Ahmed Best – Hope Among the Stars
10/01/22 • 49 min
I’m still revelling in an acute awe, inaugurated by the images captured by the Just Wonderful Space Telescope in July. As a big and beautiful conversation about our significance continues, a persistent narrative about how small we are has emerged and I suspect that the language deployed to make us insignificant as we gaze at the stars, has something to do with the dominant culture’s denuding of our imaginations, which my guest today says require an emotional athleticism.
To help us reckon with our collective awe and our responsibility to harness our imaginations for the futures we deserve, I’m in conversation with Ahmed Best. Ahmed is a multi-hyphenate story teller, artist, educator, and futurist – as well as an Adjunct Professor at USC School of Dramatic Arts and the Stanford d. school. You may also know him as the actor who played Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars. We explore afrofuturism as an imaginative framework that helps us work through current and oppressive realities in order to fashion a future worthy of us all. And the need for Black people – especially – to take seriously the project of engaging with what Ahmed calls long futures. He reminds us that the oppressions so many of us live through now are the result of someone’s imagination. If we are to have any chance of helping shape the future, we don’t have the luxury of not thinking about it.
Together with Dr Lonny Brooks, Ahmed helps facilitate AfroRithms from the Future – a collaborative, design thinking, storytelling game that helps activate our radical imaginations by centring the experiences and wisdoms of Black people and BIPOC. You can hear more of Ahmed in conversation about the power of our collective imagination and defining futures we can all inhabit on The Long Time Academy.
This conversation was made possible with funding from the AZ Creative Fund.
Busy Being Black listeners get 50% off at Pluto Press, and 30% off at Duke University Press and Combined Academic Publishers.
About Busy Being Black
Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.
Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
I’m still revelling in an acute awe, inaugurated by the images captured by the Just Wonderful Space Telescope in July. As a big and beautiful conversation about our significance continues, a persistent narrative about how small we are has emerged and I suspect that the language deployed to make us insignificant as we gaze at the stars, has something to do with the dominant culture’s denuding of our imaginations, which my guest today says require an emotional athleticism.
To help us reckon with our collective awe and our responsibility to harness our imaginations for the futures we deserve, I’m in conversation with Ahmed Best. Ahmed is a multi-hyphenate story teller, artist, educator, and futurist – as well as an Adjunct Professor at USC School of Dramatic Arts and the Stanford d. school. You may also know him as the actor who played Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars. We explore afrofuturism as an imaginative framework that helps us work through current and oppressive realities in order to fashion a future worthy of us all. And the need for Black people – especially – to take seriously the project of engaging with what Ahmed calls long futures. He reminds us that the oppressions so many of us live through now are the result of someone’s imagination. If we are to have any chance of helping shape the future, we don’t have the luxury of not thinking about it.
Together with Dr Lonny Brooks, Ahmed helps facilitate AfroRithms from the Future – a collaborative, design thinking, storytelling game that helps activate our radical imaginations by centring the experiences and wisdoms of Black people and BIPOC. You can hear more of Ahmed in conversation about the power of our collective imagination and defining futures we can all inhabit on The Long Time Academy.
This conversation was made possible with funding from the AZ Creative Fund.
Busy Being Black listeners get 50% off at Pluto Press, and 30% off at Duke University Press and Combined Academic Publishers.
About Busy Being Black
Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.
Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Previous Episode
Episode 100 – The Dancing Boy
This is episode 100 of Busy Being Black. To honour this milestone, my friend DYLEMA takes my seat to interview me. Busy Being Black emerged four years ago at a time of great personal distress – and transformation. I am unendingly grateful that you all keep showing up, tuning in and talking back. Busy Being Black returns on Saturday, 1 October, for what I’m calling Busy Being Black version four.
About DYLEMA
DYLEMA is an acronym: Do You and Let Every Man Adapt. She is an artist, musician and spoken word poet, whose life and spiritual guidance continue to enrich and inspire my own. You may remember her voice from our soaring conversation in 2019, "When I Named Myself, I Became a Poet", which I encourage you all to revisit.
The voice notes included in this episode are (in order of inclusion): Max and Freya Powers, Lerone Clarke-Oliver, Adrian Jönsson-Iseni and Pádraig Ó Tuama.
The poem included in this episode, "The Dancing Boy", was written and performed by Josh Rivers, includes vocals by Lazarus Lynch and was scored by Joshua Pleeter.
About Busy Being Black
Busy Being Black is the podcast exploring how we live in the fullness of our queer Black lives. Thank you to our partners: UK Black Pride, BlackOut UK, The Tenth, Schools Out and to you the listeners. Remember this, your support doesn’t cost any money: ratings, reviews and shares all help so please keep the support coming.
Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the LGBT+ business community.
Thank you to Lazarus Lynch – a queer Black musician and culinary extraordinaire, for the triumphant and ancestral Busy Being Black theme music. The Busy Being Black theme music was mixed and mastered by Joshua Pleeter.
Busy Being Black’s artwork was photographed by queer Black photographer and filmmaker Dwayne Black.
Join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram #busybeingblack
Busy Being Black listeners have an exclusive discount at Pluto Press. Enter BUSY50 at checkout.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Next Episode
Dionne Edwards – Attempting Utopia
One of my favourite quotes is from the late Toni Morrison: “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It’s that that makes it elegant.” For those of us inclined to share ourselves through the creative process, we can also be navigating imposter syndrome, structural barriers and limiting beliefs about ourselves. The reminder that our attempt is the grandest part of it all feels like a reminder worth shouting repeatedly.
Dionne Edwards is a wonderful example of Morrisonian attempt in action. She’s a screenwriter and director, whose debut feature film Pretty Red Dress debuts this month at BFI London Film Festival. We explore why it’s important for us to embrace the grandiose, the beauty and weirdness of distortion in the creative process, and telling the stories of flawed people with care. We discuss the impossibility and undesirability of perfection and why she thinks utopia is a wonderful ambition — as long as we never get there.
This conversation was made possible with funding from the AZ Creative Fund.
Busy Being Black listeners get 50% off at Pluto Press, and 30% off at Duke University Press and Combined Academic Publishers.
About Busy Being Black
Busy Being Black is an exploration and expression of quare liveliness and my guests are those who have learned to live, love and thrive at the intersection of their identities. Your support of the show means the world. Please leave a rating and a review and share these conversations far and wide. As we continue to work towards futures worthy of us all, my hope is that as many of you as possible understand Busy Being Black as a soft, tender and intellectually rigorous place for you to land.
Thank you to our funding partner, myGwork – the business community for LGBT+ professionals, students, inclusive employers and anyone who believes in workplace equality. Thank you to my friend Lazarus Lynch for creating the ancestral and enlivening Busy Being Black theme music. Thank you to Lucian Koncz and Stevie Gatez for helping bring new Busy Being Black artwork into the world.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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