An exhibit at Arizona State University is drawing inspiration from a podcast series, and what’s been called a "super genre."
"Griots and Galaxies: Unveiling the Multiverse of Black Speculative Fiction" is on display at ASU’s Hayden Library through February and it includes books, music and video, among other displays.
The Show went to check out the exhibit and met up with Lauren Ruffin, who curated it, as well as Jenna Hanchey. Ruffin is an associate professor of world building and visualizing futures at ASU. Hanchey is an assistant professor of rhetoric and critical cultural studies at ASU and host of the podcast that share's the exhibit's name.
Full conversation
What exactly is Black speculative fiction?
LAUREN RUFFIN: Yeah, I mean, I, I think what we really tried to do with the exhibit was get down to the, the "what is it" question. And you know, Black speculative fiction is a relatively broad genre of storytelling that spans music, film, television. And of course, artwork, graphic novels, pretty much anything you can think of whereby Black artists have made sense of and made meetings of their lives, lives of our ancestors, you know, sort of where we've been and ideally where we hope to go in the future.
Is it in some ways an idealized or hopeful version of what the future might look like?
RUFFIN: Well, it depends on the writer, it depends on the artist. So I think that's the other really cool thing is you just get a really, really broad sense of where people are and what people are thinking about at any particular time. And of course, there's always real life context to what folks are writing about. You know, we see a lot about climate change, we see a lot about gun violence and surveillance technology right now. But, you know, folks, authors as far back as, you know, W.E.B. Dubois were writing, you know, Black speculative fiction pieces.
So what kinds of things do you tend to talk about on the podcast? Like what I guess maybe what have you learned? What have you heard so far?
JENNA HANCHEY: Oh, yeah, it's great. So we're talking with African speculative fiction writers who are either living on the continent or have moved here or are children of recent immigrants to, you know, different places. But we're asking them about their work and how African imagination accesses new ways of thinking about the future than we might be seeing in the West or in white speculative fiction.
And so, we released a Halloween episode talking with Tobi Ogundiran, who is a Nigerian writer who writes about fairy tales and horror. And one of the conversations that my co-host had with him was about what makes African horror distinctive from Western horror. And white Western horror tends to focus on being afraid that the violences we have done to other people will come back to hurt us. But African horror is more focused on having transgressed some sort of spiritual thing. So if you have wronged your ancestors, if you have wronged a sacred grove, having transgressed in some way for your responsibility for community and environment, coming back to haunt you is what African horror focuses on.
Lauren, it's so interesting, I guess like the perspective, right? It all depends on what your experience or what your community's experience has been, what you think about both the present and the future.
RUFFIN: Yeah, I agree. And there are so many similarities between what happens in the diaspora and what happens here in the States. Everything you just said, Jenna, is so similar to what we would see in the exhibit, whether we're talking about like "Get Out." It's like totally spot on to this idea that for many Black people, the horrors are actually real life. You know, just sort of our perspective on real life and what actually happened to us when you read, you know, some Octavia E. Butler's writing. You know, she's dealing with, you know, the horror of slavery. What does it mean to have someone from the present day who was all of a sudden transported to the past? How, how can, what can we learn from the past about survival? And how does that feed into like our sort of horror, like the, the fear that we feel that we feel every day?
Can we take a look [at the exhibit]? So you walk in, you're kind of in like an alcove here in the main lobby of the library here. And the first thing you see is a movie poster of Wesley Snipes in the movie "Blade," which I think a lot of listeners will have either seen or know about. Why, why put this so prominently?
RUFFIN: Well, the museum's curators really wanted it there. They did all the design, and again, I can't speak more highly of them. But I also think what we tried to do with this exhibit writ large is first we wanted to make Black speculative fiction knowable. So folks have been consuming this stuff, but they haven't been thinking about it as part of Black speculative fiction, the sort of lineage. But the other thing is to really turn on its head the idea of what should be in a library and what, what is legitimate art forms and legitimate sort of of literary context.
So, you know, "Blade" is something that is successful, people have seen. And I think the poster just sort of puts you into like, oh this is what we're talking about, I probably have seen other things that are going to be here.
So you give people a sense of they may have watched or read or know of Black speculative fiction without actually knowing that's what it was.
RUFFIN: Exactly. Exactly.
All right. So what else do we have in here?
RUFFIN: So we've got a listening station. And again, when we think about the genre, it's broad. So music is so central to, you know, a Black context. So we've got, you know, a playlist from Spotify, that's got everybody from like Janelle Monáe to, who else is on our playlist. We have some Prince on there. We've got lots of well-known artists and also some, yeah we've got Drexciya on there, Drexciya is a great punk band out of Detroit. So there's a lot of fun stuff on the playlist.
And from there, we really get into the sort of four pillars of Black speculative fiction. So the first one is identity. And then we've got reclamation, survival, which also would be horror. And then futures, which ultimately is what we're, we're working towards.
So when people come in, like there's, we talked about the movie poster, you mentioned the listening station. There are some other piece of art on the wall, there are some books in front of us and some sort of descriptions. It seems like you're, you're kind of trying to cram a lot a lot of information into kind of a compact space here.
RUFFIN: Yeah. And I think the, I mean, ideally this is, you know, the beautiful thing about this is it's in the library. So folks come here multiple times. You don't have to consume everything at once. And, you know, I've been here, this is my third visit now, and I haven't looked at everything all at once. You know, the first time I came, I like read the wall text. The second time I looked at what was on the wall and like, you know, checked out the, the video, which I guess we'll talk about a little bit.
But yeah, I think the goal is because this is a place that people, it's like some people are like really traveling from afar. Like you go to a museum in New York, you really get the chance to absorb it. You check out a book, we've got a book collection. So there are multiple, there are multiple ways for people to and students in particular to engage with to engage with this content.
So Jenna, I mean, given what Lauren had said, I mean, do you envision that maybe people who come to see this will use it a little, maybe more differently than they do, going to a museum or going to an exhibit somewhere else that there's not necessarily a huge space here, but there's a lot in it. But, you know, you can come back and maybe check out a little bit of it at a time.
HANCHEY: Yeah, I think so. And then also beyond that, since students are always walking past it, there's always new people stopping to engage with it. It, it makes it really accessible for anyone to stop and spend a few minutes and not have to segment a whole part of their day to see something, but be able to come back and engage with it multiple times.
All right. So let's talk about these TV sets here. These are not new TV sets. These are the, the sets of my childhood here. And there are six of them all playing different videos. What are we looking at?
RUFFIN: So this, they're old on purpose. They're also, they are very heavy. I definitely loaded three of them and brought them over myself. So I can, I can vouch for the fact that they are heavy as heck. But this is by an artist I've collaborated with for a number of years.
His name is Mark Saab. Mark considers himself to be both a digital artist and an outsider artist, and he's a Black artist who really wrestles with capital and with the internet. I love this exhibit because it's weird, and it's definitely the sort of content that you would not think you'd see in a library. We've got, you know, he's got a lot of different sort of ways of thinking about capitalism and surveillance technology. But I think it's, it's visually appealing, and again, it's just really trying to give students a different way with engaging in, you know, this, this particular genre of, of work.
Jenna, what do you hope that people who come to see this exhibit will take away from it?
HANCHEY: I'm really hoping that they will start to pay more attention to the Black speculative fiction that they're already consuming as well as seek more out. I think Black speculative fiction in particular offers an important gateway to making better worlds for everyone. Because if we, you know, no one's free until we all are, and getting Black people free is part of what is going to make the world better for everybody.
Lauren, how about you? What do you hope that people who come to see this will take away from it?
RUFFIN: Yeah, I mean, similarly, I think to me, the genre helps people make meaning of their own lives and you know, helps them interrogate, or helps us all interrogate, you know, power dynamics and structures that we're living in, whether that's capitalism or why we're having this huge climate change moment.
I mean, I think about the workplace, right? Most of us spend over the course of our adult lives. More lives, more time in our place of business and with our colleagues and we do anywhere else, and yet those are structures that are designed for militaristic contexts and many of us don't work in huge military sorts of context.
So, I think, you know, for me, it's always asking questions like, can the workplace be a place for radical change, and for, you know, liberation, you know. Can, can whatever context we're in, you know, how are we step into a space, can that be a space for liberation? And for just a better way of interacting with each other.
