Reynaldo Anderson, PH.D.
UWP EDITORIAL
“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”
—Octavia Butler
Black Speculative Arts Movement
What is The Black Speculative Arts Movement?
The BLACK SPECULATIVE ARTS MOVEMENT, or BSAM, emerged in the wake of Unveiling Visions: Alchemy of The Black Imagination the debut exhibition curated by John Jennings and Reynaldo Anderson at the Schomburg library in New York, in 2015.
It has grown into a network of creatives, intellectuals, and artists representing different positions or basis of inquiry including: Afrofuturism, Astro Blackness, Afro-Surrealism, Ethno Gothic, Black Digital Humanities, Black (Afro-future female or African Centered) Science Fiction, The Black Fantastic, Magical Realism, and The Esoteric.
Although these positions may seem incompatible, in some instances they overlap around the term speculative and design; and interact around the nexus of technology and ethics.
Black Speculative Art is a creative, aesthetic practice that integrates African diasporic worldviews with science or technology and seeks to interpret, engage, design or alter reality for the re-imagination of the past, the contested present, and to act as a catalyst for the future.
Afrofuturist Scholar | Founder of Black Speculative Arts Movement | Ecclesiastes 1:17-18 | AΦA
Reynaldo Anderson currently serves as the Graduate Director and Associate Professor of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Reynaldo is currently the Executive Director and co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM), an international network of artists, intellectuals, creatives, and activists. He is the co-editor of the following anthologies and journals, Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness and The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity, Art+Design (Lexington Books, 2015, 2019), Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent (Cedar Grove Publishing, 2018), Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures, a special issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (2018), and When is Wakanda: Afrofuturism and Dark Speculative Futurity (The Journal of Futures Studies, 2019). He is also the author of numerous articles on Africana Studies and Communication studies and helped conceive the joint BSAM and NY LIVE Arts Curating the End of the World online exhibitions (2020-2021). He has presented papers in areas of communications, Africana studies, Afrofuturism, and critical theory in the US and abroad.
