully lived nearly two centuries ago,
including fragments of thriving domestic spaces
such as pieces of glass, stoneware dishes, a perfume
bottle, a hair comb, a kettle, a copper-alloy decora-
tive escutcheon, a small leather shoe belonging to a
woman or child, and the stone foundation of a home
(figs. 17–24).
In photographs taken of the excavation
at Seneca Village, the way that life in and around
Central Park carries on while the dig proceeds is strik-
ing. Park visitors can be seen relaxing on the grass
with friends and family, while a rare person looks on

20. Kettle found inside a roasting pan, 19th century. Iron, Diam.
with curiosity. There is a tendency for people to mind
3 1/2 in. (9 cm). New York City Archaeological Repository (S-053: 126) their own business, especially in bustling cities. Yet

31
 many people negotiate the places they live and visit
as if all that ever was is now. This presentist way of
living can render one unaware of the history and the
ways that the past informs the present moment: that
the past can offer lessons for being better contem-
porary citizens. What is it that we remember? Why
do we forget what we once actively endeavored to
remember? What are the future uses of memory?

(Social) Science, Memory, and Afrofuturism

Speaking about her novel Beloved (1987), Toni
Morrison notably lamented the absence of men-
tions of slavery in public history: “There is no place
you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to
summon the presences of, or recollect the absences
of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who
made the journey and of those who did not make it.
There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or
wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There’s no 300-foot
tower. There’s no small bench by the road. There is
not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit or
you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York
or Providence, or better still, on the banks of the
Mississippi. And because such a place doesn’t exist
(that I know of), the book had to.” 13 Through magical
realism, Morrison crafted an inventive neo-slave
narrative, a post-1965 literary genre that is informed
by slavery’s historical archive to offer more accurate
representations of enslaved people and their interior
lives. Paired with Morrison’s speculative imagina-
tion, the archival evidence assisted her in crafting
a haunted domestic space in which her characters are
compelled to process the past. An embodied ghost — ​
the returned daughter of the protagonist (who
committed the infanticide that caused the ghost’s
passing) and a representative of those who crossed
the Middle Passage — ​is used as a vessel through
which Morrison’s characters engage with their trau-
matic past and present lives, the horrors with which
they continue to struggle.

21. Shoe, 19th century. Leather and textile. New York City

In the period just after the legal successes
Archaeological Repository (S-074: 194) of the Civil Rights movement, other cultural

32
 producers — ​writers, filmmakers, historical preser-
vationists — ​inventively addressed the damage that
hundreds of years of silence and shame about slavery
had caused, engaging in a kind of interdisciplinary
archaeology to determine the ways that the institu-
tion of slavery and its postbellum iterations haunt
the present and future. The science fiction writer
Samuel Delany discussed the significance of such a
range of speculative imagining in his 1978 essay “The
Necessity of Tomorrow(s)”: “Without an image of
tomorrow, one is trapped by blind history, econom-
ics, and politics beyond our control. One is tied up
in a web, in a net, with no way to struggle free. Only
by having clear and vital images of the many alterna-
tives, good and bad, of where one can go, will we have
any control over the way we may actually get there
22. Comb, 19th century. Gutta-percha, L. 1 1/4 in. (3.2 cm). New York in a reality tomorrow will bring all too quickly.” 14
City Archaeological Repository (S-070: 57)
Although speculative thought had been embraced by
people of African descent over the course of cen-
turies, the term “Afrofuturism” was coined by the
scholar Mark Dery in 1994 to encapsulate a new turn:
“Speculative fiction that treats African-American
themes and addresses African-American concerns
in the context of twentieth-century technoculture — ​
and, more generally, African-American signification
that appropriates images of technology and a pros-
thetically enhanced future.” 15 Afrofuturist projects
use technology, fantastical elements, magical realism,
and sometimes a combination of mythologies from
African and diasporic cultures alongside Western
science to explore, in the words of writer and theorist
Kodwo Eshun, “the historical terms, the everyday
implications of forcibly imposed dislocation, and
the constitution of Black Atlantic subjectivities: from
slave to negro to coloured to evolué to black to African
to African American.” 16
One can hear articulations of a proto-
Afrofuturism in the scientific rhetoric used by Civil
Rights leaders as they agitated for liberation. For
instance, on the eve of his assassination, Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. gave his prescient, future-minded
“I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech at the Bishop

33
 Charles Mason Temple, Memphis. Speaking with
foreknowledge of the many threats to his life for chal-
lenging the racial order and for daring to demand safe
conditions and fair compensation for workers, King
urged his followers to use a particular brand of nonvio-
lent science that the white-supremacist establishment
could neither comprehend nor permanently defeat:

We aren’t going to let any mace stop us. We

are masters in our nonviolent movement in
disarming police forces, they don’t know what
to do. I’ve seen them so often. I remember in
Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that
majestic struggle there, we would move out of
the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day,
by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull
Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth,
and they did come, but we just went before the
dogs singing, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me
around.” Bull Connor next would say, “Turn
the fire hoses on.” And as I said to you the other
night, Bull Connor didn’t know history. He
knew a kind of physics that somehow didn’t
relate to the transphysics that we knew about.
And that was the fact that there was a certain
kind of fire that no water could put out. . . .
And we just went on before the dogs and we
would look at them; and we’d go on before the
water hoses and we would look at it, and we’d
just go on singing “Over my head I see freedom
in the air.” 17

Flight and the fire next time: King’s final

speech was a spirited statement about the need for
the continued poise and creativity of Civil Rights
activists to counter the prevailing “social science” of
white supremacy. His emphasis on flight, too, hinted
at the U.S. government’s contemporaneous preoc-
cupation with science and eminence via the space
race during the 1950s and 1960s, while freedom and
equality on the ground remained elusive for African
Americans. This era saw the U.S. government employ

34
23. Teapot, 1843–​57. Ceramic. New York City Archaeological the same language of conquest and expansion that
Repository (CV-080: 57, 51, 53)
had informed earlier battles over land and the myriad
ways in which it had dispossessed Indigenous people
and African Americans throughout the nation’s
history.
The writer Amiri Baraka once asked, “What
are the Black purposes of space travel,” not with the
intention of dismissing science or the idea of people
of African descent building new worlds, but as a
­compelling prompt for devising a politics for living
rather than using frontier logic that encroached
upon other people’s lives and property.18 The
avant-garde jazz composer and experimental artist
Sun Ra, who is often viewed as the artist whose works
first offered a sustained Afrofuturist vision, indirectly
offered visionary answers to Baraka’s query. Sun Ra
was born Herman Poole Blount in 1914 and raised in

35
24. Old Dr. Townsend’s Sarsaparilla bottle fragments, 1839–​70.
Mold-blown glass. New York City Archaeological Repository
(GV-522: 181, 204, 207)

36
Birming­ham, Alabama, where he often observed
African Americans contending with vicious strains
of white-supremacist violence that imperiled their
livelihoods. These struggles no doubt left an indelible
mark on the young Blount and made evident his place
in the nation as a Black person. By the 1940s, Blount
had taken on the persona of Sun Ra, sharing an origin
story in which he referred to himself as an alien
from Saturn. Sun Ra began to imagine new worlds in
his Afrocentric visual productions, which featured
elaborate costuming and unique uses of technology
and sound in their performances of futuristic scenes.
Sun Ra’s song and poetry lyrics enabled him and
his band (The Arkestra) to craft a universal message
steeped in Africanist themes regarding collective
­liberation (fig. 25). In his view, appropriate Black
uses of space travel would not be about domination
or mere escapism but building better tomorrows. As
encapsulated in Sun Ra’s poem “The Far Off Place,”
such imaginings are the perfect embarkation points
from which to take flight:

In some far off place

Many light years in Space
I’ll wait for you
Where human feet have never trod
Where human eyes have never seen
I’ll build a world of abstract dreams
And wait for you.

In tomorrow’s realm
We’lll [sic] take the helm of new ships
Then like the lash of a whip
We’ll start on our way
And safely journey to another world
Another world — ​another world’s world.19

In the post-Civil Rights era, activists, revolutionar-

ies, and artists went on to imagine and implement
a series of speculative projects that challenged the
social order, “renarrativized” history, and imagined
new worlds and alternative existences.

37
 Coda
Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period
Room, then, is a fiction of authenticity; it is a specula-
tive production of a domestic space that presents a
historical counternarrative while also raising ques-
tions about time, space, and place. Through the lens
of Afrofuturism, the period room brings together a
range of African and African diasporic visual art and
sound to reclaim, without temporal restrictions, what
had once been an intentionally buried history. The
past/present/future vision of this domestic space is
guided by the speculative query of what might have
happened if Seneca Village was never destroyed.
As anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot so aptly
explained about time, “The past does not exist
independently from the present. Indeed, the past
25. Sun Ra and His Arkestra, The Magic City, 1966 (Gatefold Edition is only past because there is a present, just as I can
LP reissued 2017) point to something over there only because I am here.
But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that
sense, the past has no content. The past — ​or, more
accurately, pastness — ​is a position. Thus, in no way
can we identify the past as past.” 20 All temporalities
exist in relation to one another. The interventions in
this new Afrofuturist period room are thus manifold,
but they begin with the centering of Black life and
the arts and cultures of African-descended peoples
in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

1.
1. Ship names drawn from actual slave-ship records that cover this
date as transcribed in “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade — ​Database,”
in Slave Voyages (Houston: The Slave Voyages Consortium;
Rice University, 2021), accessed August 3, 2021; https://www​
.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database. 2. 2. “The Dolben’s Act of 1788
[Government Document],” partially transcribed as item 146 in
Children and Youth in History (Fairfax, Va.: The Roy Rosenzweig
Center for History and New Media, George Mason University,
2010), accessed July 17, 2021; https://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/items​
/­show/146. 3.
3. Written in 1751 and circulated in manuscript; first
published as Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the
Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c.,” addendum to
William Clarke, Observations on the Late and Present Conduct of
the French . . . (Boston: Printed and sold by S. Kneeland, 1755),
4. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along
pp. 53–54. 4.
the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
5. Dictionary.com, s.v. “speculate (v.),” accessed July 22,
2007), p. 6. 5.

38
2021; https://www.dictionary.com/browse/speculate. 6. 6. Virginia
Hamilton, The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 171. 7.7. Edward E. Baptist, The
Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American
Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), p. 188. 8. 8. Savannah
Unit, Georgia Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration,
Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal
Negroes (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1940), p. 154. The
transcriptions provided by white American interviewers under the
Works Progress Administration often use purported dialect from
their African American informants. Because these transcriptions
are uneven and have the potential to reify harmful stereotypes
about African American intellect, particularly that of those from
the U.S. South, I have elected to include the quotation here in
addition to the alternate text for clarity purposes. 9.9. Michelle D.
Commander, Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the
Black Fantastic (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 6.
10. David Ruggles in “Living Conditions and Race Relations in the
10.
North,” in The Black Worker: A Documentary History from Colonial
Times to the Present, vol. 1, The Black Worker to 1869, edited
by Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1978), p. 181. The original article was published
as “Kidnapping in the City of New York,” in The Liberator on
August 6, 1836. 11.
11. “The Present Look of Our Great Central Park.
Tired of Life,” The New-York Daily Times, July 9, 1856, p. 2. 12. 12. J. F.
Richmond, New York and Its Institutions, 1609–1873: The Bright
Side of New York (New York: E. B. Treat, 1873), p. 163. 13.13. This quote
is from Toni Morrison’s 1988 Melcher Book Award acceptance
speech, which was reprinted in full along with an audience Q&A at
Toni Morrison, “A Bench by the Road [October 12, 1988],” UU World
(Boston, 2008), accessed August 5, 2021; www​.uuworld​.org​
/­articles/a-bench-by-road. 14.14. Samuel R. Delany, “The Necessity
of Tomorrow(s),” in Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language
of Science Fiction, rev. ed. (1984; Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 2012), p. 14. 15.
15. Mark Dery, “Black to the Future:
Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” in
Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, edited by Mark Dery
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 180. 16. 16. Kodwo
Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” CR: The New
Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (Summer 2003), pp. 298–99. 17. 17. Martin
Luther King, Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” speech, Mason
Temple, Tenn., April 3, 1968. In American Rhetoric, accessed
August 22, 2021; https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches​
/­mlkivebeentothemountaintop.htm. 18. 18. Imamu Amiri Baraka,
Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism (Chicago: Third World
19. Sun Ra, “The Far Off Place,” in Sun Ra: The
Press, 1972), p. 31. 19.
Immeasurable Equation; The Collected Poetry and Prose, edited
by James L. Wolf and Hartmut Geerken (Norderstedt, Germany:
Books on Demand, 2005), p. 164. 20. 20. Michel-Rolph Trouillot,
Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1995), p. 15.

39
ISBN 978-1-58839-745-4