The International Black Speculative Writing Festival (London & Remote)

Just under a week to go, with the last chance saloon doors swinging, we are dipping in to our archives: this AiW #PastAndPresent post may look back but has our sights set firmly forward to the Digital Festival Day (04 Feb) of the inaugural International Black Speculative Writing Festival weekender –– at Goldsmiths University in London, from the 2nd – 4th Feb 2024.

Because the in-person Festival — 3 days celebrating African and African diasporic spec fic writing — is London-based, organisers are running a Digital day-long edition on the Sunday 4th Feb, with priority bookings for people who cannot attend in-person due to distance or disability.

Additionally, AiW readers based *anywhere on the continent* have been offered a number of *free* tickets by the IBSW Festival for remote attendance to the full day-long Digital edition (otherwise £20 / £10 discounted, both + fee).

Claim your free day ticket for the Digital International Black Speculative Fiction Writing Festival on Sunday February 4th before they sell out.

If you are based on the continent (i.e., Africa – [you’d be amazed… Ed.]), you can follow the directions in the image above – or jump to its “How to claim yours…” details, repeated at the end of this post.

If you’re so inclined, you can also head to our socials (the image above is from our Instagram, but details are available on X and our Facebook as well).

NB: The Fest are keeping these free tix available for our readers but they are limited in number, still being allocated on a first-come first-served basis.

All other ticket details are here, at the Fest’s Eventbrite page…

This offer from the Festival presents an interesting opportunity…It’s partly this generosity in this first happening of this new UK-based international literary festival, and partly the nature of attendance at the literary festival per se, with its spotlighting capacities on its own particular stage and its gathering-up work — that’s got us rifling back through the AiW archives.

Finding evidence of the speculative and of Afrofuturist divinings winding throughout them, going way back to 2013 — from reviews to calls to Q&As; from Tutuola’s pervasive influence, to the energies emanating from the Nommos and the resources collected at https://www.africansfs.com/, to the vibrancy of the indie literary magazines furnishing the newest writing in the field — this return to the archives has woven us into a thought experiment: beginning to connect up some of the many interstitial dots in the “blossoming” rise of “home-grown” speculative fiction, alongside the launch of IBSWF2024 now.

It’s in that light that we’ve been looking again at those of the tidal currents that are shaping and reforming the defining terms that come to make up our collective sense of this capacious genre — its own archives and geographies, its possibilities, echo-chambers, and its mirror-sides — not to mention the ways that this offer out, to continent-based spec fiction and AiW readers from the first International Black Speculative Writing Festival in 2024, concentrates some of the relationships that show up in how spec fic is circulated, travels, lands with us.

Simply thinking on the internationalised histories of the evolutions that run across every word in the Festival’s full title, just for starters…

So, alongside finalised programme details of the Digital Day Fest, we’ve dug in with a few of our associative links to content — from ours, with #Past posts, and linking out to other pertinent conversations to this spec fic moment — to bring out some of the connective tissue afforded by the IBSWF’s offer to our readers, and/or as a re-starting point for (pre)orienting around some of what is being curated by the Digital Fest’s line-up — the names, spaces, journeys, worlds (and beyonds)...

Full Festival programme details for both the in-person and digital day (above) are available on this link: http://bit.ly/420kn4J

One of the primary opportunities for connection on the day, it seems, is that of the Networking Session that closes it out (18.20-19.20 GMT), where breakout rooms will offer the space to meet other participants — writers, readers, editors, each other… (It may be pretty late for some of our readers’ timezones, but it’s probably do-able late..?)

Here, we will make our way through the Day Festival programme, section by section, with the #PastAndPresent in mind — skip as desired and/or jump to claiming the freebies/purchasing your tickets at the head and tail of it — the ‘Claim your Fest tix‘ jump links throughout will speed you down to the bottom of the post.

In its spirit, and with all spirits present, as ever, please feel free to connect up with us with any thoughts or other links that can feed the conversation – comment directly on the post at its foot, or be in touch, and we can keep an Afropast feeding in to a futurist and ongoing Afropresent, where all things spec fic can be in the pic, writing our future memories…

IBSWF2024 Programme / Q&A Kadija Sesay – Archives #P&P

First up in our #PastAndPresent linkage, the Festival is organised by Founder-Director, Dr Kadija Sesay, Sierra Leonean/British scholar, publisher — of Sable LitMag and at co-director at Inscribe / Peepal Tree Press, where she commissioned Glimpse: An Anthology of Black British Speculative Fiction, among other path-breaking publications — and of tireless literary champion and cultural activist fame.

Readings from Glimpse will round out the presentations on the Digital Festival Day (17.05-18.05), with Muli Amaye, Koye Oyedeji, and Joshua Idehen.

The anthology also includes Alinah Azadeh‘s ‘The Beard,’ which was selected for the Best British Short Stories 2023 collection (published by Salt). Artist, writer, performer and cultural activist Azadeh is appearing as part of the digital day as lead and curator of the project We Hear You Now, subject of an earlier afternoon, 14.40-15.55 session (more on this and its coastal, Afrofuturistic depths and revisionings later…).

If you’re not yet familiar with Glimpse, you may find spaces where you can check out its opening ahead of the event (we were able to via an online sample). There is a theory and historically focused Foreword by Reynaldo Anderson — who is Associate Professor of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, and Executive Director and Co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM), a network of Artists, Curators, intellectuals and Activists. Revealing an approachable scholarly drive from someone at the forefront of Afrofuturist studies, Anderson opens the book with…

The changing world order and our metamodern moment is haunted by the ghosts of slavery, colonialism, and genocide…

(Reynaldo Anderson, GLIMPSE – Foreword, ‘The Rise of the Black British Speculative Tradition’, p.7)

The Foreword is followed by the collection’s editor Leone Ross’ Introduction, which starts with the joys of editing, in general — “Some of my fondest childhood memories growing up in Jamaica involve debating the ‘right’ word with my editor mother” — describes proposing to co-director of Inscribe Press, Kadija, that this latest Peepal Tree anthology be a speculative fiction one, and impresses the “fierce joy” and sheer excitement of facilitating this specific set of spec fic stories into Glimpse — because, as she says,

…the weird shit, that’s my thing.

Leone Ross, GLIMPSE – Introduction, p. 15

Archives #P&P

Taking things back a notch to our March 2022 archives, we have a richly in-depth interview with Kadija, in which AiW’s Davina Kawuma talks with her as a “Scholar-Activist” about the Pan-Africanism at the core of one of her then current projects, the AfriPoeTree app, as well as…  

…the importance of networks in managing a literary festival, gatekeeping and reading practices…

Touching on a range of Kadija’s activities and other writing and curatorial projects, this is one of those broad and far-ranging interviews that also laser focuses in.

The following excerpt, from about halfway through the conversation, contains both a mention of the literary festival, as well as making a critical distinction between forms of literary activism as she sees them (and as Davina sets them up), while making comment on genre and what “counts” as “the literary” — all with a literary-community-mind in focus:

…[Davina Philomena Kawuma, for AiW]: In ‘Literary Activism in A Country That Doesn’t Read’ (2021, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, 7:1-2, 167-170), Edwige-Renée Dro argues that, in fact, Ivorians do read – only that many of them don’t read what those in intellectual circles consider worth reading:

“It is being asked again and again what I as a writer am doing to make Ivorians read that I became a literary activist. It is the endless refrain of ‘Ivorians don’t read’, ‘Africans don’t read’, ‘If you want to hide something from an African, put it in a book’ that made me a literary activist. It is people reducing literature to reading that made me a literary activist. It is people reducing the role of the writer to one who should put society on the right path that I became a literary activist.“

Is the reduction of reading to literature, and of literature to reading, something you commonly encounter? What kind of refrains turned you into a literary activist?

[Kadija Sesay]: I agree with Dro that you can’t reduce literature to reading, which renders it easy to confuse literary activism with reader activism. Is the aim to encourage people to read or is it to open…