Authors/Artists:
Jenell Navarro | California Polytechnic State University | Instagram @jenell78
Cameron Clay| California Polytechnic State University | Instagram @cammz
Leilani Hemmings Pallay | California Polytechnic State University | Instagram @nani.isabelle
Cosmic Ancestry: Afrobliss Inner Space Explorations is a zine that operationalizes visual texts to dream of a world where the entire biosphere, including all of our human and non-human relatives (land, plants, water, animals, birds), live free from the reins of colonization. To do this we draw on many of the liberating images of Wakanda such as a world curated by the goddess panther Bast, the power of Black womxn’s minds in their meditative states to fly ships and create technologies, and beautiful uncolonized African lands alive with electric charge. These themes guide the artwork and text in this zine to illustrate the deep sense of ancestors and rootedness found within Afrofuturisms. Furthermore, this zine highlights the work of alchemy and conjuring that Black and Indigenous folx must do in order to pull our desired futures into the present moment and collapse the Western temporal frame upon itself. This work recognizes that while our bodies still live in worlds structured by settler colonial and white supremacist violence, we can utilize the power of our collective imaginations to effect forms of Afrobliss fugitivity. The fugitivity we display in this zine is intended to be understood as what we call visual marronage, which are spiritual offerings of Black and Indigenous cosmologies that showcase what we believe should be the fate of the universe for our people—beauty, laughter, play, joy, and blissfulness. In this universe, Black and Indigenous people are the first and last stargazers, the dreamers and the dream, and the corrective stewards of all ecology, mythology, and technology.
Check out the full project here:
