Colored People’s Time (CPT) is Real Time: Afrofuturism, the Speculative, the Surreal & the Fantastic

Description: Afrofuturist theorist Rasheedah Phillips asserts that Colored People’s Time (CPT) is “a temporal technology, survival mechanism and harkening back to ancestral ways of observing and experiencing space-time.” How can we use time to explore the possibilities of Afrofuturism and surrealism in screenwriting? In what ways can we expand our storytelling in honoring CPT as the innovative programming that it is? If you are a writer who needs to draft a new version of your script or you’re just beginning to dabble in screenplays or never even tried one, this three-hour workshop is for you. We’ll focus on craft elements essential to Afro-futurism, the speculative, world-building, hoodoo, magic systems, ancestral knowledge, characterization and the unique way Black folks tell stories to make images.

Writing exercises will foster experimentation across genres as we explore what makes an afro-futuristic, speculative, sci-fi story come to life. We’ll also talk about how to leverage…