Edited by Reynaldo Anderson and John Jennings. Introduction by Greg Tate.

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Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent and its inspiration, the groundbreaking exhibition Unveiling Visions, applies a global lens and planetary vision to the black imagination, and brings this context to a wide survey of contemporary works.

This book showcases illustrations, graphic design, literature, posters, and mixed-media digital and analog artworks along with insightful analysis by brilliant scholars and amazingly talented creatives.

Cosmic Underground serves as a creative, experimental and educational motive force to analyze the growing corpus of work surrounding the nexus between politics and contemporary artistic production.

This project includes the areas of black cultural production situated within Afrofuturism, AstroBlackness, the EthnoGothic, Magical Realism, Sword and Soul and the AfroSurreal.

“Cosmic Underground is a stunning collection of work, filled with work that resonates deep within the soul. It not only speaks of where we’ve been and what we’ve endured, but of where we can go and what we can do. And it does this in a visual language that sparks the imagination, giving us permission to break free of life’s confines, as we search explore our own evolution as human beings.” 
– David F. Walker, author, Power Man and Iron Fist

About the Editors

• John Jennings

  John Jennings is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside (UCR). Professor Jennings received his MA in Art Education in 1995 and the MFA in Studio with a focus on Graphic Design in 1997 from UIUC. He is an interdisciplinary scholar who examines the visual culture of race in various media forms including film, illustrated fiction, and comics and graphic novels.

  Jennings is also a curator, graphic novelist, editor, and design theorist whose research interests include the visual culture of Hip Hop, Afrofuturism and politics, Visual Literacy, Horror and the EthnoGothic, and Speculative Design and its applications to visual rhetoric. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (Rutgers) and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem. He is co-founder and organizer of the MLK NorCal’s Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco and also SOL-CON: The Brown and Black Comix Expo at the Ohio State University.

  Jennings’ current projects include the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (with Damian Duffy), Tony Medina’s police brutality themed ghost story I Am Alphonso Jones (with Stacey Robinson), and his Hoodoo Noir graphic novella Blue Hand Mojo (Rosarium Publishing). Jennings is also a Nasir Jones Hip Hop Studies Fellow at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University.

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• REYNALDO ANDERSON

  Dr. Reynaldo Anderson serves as an Associate Professor of Communication at Harris-Stowe State University in Saint Louis Missouri and is currently the Executive Director and Co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM) a network of artists, curators, intellectuals and activists.

  Dr. Anderson is the Co-Editor of several publications which include:

  — Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (published by Lexington books)

  — Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent (published by Cedar Grove Publishing)

  — The Black Speculative Art Movement: Black Futurity, Art+Design (published by Lexington books)

  — Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures, special issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies

  — When is Wakanda: Afrofuturism and Dark Speculative Futurity Journal of Futures Studies

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An incantation of black Canadian speculative discourse and innerstandings

Edited By: Quentin Vercetty and Audrey Hudson
Introduction by Nalo Hopkinson, Foreword by Zainab Amadahy

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This seminal collection consists of works from cross-generations and pan-national Black creatives and cultural producers from Canada. This generous book offers a glimpse of different innerstandings, a profound comprehension or conviction within one’s spirit or soul.

We consider the following: what does Afrofuturism look like from a Canadian perspective? What are the unique elements of artistic expression in Black Canadian art? Considering Canada’s history on Indigenous land, how do Black Canadians imagine their future in a colony that promotes erasure, yet claims multiculturalism? So ah wah dis? Qu’est-ce que c’est? Kisa sa ye?

Cosmic Underground Northside: An Incantation of Black Canadian Speculative Discourse and Innerstanding is an archival book comprised of diasporic dialogues around liberation and spirituality.

Significant contributions of poems, lyrics, proses, short stories and other expressive forms of literature along with vibrant illustrations, photography, posters, mixed-media digital and analog rendered artworks by over 100 prolific, gifted Black Canadian scholars and creatives. This is who we are.

“Draws in bold, broad strokes, in the here and now, the contours of a dazzling vision for the future. Each contribution is a priceless treasure, and an act of resistance.”
– The Right Honorable Michaëlle Jean, 27th Governor General of Canada, 3rd Secretary General of the International Organization of la Francophonie

“Quentin VerCetty and Audrey Hudson have assembled a ground-breaking and delightful collection, Cosmic Underground Northside, which dreams a Black Canadian future in conversation with the past, present, and global Africa real and imagined. Thus, time, space and consciousness are collapsed because to have a Black future requires that we have a tremendous leap of imagination.”
– Dr. Afua Cooper, Professor of Black Studies at Dalhousie University, 2018 Poet Laureate of Halifax Regional Municipality. Author of The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Slavery in Canada, and the Burning of Old Montreal

Release Date: October 14, 2022

About the Editors 

Quentin VerCetty - Quentin VerCetty (Lindsay) - also known as Di' rAstroNautty, is an award-winning visual griot (storyteller) and art educator who knows no boundaries when it comes to his creative expression. Since receiving his first award, the Governor General Bronze Medal Award for excellence in 2010 and recent accolade from the Ontario College of Art and Design University diversity award in 2015, VerCetty continues to strive for new heights in his professional creative work and community-based work along with his academic career. Currently building off his master's in art education thesis from Concordia University, Quentin explores speculative narratives like Afrofuturism addressing issues of representation, immigration, decolonization and other social and environmental issues through public art intervention. Quentin's work has been in numerous academic journals, magazines and a variety of publication. He enjoys good wine, conversation, chocolate, of course, art and traveling. In which his artistry and adventurous spirit have brought him to every populated continent on the planet Earth. His passion for artivism, using art as a tool for social change, lead to co-launching the Canadian chapter of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAMCanada) in 2016 and has since then continued to spread it across the nation. Through his work, as an academic and as a creative, Quentin hopes to engage and inspire hearts and minds further with high hope to make the world a better place not only for today but for many tomorrows to come. 

Dr. Audrey Hudson

Dr. Audrey Hudson is an artist, educator, researcher and futurist. Audrey manages school and teacher programs at the Art Gallery of Ontario and teaches at OCAD University. She holds a PhD from University of Toronto/Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (UT/OISE).

Most recently, Dr. Hudson co-edited a groundbreaking text entitled, In This Together: Blackness, Indigeneity and Hip-Hop, with a chapter, entitled, All eyes on Hip Hop: Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurities. Chapters and articles include: Where We @?: Blackness, Indigeneity and Hip-Hop’s Expression of Creative Resistance (co-authored); Here We Are On Turtle Island: Navigating Places, Spaces and Terrain; and Integrating Black lives into education: Black Lives Matter Freedom School.

Hudson believes the arts are a way to bring rich knowledge and voices of young people into spaces to discuss education, colonization, race, and relationship building between Black and Indigenous communities.

Dr. Hudson developed and taught the first course in Canada on the influence Hip-Hop has on design, entitled Hip-Hop & Convergence Culture at OCAD University. Hudson also co-developed and taught a graduate studies course at UT/OISE entitled, Desire and Change: Difficult Dialogues in Art and Art Education.

This book on Cosmic Underground Northside merges Audrey’s passion for art, social change and voicing astounding creative Black intellect.

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