On Thursday, July 23, the NorcalMLK Foundation's Black & Brown Comix Arts Festival (BCAF) presented a panel entitled, "Afrofuturism and Black Religion: Connecting Imaginations", at this years San Diego Comic-Con, which was held virtually this year for the first time due to the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the U.S.

The discussion explored the connections between Afrofuturism and Black Religion and the way in which comics, graphic novels, and animation are capturing the rich dynamic that spawns new ways in which popular culture is being impacted by way in which works of best-selling speculative fiction authors Octavia Butler, Samuel Delaney, Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, and Tananarive Due (to name a few) scholars of Black religion, including the late Charles H. Long, James Noel, Tracey Hucks, and Rachel Harding, bring to light how black religion and the imagination of matter speak to the way in which Black people in the Atlantic World syncretize their experience to create community and fashion a future.

The dynamic panel featured two-time Will Eisner Award winner and professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, John Jennings; Kinitra D. Brooks, the Leslie Endowed Chair of Literary Studies at Michigan State University; and Sakena Young-Scaggs, the Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University. The conversation was moderated by the NorcalMLK Foundation's executive director Aaron Grizzell.

After the airing of the panel at Comic-Con@Home, CNN iReport interviewed the panelists. You can see the full panel and the CNN iReport interview with the panelists below:

Afrofuturism Panel

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CNN iReport Interview