Faculty
- Dr. Casey Golomski, Africana and African American Studies
Overview
Broadly, Afrofuturism is an aesthetic movement and philosophy of technology rooted in experiences and creative expressions of Black African Diaspora communities. Dialogues between Black scholars Tricia Rose, Greg Tate, and Samuel R. Delaney and white cultural critic Mark Dery birthed the term Afrofuturism in a 1994 roundtable essay “Black to the Future.” The term embodies a 20thc legacy of African American literature, visual, and performing arts engaging technology, temporality and futurity, and African cultural and religious heritage as means to envision liberation from and worlds beyond systemic racial oppression.
For all of 2022, an inter-organizational planning committee of the Seacoast African American Cultural Center (SAACC) in Portsmouth, NH—of which I am a board member—Green Acre Baha’i (GAB) in Eliot, ME, Sandi Clark Kaddy’s JukwaAmazoa Black theater company, Najee Brown’s Theater for the People Black theater company, and other regional arts and culture nonprofits will be staging an exhibition and series of musical and performing arts events around the topic of Afrofuturism.
Dr. Casey Golomski plans to empower these community partners and UNH students to collaboratively develop and promote a locally curated vision of the Afrofuturist legacy for the first six to eight months of 2022. From December 2021 to January 2022, community partners with finalizing artwork to be displayed at SAACC and the performing arts events to be hosted in the broader Seacoast region beginning in late spring 2022. Students begin coursework in late January 2022 on Afrofuturism and basic museum and gallery practices. In February and March 2022, students visit SAACC and meet with community partners to establish goals and plans for staging the exhibit at SAACC. In March and April 2022, students interview artists about their respective work, create object labels, and interpretive text. Labels and text will be printed and mounted with artwork for the April 2022 exhibition opening. Students’ interviews with artists will be collated in an exhibition catalog and also used in promotional materials for SAACC and its community partners in their year-long programming.
About Casey Golomski
Casey Golomski is a cultural and medical anthropologist of African communities and has graduate training in cultural production and museum studies. He is also the UNH Program Coordinator for Africana and African American Studies. Since 2018 he has collaborated with SAACC as an exhibition curator and then board member. He is also part of this community-based inter-organizational planning committee along with several SAACC, GAB, and theater companies’ board members.
