Cities Imagined: The African Diaspora in Media and History

Whose images are being juxtaposed? What information is being conveyed? Which aesthetics are being valued? - Frances Gateward and John Jennings, ""The Blacker the Ink"" ""Afrofuturism is moving [toward] a more applied, theoretical, critical, and transdisciplinary approach"" - Reynaldo Anderson, ""Afrofuturism 2.0"" ""What is dark matter?"" - Sheree R. Thomas, ""Dark Matter"" Cities Imagined symbolizes the dynamic relationship between real and imagined spaces, subjects, and objects across disciplines. Forged from lifetimes of academic work that balanced critical insight with constant creativity, Julian Chambliss and Walter Greason document, analyze, and synthesize multiple traditions of critical analysis and aesthetic performance. In tracing the history of culture, identity, and structures over the twentieth century, Cities Imagined provides a framework to rethink modern history. From the emergence of the Booker T. Washington's ""Tuskegee Universe"" in the late nineteenth century through the trans-dimensional character of the comic book city and transpatial power of the Black Lives Matter moment, Cities Imagined offers a sequence of templates that will guide scholars, activists, architects, and theorists through processes of metropolitan creation in pursuit of equal justice for all people. Chambliss and Greason move their readers from the dreams of Booker T. Washington, Anna Julia Cooper, and Martin Luther King, Jr. through the recognition of Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, and Sonia Sotomayor as shapers of an uncharted future. How do dreams become real? The examination of spatial change though both literature and history provides a furnace and an anvil for the creation of Audre Lorde's new tools. Cities Imagined is the hammer we all need.… (more)