Hey Regina. Hi Kai. So in the last couple of weeks we've been talking a lot about a certain term on our team. Yeah, Afro Futurism. Right, which is suddenly everywhere it seems like. Right, exactly. It's everywhere. But what does it mean? What does Afro Futurism look like? What does it sound like? And how does it speak to the black experience?

Being black is like a science fiction experience. Right, in which aliens came and took you from your planet and brought you to another planet, forcibly.

Deep airy, sun raw, George Clinton in very different ways told that story in their music.

Well, tonight on the United States of anxiety, we celebrate Black History Month with a journey into Afro Futurism.

So it is Black History Month and we're asking people around the park, have you ever heard of the term Afro Futurism? I've never heard of the term. I'm sorry. Yes, I have. I have heard about for Futurism. How would you define it?

The idea of an Afro-centric world in the future is forward-thinking look.

Explorers, seven ways of technology in the future and how one involves in a social political climate.

It's about the importance of, because we focus a lot on black history, but also black futures are important too.

And I think it's just about focusing on that. And who comes to mind for you?

Like sun raw, or like Janel Monet, big Janel Monet fan. I would say Octavia Butler. I first researched the term because of the other company.

There were these two amazing black women that were part of their resident program. They were creating an Afro-future work.

And so when I saw their work, I was like, oh, what is Afro-futurism?

Welcome to the show. I'm Kai Wright. And we're going to start our journey into the ideas and sounds and sites of Afro-futurism by meeting one of the most influential visual artists working today.

Or that's my assertion anyway. Over the past decade, Hannah Beakler has been creating these beautiful, complex, unapologetically black worlds on film.

Among her other projects, she's been the production designer behind Moonlight, Fruitvale Station, Beyonce's lemonade.

And perhaps most famously, Marvel's Black Panther. That film made her the first black person to be nominated for and to win the Academy Award for Best Production Design.

And now she has lent her eye to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she has curated a new Afro-futurism period room, which is yet another historic first.

And given all of that, she seems like exactly the right person to tell us what Afro-futurism looks like.

Hannah, welcome to the show and Happy Black History Month.

Happy Black History Month.

So for you, what is Afro-futurism?

You know, I think there's a lot of different definitions, but for me, Afro-futurism is sort of a reimagining of a history, right?

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