Defining Histofuturist/Histofuturism

Planted: Thursday October 17, 2019 on Listed/my journal

Last Tended: Saturday November 13, 2021 on Listed

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 my 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 upward (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

In countries like Haiti where banking is difficult and not accessible is blockchain a change

How do we govern blockchain

Cloud storage

How will people find unfinished manuscripts in the future?

Where do we find old photos for curation and archives?

How do we access these cloud storages?

Surveillance

From being branded as enslaved people to being digitally tracked

Is this histography?


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?

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.