Last memorial day weekend, I attended the Escape Velocity 2019 with my lovely, Artist-Bride Caryl Henry Alexander. The conference was held at the National Harbor’s Gaylord convention Center, and was sponsored by the Museum of Science Fiction.
In general, the convention was very “corporate” compared with the few comicons I’ve attended. Some of the panels were basically sales pitches for industries or some neoliberal agenda that seemed out of place against emerging intersectionality awareness and Afrofuturism–but I suppose someone has to pay the bills. ;)
We attended Friday and Saturday panels, and I returned on Sunday to attend a panel.
Interestingly, AI was a big deal on both the fiction oriented panels and those that discussed “hard science”. I got the sense at 3 of the panels (and in real life) that AI is the next battleground or marketplace depending on your views and whether you take a opensource (bazaar) or proprietary (cathedral) focus.
I would have really loved to see more spaces and places for dialog. The conference had a decidedly “banking-model–ala Pedagogy of the Oppressed–academic modality, whereas a more dialogic approach would have been much better for me.
Speaking of spaces for dialog–It would have been great to have openmic sessions and performances.
Here are some other general observations:
- I enjoyed the event but few of my geeky and blerdy friends knew about it! I wonder about what channels should used for marketing the event in the future.
- I sincerely hope that the events/panels were recorded! Post-conference, I think videos would be really useful for people who couldn’t attend (and they could serve as useful marketing for future conferences).
- I was really glad to see the Afrofuturistic/EthnoFuturism/GLBTQ+ panels and events! Great work Dr. Aisha Matthews and team!
- A bibliography for the each panels would have been useful. Perhaps, bibliographies could be posted to a blog or social media.
- Holding an event about Afrofuturism on a Sunday morning would put a damper on participation–particularly if you’re hoping for attendance from a Black Community such as Prince George’s County or (post-gentrified) Washington DC. LOL
- To future presenters: Please consider using videos, PowerPoints, Presi and MindMaps, etc. Show as well as Tell!
We attended two panels with Afrofuture/EthnoFuture themes (and I “audited” the last ten minutes of an interesting GLBTQ panel):
- Early African American Science Fiction (Pauline Hopkins, George Schuyler) on Saturday
- Ethnic Techno-Cultures panel on Sunday.
At the Early African American Science Fiction (Pauline Hopkins, George Schuyler) I really enjoyed hearing Professor Seoyoung-Chu read Jean Toomer’s “Her Lips Are Copper Wire” and I would really love to see more Poetry at future panels and conferences. I would have liked to hear more about the distribution of the periodicals and comics discussed. I few slides of the early comics would have been very helpful.
The Ethnic Techno-Cultures panel was great because it consisted of a team from the Northern Arizona University Ethnic Studies department. The team was able play off each other’s presentations and I liked the willingness to depart from the text of their papers.
Here are my takeaways/observations:
- Really enjoyed hearing Jean Toomer’s poem and I would really love to see more Poetry at future panels
- There are interesting themes to explorer across cultures, the mashup of Japanese-American, Latinx, African-American, and Native cultures was interesting and deserved more time
- I was given new eyes and a new vocabulary to identify and reframe poems as sci-fi or speculative.
- New words: meta-slave narratives, Afro-pessimism, chronotropes. I’ll be exploring these additions to my lexicon in future posts.
We also attended panels on AI, Cosplay sewing, intelligent space probes, and I may cover those in future posts but I wanted to provide information on the most inspiring ones first.
Overall I enjoyed the conference and commend the team from the Museum of Science Fiction. I hope you will find a brick and mortar home soon!
Side note: I ran into a Phrat Brother Marcuskeith Island from my mother chapter, Alpha Alpha Lambda in Newark, NJ. Guess who he’s cosplaying as… That’s right, he’s Alpha Man!
