Title: Race, Afrofuturism, and the Digital Divide: Exploring the Tense of Black Technoculture through Art, Dance, and Literature

Description: In his book, In the Black Fantastic (2022) Ekow Eshun describes the Black fantastic as “less a genre or a movement than a way of seeing.” In 1993, Mark Dery defined “Afrofuturism” as addressing Blackness in twentieth-century technoculture. In 2017, Tina Campt asked, “What is the tense of a Black future?” This talk examines how these perspectives – identifiable in art, dance, and literature – point to a Black technoculture and to challenging the digital divide.

Biography: Cheryl Thompson is an Associate Professor in Performance at The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University where she teaches performance history courses. She is author of Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty (2021) and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture (2019). Dr. Thompson has published in the Canadian Theatre Review, Canadian Journal of Communication, and Canadian Journal of History, and many more. Her third book, Canada and the Blackface Atlantic: Performing Slavery, Conflict, and Freedom, 1812-1897, will be published with Wilfrid Laurier Press in 2025.

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