Crafting Freedom Futures

In his 1993 essay, Black to the Future, Mark Derry coined the term afrofuturism, to describe the broad culture, rooted in art and grown to encompass philosophy, technology, mysticism, and aesthetic, that practiced and imagined Black futures rooted in liberation. When I read the work of speculative fiction by ME O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 at the same time I was reading Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, something clicked about the power of building abolition geographies through imagining liberatory futures and speaking them into existence. It made me think of the first time I heard Cherokee elders talk about thinking seven generations into the future, the work to hold ancestors and descendants in our journeys. Grounded in my love of oral histories and narrative projects, I imagined space to practice trans futurism, in which we could capture and engage people in making freedom real through the practice of firsthand, narrative practice of oral futures. 

In many ways, I think to be trans is an experience of futurism. To see beyond the binaries we've been presented with, to claim autonomy, create an abolition geography, in ourselves. Particularly at a moment when things feel so overwhelming in the present, as we turn to the past for guidance, we still face an overwhelming amount of despair, often tied to an inability to imagine ourselves in the future. So let's help share our futures with one another, as a practice of hope and possibility. 

Through this project, we will begin to craft freedom futures, rooted in a practice of recording and sharing trans and queer futurisms. 

We imagine this as a multimedia project, which allows people to participate and connect with the work in a number of ways that center safety, comfort, and room to imagine. Ideally, this will take place with the support of several multidisciplinary artists to help bring this vision to life, and to craft the spaces where as broad a swath of our community as possible can craft abolition geographies and speak to freedom futures. 

We have found that thoughtful narrative work with broad reach is missing in local Oklahoma advocacy across movements, largely due to lack of resource investment. With no testimony allowed in the Oklahoma Legislative process and a small pool of press who often stay and work in the state for less than 2 years, we face a number of obstacles in how to reach folks with stories that center the full dignity of 2SLGBTQ+ folks. And yet, we’ve found lots of engagement both from our broader 2SLGBTQ+ community and beyond it, when we’re able to engage in narrative work grounded in the fact that our community has always been here, and humanizing our stories. Traditional tactics like polling have been ineffective at moving our term-limited legislators who feel they have to ride the wave of politics in Oklahoma, and tactics like deep canvassing require infrastructure and capacity to build out to an effective level that would be incredibly difficult to replicate in a state like Oklahoma where the organizing and advocacy communications infrastructure is limited to begin with, and safety concerns are a real factor in this current timeline. But through our oral futurism work, we can do deep narrative work that engages folks as deep canvassing would, but on a broader scale that helps us build power to move people, rather than focusing resources on moving political actors who then term out or face defeat in an election. We believe that the Oklahoma narratives have space to be compelling in work across the country, with multi-faceted use for assets to reach Oklahomans. And that combined with the voices of trans leaders across the movement, we can help people engage in the hopeful practice of imagining a future that includes them.

In solidarity and with the ever-earnest practice of hope towards a better future,

Cole McAfee