I am aware that I am going through well-managed fits of nostalgia that abruptly ushered in by moments of frustration and banal experiences. And my abruptly, I mean hearing a song, or happening upon a beat that reminds me of that place, that I wish I could have stayed longer in, but could not, but Insha'Allah will return to. This may happen in the middle of teaching a lesson, or writing a paper or just walking. Abruptly--like it hits me and I know I can't do anything about it, other than to hold onto that moment for a bit longer, fold it up neatly and place in my pocket. There are ways to control this nostalgia. Like, not listening to any of Little Brother's early stuff too late in the evening because it will bring back memories of Mandela Bridge and those failed robbery attempts. Not listening to Capelton's "Jah Jah City"at all because it just conjures up memories of insightful Rastas, wannabe Rastas, entertaining self-righteous Rastas, and the occasional Rasta who wanted to convert me. I also know it is not a good idea to happen upon any Foreign Exchange while browsing my music library because I am brought back to the moments I met my friends, the WITS theater, printing and rainy days in flip flops. And, I know to just to stay far away from Pete Rock's remix of Black Star & Common's "Respiration," Etta James' "At Last" and the Otis Redding version of "A Change is Gonna Come."

It is indescribable the way music summons moments, conjures up memories and thrusts you into nostalgia while at the same time delicately takes your hand and walks (or electric slides) you into this imagination of the future. It is beautiful...the way one song, just 4 minutes long can take you back, sometimes to a place you may have never been, but want to be...or forward to somewhere glorious.

This is how I feel when I listen to Gil Scott-Heron. Gil Scott-Heron alone. I cannot say this for any other artist. I am convinced that no one can ever reach his level of articulation and beauty. I am even more convinced that he is what we need now more than ever. When I listen to him, I am taken somewhere for 4 minutes and when those minutes come to an end, I am brought back here. Being able to travel in time through music is one of those experiences that I treasure especially when I am so bombarded by so much pretentist values. Pretentist in the way we eat, live, spend and speak.

Music that does what Jayne Cortez asked envision "somewhere in advance of nowhere" is what I need (urgently sometimes) to hear. It is less of an escape and more of a reminder of what could be and what was. I guess this explains my fascination with history and searches for historical "answers" to questions. This also explains my appreciation of the Afrofuturism movement which in my understanding is about the recovery of an African Diasporic pasts in the . I suggest everyone read Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0. I have pasted a chunk here:

Hack this: Why do so few African-Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other---the stranger in a strange land---would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists? Yet, to this writer's knowledge, only Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, and Charles Saunders have chosen to write within the genre conventions of SF. This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African-Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees. They inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done to them; and technology, be it branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, or tasers, is too often brought to bear on black bodies.

[...]

Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture---and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future---might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism. The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, don't the technocrats, SF writers, futurologists, set designers, and streamliners---white to a man---who have engineered our collective fantasies already have a lock on that unreal estate? The African-American SF writer Samuel R. Delany has suggested that "the flashing lights, the dials, and the rest of the imagistic paraphernalia of science fiction" have historically functioned as "social signs---signs people learned to read very quickly. They signaled technology. And technology was like a placard on the door saying, 'Boys' Club! Girls, keep out. Black and Hispanics and the poor in general, go away!" What Gibson has termed the "semiotic ghosts" of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Frank R. Paul's illustrations for Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, the chromium-skinned, teardrop-shaped household appliances dreamed up by Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and Disney's Tomorrowland still haunt the public mind, in one guise or another.

I also suggest you read Robin DG Kelley's Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Heck, I suggest you just take a look at the official Afrofuturism site.

The next task is figuring out how to get all of this into some high school curriculum...