Valorie Thomas

Valorie D. Thomas 

Valorie D. Thomas is a scholar and an associate professor of English and Africana Studies at Pomona University in California, where she has been a professor since 1998. She is credited with creating the Diaspora Vertigo concept as part of the decolonization picture. Her expertise is as a curator, in Afrofuturism, the African Diaspora (including film and visual art, social justice and screenwriting), women of color literature, Africana Studies (including early and contemporary African American literature), and Native American literature (including indigenous spirituality, media studies, and diaspora social space). Her research interests are Afrofuturism, Diaspora space and mobility, African Diaspora literary theory, spirituality in African Diaspora film and literature, African American and women of color feminist writers, and race, feminism, language, and social justice. 

African Diaspora occurred as a result of Africans being traded from Africa primarily to the Americas and the Caribbean in the slave trade. Valorie Thomas' Diaspora Vertigo concept, in terms of an exhibit held at Scripps College's Clark Humanities Museum (Carlisle), "incorporates the idea of trauma, displacement and dispersal that the African Diaspora has experienced through the slave trade." (Peter Harris, 2015) Ms. Thomas is also quoted as saying, "Being uprooted and dislocated — and culturally disrupted and traumatized — that's one version of vertigo." In this exhibit, the diaspora was incorporated in visual art, poetry reading, and intellectual questions, including Peter Harris' question of "What is a happy black man?"

Afrofuturism is the study of African and African American art in relation to the African Diaspora. More specifically, it places blacks with science fiction (like Lt. Uhuru in Star Trek), funkadelic music (as in George Clinton and the Parliament), art, and politics. In a 2011 Ebony article, it is said that the term Afrofuturism was coined by Mark Dent in an essay entitled "Black to the Future," where Afrofuturism talks about the future world where blacks are in music, art, theater, politics, and academics in today's terms. Afrofuturism also keeps blacks in the forefront, challenging emotions, thought, and beliefs. Blacks can be involved in technology, science, and space, and it not be "antithetical," or "being in direct and unequivocal opposition," to what it is to be a black person in a stereotyped sense (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2016). It also moves forward "African philosophy, spiritual knowledge and connections to nature."

In Mr. Carlisle's article, Ms. Thomas stated that "The Afrofuturism point of view, for me, is one that acknowledges race and racism as political, social and material realities, but, at the same time, is seeking to displace race as a central preoccupation of every narrative."

Featured publications by Ms. Thomas include:

Cultural Vertigo: Spiritual Roads to Social Justice in African Diaspora Film and Literature (Manuscript under submission)

"Placing Toni Morrison's 'Love': African American and Women of Color Feminists Theorizing Embodiment, Home, and Memory." International Journal of the Humanities, Common Ground Publishers, Victoria, Australia 2007

"1 + 1 = 3 and other Dilemmas: Reading Vertigo in Invisible Man, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Songs of Solomon," African American Review, vol. 37, n. 1, Spring 2003.

"Keys to the Ancestors' Chambers: An Approach to Teaching Beloved," Reading Between the Black and White Keys: Deep Crossings in African Diaspora Studies (V.A. Clark, ed., UC Berkeley, 1994) 

References:

Afrofuturism. (April 28, 2011), http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/black-alt-enter-afrofuturism-999#axzz3ym8dhtEC, Accessed February 15, 2016 

Antithetical. Merriam-Webster Dictionary,  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/antithetical, accessed February 16, 2016.

Micallef, Carlisle. Pomona Afrofuturist Exhibit Explores Race, Diaspora, Vertigo. February 28, 2015. http://tsl.news/life-style/4624/, accessed February 16, 2016 

Valorie D. Thomas. http://www.pomona.edu/directory/people/valorie-d-thomas, accessed February 13, 2016 

Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.