white supremacy culture

The Afro-Surreal Manifesto

| Sheree

Considering D. Scot. Miller’s essay , Afrosurreal Manifesto
“I was there…” – Black is the New Black, a 21st century Manifesto.

In an introduction to prophet Henry Dumas‘ 1974 book Ark Of Bones and Other Stories, Amiri Baraka puts forth a term for what he describes as Dumas’ “skill at creating an entirely different world organically connected to this one … the Black aesthetic in its actual contemporary and lived life.” The term he puts forth is Afro-Surreal Expressionism.

Dumas had seen it. Baraka had named it.

This is Afro-Surreal!

This was my first brush up against the term Afro-Surreal, even though as soon as I read what it means/ what it is, I knew in my bones that I’ve been living it, I’ve been experiencing it from time.

Miller takes the time to lay out what Afro-Surrealism is NOT.

Afro-Surrealism is not SURREALISM or AFRO-FUTURISM

SURREALISM is a white, European, literary and artistic movement that attempts to express the subconscious. It’s dreamlike, fantastic imagery and an illogical juxtaposition of subject matter.

Leopold Senghor, poet, first president of Senegal, and African Surrealist, made this distinction: “European Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical. Jean-Paul Sartre said that the art of Senghor and the African Surrealist (or Negritude) movement “is revolutionary because it is surrealist, but itself is surrealist because it is black.”

AFRO-FUTURISM

Afro-Futurism is a diaspora intellectual and artistic movement that turns to science, technology, and science fiction to speculate on black possibilities in the future. 

Afro-Surrealism is about the present. There is no need to speculate about the disasters that are coming our way or are just around the corner, somewhere in the future. The worst case scenarios of bombs, genocide, floods, fires and destruction are here now.

What is the future? The future has been around so long it is now the past.

Afro-Surrealists expose this from a “future-past” called RIGHT NOW.

RIGHT NOW. Trump is President of USA and is destroying/ dismantling democracy over there, at the same time as creating wars and genocide around the world.

RIGHT NOW, Afro-Surreal is the best description to the reactions, the genuflections, the twists, and the unexpected turns this “browning” of White-Straight-Male-Western-Civilization has produced.

Miller, at the time of writing this manifesto, professes that San Francisco is the land of Afro-Surreal poet laureate Bob Kaufman. San Francisco where black artists are changing the narrative , “to transform how we see things now, how we look at what happened then, and what we can expect to see in the future.”

Briefly, the ‘A MANIFESTO OF AFRO-SURREAL’ includes:

  1. The unknown worlds and wonders are emerging in the works of Wifredo Lam, Jean-Michel Basquiat,Frantz Fanon to Jean Genet, Zora Neale, Chester Himes etc.
  2. Afro-Surreal presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.
  3. Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the past, revisiting the old ways with new eyes. Appropriating symbols of the past, conjuring the ancients for now.
  4. Like the collage of Romare Bearden and Wangechi Mutu, the use of excess is used as subversion. Hybridization is a form of rebellion, refusal, disobedience.
  5. Afro-Surrealists strive for rococo: the beautiful, the sensuous, and the whimsical. We turn to Sun Ra, Toni Morrison, and Ghostface Killa. We look to Kehinde Wiley.
  6. The Afro-Surrealist life is fluid, cannot be pinned down. Afro-Surrealists are ambiguous and reject servitude.
  7. The Afro-Surrealist wears a mask while reading Leopold Senghor.
  8. Think Prince. The Afro-Surrealist seeks definition in the absurdity of a “post-racial” world.
  9. In fashion (John Galliano; Yohji Yamamoto) and the theater (Suzan Lori-Parks), Afro-Surreal excavates the remnants of this post-apocalypse with dandified flair, a smooth tongue and a heartless heart.
  10. Afro-Surrealists create sensuous gods to hunt down beautiful collapsed icons.

This Afro-Surreal Manifesto is Afro-Surreal.

Where am I at with Afro-Surreal?

| Sheree

Afro-Surreal was the word I chose for 2026. My guiding word of the year. I might not have posted a lot about it here, and yet, it has been a constant so far, bubbling away in the background. Shimmering away just beneath the surface, ready to boil to the top, or over when something happens to question or disrupt my reality.

I chose Afr0-Surreal as my word of the year because I was doing it already. I had finally found a word for what I was experiencing and I wanted to explore it further. Unpick it, hold it up to the light and examine it closely.

In a sense, it’s an attempt to go back to the beginning, go back to the source of this term and its meaning and how it does show up in my life and practice.

D. Scot Miller in 2009 wrote “The Afro-surreal Manifesto”. He is the source who coined the term. He could only find the term being used one time before this by Amiri Baraka, who used the term to describe the work of Henry Dumas. Miller went to Baraka asking him if he had any issue with him using Afro-Surreal and running with the term and concept. Miller asked permission and was granted it. Since then Afro-Surreal / Afro-Surrealism has gone on to be a genre or school of art and literature.

I’ll start my study with looking at what Miller has to say about Afro-Surreal and continue from there as since 2009, Miller came out in October 2024 to say that Afro-Surrealism is dead. And when I read this I was like, noooooo. I’ve just come to the party and it’s over? But then on further reading I totally get why Miller is saying this.

Go back re-read the paragraphs I have already written about the inception, the birth of Afro-Surrealism. And then imagine or consider this, predominately white institutions, universities, academics trying to erase the work, trying to erase the manifesto created by Miller in 2009 as the beginning of Afro-Surrealism, trying to change the history of Afro-Surrealism, sound familiar?

We’ll be exploring this and more but let’s get things straight from the start, the names we need to know and give credit to. Amiri Baraka and D. Scot Miller. Remember those names as we insert them back into history, into their rightful places of the founding fathers of Afro-surrealism. And as Miller has said lately, in 2024:

So what to do?

When Brooklyn Rail contacted me, I understood the impact and reach of the publication, and after some serious reflection, it came to me that if I brought Afrosurrealism to life, I was the only person to be able to announce its demise in order to divorce my vision from this white-led hostile takeover. So I killed Afrosurrealism in front of the very people who need it alive in order to feed off of it.

AFROSURREALISM IS DEAD! LONG LIVE AFROSURREALISM!

Re-engaging with Fugitive Feminism

| Sheree

How would you improve your community?

I applied to Arts Council England for a Developing Your Creative Practice grant mid 2025. It was unsuccessful.

Undeterred, I resubmitted it under the project grant scheme. I was notified of being successful just before Christmas 2025.

Practicing Creative Fugitivity is its name, and it involves researching fugitive practice. It also involves reading in community Fugitive Feminism by Akwugo Emejulu.

A study circle of women of the global majority.

When did you first learn that you were a non-human?

The question that opens the first chapter of the text Fugitive Feminism.

A question that hits me in my gut with its open, blatant honesty and curiosity.

A question which niggles at a truth that I’ve not wanted to face up to as it would mean that I’ve spent a lifetime trying to demonstrate, prove, live up to an unattainable category of being human.

Human as a category was never created to include someone like me within it.

Human = Whiteness

Human v Non-Human

You can’t have the light without the dark.

All constructs to create hierarchies. A hierarchy where white, EuroAmerican, able bodied, middle class, cis-gendered, college educated and suburban men reign supreme. Superior.

Conceptual Other. No Humans Involved. The Lack of the Human.

Black women. Outside. Out Outside.

Our exclusion determines the borders/ boundaries of the human.

But consider this …

If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.

Combahee River Collective

Where the excitement lies for me and others, is once we realise that Black women cannot be human, then with the support of this book in community, let’s consider what if ‘human’ cannot and should not be reclaimed?

Speculate. Speculation. Speculative.

How might we divest from the human?

That the non-human Other actually decentres the human. Move beyond human to something otherwise.

Something else.

Becoming ( something else).

Thinking of how to be/ how to live beyond the binary of human v non-human could produce the means of improving our community/society/our planet.

Centring the human ( v non-human/ othering all else) has got us into the shit we’re facing now in terms of ecological disaster.

Finding a way to decentre the human, divest from what this concept / construction means and how it operates has to be the way forward.

Fugitive Feminism is the doorway into another way of being. A portal into an alternative world built upon the Black Feminist politics of liberation.

The path ahead is not clear or defined. It’s slippery and ambiguous. It’s experiential and experimental. Yet full of possibilities. Caring not harmful possibilities.

Speculative. Suggestive. Spacious.

And it starts and continues with the act of refusal. Refusal of the way things are right now.

Refusal of being defined by others to fit into their definition of humanity ( whiteness).

Refusal of being extracted and exploited for the benefits of a few.

Refusal of being non-human.

Refusal of being outside of humanity.

Refusal of the whole concept of human/whiteness/ fascist.

Refusal of these limitations when i, we, i and i can be something else beyond humans.

Bedtime reading

| Sheree

I started reading this book, hardback, a few years ago from the university library. It got recalled before I could finish it.

I was reading it after reading about how for decades the remains of two MOVE children had been kept at Penn Museum and later Princeton University illegally.

How they were using these children’s remains ( bones) in an online course for demonstration purposes as if they were nothing. Just fine specimens to illustrate a scientific point and not actually once being human and that their family was still alive and none the wiser. They thought they’d buried their children after they were bombs but piece of them were missing. And this wasn’t a mistake or oversight, the family had been lead to believe that all remains had been released to them to lay their children to rest.

I took an interest in this case along with the fascination of bone collecting/ salvaging/ pillaging to study and use as evidence of race hierarchies.

I even started a creative hybrid piece around it all as a means of trying to understand it as well as shed light in the continued extraction and exploitation of black bodies even beyond death.

I titled it:

Why are

our bones

still studied,

disputed,

displayed

and litigated?

I think I need to return to this piece.

Over on patreon

| Sheree

I spend so much time and energy on the work I share at Sunderland University, one or two sessions, out of their social work studies that I’ve decided the share what I create over on my Patreon in a special collection.

It’s just the power points for now. I’ll go back in at some point and share the resources as well. But I just thought it might be of some use for someone else. I’m not expert either. And my style and message has changed over the six years of doing it. I’m mighty please withy last one, November 2025, because I just centred blackness all the way. I was unapologetic and intend to stay this way.

Go check them out if you’re interested.

Girl’s Reading for Pleasure

| Sheree

I’ve got a reading streak going on with kindle – not including the physical books I’ve read this year.

I’m at about 210 days and 70 books done. I surpassed my projection of 50 books on kindle.

Anyway when I get sick, I get to taking it even slower and instead of watching pap TV I turn to books to escape from my uncomfortableness and irritability.

It soothes me to read a good book. And I’ve been getting into speculative fiction. I would have said I’m crime fiction and romance fiction till I die. But once I’ve come to realise, really see how both of these genres prop up the capitalist, white supremacy, patriarchal, colonialist system, I can no longer read them with joy.

I can no longer read them full stop. So to fill the void, I’ve been reading non-fiction by black authors and speculative fiction by black authors too.

If I’m gonna be buying this shit then let me buy the shit that supports my people and continues to help me get free.

So here’s a selection my recent reads.

Anti-racism is anti-capitalism

| Sheree

I really appreciate it when you’ve bought a book and are ready to dive into it, but you’re just not feeling it. You can’t get into it. So onto the book shelf it goes, collecting dust. Maybe even taunting you.

And then, over time, into a different time, you pick up said book again and you dive into this time, deeply. It’s singing it’s message through you mind, body and soul.

This practice happened for me with Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes and here it’s happened again with What is antiracism? by Arun Kundnani.

It’s that time of year again where I’m due to go back into Sunderland University and lecture within the Social Work Department around anti-racism. This started in 2020, in the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprisings around the world. Up until this point there had been no addressing of race and racism within social work training. And you could still say this is the case as one session, 2-3 hours long, is hardly making a dent into racism and its consequences. But I digress.

Anyway each year, my thinking and practices have changed as I’ve read more and developed more as an anti-racist, anti-capitalist agitator, organiser and activist.

I share my learnings and findings as I want to bring about change for everyone. And this transformation can’t be just limited to working on a personal level as the usual anti-racism training/ education would have us believe.

The problem is not just on an individual level, our unconscious biases etc, the problems are structural and are engrained into the bedrock of our societies, countries and communities.

Anyhow, this book What is antiracism? is not only giving me the historical evidence of racism, the term and practices, but is also sharpening my argument around how racism and classism go hand in hand and that you cannot have a revolution without black workers leading the way. As black workers have always fought for freedom and the dismantling of capitalism for everyone, not just for (white) workers as the revolutions within Europe have done.

We have the French Revolution in the 1700s, lead by the urban masses. We have the Russian Revolution lead by the vanguard party for the proletariat. But we have the Saint-Domingue Revolution in the 1700s lead by the enslaved for abolition of all enslavement in the colonies and Europe, in tandem with the French Revolution happening in Paris. The first time that black and white workers were fighting a common cause together on this scale.

Which revolution succeeded?

The revolution lead by the enslaved, black forced labour, which created the sovereign state of Haiti, a black revolution which had at its heart radical action to transform all societies.

This is what we need now.

I refuse to allow you to suck me dry and believe you’re doing me a favour

| Sheree

I’m trying here. Really trying to look after myself. To rest when I need to. To eat well. To move my body. To protect my mind, body and soul. To make a way out of nothing. Protect my energy. From what I hear you say?

Vampires. Blood fucking sucking vampires. I’m not referring to the Count here. I’m referring to those people who treat others like a puppet or pawn ( insert whiteness/ white people here).

All paternalistic, thinking they’re doing me some kind of favour when they take my ideas and run with them and then come back to me ( that is if they do) and present some kind of gig/job/role for me to carry out sometimes for free( sometimes for a fee) and think/expect/assume that I’m okay with this. That I’d jump at the chance of doing this shit for them on their own terms with them assuming all the control and power when I’ve been doing this shit by myself for others for as long as time, without shit from them.

Exploitation. Extraction. White supremacy culture comes to mind. Comes to heart here.

No discussion. No seeking permission. No asking if this is okay. Nothing.

Except the conceited, privileged, racist assumptions/ take over that this is something I would do and not refuse to do because … that I need them? Or that I need the money or the exposure? That this is the only way to do it? Or what?

I don’t know because they didn’t see fit to talk to me about it.

So many things are wrong about this situation. The whole concept. The timeframes. The costings. The language used to describe my people. My community.

Not to even mention that they spelt my name wrong throughout the whole fucking ‘proposal’.

I don’t think they know who they are dealing with. I don’t think they really know who I am or have been listening to me all along. Really listening to me and understanding who I am and where I’m coming from.

There’s blood in the water.

The sun has broken through the dark.

Vampires are not feasting on my fucking soul anymore.

I sold my soul once before and it didn’t turn out well for me.

With soul and dignity and integrity intact I’m not about to surrender them again for jackshit. For someone who does not hear/ value/ see me.

I refuse.

Jog on!

where are you judging yourself as wrong?

| Sheree
i ain’t smiling

The whole shebang.

I second guess myself around race and the way I’m being treated. Or think I am. The vibe I’m sensing from other people. And if I always have to bring it back to race. Why I’m always seeing the gaps and having to speak up.

I’m judging myself as wrong on the ‘i ain’t smiling’ stuff. How I’m doing this to individuals who have probably not done anything to me. It was someone else who looked like them who did me wrong.

And I’m treating them in a way I don’t want them to treat me. Like lumping them all together and not seeing them as individuals. Judging than as all the same and not giving them the benefit of the doubt. Not giving them a chance. This individual might be different. Might be doing the work. Might see me. Might smile.

I think I’m tired. I’ve been living that way for so long now. Smiling into the faces of strangers. Smiling with hope without much in return. Without much connection and now I’m just not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because I’m not given the same curtesy.

We see in the US, the Republicans are in office, have control of both houses, Congress and the Senate. They have all the power and are shutting down the government peddling lies that it’s the Democrats fault. But instead of the Democrats stopping smiling and taking the gloves off, they’re reaching across the aisle, holding out their hands and hoping that some Republicans will join them and vote against the shut down.

Now I’m not dissing hope. I still have hope. Hope is a wonderful thing. We have to have hope. Hope is a practice. But the uselessness of the Democrats hope is around where it’s placed.

Even when the Republicans know they are wrong, doing wrong and being dishonest, they will not admit it, take responsibility and change. Act differently, no. Something about keeping face. Winning an argument and keeping power is the mission. Not giving anything away out of fear and greed. Keeping power.

This is how I see my situation. I’ve been appeasing monsters. I’ve been holding out hope for change and I still do. But I’m just choosing to place this hope elsewhere. Holding hope within my community ( village, Dal!), for and by us.

Smiling into the faces of the comrades and friends as they have not let me down. They see me. They respect me. They listen to me. They’re with me not against me.

I don’t need to perform any convincing, or prove my credentials as a human being. They love me as me. And there’s the rub. They love me. And I love them.

I’m smiling at that.