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Harriet Tubman was an Afrofuturist in her own right.

Looking to the constellations as skyward beacons, she guided enslaved African Americans to freedom, helping them envision futures, lives, and communities outside of the restrictive structures presented by racism and dehumanization.

While a distinctly 20th century term, Afrofuturist ideas, expressions, and themes trace back to the country’s origins. Afrofuturism as we know it now, has roots spanning back to self-liberating trailblazers like Tubman, who imagined new worlds for Black Americans.

Harriet Tubman escaped the bonds of slavery as a young woman in the early 1800s. She returned to the South many times as a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad to lead other African Americans to freedom. During the Civil War, Tubman served as a spy, nurse, and cook for Union Forces. In 1863, she helped free more than 700 African Americans during a raid in South Carolina – a feat that earned her the nickname "General Tubman."

Artist and quilter Bisa Butler draws on Tubman's command of the stars above in her piece, "I Go To Prepare A Place for You,” on display in our Reckoning exhibition. According to Butler, "the sunflowers in the background have multiple meanings; one is to acknowledge Harriet Tubman’s reliance (and that of many people escaping slavery) on the North Star to help point the way towards freedom.

We explore the impact of Black women like Tubman on the cultural phenomenon of Afrofuturism in our newest exhibition opening March 24, 2023, “Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures.” More: https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/afrofuturism



📸 Harriet Tubman c. 1885 (detail and full view) Courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Vending books.

New book vending machines showcase Afrofuturist authors The goal is to increase readership of the genre among children and adults.

Aida Cartagena was a prominent Afro-Latina poet, novelist, scholar, and public intellectual. She was born in Moca, Dominican Republic on June 18, 1918, and died at the age of seventy-five on June 3, 1994. Aida was the daughter of Olimpia Portalatin and Felipe Cartagena Estrella. She never married or had any children. Cartagena was a major proponent of the Negritude Movement in the Spanish-speaking world. The Negritude Movement was an anti-colonial cultural and political struggle founded by African and Caribbean students in Paris in the 1930s. It sought to reclaim the inherent value of blackness and African culture.

Professor Cartagena was an early member of La Poesia Sorprendida (1943-1947, Surprised Poetry), an internationally well-known avant-garde literary journal. Based in the Dominican Republic, the journal published short stories, essays, and artwork from throughout but not exclusively, Latin America. Although the journal survived only four years, it was exceptional in being allowed to operate under the oppressive dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930-1961). La Poesia Sorprendida published Aida Cartagena’s works and gave her exposure as a writer to the international community.

The life, education, and emphasis on a public career that we see in Aida’s example was unusual for her time and place. Cartagena attended the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo (the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, AUSD), where she earned a doctorate in the humanities, and she attended the Ecole du Louve in Paris for postgraduate studies with an emphasis in museology and the fine arts. In her final published interview, Aida Cartagena described how her mother was more traditional about her gender expectations for her daughter, including her worry concerning all her daughter’s international travel, but that her father was “very liberal” and supportive of Aida’s goals. One can see the influence of extensive international travel on Aida’s work. In perhaps her most renowned novel, Escalera para Electra, the emphasis on the universal intertwined with the local (her “pueblo” or the Dominican Republic) shines throughout the book.

The extensive travel Aida experienced in life shaped her mind and soul in numerous ways. She moved in cosmopolitan circles and counted some of the most famous Latin American intellectuals and writers of the twentieth century as her friends. Cartagena credited travel and her relationships, more than books, as the key to her education and development as a writer. She said, “I don’t think a poet is born, the poet is made.” In her later life, she served as a representative for the Dominican Republic at UNESCO, she worked as a professor of art history and archaeology at AUSD, and she was the director of the anthropology museum.

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Shoutout to John’s Hopkins doctors community-based efforts like at St. John to tackle COVID.

Johns Hopkins doctors helping community members stay safe one mask at a time On Tuesday health experts went to Saint John AME church to hand out mask to ensure the church stay's alive during the pandemic.