Afrofuturism Cycle of the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities (2020-2024)
From 2020 to 2024 Dr. Julian Chambliss served as the curator for the Zora Neale Hurston of the Festival of the Arts. Held in Eatonville, Florida, and across Orlando, Florida. The Association to Preserve Eatonville Community organizes the annual event. As the curator of the cycle, Dr. Chambliss worked closely with the Academics Committee of the festival to design an exploration of Afrofuturism. The scholars invited to the 2020 festival were the first interviews for the Voices of the Black Imaginary Oral History project. Those conversations were the basis for the fifth season of the Every Tongue Got to Confess Podcast. The festival activities also serve as the basis for an open -access digital archive of material to teach Afrofuturism. You can see that syllabus online here.
Throughout the festival cycle, the programming engaged a thematic approach. This allowed the public programming to have clear and compelling framing for the community audience.
One way Afrofuturism challenges our understanding of knowledge production is through critical making, which artists Stacey Robinson and John Jennings describe as a methodological approach that insists that scholars and artists engage with broader critical and cultural conversation through the act of making. From an aesthetic perspective, contemporary Afrofuturism continues an established practice of black scholars and artists seeking to celebrate forms, shapes, and textures linked to the African Diaspora. The creation of black counterpublic space through artistic means has been and continues to be central to black speculative practice. At the festival, we explored the complexity of vision and futurity.
In 2023, we shifted our concern to metaphyical and Afrofuturism. From an engagement with African cosmology to tracing the legacy of African practice in Black religion, a consideration of spirit calls attention to the ways Afrofuturism seeks to recover cultural legacies that have been erased, contend with those practices that have evolved to support survival, and asks important questions about what paths forward will support a better tomorrow.
In 2024 the cycle concluded with a consideration of space.
By concluding our conversations by examining space, we align our concerns with contemporary debates about land, community, and the future that have brought a renewed focus on Eatonville in recent months. The struggle over the Robert Hungerford property can be read as a return to a consideration of the mission and vision offered by the creation of Eatonville. Celebrated as a way “solve the great race problem” by its founders, Eatonville has long stood as a space of liberation for black Americans. While we quickly imagine the “space” of Afrofuturism being connected to a cosmic imagination, creating spaces that nurture our being is the core to understanding the space of Afrofuturism. The effort of the enslaved to reject a corrupt narrative of Christianity that embraced servitude in favor of a narrative of liberation, or those efforts of early black educators to document black people’s contribution to American society offers represent essential efforts to change the collective mindscape that all too often advocates that blackness equates to social and economic failure.
The Department of History’s Sebastian Garcia spoke with Afrofuturism Cycle Curator Dr. Julian Chambliss alongside Dr. Scot French, head of the Zora Neale Hurston Festival Academic Committee about the final year ZORA! Festival Afrofuturism cycle in this episode of the Knights Historycast. Dr. Chambliss reflects on the thematic approach and the effort, working alongside Dr. French to make the Zora Festival a public platform to widen attention to Afrofuturism. Since this was the final year of the 2020-2024 Afrofuturism Academic Conference Cycle, Dr. Chambliss reflected on the half-a-decade experience of developing, leading, and curating this tremendous scholarly and public event.
