Andrea Hairston describes her latest book, “Archangels of Funk," as "Afro-funk-tastic cyber-punk with a hoodoo twist."
And Hairston said she wanted this book — in a western Massachusetts setting inspired by her own community of Florence — to be fun.
Andrea Hairston, professor emeritus, Smith College: So even though there are these intense ideas and it's a dystopia, all of that, I wanted people to have a good time with the struggle, you know what I'm saying? Because if you can't dance, why have a revolution? You, know, that whole idea. I really wanted people to have fun.
Cinnamon Jones, the major character, is a scientist, artist, and hoodoo conjurer. She's living in the western Mass. Of my mind after the Water Wars. And so, those are like, you know, disastrous. These are trying times — violence and despair on the uptick. Cinnamon is having an existential crisis, and she's got two days to mount the next world festival. And that's a sci-fi theater jam celebrating the ancestors, and scheming and dreaming for the future.
And folks are like, "Girl, this is the end of the world and you're still doing shows?" So she's having difficult times continuing this tradition of this festival that her ancestors or her grandparents did.
Basil Pursley, NEPM: Could you tell me a bit about who Cinnamon is and what is her history that leads her to this moment that we meet her in?
So I have another book in which Cinnamon is a young character. These books are all standalone, but cinnamon was 13, and she was a theater kid. But she was also always a science geek. She studied to to be a computer engineer. But, you know, the computer world was just not welcoming. So she has left that world.
And her grandparents left her their farm in western Massachusetts. And then the water wars happened. So she was lucky that she had her grandparents farm. It was up high. It didn't get inundated. And so she joins with farmers and all these different kinds of people who are trying to survive the effects of climate change. And ... they pool all of their capacities. And I was really inspired by my western Mass. community and what we were doing during COVID when I was writing this.
Could you talk a bit more about what this region means to you and how it has inspired this book?
So I knew I was going to write the book, but I thought, well, I could put it right here. They could be in western Mass. — a fantastic near-future western Mass.
You know, I live in Florence [in] Northampton, and Florence is amazing. There's a statue to Sojourner Truth in Florence, so I put that in the book. Sojourner truth worked at a silk mill. There were abolitionists. You can go and see their houses. There were free Black people living there, David Ruggles. There's an Underground Railroad church that's now Bombyx. So it's like a music center now.
And so, this town that I'm in has had a long tradition of amazing perspectives on imagining a world and then [saying], "OK this world doesn't quite exist yet, but I'm going to start it here and make it happen."
You know, in this book we have a lot of different technology stuff. We've got the circus box, we've got a cyborg dog. I was wondering if you could elaborate on the role of technology in this universe.
I've been doing a lot of research, particularly on machine learning, [artificial intelligence], and the impact on society and AI and race, class and gender. And I've been doing that for years. So the notion that technology is value-neutral or that the indigenous wisdom of Africans or Indigenous Americans, we check that at the door as we go to the future — I wanted to address our anxiety about technology, our love of it, its power, its possibility and its dangers.
