Their attempt to only endorse proposals is they are universally accessible collapses into purity politics which naturalizes the erasure of Afrofuturist production. The aff is uniquely key to center black disabled futurity that undermine normative constructions of the body.

Put simply, Afrophantasm is a rhetorical state of being that adequately recognizes the lived states of Blackness and disability together with the understanding of the invisibility that accompanies that position, and the specific decision to weaponize said state in either a positive or a negative way. It’s not enough to know that for example, I am both Black and disabled because how this information is relayed and understood is also equally important. Oftentimes, race and disability are “correlated…with violent and oppressive overtones,” and are “conceptualized as being analogous to each other,” (Erevelles, 1); and the idea that people can simply switch one for the other, when talking about the realities of oppression, considered as a moment of a lesser state, often puts me into a position of having to pick a side. But Kimberle Crenshaw, Theri Pickens and others have instead, made it a point to constantly rebuke this idea. Her concept of intersectionality as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations…[and how they are] regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage” (Merriam-Webster, 1) sums up the overall point. But the nuance regarding disability (as 15% of the world’s population according to the World Health Organization) and the language we use to talk about it, hasn’t caught up. As a rhetoric scholar, the concept of Afrophantasm is made up of four distinct methodologies including critical race theory, rhetorical theory, disability studies, and Afrofuturism. By combining the four ideas together, it allowed me to think about not only about the conception of the word, but also its potential uses and applications which I have drawn together in an Afrofuturist audio novel that I call Spectre: AV about a wheelchair user who gains the ability to turn into a digital ghost. It was important for me not only to suggest the ways that such an idea could operate, but also to think out loud about how it could be twisted and allocated as a rhetorical concept. Subsequently, such an idea ultimately has perfect merit in the realm of agency and embodiment relating to both the wider world and the individual. As the first research method, by looking at critical race theory and my use of “afro” it roots the experience specifically in the realm of Blackness. As a counternarrative to Black negativity mentioned earlier, it’s important for me that the work call out the way that Blackness has been misused and pushed aside in favor of capital, and the work of empire. No one does this better than W.E.B. Du Bois, and I focused on his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk when he wrote, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others…One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Though he is referring to the two-ness of being an American Negro in 1903, such views have never gone away. To that, I add a third layer which I consider “three-ness” of disability which makes up the concept of Afrophantasm where you are considered for your Black disabledness in the space of Americana. // All of these ideas are combined and worked through my audio novel Spectre:AV, which showcases Black disability through the ideas of a futuristic Neo Orleans in the year 2135. In the story, Kyrie Di’allo goes from college student, to public enemy #1 after a racist medical organization kidnaps him to harvest his unique DNA but accidentally grants him the ability to change the world around him through his invisibility. I combine the various aforementioned methods with the keystone concept of critical fabulation coined by influential scholar Saidiya Hartman, and it talks about how to build creative worlds on top of slave archives full of missing information, in order to achieve narratological research. Hartman details the difficulties in trying to maintain power of historical agency when juxtaposed against death and archival erasure, and using her technique, Spectre is built from the real records of five disabled Black slaves who lived in historical New Orleans in 1870. However instead of focusing on their deaths and limited information given by the hospital during the time in which they lived, I reexamine the spectacle of what it would’ve meant to be a Black disabled person in the far future under a different set of rules where the world has removed the need for disability completely. // In conclusion, I created the idea for Afrophantasm as a way to give Black disabled people more autonomy over the words we use to describe ourselves. The ideas of marginalization and deficit continue to leave derogatory aftereffects attached to real people’s lived experiences when the people who inhabit them, may not feel this way at all. So this was a way to honor those lives and to expound on the near limitless resilience that Black disabled people inhabit on a daily basis. Further, it’s a way to call out the ignorance and macroaggression we receive all the time and to use such views in order to improve our own lives. Through Spectre:AV, I am presenting a different reality where Black disability features prominently in the dead center, while pulling in all the threads that reimagine the lives of people who are overlooked. It’s a high concept piece of creative scholarship that combines Black rhetorical theory with Afrofuturist dreams of disability and power, to show off the idea that stigma and performance can be weaponized through Black art. I wanted a Black power fantasy of high speed chases, gunfights, queer love stories, and historical research to show how powerful Afrophantasm can be when it’s designed, created by, and starring Black disabled people; ultimately because we recognize that we are invisible, but I want people to know that that if we are, it’s only because we choose to be.