February Reading

Another month gone and some more books read. Why not share? Building off the epically popular “January Reading” post, clicked on by an entire 11 people who weren’t me, I’ve decided to expand the Internet a bit and add a post for February’s books.

As a result of life circumstances, I didn’t get as much reading done as I was hoping to this month, though some books definitely gave me a lot to talk about. How about you? What have you been reading? As for myself, here are the texts this post will be talking about:

  • Foundation and Earth by Isaac Asimov
  • The Keeper’s Six by Kate Elliott
  • The Visit by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild
  • Radon Journal Issue 2
  • Sustainable Superabundance: A Universal Transhumanist Invitation by David W. Wood
  • The Actual Star: A Novel by Monica Byrne
  • The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality by Bernardo Kastrup
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At the End of the World: Afrofuturism, Black Speculative Futures, and Black Transhumanism

On the most recent episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, I had the opportunity to speak with Clay Colmon, who teaches in the Cultural Studies Department at Claremont Graduate University and is the Associate Director of Instructional Design at UPenn’s School of Arts and Sciences. A shorter version also aired on KPFA (Bay Area, Santa Cruz, and Fresno) on April 30. That version can be heard here.

We discussed the potential and meaning of change, the growing capaciousness of Afrofuturism, the power of Black speculative futures, the significance of vision and story in social struggle, the construction of the human, the possibilities of Black transhumanism and posthumanism, and the implications of all of the above.

Clay can be found on Twitter at @warmclay.

The interlude track is “Soul of the Sea” by Drexciya, accompanied with audio clips of Octavia Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Wanuri Kahiu, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, and N.K. Jemisin, respectively.

Collage by Kaylan Michael