PEACE IN THE TWENTY-SECOND CENTURY:
An Afrofuturist History
Professor Walter D. Greason, Ph.D.
Welcome and thank you to the amazing people who could join us here tonight.
This day started in early September 1978. My parents, David Harlan and Wilma Ham Greason, made everything possible. This presentation is dedicated to their memory.
History is a specific form of philosophy, and recently some colleagues have expressed a suspicion of history as a method. The discipline requires a deep sense of time and order, and, in a chaotic world, many people prefer the answers provided by the sciences – social and physical.
History stands back from fads and invokes an almost-religious sense of authority through its approach to understanding the past to clarify the present and to seek a brighter future. It has never been more important to study history, and, for this reason, historians around the world face unprecedented censorship.
As a confession, a significant portion of the blame for this moment falls on me. My approach to history has attacked the orthodoxy of the profession. It makes the reality of our gathering today quite surreal. For forty-seven years, I have pursued a command of academic knowledge and production. 47 years.
Today is not a Superbowl or Olympics for me. It is an inauguration of something deeper, and I ask for your patience as I explain.
Sankofa is the first insight we need. It is the west African concept of simultaneously looking forward and backward in time – to determine where you are going, based on where you have been. Toni Morrison cultivated this skill in American literature. Octavia Butler applied these lessons to her writing in science fiction. Dwayne McDuffie crafted these skills in graphic art and animated storytelling.
Sankofa is the heart of the practice of Afrofuturist history. Sankofa is the heart of the practice of Afrofuturist history. It makes explicit the perspectives and assumptions implicit in professional history. It liberates the disciplinary study from its boundaries in European language and epistemology.
How do I know? Two additional concepts illustrate the method. Positionality requires an acknowledgement of our individuality, its pitfalls, and its possibilities. Begin with a reflection about who I am, what I am doing, where and when I share my ideas. Plausibility offers an alternative to objectivity, based on the evidentiary record of the past. There is not a single way to understand history, but thousands of valid insights. These approaches are only exceeded by the incorrect paths, based in propaganda, deceit, and manipulation.
In the study of New Jersey, from Graham Hodges to Robyn Rodriguez, academic histories evolved rapidly in the last thirty years, challenging simple narratives about politics, railroads, and military conflict. The emergence of social history incorporated the tools of social science while preserving the strength of narrative writing. The special challenge of combining economics and history remains difficult, but the breakthrough of stratification economics holds important promise for both fields.
The main point of comparison I hope to share with you is the foundation of professional history and how it prohibits any chance at stable and longstanding peace in the twenty-second century. This foundation? It is the assumption that war is the primary subject of history. “War is the primary subject of history.”
I contend that this premise is false and deeply destructive. Look at the period from 1860 to 1920. It is the formation of the world as the two hundred and ninety-fifth generation of human beings attempted a global revolution in manufacturing and industry. We are only six generations removed from this process. With Columbian expositions, World Fairs, systems of Industrial Segregation, a widespread belief in social Armageddon, Woodrow Wilson seized the opportunity of the first World War to negotiate a world order that aspired to democracy and self-determination (for a few).
This era believed that conflict – massive military conflict – was the driver of human history. Only the threat of nuclear annihilation challenged the assumptions of empire and allowed for the creation of the United Nations and, in turn, the creation of Macalester College’s mission of internationalism, multiculturalism, and service. In a modern world understood by conflict, genocide, and warfare, peace became an option – within the framework of a Cold War, neocolonialism, and capital accumulation. Great depressions, recessions, and technological change limited this ambition. Even the triumphs of Martin Luther King, Jr and Nelson Mandela compromised with hegemonic power to advance smaller reforms for civil and human rights.
As a student of their work, I asked the question, ‘how does the world move forward?’ My career has been dedicated to those answers. They only make sense in the context explained here.
In a world that denies Black history, the need to create Afrofuturism is essential. It requires that we look forward to seeing the unknown, then turn back to understand the terrain we seek to leave behind. It is called Sankofa. Tonight, I hope you will join me in turning our backs on a past, and its histories, that assume the undying nature of war.
As Marvel Comics went bankrupt, they decided to re-launch stories about Daredevil and Moon Knight to capture new audiences. The decision to hire Christopher Priest as the writer for Black Panther stories offered layers of creative storytelling that updated the literary history, but also provided an ironic twist that examined the social history of the African diaspora. The first story reflected Priest’s work as a Baptist minister – it was an African king that would defeat a Greek devil through the power of the nation’s ancestry. Additional stories considered questions of refugee crises and global economics.
When I taught this material the first time at Drexel University in Philadelphia, the power of the writing and art immediately transformed the learning process for everyone in the room. In the same year, I taught a course titled ‘collective racial violence’ for the first time. Sankofa — the study of the past to inform the creation of the future. This process became a form of Afrofuturist education. It energized the ways we learned together, while also offering specific techniques to design alternatives to the painful assumptions about conflict and empire.
The lessons grew rapidly by 2012 when social media enabled scholars and educators to collaborate instantly on a global scale. For a decade, these insights combined in resources like the Wakanda Syllabus and the Racial Violence Syllabus. They led to powerful new graphic literature like Tim Fielder’s INFINITUM. In the last two years, school districts nationwide adopted these approaches, led by New York City’s Civics for All group and the landmark publication of THE GRAPHIC HISTORY OF HIP HOP.
But there is no similar timeline in history for these events. Nothing like the clear and repeated order of global revolution to civil wars to world wars to cold wars to wars on terrorism exist for Afrofuturism and its related fields that inspire peace. There is no better place to cultivate this knowledge than Macalester College. Tonight, we get started.
Begin with the lessons of Timothy Thomas Fortune who diagnosed the roots of conflict and the solutions for democracy almost a generation before W.E.B. DuBois published The Philadelphia Negro or the Souls of Black Folk. Continue with deep explorations of the work of Fredrick McGhee, the civil rights advocate who inspired the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with his work here in Saint Paul.
Consider the persistence and freedom of the “pre-modern” world, glimpsed in popular media like the film, Cloud Atlas. A sustainable future can be modeled on the present when we embrace Indigenous and African rural land use practices, turning away from voracious consumerism and global suburbanization.
At the scale of our college, we lead the world in sustainable design. Can we break our silos to make a more cohesive community experience for our neighbors across the Twin Cities?
Saint Paul, as the capitol, has a special responsibility for the state and the entire Upper Midwest region. Can we follow the work of Duchess Harris and Brian Lozenski to transform the legal and educational frameworks in this region?
Minnesota must reimagine itself as more than an international leader. It is a hub for global commerce, connecting North America to the urban Pacific and the metropolitan centers of Europe. Now is the time — based on Afrofuturist history and indigenous design — for Minnesota to become a TRANSNATIONAL leader on questions of migration, economic development, and global citizenship.
Look to the examples of New Orleans and the Gallier House’s SHIFTING LANDSCAPES exhibit as a model for transnational collaboration and historic preservation in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Study the case of Zora Neale Hurston’s hometown, Eatonville, Florida, and its recent breakthroughs in preventing the destruction of unique cultural heritage sites.
Right now, it is possible to create systems worldwide that preserve the inalienable right to pursue happiness, while divorcing human creativity from property accumulation.
Follow the leadership of Macalester students like Ben Levy, Milkee Bekele, Bryson Berry, Catherine Driver, Mack Williams, and Adisa Preston in the study of maroon communities and interdisciplinary education. There are entire worlds for us to build in collaboration with the people outside of hegemonic power in Washington, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Tehran, and Pyongyang.
This strategy is how we create peace in the twenty-second century.
Learn the MA’AT OF SANKOFA. Or, in European terms, the universal order of history. Or, maybe, the deep structure of knowledge.
Return to Toni Morrison’s lessons about RE-MEMBERING. The process of understanding of ourselves and our worlds in fluid dynamics of becoming.
As history educators, begin now, then move backwards into the lessons of the past. Keep the possibilities of the future in constant focus.
Consider that someone born today WILL NOT DIE until 2125. Their children will likely see the arrival of 2201. As the past is always with us, so is the future. How will they remember peace? It is Afrofuturism that allows us to understand.
Move beyond the linear timelines that professional history requires. Think of the fractal patterns we see in nature that shape everything from sub-atomic particles like bosons to galactic clusters that show us the boundaries of dark matter. Use shapes like the ambagesque in Smail Gallery of Olin-Rice Hall to consider the dynamics of history – their patterns and unpredictabilities.
This is the premise of my work as an Afrofuturist historian, explained more fully in works like ILLMATIC CONSEQUENCES.
PEACE DERIVES FROM DREAMS THAT ARE ROOTED IN SANKOFA.
Thank you for the opportunity to share these ideas.
Genius Locus 
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