William Andrew Sadler and Mary Louisa Goldsborough Sadler

In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I began my PhD program in lockdown. I took a class titled, “Black Speculative Futures” with dancer, professor, and speculative artist Christina Knight. In this class, we explored apocalypse, “doomsday,” futurity (Campt, 2017), and liberation in regards to the speculative—themes which felt all too real during this time. Toward the beginning of the semester, we read Octavia’s Brood (2015), a science fiction anthology full of stories written by activists, artists, and educators focused on social justice (who weren’t necessarily writers) imagining alternative worlds and speculating futures, curated by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha. In the opening, there’s a passage by Walidah Imarisha that I continue to revisit time and time again: 

“Art and culture themselves are time-traveling, planes of existence where the past, present, and future shift seamlessly in and out. And for those of us from communities with historic collective trauma, we must understand that each of us is already science fiction walking around on two legs. Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us. For adrienne and myself, as two Black women, we think of our ancestors in chains dreaming about a day when their children’s children’s children would be free. They had no reason to believe this was likely, but together they dreamed of freedom, and they brought us into being. We are responsible for interpreting their regrets and realizing their imaginings” (pp. 4-5). 

It articulates the power of art, culture, the speculative, and radical imagination more beautifully than anything else I’ve read and contextualized so much of the work I’ve been doing (or trying to do). 

In terms of my maternal ancestry, I am only 4 generations removed from slavery. The collage I created of William Andrew Sadler and Mary Louisa Sadler who were both the children of enslaved Black Americans, was a meditation on their lives and how they might have pictured futurity, specifically in their home state of Delaware. I considered what they might have envisioned for my life and the lives of the descendants who come after me (if they imagined anything at all) and how that might have been limited by the period they lived in. What might they have wanted for me (or more tangibly for their children or grandchildren) that they couldn’t have for themselves? What sorts of things might they not have even considered wanting? I’ve begun considering these same questions for myself, and how I can more unapologetically work toward tangibly creating a world that can contain all of the hopes I have for those who come after me.