Space-Time Collapse II: Community Futurisms
by Rasheedah Phillips

Space-Time Collapse is an experimental writing and art/activist series in which Black Quantum Futurism— as both a praxis and a movement— imagines future(s) and recovers pasts, using experimental writing, cosmic visions, and exploratory images in Black speculative practices where ancient anti-clock time theories and practices vibrate, grow, and live.

Space-Time Collapse Part II considers time, memory, and temporality as experienced by the people of the African diaspora over time and across space, while exploring how these communities create and enact alternative cultural, communal, and personal temporal-spatial frameworks. The book dreams and speaks in oral futures, witnesses spatial-temporal autonomy, and demands housing justice among other essential tools. Included in the collection is research, images, interviews, and writing from Community Futurisms: Time & Memory in North Philly, a BQF collaborative art, preservation, and creative research project exploring the impact of redevelopment, gentrification, and displacement— forces that cause activated space-time collapses within marginalized North Philadelphia communities.

Contributions from local writers and activists revive the historical memory and quantum histories and detail some of the spatial-temporal interventions and memory preservation projects happening in the neighborhood. Submissions by non-local writers and artists reflect on how the experiences of the North Philadelphia community are not unique; the affordable housing crisis, gentrification, and spatial-temporal displacement of Black and poor people are all happening in similarly-situated communities throughout the Afro-diaspora. Thus, their contributions will explore Afrofuturistic, Black speculative, and Black quantum tools for addressing these issues, speaking into existence both ancient and new visions for deconstructing old problems.Featuring works by: Camae Ayewa, Rasheedah Phillips, Quentin Vercetty, Faye Anderson, Soraya Jean-Louis, Arturo Castillon, Jason Harris, R. Stanford, Dox Thrash House, North Philly Peace Park, Natalie-Claire Luwisha-Bowditch, Marcus Borton, and Womanist Working Collective. Cover by Jessi Jumanji.