Recurrence Plot: Afrofuturist Time Travel

Author: Rasheedah Phillips Let me open by saying that this is the second book I’ve reviewed by a Black woman named Rasheedah. You’re not going to get that kind of coincidence in any other book review column on the Internet. It isn’t that I won’t review your book if your name is Sophia (the top girls name in the country in 2013) it is just that in the AfroFuture, Rasheedah and Sophia are in the same writing group and they accept their awards side by side. This month’s Rasheedah, Rasheedah Philips, has a strong Afrofuturist pedigree as the founder of AfroFuturistAffair, a grassroots organization dedicated to celebrating and promoting Afrofuturistic culture, art, and literature through creative events and creative writing, centered in Philadelphia. If you’re not on their tumblr, afrofuturistaffair.tumblr.com, then you’re missing some great art and commentary. Art that I found myself thinking about as I read the book. I think this is intentional, as Philips takes a multimedia approach to writing, embedding images and graphs into the text and offering a separate soundtrack for the book via SoundCloud or CD. That multidimensionality of text, image, and sound, takes an already immersive book and really makes it one you can get lost in. The plot … well, that’s a little tricky. This is a book about time travel, not just in that the main character travels through time, but she also thinks about, and practices, how to time travel. This inevitably takes the reader on a circular journey o…