‘I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world’: Black Dreaming in ‘the Wake’; Reflections on Futures Past – A TESS Talk

Using Christina Sharpe's (2016) concept of 'the wake' as living in the afterlives of the plantation, and some of my own work on Blackness and joy, this lecture works through ideas of dreams and Blackness as futurity in Black geographies scholarship. It will critically assess what it means to imagine new worlds and live (in) various futures, notwithstanding the waking presence of anti-Black racism and the accompanying sense of terror that it evokes in various Black subjects. Indeed, Blackness is regarded here as not exclusively tethered to North American or European ideas and geographies; rather, by deploying a more global framing, the Caribbean is also included as a space in which diasporic/creole dreams have always been mapped, and mapped differently.

To do this, Dr Pinnock will consider excerpts from Erna Brodber's One Bubby Susan as well as a film by Black British artist and film-maker, Jaz Morrison. Jaz's insights about Blackness and joy in Britain will be used to understand how Black futures are (re)imagined on film as a form of dreaming. Note, the concept of 'the future' deployed in this lecture does not necessarily conform to linear ideas of time as progressing either from the present or past. Dr Pinnock will move between writings from Black geographies and Caribbean literature as well as film to help unravel some of these concepts

Speaker: Dr Agostinho M N Pinnock

Agostinho is an interdisciplinary GeoHumanities scholar working at the intersections of geography, art history, visual theory, and Caribbean Studies. He is a GeoHumanities lecturer at Royal Holloway University of London (RHUL), and a member of the editorial board of Communications in Humanities Research. His doctoral research investigated the performance of national identity in postcolonial Jamaica. Building on his undergraduate and master’s degrees in media and communications, gender studies and literatures in English, it examined a series of creative practices and performances involved in recovering the lost, suppressed and otherwise erased Black presences in modern Jamaica through the project of ‘multi-cultural nationhood’. Agostinho’s publications include critical discussions about the development and advancement of Global Black Geographies in geography, dancehall culture and grassroots feminist practices in popular culture in Jamaica. He also cocurated the creative film project, Creating joy.