How can we envision the future in times of mass crisis and grief? We learn what it means to imagine better worlds ⎯ or if such a thing exists ⎯ as Whitney French speaks to Terese Mason Pierre in Room 47.1 Utopia.
This post is part of our 2025 Black Futures Month & Black History Month feature, where we’re republishing brilliant works and conversations with Black organizers, writers, and artists from Room‘s past issues, to live on our site in perpetuity.
In dreaming up and discussing strategies and modes for different, brighter futures, we turned to Whitney French, a self-described Black futurist, for her perspectives. Whitney is a Toronto-based writer, multidisciplinary artist, arts educator, and publisher. She edited the anthology Black Writers Matter, and she is the cofounder and publisher of Hush Harbour, Canada’s only Black queer feminist press. She is also the host and facilitator of the Writing While Black creative writing studio. You can find Whitney online at whitneyfrenchwrites.com.
In this interview, Whitney references two essays: Octavia E. Butler’s, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” from Essence, and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki’s “Too Dystopian for Whom? A Continental Nigerian Writer’s Perspective,” from Uncanny. These Black writers’ ideas of the utopic and dystopic boundaries influence what they believe speculative writing can accomplish, including the limits and potential of the imagination. Here, Whitney links the political and personal realities of constructing utopia, and how the term ‘utopia’ changes to meet needs, to wield power, and to explore possibilities.
ROOM: How do you define ‘utopia’? As you read, write, and curate speculative and literary futures, how has the definition of utopia changed for you?
WHITNEY FRENCH: This is a fun question. A simple answer is my definition of utopia is a world that centres a collective vision instead of a world that centres a vision of the few. The few are often those that wield power to have their vision actualized, a particular quality of power that stems from oppressing the collective.
Another impulse is to name the politically obvious versions of utopia for me: prison abolition, elimination of famine, ending sexual assault, war, and the disollution of borders. However, this is merely a list of things I am unhappy with in the now. That’s not how I define utopia: with what it isn’t. The utopias I’m interested in living and reading about are hard to pinpoint, as the nature of speculative futures reminds me that one person’s utopia can very well be another person’s dystopia.
It also reminds me that I have been witness to other utopian-like communities that work collectively toward a world that centres care, like Octavia E. Butler’s Acorn community in the Parable series, or Mia Mingus’ short fiction piece “Hollow” (which really demanded me to check my internalized ableism when thinking through utopia) as well as many others. But the vision of the many is deeply complicated.
I am defining utopia as the unrealized also: something to strive toward and work at collectively. I hate how the word ‘new-topia’ has been co-opted by corporates because I don’t hate the concept; some of my favourite artists insist in their work to create new realities. Works-in-progress. We as critical thinkers should be careful, as utopias are often related to a type of homogeny and purity, which can be dangerous as an aspiration—we know this historically. I’m much more interested in unity than sameness. I struggle logically to believe there is a way to obtain utopia but, then again, my desires lay in the collective imagination, so my singular logic doesn’t have to suffice. So, that has definitely changed for me.
Perhaps in answering this question, I am interested in designing and demonstrating some thorough real-time experiments that we as humans can work on toward a collective definition of utopia. And even as I say that: why are we centreing humans? Utopia for the planet at this stage (perhaps all stages) is one that doesn’t have humans around at all. We are the villains in their story, until we stop behaving like villains.
ROOM: Butler, in her essay, “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” and Epeki, in his essay, “Too Dystopian for Whom? A Continental Nigerian Writer’s Perspective,” talk about places in our common reality being “dystopic.” That one person’s reality can be another person’s dystopia. How do the dominant apocalypse narratives interact with marginalized peoples’ histories, and what histories are being ignored in these narratives?
WF: Recently, I was facilitating a two-day creative writing workshop (shout out to Shaya Ishaq, the Creative Director of Library of Infinities) and it was entitled Personal Apocalypse. Myself and some very rad and talented Black writers were interrogating the common images of apocalypse: think mushroom plumes rising up from an atomic bomb, think zombie wars, think desolate ransacked cities, think Mad Max. We unravelled some core commonalities in these dominant apocalypse narratives—the hero tropes, the human-centred qualities—and then we stepped back and got deep about the nature of Change, of chaos and of disaster. How Black folks have lived multiple end-worlds, have adapted, survived, perished, prophesized the conditions and realities that dominant culture is only now catching up to.
Linking this rich conversation back to what Epeki talks about, the lives of everyday people in different places on this planet, from different cultures and perspectives, reads as simply unbelievable. That, to some readers, a reader who has never experienced this flavour of apocalypse could dismiss entirely their world, even within a fictional container, is downright sad. He goes on further to underscore the “paradoxical difference lying in the gap between our realities.” The realities of the Western readership/market and his community.
And we’ve seen this in the reversal. A science fiction, speculative, fantasy narrative from a dominant culture writer (I’m not just talking white folks, but straight, cis, and North American folks too) taking a very real experience from “over there” and making their characters live it and [snap] it’s a dystopia. Those interactions are very challenging for me. Also, I think that I, too, am susceptible to doing the same thing if I’m not careful or thoughtful with my own futuristic storytelling. I am born in Canada, I am cisgender. I have class, language, and status privileges. It’s a super easy trap to fall into.
Butler reels us in though. She reminds us “where we stand determines what we’re able to see.” And that is beyond resonant to me. Butler cautions us to be aware of our perspectives. We have to acknowledge the traditions, the overlooked aspects, and the deep influences that contribute to the way we Future. On a larger scale, I’m excited to see how racialized, global majority, multi-intersectional writers tackle the much-needed touch-up on how dominant culture imagines both apocalypse and utopia.
ROOM: As we become more educated in social justice movements, capitalism, and colonialism, we understand that current conceptions of utopia may have insidious implications. How can marginalized peoples conceive of futures that include us? What matters to you most?
WF: I have been witness to racialized, queer, disabled writers who exist in one or multiple axis points of these identities as they not only conceive, but birth futures through honouring, acknowledging, challenging, and remixing culture (their cultures that they belong to).
So, let’s look directly at how some rad writers who’ve been in the game are doing it: Waubgeshig Rice in Moon of the Crusted Snow centres apocalypse on the Rez. Larissa Lai in The Tiger Flu transports us hundreds of years into Vancouver’s altered Chinatown to build a female-only society using starfish technology for procreation and healing. Nalo Hopkinson in the classic Midnight Robber creates a hyper-futuristic, united Caribbean using West African technologies. To overquote a deeply important quote from Lorde: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” We are part of a global majority and are only marginalized because of systems of oppression; colonization is a process that required a “radical” (as in, world-altering) imagination. And it became real. What can we—peoples invested in decolonial, collaborative future-building—imagine to counter it?
And it gets complicated depending on our proximity, assimilation, and absorption of dominant culture. That’s OK. That’s very real too. I don’t wish to dismiss those who have limited-to-no access to their cultures. I don’t wish to ignore that raw pain. Writers building the types of utopias of interest to me use that pain, they do not abandon it. They creolize it, complicate it. Birth a future that doesn’t erase histories. Even acknowledge it and how it may be implicated in colonial harms even now.
What matters to me most is being responsible for the images, stories, and languaging about utopias, dystopias, apocalypses, and futures. Being responsible for conceiving something and considering the multiple generations onward. Doing that labour of collaboration. Our kids and our elders are living, breathing time machines. We have access to perspectives of generations before us and after us. To the more spiritually inclined, you can argue we have access to our ancestors (blood and chosen) and our descendants (blood and chosen). We can commune with those who have transitioned and those who have yet to be. During a panel discussion I learned about the work of B. Sharise Moore, the author of Conjuring Worlds: An Afrofuturist Textbook for Middle and High School Students. That is someone who is thinking about the responsibilities of showing young people brilliant narratives of Afrofuturism so they can do Future work. God, I would have loved a book like this as a kid. Another person who comes to mind, Sheniz Janmohamed and her series Questions for Ancestors, which selects artists and creatives to ask a question to an ancestor and offers knowledge to a descendant. This type of workings and reworkings matter to me.
ROOM: Epeki mentions the editorial push to write hopeful futures in our stories, pitted against stories of the dystopic and real—that one is claimed more necessary than the other is, at this present moment. How do you think we can reconcile writing about a difficult present with writing a hopeful future? Where does writing help, and where does it fail?
WF: Past, present, future, history, it’s all moving parts for me in my mind. It’s challenging to separate them. Sometimes my friends tease because I don’t really plan for the immediate personal future (five-year plan, how to pay rent, what I’m cooking for dinner) even though I consider myself as a bit of a speculative, futuristic thinker. The difficult present allows one to write into a hopeful future. If the present was “chill” then there would be very little need to envision a radically just and different future than the one we got.
Where writing fails? I can’t answer that. Often people have mentioned that writing and the arts do not activate political change. Only organizing can do that work. I’m no expert on that. I will say, though, when a brilliant wordsmith does something fresh and I say to myself, “I didn’t even know you can do that with writing,” that’s probably why I am slow to speak of writing’s failings in this context.
ROOM: Butler mentions that there is “no single answer that will solve all of our future problems,” and that “the past is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness.” What do you think is the value of writing hope, of hoping that this current “weak cycle” might pass?
WF: It’s hard to say definitively that we are indeed in a “weak cycle.” It’s a tough one for sure, and it would be redundant to highlight all the ways the era we are in now is messed up. But it is also a pivotal cycle. A polarizing cycle. Particularly folks in the West are only now seeing the devasting impact we have on the planet. But there’s also depth in this cycle. There’s so much cycle-breaking and new patterns, new languages to speak to the many ways we exist in this life and exist on the Earth.
In terms of what I think is of value in writing—let’s keep hope on the shelf for a second—I value all that writing can offer. Yes, hope, but also the despair, the curious, the profane, the holy—for me, and perhaps for others who sit and think consciously about the future and vision work, writing the hope, not just hoping for hope, means devising alternative stories. These “living” narratives that are persuasive, creative, carnal. They can turn others on to imagining with hope in mind. When you read something on the page, you don’t have the images dictated to you like moving pictures do—as a reader you must imagine. Engage. Build the vision in your mind. That’s the value that writing offers.
The value in writing hope—in this, and in any other cycles we as humans find ourselves in—is not to simply counterbalance the despair, but to imagine what can be real. Butler herself wrote dystopias, but she almost always writes elements of hope into her stories; rarely does this hope come from governments, leaders, or massive powerful groups. These experiments that highlight hope often are found in small collectives.
ROOM: When I think about writing about utopia, I think about the ways that our current world has collectively stunted us and put limits on what we can conceive. What do you think is the role of imagination in utopia, if any? Where does imagination fail? How do current conceptions of utopia flatten the imagination?
WF: The role of imagination in utopia is everything. One of the reasons we were so keen on starting Hush Harbour is to hear how different folks imagine. In high school art class, we had to draw thumbnails of creative ideas from a cliché phrase and, even though many people went the most obvious route, I noticed how fascinated I was to see the result of a different mind or perspective making something with the same set of instructions I got. We have inherited the same planet, in a way; our imagination determines what we do with it now.
Strangely enough, this question reminds me that utopia can also be a good death. Many Hollywood versions of utopia/dystopia generate hero narratives, characters who overcome and resist apocalypse while closing off imaginations that question: “What if we embrace this ending?” Death is not meant to be merely feared, but also to be respected. Back to the cycles, there are eras that are ending, and that’s coming no matter how much we sit and think and imagine our way out of it. “The only last truth is Change,” as Butler reminds us.
Throughout this interview, I am still rejigging this definition of utopia or offering up ideas around it. Ritualizing an era-ending is a brief utopia. A small place in celebration or mourning. So curious to see what a utopia that is full of abundance without waste looks like. It comes back to the collaboration piece. My imagination flourishes, and I suspect others’ do also, in conversation and communion with other humans, and other species even. Someone who’s investigating this in an astonishing way is Ashia Ajani. Her work calls into question what is left between utopia and dystopia and how to explore human and more-than-human kinships in literature.
ROOM: When it comes to the future, to imagination, to reconciling the past with the present, what do you find yourself writing about? What are you writing into your future self?
WF: Oh my! I love this question. I find myself writing into spaces where myself (in my poetry and non-fiction) or my characters (my fiction and my dramatic works) are in conversation with other species about Future. In one major project that I had a lot of fun with, I had characters talk to rivers, forge for wild grapes, communicate, and offer gifts to mycelium as a means to trace their family in the soils. Presently, I’m doing a lot of research around pre-colonial and early colonial Jamaica, where my family roots are from. There’s a plethora of work in that history, but in thinking about Future there’s some fascinating connections to how Maroons, in particular, intrinsically knew the land, and how that knowledge of the mountains, waterways, and forestry kept colonizers away for almost a century. Calls to mind what type of Maroon tactics are necessary to ensure a future utopia in our time.
I find myself writing about what does grief look like in the Future, how technology and nature are comrades rather than the oft-depiction of them being against each other. Also, writing about how communities are divided by life forces, like a river for instance, and what the presence of the river means for one group of people compared to another. That the folks on this side of the river generate a whole new set of cultures and customs, mythologies, and collective truths, even though they face the same body of water.
What am I writing into my future self? I don’t care what people say, journaling and self-affirmations are future work. Octavia Butler did it. “So be it. See to it.” I think of how Alexis Pauline Gumbs brought to my attention that Harriet Tubman told herself, “My people are free,” and that was certainly not her reality. It’s a technology of self-hypnosis and repetition, to not merely stay focused but to speak truth into existence. I also dig this approach as it is a form of time-travel, non-linear voicing to your Future self, and perhaps your past or even ancestors spoke the reality you have now into being. It works in multiple directions.
Lastly, one publication I’m proud of called “Rhizome Home,” published in WATER, was fun beyond fun. It depicts a future where Black folks are liberated from our physical bodies and become architects of galaxies. Another was a poem called “the currency is in the collective,” which imagines an alternative currency source in the future, published with Carousel. That’s what I’m up to.
May this interview guide us as we continue to resist and confront anti-Blackness, and support of the rights, safety, dignity, artistry, happiness, material and mutual aid, and scholarship of Black people worldwide, year-round.
