Imagine a world
without prisons & policing…
LISTEN NOW!!!!!
BLACK FREEDOM BEYOND BORDERS: ABOLITION DAY PODCAST NOW AVAILABLE
PRESENTED BY
WAKANDA DREAM LAB
Wakanda Dream Lab & PolicyLink present…
Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day
An anthology that invites you into future of safety & freedom; a future without prisons & policing. Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day is a collection of freedom dreams written by a band of Black Radical storytellers. While debates about “defunding” raise the question of what a new public safety system might look like, these authors & artists are showing us what is possible through speculative fiction.
DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY OF THE ANTHOLOGY NOW!!!
“Toni Morrison once said “if you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it.” This anthology takes us to a place where we can imagine, have and live in our freedom dreams. Another world, where abolition is ours, is not only possible - it’s in progress.”
Learn more about PolicyLink’s
Community Safety & Justice work.
“I always thought abolition was a pipe dream. But contributing to this anthology made me realize that it’s not a dream, but a combination of empathy and political will.”
About the project
Cities across the country are responding to the call from residents to right-size bloated police budgets in order to resource disinvested communities. While debates about “defunding” raise the question of what a new public safety system might look like, authors and artists are showing us what is possible through speculative fiction, creatively challenging the status quo by telling stories of a more equitable future. The Black storytellers in the “World-building for Abolitionist Futures” writers room follow in this revolutionary tradition.
In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Audre Lorde wrote, “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so that it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock of experiences of our daily lives. As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.”
In other words, art-making is policymaking. This anthology is a call to write our own future of safety, freedom, and liberation through stories, poems, and policy.
-Jeremy Liu, Senior Fellow for Arts, Cultures, and Equitable Development
The Artwork
All of the collages for this project were created by Amir Khadar. RIght now, you can experience the anthology cover in augmented reality using the free app, Artivive, on your smartphone or device! Soon all of the images will be brought to life using augmented reality…stay tuned.
Here’s how to use Artivive: STEP 1: Download the anthology on a laptop/device other than your smartphone STEP 2: Download @ARTIVIVEAPP on your smartphone STEP 3: Open the @ARTIVIVEAPP on your phone and point your phone camera at the art on the screen! STEP 4: BE AMAZED, ENCHANTED, AND TAKEN ABACK!!! You can currently view the anthology cover art in augmented reality - and overtime, we will release new augmented reality artwork including all the collages inspired by the stories of the anthology shown below.
Meet the Contributors
Ayize Jama-Everett
Ayize Jama-Everett is an African-American science fiction and speculative fiction writer. He is the author of the trilogy The Liminal People (self- published, 2009; Small Beer Press, 2012), The Liminal War (Small Beer Press, 2015) and The Entropy of Bones (Small Beer Press, 2015). Born in Harlem, New York, Jama-Everett is now based in Oakland, California. He holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology and divinity, and has been a therapist, and a teacher at high school and college levels.
Amber Butts
Amber Butts is a queer writer, organizer, grief worker and educator from Oakland, CA who believes that Black folk are already whole. Her work centers Black children, Black mamas and Black elders, which asks big and small questions about how we move towards actualizing spaces that center tenderness, nuance and joy while living in a world reliant on our terror. Amber has been featured in Essence, Medium, RaceBaitr, and Black Youth Project.
Naudika Williams
Naudika Williams loves sci-fi and fantasy, especially the writing of Octavia E. Butler. Writing is Naudika’s own way of creating new worlds. Naudika has garnered many accolades including the Sargent Shriver Youth Warriors Against Poverty and performed spoken word at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and CounterPulse. Naudika was born in Oakland and attends Laney College and hopes to be a screenwriter for cartoons and movies.
Walidah Imarisha
Walidah Imarisha is a historian at heart, reporter by (w)right, rebel by reason, an educator, writer, public scholar and spoken word artist. She edited two anthologies, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements and Another World is Possible. Imarisha’s nonfiction book Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison, and Redemption won a 2017 Oregon Book Award. She is also the author of the poetry collection Scars/ Stars, and in 2015,
she received a Tiptree Fellowship for her science fiction writing.
Shawn Taylor
Shawn Taylor is a lifelong science fiction, fantasy, and comic book fan. He is a founding organizer of thenerdsofcolor.org, and the Black Comix Arts Festival. His passion for stories of other worlds led him to becoming a paid Dungeon Master for many D&D campaigns. Shawn just concluded a Senior Fellowship with the Pop Culture Collaborative where he studied how fandom power could be used for social good. Currently his company, Drum and Gourd, is working on a toy line, a collectable card game, and a LARPing system. He also consults for media and gaming companies.
Donte Clark
Donte Clark is a poet, emcee, educator and activist from Richmond, California. He was founding member and artistic director of the RAW Talent Creative Arts Program at RYSE Center. Clark became the artistic lead of the program’s first play, Té’s Harmony, which examined local issues through the structure of Romeo and Juliet. The 2015 documentary Romeo Is Bleeding follows Clark in the process of writing and performing Té’s Harmony. Donté Clark has appeared in Kicks (2016), Code Switch (2018) and The North Pole (2019).
Lisa Bates
Lisa Bates is a 2019 Creative Capital awardee, recognizing her practice at the intersection of art, urban planning, and radical geographic thought. Through collaboration with multimedia artists, the works ask us to develop new visions of Black history, present, and possibility. This radical Black spatial imaginary practice includes the Portland African-American Leadership Forum People’s Plan, which asked “what would it be like if your city, neighborhood, community loved Black people?” and the art exhibition and social emergency response center HERE|Humboldt
Calvin Williams
Calvin Williams is a Cultural Strategies Fellow at Movement Strategy Center. He is a founding creator of Wakanda Dream Lab, producing the Black Freedom Beyond Borders fan fiction anthologies and augmented art exhibit at Betti Ono. He conspires with fellow afrofuturists to produce immersive spaces for new stories and storytellers of liberation to emerge. He cosplays as an immersive experience curator, a podcast host for The Big We, and impact producer for The North Pole Show + Offsides Productions. He lives in Oakland with his Beloveds, Leila & Baby Malik.
Amir Khadar
Amir Khadar is a Sierra Leonean-American multidisciplinary artist and educator from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Their main mediums are poetry, fibers, and digital art. Regaurdless of medium, their practice has always been grounded through afro-futurism, black beauty, and ancestral practices. They were Creative Director and Designer of “Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Re-imagining Gender in Wakanda.” Amir is currently a student at Swarthmore College.
Meet the Collaborators
Wakanda Dream Lab
Wakanda Dream Lab is a collective fan driven project that bridges the worlds of Black fandom & #Blacktivism for Black Liberation. It functions according to a value of emergence & celebrates the organic self-organizing nature of fandom. We intend to build on the aesthetics & pop culture appeal of Wakanda to develop a vision, principles, values & framework for prefigurative organizing of a new base of activists, artists & fans for Black Liberation. We believe that Black Liberation begets liberation of all peoples. https://www.wakandadreamlab.com/
PolicyLink is a national research & action institute advancing racial & economic equity by Lifting Up What Works. The PolicyLink signature Arts, Culture, & Equitable Development (ACED) Initiative uses arts & culture methods to support equitable policy change across the country. PolicyLink’s Community Safety & Justice program supports the visioning & building of an equitable & just system that keeps all communities safe while working to reduce the harm of our current prison & policing systems.
For more information, visit policylink.org.
The BIG We
We are a collective of creative, hopeful, risk-takers shaping culture through creativity & strategy; boldly shaping narratives that transform generations. We are an innovative high impact pop-culture media company revolutionizing how inspiration is consumed.
ABOLITION DAY EVENTS
Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day - August 24, 2020 - 5:00-6:30 pm PST
Join Wakanda Dream Lab & PolicyLink in a storyworld of safety & freedom in a future without prisons & policing. We invite you to a reading from contributors in the forthcoming anthology, Black Freedom Beyond Borders: Memories of Abolition Day, speculative fiction of freedom dreams written by a collective of Black Radical storytellers. While debates about “defunding” raise the question of what a new public safety system might look like, authors & artists are showing us what is possible through speculative fiction.
In this session we will hear from the contributors & curators reading excerpts of their pieces, & exploring visuals with augmented reality artwork to bring this liberated storyline to life.
We look forward to sharing this creative & visionary space with you.
