Editors’ introduction: remembering blackly

Abstract

ABSTRACT Shows like Moesha and Fresh Prince both fictionalized and revealed the twentieth-century dreams of Black folks who like Moesha’s family had just established themselves in Lamert Park or like Will had recently left gang and drug-infested urban streets. Friends like Tony and Joan or Khadijah and Maxine typified the friendships that many Black women had just developed in college settings like A Different World. They dated people like Lynn, Kyle, or Martin and created the material wealth that generations past could not access. These Black cultural productions positioned Black people, their conversations and their aspirations, as part of a larger project of inclusion and made our dreams seem possible. Remembering or engaging anew with Black cultural production of the 1990s and 2000s via streaming platforms re-introduced these dreams and the ways that the ‘too-rough fingers of world’ had made them immaterial. Seeing them again, with our new twenty-first-century eyes, forced us to bring our concerns to social media, to visual art and to music – sites where we continue to think, aspire and work collectively to manifest Black futures. The essays in this special issue then take seriously the complex nuances of remembering Blackly through and beyond these cultural productions. We charged the authors to think critically about nostalgia and how Black cultural production in Western contexts has not only shaped our understanding of contemporary discourses, but also in how we shape the future based on the (remembered) past across Black cultures. We hope that these essays provide further insight into the ways our contemporary moment will continue to shape our present and future renderings of the past. In addition, we envision that the authors’ ideas will affect how we access those pasts. Black nostalgia will mould our understanding of everything we think we remember.