Defining Histofuturist/Histofuturism

Planted: Thursday October 17, 2019
Last Tended: Saturday November 13, 2021

I’m a life long learner and dedicated to improving myself, the life of others, and the condition of our planet.

I care about transformation and growth of the environment... self, built, natural, and spiritual.

I don’t have a catchy branded mission or summary, but the overarching theme of mt writing is transformation and growth.

I see the final product for my collection, but I’m still working on finding the right words. So I’ll just describe my desires.

My blog serves as a resource. It’s an online learning experience. It’s the digital library of my thoughts. It’s a place to find worksheets and templates. It’s a meeting place. It’s a place for people who don’t have mentors and have questions on how to navigate uncertainty. It’s a place for conversation. It’s a place where understanding can occur. It’s a place for creativity to be fostered. It’s a place to be me.

I think a lot about how people can grow individually (with their own perceptions and reality) and how people can grow collectively (despite different perceptions and realities we can rally toward a common goal).

I like the idea that the world is always changing. I vibe tremendously with adrienne maree brown book emergent strategy

I like to think about past realities and imagined futures. Especially about Haiti, women, economy, learning.

I’m a mix between a historian and a futurist. Histofuturist? When I looked this word to see if anyone else has used it, turns out Octavia Butler describes herself as a histofuturist. I knew she was my favorite speculative fiction writer for a reason.

Histofuturist. As I read about Octavia Butler, I realize I have some things in common with her. 34 is when she called herself histofuturist. I used the same word then as well @ 34. She loved public libraries, um me too. And she loved using various sources/disciplines to support her ideas. I realize I am a speculative non fiction writer. I mostly think about Haiti and Black people as a whole and the planet and distant planets.

A Histofuturist, tells stories of the past realities and imagined futures. They are a Storyteller. Keeper of knowledge. An oral historian. A griot. Krik Krak.

I am a histofuturist. I am embolden to shared stories of change to archive and document conversations, stories, ideas that transformative leaders are having; to leave a mark, a roadmap, a blueprint, a log for future generations to ensure the transfer of knowledge, and most of all the retention of memory history, a marker to say in 5th grade voice "I wuz here, dr Lisa-Marie wuz here, we wuz here"

I like thinking about untold stories. I like thinking of strategies. I like thinking about people who pursue their hopes and the people and places that are shaped by that hope.

People- women, indigenous, Haitian, African diaspora, basically anyone underrepresented and historically oppressed

Places - the body, the mind, the home, work, parks/cultural spaces, earth
Hope - freedom, connection, cooperation, enrichment.

I like to think if we had more meaningful connections with people despite our differing realities/perceptions, maybe we could shift paradigms and live in peace and freedom.

So what’s my writing about? I guess it’s about my thoughts on how I and others can transform despite our differences to pursue freedom.

I try to my best ability to codify and visualize and share my thought process. I understand it’s difficult to share knowledge but I try to share my tacit knowledge. Maybe it might help someone think through their ideas.

Some topics that I think can fall under Histofuturism:
Emerging Technologies to consider
• Blockchain
o In countries like Haiti where banking is difficult and not accessible is blockchain a change
o How do we govern blockchain
• Cloud storage
o How will people find unfinished manuscripts in the future?
o Where do we find old photos for curation and archives?
o How do we access these cloud storages?
• Surveillance
o From being branded as enslaved people to being digitally tracked

Is this histiography?

What do I mean by past realities and imagined futures?
• A past reality – is something that happened in the before the future. It is real and it happened. This includes the present. Present day is an middle passage to the future. It is a split in possibilities.
• Imagined futures – is something that has not happened yet. It is forecasting and thinking about how the unknown will emerge. It’s creativity, it’s worldbuilding.
• Merging the fields of history and futurism – cannot forecast the future without considering the past. Or the history of that topic/context.

Is this path dependency?
As a Black feminist, what does it mean to look in the past and into the future? How do I look at the past reality and imagine a future?
• What past am I looking into?
o For the purpose of illustrating Histofuturism, I can use technology. The future is technology, but that does not necessarily mean that the past I’m observing is technology.

What is technology?
• define technology?

What is governance?
• Define governance

These are rough thoughts. Eventually, I want to take this concept and write an academic publication on it. It's interesting that when I first thought about histofuturism it was because I was thinking about how to share my knowledge and gather my thoughts. This makes me wonder if histofuturism is a blanket term for knowledge sharing. How do we bring our knowledge into the future. How do we archive our thoughts and leave a legacy. How do we pass on knowledge to the future?

All these thoughts are all over the place, but I would like to spend this year exploring what I think or mean by histofuturist and histofuturism.