See You Yesterday (2019) (with Ebony Elizabeth Thomas)

2022 kicks off with the provocative politics and violent tragedies of See You Yesterday (2019), the Netflix science-fiction feature about the time-travel adventures of two young scientific prodigies in Brooklyn. The special guest for this discussion on the stakes of temporality, the futility of breaking out of a cycle, and the immediacy of racialised trauma is Dr Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Associate Professor in the Division of Literacy, Culture, and International Education (University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education). Ebony has written and co-authored more than 25 articles and book chapters across numerous academic journals and edited volumes, and is also the author of Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era: Theory, Advocacy, Activism (Peter Lang, 2012) and, most recently, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to The Hunger Games (NYU Press, 2019). Topics for this episode include how director and co-writer Stefan Bristol plays with the erasure of timelines set against the backdrop of systemic police brutality and institutional violence; the exchange between computer graphics and black subjectivity in the pursuit of fantasy; nostalgia, progress, and the emotion of racialised bodies that are haunted by the replaying past; the film’s portrayal of childhood and discourses of black exceptionalism; narrative distinctions between ‘aspirational’ and ‘inspirational’ fantasies in the desperation of seeking change; and links between the racial dimension of puzzle films and the digitally-mediated and progressive (Capitalist) spectacle of Afrofuturism, and what happens when low-budget films such as See You Yesterday do not have have access to Hollywood’s VFX opulence. **Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**