Worldbuilding Inevitable Futures

Dreaming and Practicing at the Scale of Black Feminist Futurity

Image description: I’m sitting on river rocks in a white dress made with my need and needle as eager water gushes behind me. The distant horizon is lined with a forest of green trees and the sky is made of cotton. Photographer: Chukwudemebi Ezefili

Why worldbuilding?

Why worldbuilding?

Why worldbuilding?

Why not weaving or quilting or braiding? As a black feminist textile artist and software engineer I know how much power and possibility lie inside metaphors related to fiber. The black radical tradition of quilting and it’s ancient overlap with sample culture in hip hop, ancestors braiding seeds into our hair before the violence of departing from our shores, the weaving loom being a computer and cloth being a coding document, DNA of the cotton plant hosting the data of freedom dreams spun into fiber to keep us warm, entanglement….so much entanglement whether it’s mycelial or memory, below the forest floor or on the web. There are invisible strings everywhere holding us together, binding u…