But I digress. I was saying that culminating an awards campaign during Ramadan is a special kind of exhaustion. Especially when that same Ramadan, you’re running a Kickstarter to release a MUSLIM FUTURES Anthology into the world! Seriously, whose idea was that? Oh. Right. Well then in that case, perhaps you might want to…?

BUY THE BOOK!

And if you need another nudge or just a lil’ more food for thought, I’m sharing the latest batch of short interviews I did with each of my awesome co-creators of this anthology below, where we unpack the inspiration for their stories and the worlds they’re set in, and how important it is to envision these aspirational futures as we’re all living through a dystopian present. Check ‘em out below and please consider supporting our pre-order campaign, it would really help us cover the distribution expenses for the book!

MUSLIM FUTURES

Here’s that link again to pick up the book!

BUY THE BOOK!

See you in the future!

Karim

Check it out, and pick up your copy of the MUSLIM FUTURES anthology at this link:

Order the book!

See you in the future!

Karim

Can I just tell you how impressed I am by Angelica’s ability to worldbuild across multiple time periods simultaneously and to hold all the details about society’s movements from now through a collapse and back to an aspirational place in her mind all at once? From the car, in a library parking lot, no less! This talk ranged from time travel to ancient technologies, to Toni Morrison and the idea of “re-memory.” This convo, like Angelica’s beautiful story, has layers galore!

See for yourself, read Angelica’s story, by ordering your copy of MUSLIM FUTURES at the link below!

Order the book!

See you in the future!

Karim

This talk was all about love, as Fawzia and I dug deep into how to reinvent narrative structures and dramatic conflict for an aspirational world that refutes the tropes of leaning into trauma, and leans into the deep emotional turmoil we feel around the precariousness and potential loss of love. In that way, this talk exemplifies something we all sought to do with all of our MUSLIM FUTURES stories, and which Fawzia’s story captures so perfectly. Plus, it centers a qawwali Muslim pop star. I mean, come on.

See some pics from the comic book version of the story at the bottom of this post, and to read Fawzia’s story, you can order your copy of MUSLIM FUTURES at the link below!

Order the book!

See you in the future!

Karim

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Helen had spent most of her very long life married to Nakhuda, who was a general in the Pakistani army. They had two daughters, whom Helen raised, and she argued with them constantly. The kids grew up, my grandfather retired, my mom went to med school, married my dad, and they immigrated to Chicago. Nakhuda and Helen soon followed, and they grew old there together, largely living in their own little bubble, where they too now argued with each other constantly. And eventually, when dementia started to creep further and further into Nakhuda’s mind, Helen’s life became more and more about caregiving. She complained a lot about it - and about him - over the years, it became one of her signature characteristics, from my vantage point. But when he died many years later, a few weeks shy of his 104th birthday, she was heartbroken nonetheless. I spoke to her more often in those months after his passing, and the thing that really struck me was a loss of purpose. She’d spent so much of her life caring for family, even though my mother will be the first to say Helen was never very good at it, and to be honest, I don’t think Helen wanted that for herself either. But it’s what she had and when Nakhuda died, there was not much else left. By then, she was nearing a century old herself and living in a large care facility that tended to her daily needs as much as it could, but it couldn’t give her the thing I felt she needed on a deeper level. Purpose. And I wanted her to have that.

A few months before Nakhuda died, we’d just started incubating the MUSLIM FUTURES anthology at the Butterfly Lab. And if you’ve been following our series on the making of that project (on sale now!), then you know it began with this elaborate idea I had to facilitate a worldbuilding experience wherein we would all co-create a veritable menu of aspirational futures for more than a dozen authors to pick and choose from to create the stories set in their personal visions of the future. I had a lot of ideas about what an aspirational future would look like for me, but to be honest, I still didn’t know what story to set in that future. We’d all worked really hard to make sure our stories eschewed the violence and trauma that was so often thrust upon our community, set in worlds where we had all the conditions we needed to thrive, both individually and as a community. Then, a few weeks after our worldbuilding session, Nakhuda died. And it became clear to me that no matter how aspirational our future might be, no matter how just and kind that future might become, no matter how radically advanced our care facilities might become, no matter how much we choose to value our elders in the future, no matter now much our technology might be shaped by the values of our ancestors…

We will all eventually struggle with aging. With our health. Perhaps with dementia. And certainly with loss. Loss of our loved ones, and perhaps a loss of purpose. Like Helen. And even if Helen wasn’t able to find new purpose in the real world, maybe in this story she could find it. And maybe that new purpose was really freaking big and cosmic and something only she could fulfill.

So that’s the story I wrote for my Nani. As it turned out, Helen would soon pass on as well, less than a year after Nakhuda did. I hope they’re bickering playfully somewhere across the multiverse together as I write this.

I’m including the first couple scenes from the comic version of the story here, I hope you dig it. And if you want to read the whole thing (and a whole lot of other great stories set in aspirational MUSLIM FUTURES), you can pick up the anthology here:

Order Muslim Futures

My hope is that this story can be inspiration for whoever’s gonna actually build the radically aspirational elder care facility of the future you see below. But I also hope that in offering an example of someone finding massive, world-saving purpose later in life, I can inspire some of you to find yours, in case you’re still looking for it.

See you in the future,

Karim

This talk was so much fun, in part because Mike and I got to nerd out hard over our mutual love of superhero stories, our perennial optimism, and how much of a wall to wall series of bangers DC’s Reign of the Supermen was! So if you’re finding yourself in need of a little optimism yourself, this is the talk for you.

See some pics from the comic book version of the story at the bottom of this post, and to read Mike’s story, you can order your copy of MUSLIM FUTURES at the link below!

Order the book!

See you in the future!

Karim

Check out a few pages from the graphic novel version of her story below, and pick up your copy of the MUSLIM FUTURES anthology at this link:

Order the book!

See you in the future!

Karim

Order Muslim Futures

I invited Jeff into the wayback machine to talk us through the revolutionary model he and his colleagues developed at the B-lab, a handful of years ago. Little did I know, Jeff was gonna go much further and trace the history of this work back another 60+ years! Maybe even millennia? We looked at the long arc of the relationship between culture and politics, how to invert the tools of surveillance capitalism to sell more people on the idea of their own liberation, and even touched on what Bruce Lee can teach us about solidarity and community building.

Speaking of which, please also check out Jeff’s new book, WATER, MIRROR, ECHO: BRUCE LEE AND THE MAKING OF ASIAN AMERICA!

And if you wanna go deep into the Butterfly Lab process that informed the making of the MUSLIM FUTURES anthology, check out the Butterfly Lab Narrative Design Toolkit here!

But of course, don’t forget to snag your copy of the MUSLIM FUTURES Anthology at the link below!

Order Muslim Futures

Oh, and I’m trying something new with this interview too - for folks that would rather read the interview as opposed to watching the video, I’m including the transcript below! Please feel free to let me know in the comments if you prefer to watch or read these interviews in the future, it helps me a lot to know!

Please and thank you, and see you in the future!

Karim

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Karim’s interview with Jeff Chang, author and culture strategist extraordinaire!

KARIM

Jeff, thanks for gathering with me here. I’m super excited to talk to you about Butterfly Lab. It’s been a minute. And I know you’ve been on a really intense book tour for a little while. So I appreciate you finding some time at the end of the tour, as you said, to be able to sit down and like dig deep. I guess it’s not that deep. It’s only like a few years old since we were in going in the thick of the Butterfly Lab together. But...

As you know, it’s a program that was really influential to me and not just to the project that we brought through it, the Muslim Futures Anthology, but also just in terms of the way that I think about culture making and the way that I think about the opportunities to marry really thoughtful, hard audience research and narrative strategy with culture making. And so, as we’re now in the process of getting ready to launch the Muslim Futures Anthology, I was super excited to get back on the horn with you and revisit like that journey and especially talk a little bit about the origins of the program because it came into fruition. came into being before like well before I was involved in it. And so from my perspective, it’ll be cool actually to hear about some of the origins and what went into the program before I was even involved with it. So thanks for doing this.

JEFF

Thank you for having me. So it’s always great to hang out with you.

KARIM

So let’s start at the beginning. When I talk about the program, I think one of the most surprising things is the project originated, within race forward, because I think a lot of people don’t know about a lot of the sort of narrative arts and culture strategy work that race forward does. think they’re known for a lot of other kind of work. And so I think like it might be useful just to kind of talk through what were the origins of the program? How did it come about through Race Forward? And how did you get involved?

JEFF

I mean, it really predates race for getting involved in narrative arts and culture. I could take it all the way back to the turn of the millennium and the sort of generational kind of shift in the movement and thinking about how to understand the role of culture in movements and social movements.

I think the generation previous to us had an understanding of culture as downstream from politics. And I think there’s a lot of theoretical reasons for that. There’s a lot of actual political reasons for that. There’s a lot of ways that we can understand it within the histories of liberation movements for people of color and other disenfranchised peoples that go back to the 60s and even before that into all these other kinds of ideas about change. There’s a whole other podcast in that and it could get just very arcane, you know. But we were all kids, essentially, who came of age, around the turn of the millennium into social movements that were losing. We grew up in a period during which, you know, the the the large portion of what was happening in the political realm was regressive, was reactionary.

And it’s interesting to think about kind of how we go from a point in maybe, you know, the mid sixties to the mid seventies during which these insurgent movements think that the revolution is around the corner and there’s all these different types of visions for how we’re about to get there. And people are arguing about that, but people agree for the most part, if you’re in these radical social movements at that time, that we’re about to win. And instead what gets ushered in, you know, and people point to 1968 as this turning point in so many ways, or maybe this peak in so many ways, that from 1968 onwards, we start seeing this period that has variously been labeled the post civil rights era, the sort of era of of revanchism or whatever you want to call it. But the the sort of movements that like were able to win massive change changes, you you can point from everything from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to maybe the peak, which is, you know, maybe the passage of the Immigration Nationality Act, , to all kinds of different types of wins and literally all the way up until last year, seeing affirmative action being knocked down by a majority conservative Supreme Court. So you know, we’ve been living in this sort of long undoing of that revolution. And so that that sort of sets a stage for for us coming of age in the late 1990s, looking at sort of how do we understand the world, seeing the rapid expansion of the prison industrial complex, the defunding of of education, the huge increase in policing and militarism all around the world. The removal of regulations on global capitalism, on and on and on and on, right? The undoing of fair housing, the resegregation of the US, could just, the list goes on and on and on. And thinking about, how do we enter into this particular moment? And people being energized, in local communities by fighting, say the siting of juvenile jails, the increasing sort of military state that’s happening in public schools, looking at the crisis forming around the climate questions, thinking about how do we actually deal with this and seeing things like the uprising in Seattle, looking at important local movements that youth are forming to fight back against the prison industrial complex and expand the policing and trying to think about how to form an agenda in this particular political environment and realizing that culture is the way that people are meeting up. Right? People aren’t meeting up through of visions of a political takeover, revolutionary sort of political takeover. People are meeting up through hip hop. People are meeting up through punk rock. People are meeting up through fan groups and thinking about how the storytelling that we have is giving us moments of opportunity and windows and portals into alternative futures. And so, you know, my particular trajectory is thinking about how that leads to, you know, the national hip hop political convention 2004 and how that re-energizes young folks to participate in electoral politics and ultimately gets young people to elect, you know, a president.

And then seeing that culture has ways in which these portals to alternative futures actually occur. Barack Obama didn’t run on reversing DOMA and establishing same-sex marriage. But during this 2008 campaign, there sure were a lot of artists on the ground who were putting together posters saying “Obama: hope, change and same sex marriage.” Those things were not on his agenda, but people were putting it on his agenda because there were these youth movements that had expressed themselves through the culture that were allowing folks to be able to come together and to make those demands and and to to move that. And arguably, you know, that’s the beginning of moving into the decade of the 2010s where there are insurgent social movements on everything from, you know, Standing Rock, right? Stopping the pipeline, which brings together Indigenous worldviews with climate crisis questions, with environmental justice questions.

Obviously, Black Lives Matter is like the linchpin for all of this type of work, but there’s also the Occupy movement as well, raising the question of economic inequality and what’s really happened with global capitalism. then, you know, then to connecting that to the Me Too movement as well, which all of these find their expression through culture before they find their expression through an institutionalized sort of version of what we had in the 60s, which are, you know, sort of nonprofit funded organizations who have become sort of the institutionalization of the revolution that everybody thought we were going to have in the seventies. All these movements happen outside of that. And so just reaffirmed to us that culture is really the main game.

And even now, when we look at like the way that the Trump counterrevolution, the Trump sort of restorationist kind of project has come together. It’s it’s being masterminded by people like Steve Bannon who are like culture’s upstream from politics. It’s not it’s not politics that are upstream from culture. And and so having a theory of how the state should be responding to culture and enforcing culture from on high in everything from book bands to this sort of anti-“DEI,” anti-wokeness type of movement that’s meant to sort of put to final rest the sort of restorationist agenda that first starts getting instituted in 1968, you know, by the by the hard right getting Richard Nixon elected and all that kind of stuff.

That’s all due to their theorizing that they have to win back the culture war. So I give you this sort of big fucking wide history to kind of talk about like this idea that we’ve had to pursue thinking about culture in an intentional kind of a way, in a purposeful kind of a way, in a strategic kind of a way.

And to add to that, all the other side has to do is to restore white supremacy. What we’ve got to do is to be able to bring people to a new sense of of what’s possible. We have to expand the imaginary. So the burden is always upon us to actually do the harder work to take people in a direction that they don’t know necessarily yet that they want to go.

And I think that that’s sort of what undergirds all of this work that we’ve been doing over the last, you know, however many years. And this is just joining it to millennia of people who have been thinking about this in this kind of a way. But to think about how we convince people, persuade people to join us in making a better world.

KARIM

I love how I was like, let’s like wind it back just a few years. You’re like, no, Karim, we’re going to wind it back 60 years.

JEFF

Ha ha! Well, not even 60 years. mean, we can talk about like the rest of the recovery of indigenous ideas and worldviews and acknowledges in this particular moment, right, which, you know, takes us back to Africa. It takes us back to Asia, right? It takes us back even to alternative ways of pre-capitalist ways of understanding the world, that come from Europe even as well.

I think that that’s really what this is ultimately about is to try to convince people of the world that they want to build. And that world draws upon all of these ways of knowing that have been around for not just 60 years, but millennia.

It sounds really weird and fanciful to kind of talk about it in that kind of a way and almost like, beyond belief, but that’s ultimately where we point back to in some ways. And of course we’ve got to figure out like real practical ways to be able to behave within and, and change behavior within, this worldview that’s come to dominate in this moment, which is this European global capitalist, extractionist, individualist, isolationist type of worldview. So I don’t know, it gets big.

KARIM

It does. It resonates a lot with a lot of conversations. I feel like I’ve been having certainly over the last handful of years, where the conversation is just that the transnational right is just doing a way better job of like painting their vision for the future for the majority of people than we are. And I think it’s really, it’s really useful to contextualize it in the way that you just did, which is just like, yeah, the burden of proof is harder on us, because we have to show a world that doesn’t exist yet. And why that’s irresistible. It makes me think a little bit about the FUTURESTATES series that we made like, you know, many years ago, right? We started that in 2008 where you have Obama being elected and you also have this global financial crisis and people are both hopeful and fearful about the future. so storytellers want to try and make sense out of that by projecting into the future. And so we were trying to kind of comment on relevant, urgent themes of today, political and social themes of today by extrapolating them into the future. And obviously, there’s a rich tradition, as you alluded to, of a lot of culture makers, science fiction being a particular example, trying to comment on the world we live in and where we’re headed, the trajectory of society through that lens of the fantastic of science fiction. And I think, we tell these stories, hoping that they’re going to impact society and change people’s minds and or open their minds and shift perspectives in a particular way. But I think most culture makers that are doing that work, you’re kind of making an assumption based on our own creative perspective or our gut or people we’re talking to. And just to kind of connect it back to Butterfly Lab, there’s this long history of culture makers using culture to talk about the world and try and talk about their values on a broad, wide scale. But we’re kind of doing it almost on instinct. We’re doing it from gut level, as opposed to necessarily a more scientific perspective in terms of the way that you guys did it within the Butterfly Lab. So talk to me about how this idea of, we need to use culture, which is, as you said, upstream of politics, and so we need to use culture to influence the political realities of our world but the Butterfly Lab was so different in incorporating a very different set of tools that I think most culture makers use. How did that kind of come about to think about some of those tangible research sets, data sets and toolkits that you guys developed? Like how did that idea kind of come into it beyond just the idea that, you and all of your collaborators were like, okay, we want to invest in time, energy, resources into like a cohort of projects that are really intentionally designed to use culture to shift perspectives in important political ways. How did that take shape in the specific way that it did within the Butterfly Lab?

JEFF

Specifically for the Butterfly Lab. What happened was, I came to race for it in 2018. I’ve been working on cultural justice issues, pretty much for the previous two decades, not necessarily knowing that cultural justice was what I was working on, not having the words for it until I really began teaming up with a lot of other folks and falling into this sort of nascent cultural strategy movement that begins to take shape in the early 2010s. And so I was part of a group called Culture Strike. I was one of the founders of this group called Culture Strike with Favianna Rodriguez, a bunch of writers, a bunch of artists, photographers, filmmakers, poets, know, just all kinds of

And then of course, musicians who are working together in a group called Soundstrike, thinking about how practically to harness culture to draw attention to at that particular point, what was happening around immigration in Arizona with the passage of SB 1070, which looking back now, looks like a blueprint for Trump’s national immigration agenda. And so, when I came in, there had been somebody who was working at Unbound Philanthropy, who came to me and was like, I’ve been following you, I know you’ve been working on these questions of cultural strategy. I know you’ve been working on these questions of migration and immigration and refugees. Wwhat if we brought the two together and figured out how to move the immigrant rights movement towards a place where they’re better able to deal with the culture because a lot of the organizations had been thinking about and working on culture in a very limited kind of a way. The funders gave organizations money to be able to think about work in terms of strategic communications, which is a model that was really based for a previous media landscape. And people were not thinking in terms of narrative per se, but in terms of messaging and thinking about messaging within this media landscape that was very limited and very centralized.

And of course, now we live in a media landscape that’s completely dispersed and which is sort of run according to the rules of surveillance capitalism. So essentially, in some ways what we were trying to do was to look at this new kind of landscape to theorize kind of what we needed to offer to many of these organizations, to on-the-ground organizers and to artists, in order to be able to work in new kinds of ways, and to kind of look at the ways in which we had kind of been bypassed by the moment in which surveillance capitalists, in which technologists had begun to collect all kinds of information from us, and could construct algorithms that would know us better than we thought we would know ourselves, and to move us all into, you know, a place of becoming consumers of everything, including messages about immigration, and ideas about immigrants, refugees and migrants.

And so, the Butterfly Lab began sort of as an experiment in terms of thinking about, well, how do we get people to really understand narrative and how to understand how to move people, not at the level of a yes/no binary on a particular message, but thinking about how we move them to the world views that were probably that are probably already there, within their minds and their heads and their experiences that actually activate a politics that can move us more towards the world that we all want to live in together, right? Towards values that are expansive, that are inclusive, that are sustainable, that are mutual. And so what we we’re building on at the Butterfly Lab was basically a decade of folks working deep in culture to try to put together literally a toolkit, a set of tools that people might be able to use in order to rethink the way that they’re understanding what their roles are in bringing about change, and that’s what the the butterfly that was meant to do

KARIM

So you just mentioned the toolkit, which I think is also one of the most interesting aspects of the project and certainly one that I personally spent a lot of time with, and it was the first time that I really sort of thought about kind of story creation through the lens of very tangible outcomes and to have a framework and a step-by-step process to follow in terms of the story creation. And so maybe you can talk a little about like what went into the creation of that toolkit. How did you know to sort of sequence things in the way that you did? What was the process of like kind of creating that? What were the inputs into the creation of that toolkit?

JEFF

I think the breakthrough for Nayantara Sen and I was coming up with the narrative pyramid because that allowed us to be able to explain to people in a really easy kind of a way. Like here’s actually how culture functions and here’s the different points at which we need to be able to move people. And to be able to explain that in that way allowed us to show how the strategic communications model was a model that was essentially ephemeral and not sticky. That what we really needed to do is to be able to move people at the level of narrative and really to move them, you know, to understand how these narratives fit together into a larger set of values that define a worldview. Which again, I think is latent in everybody’s, you know, way of kind of looking at the world.

I don’t want to simplify it too much, but to say there’s a worldview in which scarcity is the primary rule and this particular worldview and this particular value of scarcity fits along with all these other types of things. Scarcity fits into narratives that are based on fear. Scarcity fits into narratives that are based in this idea of competition or meritocracy. It fits into all of these different types of of ideas that actually activate us in a particular kind of a way often towards reactionary politics, not always, but often, towards reactionary politics. But what if we can counter that with narratives of expansiveness, right? Of connection, of mutuality, for instance, that those would activate a different set of politics and a different set of points of view about a policy. And I think in every person, we have these different conflicting types of values that are at work in any given type of moment.

And as you were talking about earlier, right, in 2008, right, these are moments where different kinds of values could be activated, right? If there’s a economic crisis, you can activate fear, right? But you could also activate generosity or mutuality, right? That could activate ideas of mutual aid or assist that result in people creating modes of assistance for each other. The idea that we’re all in this together as opposed to we’re all fending for ourselves.

And so we wanted to try to remind people of these types of ideas, which are not they’re not foreign to the organizing that we do. But oftentimes we get caught up with the tactic and the tactic becomes the strategy in of itself. Like you’re given a hammer, and you just hit the nail, right? So that was the idea about the toolkit. Like, can we get people to understand all these other ways to be able to approach the problem of communicating what it is you need them to do. You need them to vote a certain kind of way on an issue, right? But if everything gets kind of reduced to a certain end, right? Then you might lose sight of where it was you were trying to take people in the first place.

And so that became the basis of the toolkit. And there’s any number of tools that you can put into the toolkit. I’d argue that our toolkit is like just one type of toolkit that all kinds of other folks can come and add other tools to that particular type of toolkit. But ultimately, if we get people to understand that the end is not just vote a certain way on this particular day, that it’s not a yes or no binary, that we have a long way to go towards moving people in the direction that we want them to move to, and that if we’re thinking about trying to align our messaging in any given moment to a narrative and sort of a deep narrative destination or a worldview that we wanna take people to, then that gives us a different way of kind of understanding the work that we’re doing in any given type of moment.

KARIM

Yeah, it is really versatile. I was really impressed with just how applicable it seemed to a lot of different kinds of cultural projects. And it’s super accessible and is online and I’ll make sure that we link to it so folks can access it because it is something that I think can be used in a lot of different cultural organizing situations. Concurrently to developing the toolkit, you guys were also prototyping, I wanna say like a dozen projects, in the first year of the lab. And so I think that was all happening at the same time, if I understand correctly. Can you talk to me about, what were the kinds of projects you were looking at in that initial phase? How are you thinking about what you were trying to prototype? What are the spaces that you were operating in? Who are the folks that you were trying to engage with? And then how did that kind of lead you into the phase of the lab where I and the three other folks kind of came in with with a different kind of project?

JEFF

I think in general, what we were trying to do was to look for people that were working in a wide variety of different types of scenarios and situations. So we wanted to get people who are working in the law. We wanted to get people who are working in policy. We wanted to get people who were working specifically just as artists. We wanted to get people who had been kind of thinking about the different sides of the arts. Like they could, they could have been working from the art world. They could have been working from pop culture. They could have been working in different types of spaces. And what we wanted to do was to really get people to meet each other, right?

The nonprofit industrial complex has had everybody siloed and we all kind of get labeled and put into sort of a butterfly case, so to speak. We’re all these beautiful little butterflies like on a pin with a little label on it. And we don’t get to interact or literally cross breed our ideas. You know what I mean? And so that in of itself was, I think, really eye opening for a lot of people. It was eye opening for us, for sure.

You know, to have an artist who’s working on this notion of open borders and to have them in a room with somebody who is a lawyer who’s working immediately on this issue of what’s happening in Texas, where the border has been closed by executive order or by a policy that’s come down from ICE, and to have them being like, how do we work with each other. Like we want to get people to the same place, right? To be more inclusive, to be more empathetic to the plight of refugees. But one person has an issue in the immediate case, like, how are you going to get asylum for these folks? And of course, the issues have changed dramatically since then, but you’ve got folks who are like, we’ve got to get these people as potential asylees.

And then on the other side, people are like, you know, like we’ve got to get people to understand that borders are fluid and they’re fixed by this, like sort of construction of the nation state. And how do they even have a conversation together about what to do in the moment? So those are some of where some of the most generative types of things kind of came.

One of the lessons that we took from previous generations where there would be these types of debates and sectarian kinds of fights about what the proper line was and what the proper job of a revolutionary was to be. These conversations would have been had on the sides of broadsheets. You know what I mean? And also have violent ends. But if we could get everybody in the room to say like, hey, you’re doing this, I’m doing that, we’re all kind of in this together. That’s something that narrative work allows us to do is to be able to understand in some ways, where it is that we can be best in expanding that imaginary. Like you’re pushing back the imaginary in this way and you’re pushing the imaginary back in that way and we can figure out ways to work together. So that was one of the things that I think was one of the big takeaways from just year one was that all of these different projects, they were very, very different. They all needed very different kinds of things. I don’t know that we were successful in being able to provide all of those folks with what they actually needed in that particular moment, but it allowed us to be able to understand, in general, like what are the kinds of things that we can know? What are the things, the kind of things that would become informative?

And so in year two, we got like really in the weeds about thinking about the kinds of audience research, so to speak. Right. And even that is a marketing term. Right. But this is like how we’re building ⁓ constituencies for change, how we’re building ⁓ our, our blocks of how we’re, how we’re turning people into change makers themselves. And, and even using the tools that surveillance capitalism has used to actually sell shit back to us, to turn our desire, to reduce our desires from freedom, having freedom or being free to having the latest Blue Note record that, reissue that’s come out, right? Which I am absolutely guilty of and which happens every time I open up Instagram.

KARIM

100 %

JEFF

There it is. Like, how do we get people to desire freedom in the same way that they’re desiring, you know, to be part of that next record club that’s that’s coming down the down the pike? That’s part of the job that we need to do. And we can’t we can’t compete in in the old kind of a way. You know, we have to be able to use these types of things. We need the critique of that. And we also need to be able to figure out how we play on that new terrain.

KARIM

One of the things that you said that really resonated with me a lot is like that bringing folks together across all these different sectors from organizers to artists and folks that sort of traverse sort of the interstitium between some of those two spaces.

That’s one of the most important things that I feel like I took away from the program is like ever since then I’ve been really kind of like obsessed with like spending as much time with organizers that are working in the same issue areas that I am or even just like interrelated areas because I think some of the some of the things that we take for granted or how interconnected a lot of the social goals are that we’re pushing towards but spending a lot of time with organizers I think made it really clear to me that what they’re doing on a one-on-one basis is what culture makers are trying to do on a one-on-a-million kind of basis, right? And so, if you can understand how organizers are shifting from looking at like the work that like TIRRC was doing in our cohort, right? Like that deep canvassing work is like super just one-on-one hyper personal, but it really has direct bearings on like what we’re doing, telling a series of short stories set an aspirational futures, right? Like if we can have a similar kind of conversation that taps into something in the way that organizers do, then the possibilities are phenomenal. So since then, I feel like I’ve tried to spend a lot more time with organizers that are doing work like that, just to better understand like what are the stories that they’re telling that are shifting people’s perspectives. And then how do we kind of capture some of that magic in a bottle and like, you know, kind of put it in a book.

I’m curious too, because again, you have a background in culture strategy, but you also like have a deep background as like a culture maker. And so I’m curious to hear you talk a little bit also about like how some of these ideas around strategy influence the way that you think about the art that you’re making and the books you’re writing. I mean, I think your most recent book is like a really interesting example of that, right? Like how does telling the story of Bruce Lee fit into the culture strategy work that you’ve been doing alongside your writing practice for so many years. How does it make you think about what are the important stories to tell right now in this moment? Because I feel like all of these things are connected, right? And what are the changing dynamics of the world that we’re in that deepen us kind of further into a purpose and kind of inform what we want to work on and what we need to be.

JEFF

Ooh, jeez, Karim, yes, such simple questions. These are the absolute opposite of a yes/no binary! OK, all right. So some things to say. So I just got off tour. One of the great conversations I able to have was with Walida Amarisha, who’s an organizer in Portland, and who coined this amazing sentence that just sticks with me and is it just takes all kinds of different types of shapes for me and helps me to rethink my thinking all the time. But she wrote that all organizing and science fiction.

KARIM

I can’t tell you how often I use that quote! Do you remember when I first pitched you guys on Muslim Futures and I brought in a copy of Octavia’s Brood and like, I was like right here, all organizing is science fiction!

JEFF

It’s all right there. And then that means that all science fiction is organizing as well, right? Because we’re not saying one precedes the other. We’re saying they are each other. All organizing is science fiction and all science fiction is organizing. That’s one of the things that it made me think of in that particular type of moment as you’re saying all that kind of stuff. Like in the creation of what we’re doing, we’re actually all organizing and that takes us back to that point that I just made, is like, if we think of all of, if we think of all of this stuff is organizing, right? If we think of organizers as organizing, but we also think of creators as organizing as well, like then that gives us a different way of kind of understanding what it is that the work is that we’re doing. And if we’re organizing folks, what are we organizing them towards? And I think that that’s again, like part of like what the lessons of this last decade are about. And in terms of these resurgent social movements that came about, they even allow us to kind of think about the roles that we need to be able to play in this current movement. How we need to be in relationship to each other.

So the Bruce Lee project came about decades ago and and it’s weird that it’s kind of taking the shape that it’s taken because I finished really writing the book last year (2024) for the most part before the election. And yet it’s kind of continued to take a different shape now in this political and this particular political moment. But, know, the idea that I was thinking about in that particular moment last year was why is it that we had this powerful narrative around Stop Asian Hate and Stop AAPI Hate that actually turned a large part of our Asian American Pacific Islander Native Hawaiian communities reactionary. It triggered the fear narrative in them as opposed to the sort of solidarity narrative in them. And then how does that relate to thinking about like what it is that we’re trying to to advance in terms of, know, the very idea of identity itself? If violence is the thing that’s making us all Asian-American because it didn’t make us all Chinese, it made us all more Asian-American, then what is that narrative then point towards? And here’s a perfect example of how the messaging gets in the way of of what it is that we want to move and activate people towards. Like the stop portion of this actually activates the fear narrative. It activates this narrative that pushes us in the direction of isolating ourselves. It becomes sort of this this mechanism for which is I think it makes for a great story, like the story of us against the world type of thing. But it ultimately like leads us towards negativity, towards death. Right. It’s a. It’s what we’ve learned in hip hop time and again.

Right. It’s the Tupac story. Right. In a lot of ways. Right. ⁓ And and so, you know, instead, like for me, when when violence is occurring against us in the bottom of 2020, the bottom of our feeling most like vulnerable and victimized, that’s when the image of Bruce Lee starts reappearing on the walls in Oakland, Chinatown, San Francisco, Chinatown, all over the country on our all our feeds.

He’s a symbol of strength. He’s a symbol of pride. Obviously, he’s a symbol of “let’s fight back.” But what does he point to and his life? His biography always for me pointed back towards openness, to inclusion, to solidarity, towards lifting people up towards freedom.

You know, in his first two movies.

He plays a character who isolates himself, who has a community that loves him, that cares for him. And in both instances, he decides to go rogue, to go lone wolf, and he loses his community. Like the opponents, the villains in the movie, literally kill his community off. And that puts him into justice seeking mode. But both those movies are tragedies. At the end of the movie, he’s either killed (in Fist of Fury) or he’s sent off to jail, as he is in Big Boss. So he comes up with his own story for this third movie, Way of the Dragon, where he comes in from the outside to help this group of restaurant workers who are in a foreign country and who are being victimized by a mob boss who literally wants to crush the restaurant, deport the immigrants and to gentrify the neighborhood. And he comes in to help them out. He teaches them how to fight. He literally organizes them, teaches them how to fight, and then he helps to defend them and he’s able to survive. In the end, he walks off and theoretically goes to the next folks in the diaspora who are in need of help. And that’s the story that Bruce writes. And so, you know, that’s the story of Bruce to me in a nutshell. And we could go so much deeper into that kind of thing, but you know, that’s the story that I want to tell people.

And then, of course, we move into this period that we’re in now. And even more so those themes of needing solidarity and how far does our our solidarity expand? And and what does it mean for us to think about an expansive solidarity as opposed to a solidarity that ends with just those who look like us? That’s even more important in this particular moment, right? Where the same folks who are all like, you know, like they’re all against us are now like, look at the state coming to round us all up. You know, like these are stories that, that point us towards having solidarities with other people who are getting rounded up, who are expressing their political views and seeing their book banned or how, or being forcibly removed to people who are immigrants who are actually legalized who are getting deported, to families that are getting separated, to two people who are being preyed upon by the police, like that’s where our solidarities could and should go to so it’s weird that the book is out now because in some ways it’s just kind of helped to reinforce all of those types of things that I have been kind of writing about last year with no idea that that we were going to be in this type of political situation that we’re in. So again, like all of us are all of us become all of us who are kind of expanding the imaginary, whether that’s through science fiction or that kind of thing. We’re all organizers and through the stories that we write, the narratives that we apply, and the places that we want to take people with our stories, we are organizing people as well.

KARIM

That’s amazing. I didn’t know that story about Way of the Dragon. That’s really cool. Like I mean, and also just the story around how your book evolved because it makes me think like, yeah, these like stories enter into the world at the moment that there’s that they’re supposed to, right? They enter into the world when they’re needed. And your book seems like a great example of that.

I thought, maybe we could just close with, again reflecting on your book coming out this year, in this current political and social climate, and reflecting on the experience of the Butterfly Lab and knowing without saying anything specific that there’s, there’s more Butterfly Lab stuff happening in the future, when you talk to other culture makers, what is the assignment like in this current moment? What’s the role, what’s the significance of folks making culture, particularly in a political climate like this, where things are so much more dire than they were five years ago, for so many communities, not just ours.

JEFF

Yeah, I think it’s just continuing to be able to tell the stories that that we want to tell. I thought it was interesting, just looking at the list of of of movies that have come out, like in the past couple of months and and all of them have kind of been duds.

And the one big success is this movie that actually takes on ICE directly, right? One Battle After Another. And it’s not to say that’s the most perfect movie in many ways, but it’s literally one that is is positing, you know, revolution in the form of an underground railroad that that these, anti-immigration enforcement, these anti-ICE activists and organizers have been able to create and drawing explicit parallels to movements for liberation, Black liberation movements in particular. I thought that was really interesting, and I think that that’s what people want in this particular moment. People want those kinds of narratives to be able to kind of help them think about the current moment. So it’s just continuing to do the work that we’re doing. It’s not to be daunted by this or to imagine that, it’s to point out that we all, in a classic way, been shut out again because of all this anti-woke-ism and the sort of collaboration-ism, the sort of Vichy regime that all of these universities and studios and media companies have become. But to to like just continue to be able to network and do our work and build the structures that we need to build because we saw how fast it turned. And we could see again, if we look back, how fast it turned even in the last decade, you know, from Black Lives Matter being a hashtag to overnight becoming a global movement and what folks did in terms of building the structures that they built at that, like none of that structure building has gone away.

None of those storytellers have gone away. If anything, we have more stories to tell and more lessons that we’ve learned in that time. so yeah, we just have to continue to to persevere. If we think about the movement from Lewis Powell to Steve Bannon, that’s like a 50 year arc. And there’s ways in which we can steel ourselves, I think, by thinking about things in the long run. We’ve continued to build through all these moments of reactionary politics. And we’ve had these kinds of breakthroughs, and I believe that we still will.

KARIM

Well said, Jeff. I appreciate you taking some time to chop it up with me, man. It’s always good talking to you.

JEFF

I love this. Thank you so much, Karim. I’ve got to reverse the tables at some point and ask you for the answers to these same questions, because I know you thought about this so deeply too.

KARIM

I’m so grateful for all the work that you’re doing both as an artist and also as a strategist. I mean, like, like I was saying before, the Butterfly Lab has been so influential to the way that I kind of think about how I tell stories, how, you know, I write books, how I make films, how the Utopia Studio is doing all the work that we’re doing. And that tight relationship between thinking about political organizing and storytelling is so foundational. And so I’m just really grateful to have gone through the program and being able to work so closely with you on developing Muslim Futures and looking forward to a lot more to come, my friend.

JEFF

It’s my honor and pleasure, man, to be able to work alongside you. So thank you.

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This chat brought me so much joy, Iman cracks me up every time we talk. And as funny as this conversation was, we also dug into some deep emotional and philosophical territory. Like, if there was complete transparency in the world about every good and bad deed all of us ever did, could that kind of accountability nudge the world toward greater kindness and solidarity? For all of our sakes, I sure hope so.

Well, Iman’s story posits that exact hypothesis, where our good and bad deeds are plain as day for the whole world to see. And as much as that makes the world a better place, it also presents a whole slew of possible ethical conundrums…

See some pics from the comic book version of the story at the bottom of this post, and to read Iman’s story, you can order your copy of MUSLIM FUTURES at the link below!

Order the book!

See you in the future!

Karim

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MUSLIM FUTURES is available for pre-order

Regular readers will know that this month, I’m doing a little series on the making of MUSLIM FUTURES, our brand new anthology book featuring a multiverse of stories set in aspirational futures. It’s available NOW as a prose fiction book and as a graphic novel, and a ton of love from a ton of wonderful artists went into this, so I hope you’ll check out the pre-order campaign at the link below and snag a copy for yourself and maybe some friends that need a dose of an aspirational future right now! (i.e., everyone. We all need that)

Order Muslim Futures!

I’ve also been posting a really fun series of conversations with each of the authors in the anthology! See below for my first 3 of these chats with:

Nijla Mu’min, author of THE WEDDING

Randa Jarrar, author of LUNCH AT THE PENAL COLONY

Sami Khan, author of MA’IL

I loved being able to have the excuse to jump into the wayback machine (or is it the way-forward machine when we’re talking about the future?) and talk through the inspiration for these stories, and how these aspirational futures hit different now in 2026, now that our descent into dystopia has accelerated so dramatically. It was really nourishing for me, and I hope you dig these convos too!

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THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB is available for home viewing

The Voice of Hind Rajab is now available to rent or purchase on digital platforms in the US. If you haven’t seen the film yet, now is the time to help amplify Hind’s story across the world, and support the film’s calls to action to protect children, demand immediate humanitarian and medical aid to Gaza, and end the genocide.

Rent or Buy The Voice of Hind Rajab

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Thank you so much for your support!

See you in the future,

Karim

Sami’s story is so layered, there’s a lot to love here, but what I love most is how it embodies something so culturally specific about Islam, but also very universal. Namely, the idea that to reach into the future, we also need one hand reaching back to preserve the past. For example, in our conversation, we talked about how Muslims preserved the world’s knowledge during the Dark Ages, and how sadly relevant that is today, as we’re seeing virtually every industry struggling to preserve its art and culture in an increasingly digital and corporate ecosystem.

See some pics from the comic book version of the story at the bottom of this post, and to read Sami’s story, you can order your copy of MUSLIM FUTURES at the link below!

Order the book!

See you in the future!

Karim

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Sometimes creating a future means imagining worlds wildly different from our own, showing the immensity of what’s possible ahead across all aspects of society.

But sometimes the future is a feeling.

Sometimes the most aspirational thing about the future can be how it makes us feel when the world chooses to value us the way we deserve. For example, what if American society decided to value Black maternal health? What if we all decided that aging was to be treasured, and that our time ahead is always infinite? Nijla’s story embodies that world in the most intimate way.

See some pics from the comic book version of the story at the bottom of this post, and to read Nijla’s story, you can order your copy of MUSLIM FUTURES at the link below!

Order the book!

See you in the future!

Karim

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Check out a couple of pages from the comic book version of this story at the bottom of this post and please order your copy of MUSLIM FUTURES at the link below!

Order the book!

See you in the future!

Karim

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Pre-order Muslim Futures!

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece for the Color Congress blog called “Bridging an Ethical Divide: Islamophobia, Harm and Repair in Film Curation.” The cliff’s notes version of it is that during my previous life as an exec at some predominantly white cultural institutions, I experienced pretty shocking demonstrations of Islamophobia, made all the more shocking by how politically “progressive” these organizations claimed to be.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I kept asking myself, what is it going to take for the majority of Americans to see Muslims in an authentic and un-manipulated way? I mean, there’s no shortage of Muslim cultural icons that have proliferated into the mainstream. But it’s not enough. Our stories are a drop in the bucket. They’re too few and far between. That was my thinking: that the problem was scale. We need to create a narrative ocean of authentic Muslim stories that subverts all those awful (and false) tropes laid out pretty clearly and comprehensively in “Missing and Maligned”, a first-of-its-kind study commissioned by Pillars Fund. But IMHO we had to go beyond just subverting the tropes. We had to depict an aspirational future for Muslims in America and beyond, one that shows our our true values of belonging and community care, our intersectionality and thus, how when Muslims thrive, the entire world thrives. In other words, we needed to create a multiverse of radically aspirational Muslim Futures.

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That may sound daunting at first, but actually, the prototypes for this kind of massive storytelling footprint were already in our rearview.

In 2020, I joined a group of interdisciplinary futurists called the Guild of Future Architects, led by the fabulous Kamal Sinclair. She’d just launched the group a few months before Covid shut everything down, so they had to scrap all their plans for the year and quickly prototyped a worldbuilding process where about 20 people from a variety of sectors (artists, organizers, data scientists, urban planners) could all gather on zoom and design a radically aspirational future together. Then someone would write a short story set in that world. We did 10 worldbuilding sessions over 10 weeks and before long, we had a book of short stories. It was a multiverse. Mine was set in a radically aspirational 2090, in a world where we finally figured out universal childcare, centering on a rite of passage for a ten year old child, through the eyes of her single parent, struggling to let go. You can read it here. Oh, and the characters all happened to be Muslim.

Another one of these prototypes had come years before even that. Way back in 2010-2014, when I somehow convinced the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (RIP) to give ITVS half a million dollars a year so I could create and showrun a science fiction anthology, inspired by the Twilight Zone, where each episode featured a different indie writer/director’s vision for a not-too-distant-future that commented on our current present. It was called FUTURESTATES. And yes, that too was a multiverse. A less aspirational one, but a beginning…

As I started thinking about how to Frankenstein these different methods together, I also couldn’t stop thinking about comics. Comics reach a totally different audience than literary fiction or film, and can be incredibly evocative and inspirational. See my origin story post.

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So, I thought, what if we gathered an awesome intersectional group of Muslim writers for a worldbuilding experience, wherein we co-create the building blocks of a variety of possible aspirational futures. And then each of us writes a short story set in one of those futures; a story that embodies our core themes of belonging and abundance and community care. That’s a fiction anthology. And then, what if we gather an array of artists and colorists and letterers to adapt the whole thing into a graphic novel anthology too. And then could be a prototype for a whole slate of feature films and TV series. It would be a whole new kind of values-driven mass-development process, to create a multiverse of stories set in unique worlds that all thematically talked to each other. That’s MUSLIM FUTURES.

I started reaching out to co-creators. I was fortunate to get a grant for this project up front from Race Forward’s Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy (more on them next time), and so I tried to figure out a model wherein folks were getting paid as equitably as possible for what they were offering to the project, given the limited resources we had. And because I think it’s important to be transparent about this kind of thing - new ways of working that don’t rely on broken or extractive models - I’m going to break down that arrangement here:

• I’d facilitate a worldbuilding session that all the co-creators would participate in, and then we’d all write a short story.

• Everyone would get an equal stipend up front. It wouldn’t be a lot, but it would honor their time and creative effort.

• In exchange for that compensation, I’d license the publishing rights - and only the publishing rights - to these stories. Everyone retained their own copyright, the underlying rights to their IP, and thus, the film and TV rights to their own stories, and could exploit them however they wish.

• I would fundraise for the additional dollars we’d need to make the graphic novel (which was later provided by the great folks at the Pop Culture Collaborative), and oversee that whole production process, in collaboration with the writers.

• Once we published, everyone would share equally in all back-end profits from the books, and explore film/TV adaptations of those stories however we liked.

That’s the 40,000 foot view. There’s a lot more to dig into about how we made this happen, and so we shall, in the rest of the posts in this short series.

Next week we’ll go back to the beginning and dig into more depth about Race Forward’s Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy. The B-lab team turned out to be a whole lot more than a funding partner, they had a deep bench of research and methodologies they’d been cultivating for years on how to engage specific audiences to maximum impact around immigration specifically. More on that next time with Jeff Chang, brilliant author, and former Director of the B-Lab!

And, once more with feeling, we’re rolling this whole case study out piece by piece over the next month, through Ramadan, until Eid, in coordination with the launch of the campaign to pre-order your copy of MUSLIM FUTURES right here!

Pre-order Muslim Futures!

See you in the future,

Karim

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Yet again, the answer is a question of how well we are compartmentalizing the world from our day-to-day. For those of us that still have that luxury, that is. For me, the answer lies in how wide I’m setting the aperture on the question. The world is an increasingly dangerous place for everyone now. Or perhaps just more visibly so.

But even in a creeping dystopia, we find power in each other. We find purpose. I’ve always found that to be true. I hope you are finding your purpose also, and if you need a little inspiration, I hope you can find it in what we’re cooking up for you in 2026.

Hopefully these can be a few more lights in the tunnel for you…

“The Voice of Hind Rajab” echoes on…

A couple of weeks ago, THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB was nominated for the Best International Feature Oscar, which is truly amazing. Deep gratitude to the Academy voters that uplifted Hind’s voice, and a Palestinian story about the ongoing genocide, in this way. It’s truly unprecedented.

Meanwhile, we continue to screen the film for members of Congress, the UN, and the EU and UK Parliament in our push to honor Hind’s voice by strengthening protections for children, and removing the barriers to aid in Palestine and around the world. Most powerfully, Wesam Hamada, Hind’s mother, just wrote an op-ed in the NYT on the anniverary of Hind’s murder. Please read it and help amplify her calls to action in any way you can.

And the film is still in theaters, please go see it. As Kaouther says often, it’s important that we bear witness. Theater listings are available at https://www.thevoiceofhindrajabfilm.com/

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“Muslim Futures” launches this Ramadan!

At long last! This Ramadan (Feb 17), we are launching the exclusive pre-order campaign for the MUSLIM FUTURES anthology!

For folks that haven’t already heard about this wild new narrative change project we’ve been cooking up for a couple years at the Utopia Studio…

Muslim Futures is a prose fiction anthology AND a graphic novel anthology - yep, we are releasing 2 entirely different versions of this book here on this campaign - featuring a multiverse of stories from my favorite authors and filmmakers and artists, all of them Muslim, and all of us representing a vast spectrum of what it means to be Muslim based on our wide array of lived experiences and backgrounds. And all of these stories are set in aspirational futures for Muslims in America and beyond. Futures where Muslims have all the conditions to thrive, where our experiences are not defined by our trauma or our proximity to violence, as the mainstream media tropes love to do, but where our stories are defined by our authentic values of community care, justice and love. We wanted to tell our stories, our way, in our own words, and create our own futures, full of abundance and belonging.

I think there is such power - such necessary power, especially now, in the year 2026 as we are seeing so much Islamophobia and xenophobia - to re-root the world’s perceptions of Muslims and Muslim adjacent communities all over the world in our true authentic values. Especially as we’re living through a dystopia here in the US, it’s important to envision aspirational futures, and map out how we can build them in the real world.

Most exciting for me is that we cast those experiences and visions of the future through a lens of science fiction, the supernatural, magical realism! This multiverse was the product of a really deep and expansive worldbuilding process, designed to center values of abundance and belonging and radically aspirational futures for all, and so not only are these stories really emotionally powerful, but each world showcases some really fantastic futurist thinking. This book was so much fun to create and I hope it is just as much fun for you to read.

And the book is done! It’s beautifully crafted and designed by our collection of writers and artists, and we can’t wait to share it with you.

The pre-order campaign kicks off on the first day of Ramadan and launches all month long until Eid, so please get in there and snag your copy!

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This project was incubated through Race Forward’s Butterfly Lab for immigrant narrative strategy, which for folks that don’t know about it, was IMHO just one of the most innovative models for creating cultural projects to combat xenophobia that I’ve ever experienced. I learned a lot about optimizing a story for a specific audience and maximum impact. And as readers like you know by now, the whole purpose of the Utopia Studio on Substack is to share what we’ve learned, so…

As the campaign unfolds across the month of Ramadan, I’ll be sharing a lot about the process of working through the Butterfly Lab fellowship, their model and toolkit, and share interviews with the team that created that whole program, and unpack why it is so awesome. Stay tuned for that!

I’ll also be sharing fun interviews with each of the Muslim Futures authors, talking about their weird wild stories and storyworlds and on everything from science fiction and magical realism, to spirituality, to what it takes to envision an aspirational future especially now as we’re living through a dystopian present. I hope you dig it!

See you in the future!

Karim

A very small bit of prologue: something no one tells you about indie comics is that if you’re lucky enough to partner with publishers that share your values, there are very few limits to how far you can bend the rules. It’s such a versatile medium, that’s one of the things I love most about comics. And it’s a medium that’s very tolerant of very off the wall genre conventions. You really can get just about as wild as you want. Or as political as you want. As radical as you want.

And if you’re lucky enough to also be working with a values-aligned indie publisher like CEX Publishing, and you suddenly decide that issue #3 needs to be twice as long as any other issue that came before it, because a mass prison break of unjustly incarcerated POC from an illegal detention center in the far reaches of space is just that epic? Well you just pull up your pants and write that double long issue, FTW.

I love this chapter for so many reasons. For one, it has my absolute favorite final page of this entire series. Let me know what ya think!

But mostly, because David N. Gordillo just destroyed the art on these pages. I mean, look at this cover, above! And Lesley’s colors? Come on now. [chef’s kiss]

Ok, I said I’d keep it short, so that’s all for now. Enjoy!

And see you in the future,

Karim

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See below for the trailer:

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As many of you know, this is the inaugural film in the Utopia Studio slate of projects, all of which explore the legacies of imperialism, manifestations of structural Islamophobia, and the way these injustices are mass-produced to impact so many more communities worldwide, especially now in the year 2025. So I’m incredibly grateful to see this film now reaching a theater near you. This story, its inherent call for justice and liberation for Palestine, and a call for the protection of children and aid workers, all nested within an incredibly faithful and artful retelling of the real events, lives deep in my heart. Every aspect of this film exemplifies what we’re working to build at the Utopia Studio - from the kinds of stories we tell and support to the way they are made.

In this case, the producing team worked tirelessly to make sure that The Voice of Hind Rajab was made in the most community-rooted and ethical way, from prioritizing Hind’s voice and the family’s wishes in the creation of the story from the very beginning, and deep partnership with the Red Crescent, to the ways in which the family and the Red Crescent are being equitably remunerated for sharing their stories. We’re also launching a wide-reaching impact campaign, beginning this week with a screening at the UN and a screening for members of Congress and their staff. Much more to come on this front, but in the short term, I hope that all of you in the NY and LA area can show up to see the film in theaters. And the film releases nationwide in January, so stay tuned for updates on that.

Please visit the site for showtimes and tickets at: https://www.thevoiceofhindrajabfilm.com/

Thank you, fam!

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This is another chapter we could just as easily call “as in life, so in curation.”

Last time, we talked about curatorial values, and offered some examples from organizations that have codified theirs. But values don’t mean much if we don’t put them into action. So as much as it was exciting and honestly a big relief to hear from so many programmers all about their curatorial values, it was even more important to me to learn how they were putting them into practice. That’s what the next chapter of TOWARD CURATORIAL JUSTICE delved into, and what I’ve excerpted below. Here we examine what it takes for a film festival, a distributor, any arts organization of any kind really, to build an operational praxis.

Short answer? Time. A lot of it. Because there’s no manual for it. If your organization’s values are unique and organic to the people that comprise it (as they should be!), there’s no cheat sheet, no shortcut. It’s unique to your culture and you have to discover it for yourself, think through it yourself, but probably most importantly, FEEL through it yourself. In going on this journey myself, I’ve found that this is heart-work as much as head-work. We have to bring our whole human selves to this practice, engage with what feels nourishing, and talk to a community and find out what would make them feel seen and heard and uplifted. You gotta feel your way through it. It takes time. And it will undoubtedly change over time too, as communities and society and culture changes around us over time. Which leads me to the other big takeaway here…

This work is never done. Those of you in movements know, justice is a practice, not a destination. And again, “as in life, so is it in curation.”

Ok enough prologue, on with the good stuff. Read on and please share what resonates and what doesn’t in the comments!

See you in the future,

Karim

FROM VALUES TO PRACTICE

As we explored in the previous section, curatorial justice begins with deep engagement with audience and community, codified values and commitments to artistic and ethical rigor, and intentional focus on disrupting the perpetuation of systems of exclusion and harm. We’ll now explore how these values and commitments manifest as tangible daily practices for programmers and curatorial organizations.

Community-engaged review

A wide survey of general programming processes across all our participating organizations reveals a general consistency of some practices. In most (though not all) cases, open submissions of films are reviewed by a team of screeners, or interns, or volunteers. The employment bases for these larger teams of initial curators varies greatly depending on the resources of the organization, but there is general consistency in that few organizations (if any) are fully resourced to equitably remunerate these initial reviewers for their considerable labor, despite best attempts to do so. Thus, while films from priority communities or films raising authorship or ethical questions are flagged for more experienced programming staff, the majority of values-driven programmatic practices are administered closer to the midpoint of the curatorial timeline, when programming staff receive a reduced slate of submissions for deeper review. Additionally, several festivals interviewed explained that their screeners, whether volunteer or compensated, are in several cases not film professionals, but rather community members that are film lovers and aficionados. This is notable and refreshing, given that several programmers we spoke with detailed at length the environment of elitism that permeated the programming climates of many larger festivals and legacy cultural organizations. For example, the New Orleans Film Festival (NOFF), the Cleveland International Film Festival (CIFF), BlackStar, and CAAMFest all bring community members that are non-film professionals into their programming process, underlining the prioritization of constituent communities and an audience-forward approach in action. NOFF Artistic Director Clint Bowie: “Bringing them into the process really helps us understand how films will play locally. It’s about having the audience curate the program they will be watching.”

Exceptions to this practice emerged in conversation with some participants, however the result was often the same - a tremendous amount of labor being held by the programming staff. For example, despite not receiving open submissions (and instead soliciting submissions entirely through outreach), HRWFF still receives hundreds of submissions, which still necessitates the use of a volunteer screening committee, though that is a practice they are currently revisiting. Conversely, LAAPFF for example does not utilize volunteers at all (as a matter of ethics), resulting in staff programmers or stipended screeners reviewing everything submitted.

Demographic analyses at work

Many of the programming leaders we interviewed indicated that filmmaker demographics are continually assessed on an ongoing basis, and that authorship is a consistent point of discussion in all programming meetings. A critical mechanism for these assessments lies in the submission paperwork from the film team, which may take various forms, from an artistic statement to a question on the online application, but its purpose is the same - to hear the filmmakers themselves in their own words describe their relationship to the community at the center of the story they are telling. Without this filmmaker-submitted statement, authorship and ethics are virtually impossible to assess, indicating the foundational significance of this tool. Of course, this is not a vetted document and could contain fabrications, but nevertheless, its existence is an important move toward curatorial justice.

Different organizations took different approaches to ensuring their programming slates were representative of their constituent communities. Interestingly, very few organizations expressed that they used tangible quotas for any community. Quotas aside, many film festivals identified priority communities that they seek to represent robustly and regularly. For example, the BlackStar programming team noted that while they do not use benchmarks for any community, Black women are a programming priority, as are Queer filmmakers. They also prioritize transgender voices and filmmakers with disabilities, though in both of these cases, submissions tend to be much lower. Festival Director Nehad Khader: “We also periodically just step back and review the program and ask who is missing overall. And if all else is equal, scoring-wise, if we are choosing between two similar films, we intentionally choose the film from the filmmaker that is from a more marginalized community. And we similarly prioritize native voices over outsider voices.” The team also noted years where certain priority communities, such as filmmakers in US-occupied territories like Hawai’i and Puerto Rico were not well represented in the open submissions, so they actively outreached to seek them out and program their films. Khader again: “As a festival that has decolonization called out in its core values, it is important for us to program films from US-occupied territories as often as possible.” Similarly, the Hawai’i International Film Festival is also particularly attentive to the cultural dynamics of their curation, and assesses cultural demographics heavily, because of the unique cross pollination of cultural interests, according to Artistic Director Anderson Le.

Festivals rooted in Indigeneity like Māoriland Film Festival take similar approaches to priority communities. Māoriland Festival Director, Madeleine Hakaraia de Young stated: “Cultural demographics are considered throughout the programming process - from submissions through to selection. We are constantly evaluating the mix and make-up of the programme. And where the eligibility of a submitter is unclear, we will always follow up with the submitter to clarify eligibility.” Here the notion of eligibility refers to whether significant members of a film’s creative team identify as Indigenous, which in cases where film creatives are not legally recognized members of certain nations, may require consultation with elders and community leaders of those nations. This “Indigenous-led” metric is critical to preserving authorial sovereignty, which is of great importance for the Indigenous-led festivals we spoke with. These eligibility frameworks that exist at community-specific film festivals and are not typically in place at legacy festivals run by predominantly white institutions are worthy of expansion and adoption on a universal scale. For even when demographic vetting is not necessary to ascertain eligibility, it is a potentially transformative tool in the hand of the programmer to assess the point-of-view and thus potential community impact of the film. For example, there were films cited by our participants as having been characterized “Indigenous films” in the programming guides of legacy film festivals where they screened, despite having no Indigenous filmmakers on the core creative team and no vetting process by which to determine that was the case. Unsurprisingly, these films were subject to great scrutiny and concern from Indigenous communities upon being exhibited.

Many interviewees also spoke at length about the significance of a plurality of perspectives on every film. That often includes getting multiple programmer voices from within the community at the center of the film (not just one) to vet the film for authenticity. VC’s Eseel Borlasa: “Even when there is a programmer who is a part of the community in question, a film goes through multiple community members to vet for lived experience. I’ve asked my parents to watch some submissions with me. Because we are not every human in the world. Maybe I love a film, but I need someone else to watch it to make sure I’m not romanticizing or exoticizing it, based on my lived experience.” NOFF’s Clint Bowie reaffirms this practice as well: “Even in the screener phase of review, staff leads are very intentional about who is being assigned what film, specifically in order to gauge authenticity. Because for example, we can’t just have one Black screener to represent the entirety of all Black communities in curation. It’s not realistic or fair.”

This process of ensuring that no one individual from a community is the sole gatekeeper assessing the authenticity or potential harm of a film is important. Interviewees expressed that it allows for an informed discussion around not just who is telling the story, but whose voice is centered in the film. HRWFF also investigates these questions deeply in their programming process. They write: “We try to analyze the ethical approach behind the filmmaking process – is there seemingly a healthy dynamic between participants and filmmaker? Is there re-traumatization without agency, or use of explicit material without intent or purpose?”

External allies to curation

HRWFF’s programming process was particularly interesting to us, because of the unique nature of the parent organization, Human Rights Watch, and its wide array of subject matter experts and ethics specialists on staff. The team shared: “We have an HRW researcher with knowledge of the subject matter review each film. As HRW is a global organization working in over 90 countries with a staff of 600, it is very rare that we encounter a film that our researchers are not equipped to review. In the rare instances that this occurs, we get a recommendation from knowledgeable HRW staff of an outside organization or individual expert they know who can review that film.” This robust ethical vetting practice was impressive to learn about. It’s significant, in that it is the single most expansive case we encountered in our research of programmers systematically bringing external subject matter experts in the review of every film.

Of course, such a process is not easily replicable within film festivals that do not have such large parent company infrastructure. But what if such a body did exist - perhaps one that was independent and accessible to a variety of organizations, or the field at large? And what if festivals were resourced to consult with the independent body on a regular basis as a matter of standard operating procedure? How might that shift the burden of ethical vetting away from programmers and onto a community of specialists specifically trained to do so?

In the meantime, however, without such a resource, many of the organizations I spoke with implemented a version of an external ethical review process, when that additional vetting was necessary. For example, Māoriland notes that “ the Indigenous Film Circle has created our own ecosystem that connects from time to time. Within this ecosystem are trusted community partners who are invited to contribute their perspective on films from their region.” Additionally, HIFF Artistic Director, Anderson Le: “We do engage external community partners or subject matter experts when vetting selections that feature communities not represented on our staff. For example, we did a Muslim filmmakers section some years ago and reached out to the University of Hawai’i and other Muslim groups, primarily from Indonesia and the Philippines, for consultation and outreach.” BlackStar Festival Director Nehad Khader noted that “we don’t always have the ability to assess ethics broadly, but that we are bringing in external voices to help vet a film if the community does not have representation on the programming team and we aren’t shy about asking folks to help, because if it was a film about my community, I would want to be asked. But we can do more.” CAAM’s Executive Director Don Young spoke about CAAMFest’s long standing practice of partnering with Pacific Islanders in Communications (PIC) on programming PI-centered films. “We should not program a film about NHPI [Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander] communities without consulting PIC.” LAAPFF adds further that this is why they need to be so community rooted, to center the needs of their community in what they program, because they need to be able to reach out to external culture bearers for guidance and be trusted that they will take the advice of those culture bearers seriously.

Empowering younger curators

Another important dynamic common within those programming teams interviewed is the manner in which they are cultivating junior staff and younger perspectives in their curatorial processes. For example, it was exceedingly rare among those programmers we interviewed for final decisions to be made by one or two individuals. Decisions were often cited as being made collectively. Several interviewees spoke directly about their intentions to deconstruct hierarchy and foster lateral decision-making processes. For Māoriland Film Festival, this practice is guided by the Māori principle of Tuakana-Teina, in which tuakana, or more experienced filmmakers, interact with teina, emerging filmmakers. Festival Director Madeleine Hakaraia de Young: “In a Tuakana-Teina relationship, the knowledge and experiences of both the tuakana and teina are acknowledged and celebrated. Tuakana-Teina is a practice that dissolves artificial barriers to collaboration and mitigates some of the toxicity within the industry. It compels those working together to create safe learning and work environments where the mana of all involved is respected. It is a tikanga for intergenerational success.”

For some festivals, this process of systematizing younger voices in the room has increasingly taken the shape of Programming Fellowships. In the case of Outfest Fusion, former Outfest Festival Directors Lu Mukerjee and later Faridah Gbadamosi both turned over the reins of the Fusion programming process to a cohort of younger QTBIPOC programmers or aspiring programmers. Gbadamosi: “We designed the fellowship to be something that can exist alongside a full time job, and they programmed the entire Fusion festival. They did all the intros and Q&A’s, and wrote the film descriptions. Because the only way to fix curatorial problems is to change who’s doing the curating.”

The Vancouver Queer Film Festival put on by Out on Screen, also recently launched their Programming Disruptor Fellowship, a game-changing training and mentorship initiative for emerging BIPOC 2SLGBTQIA+ film curators, led by Out On Screen’s Artistic Director, Charlie Hidalgo: ”This Fellowship aims to be a catalyst for transformative change in the Canadian film industry, shepherding new talent into a field that is in critical need of diversification, in order to further the dignity, liberty, and justice of BIPOC and 2SLGBTQIA+ identities.”

Through the fellowship, three emerging film programmers who identify as BIPOC 2SLGBTQIA+ receive $10,000 and the opportunity to be an integral part of the curation of the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. They detail further that the compensation is “based on an hourly wage of $24.08/hour + 4% vacation and wellness and networking funds. Selected Fellows are credited as Festival Programmers, and by the end of the program will have acquired a practical toolkit and a robust ethical framework that will enable them to approach their curatorial practice in a restorative and impactful way, centering accountability, integrity and community care.”

Full Spectrum Features, which is not a film festival, but a production and distribution company, also launched a Film Festival Leadership Lab some years back which also provides a vital support structure. Company President Eugene Sun Park: “From what we’ve experienced in relationships with film festivals, we have seen first hand that it’s not beneficial to throw people into Festival Director roles unless they’ve received training and the middle level for years. But many BIPOC folks are not supported at that level. So we partnered with the Film Festival Alliance to start a program that does that. We felt that if we can mentor and train 8 to 10 professionals that are BIPOC and from underrepresented genders every year as a cohort, spread across the country, then they can support each other and build connections and solidarity across various festivals. Unfortunately, we launched the program during the pandemic, and Film Festival Alliance was rebooting its leadership and programming, so we put the program on pause to retool the program a bit further for more meaningful impact.”

What is perhaps most compelling about these relatively new programs is not just that they are training and diversifying a new generation of programmers with tangible actionable experience that will create greater professional opportunities in the future for those supported, but that they are also teaching a new and more progressive, community-forward philosophy of programming, free from the vestiges of elitism and extractive community relationships. This is especially radical and necessary.

Just operational praxis

As alluded to above, it is important to underline that justice-centered festival practices are of course not limited to the process of curation. Curation of a film festival or any other exhibition venture exists within an ecosystem of operations that can either uplift those values even further or detract from them. Critical operational considerations, such as accessibility, childcare, pay structures for staff, screening fees for filmmakers, speaker fees, and the dismantling of generally toxic culture have also been woven into the values and practices of our participating organizations, and many stated explicitly that this work is ongoing. For example, BlackStar cites child care for festival participants as a manifestation of their aforementioned artistic and ethical rigor, as is accessibility technology like audio description and open captions and that disability justice as a core value underpinning all its operations. For many, including LAAPFF, justice manifests as low ticket prices for both online and in-person screenings, and a pay-what-you-can structure to programming, including opening night, and stipends for Festival staff to be able to eat and care for themselves appropriately during what many interviewees referred to as a traumatic period. VC Executive Director Francis Cullado again: “Film festivals are traumatic. A lot of things can go wrong. There’s always a fire to put out and we always have to perform. I am always asking, how much more, as people, can we take from this? How can we become more of a space of healing?” These factors contributed to the reinvention of LAAPFF’s C3 conference and panel programming (previously a series of professional development talks and workshops) into R3, or “R3NEWAL, a series of restorative activities and gatherings to connect peoples as themselves, instead of our titles as artists and creators.”

In regards to revenue sharing, many participants were particularly vocal also. Faridah Gbadamosi again: “At Outfest Fusion, it was very important to us that all the filmmakers got stipends, including shorts filmmakers. Festivals need to be building toward paying fees to filmmakers, and large organizations and their leadership are aghast for reasons that make no justifiable sense.” HRWFF’s team wrote: “We have revenue sharing of our online components with our cinema partners (which we began at the start of the pandemic to help support the cinemas and have continued given the slow return of audiences to in person screenings). We offer both screening fees to every film in our programs and travel honorariums (covering roundtrip airfare, hotel/airbnb accommodations, and a daily stipend) to all filmmakers we invite to our festivals. We offer speaker honorariums to every external panelist (including film participants but exempting the filmmakers). Speaker honorariums are important to ensure we aren’t furthering the practice of extractive storytelling or benefiting from expertise that is historically and continually under-compensated.” Thankfully, practices such as these are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, even at larger legacy festivals. However our industry lacks a clear and field-wide standard rate for fees like this, so the possibilities are still open for organizational undercutting and extractive economic models where filmmakers have no choice but to pay out of pocket to participate in those festivals that have historically demonstrated the most potential for professional growth dynamics, despite the fact that there are no guarantees that they will sell their film for a fee that will allow them to recoup these scarce resources.

SPOILER ALERT, if you haven’t read the first issue I posted last week, you can do it now HERE

… 1) the fact that the detention center our heroes are trapped in is in some uncharted evil maw of deep space, and 2) that the President is actually some kind of Emperor Palpatine level inhuman monster that fed off the suffering of all the inmates.

That’s it. That’s all I had. Sure, I thought that premise was cool as hell, but a premise is not a story. What the hell would our people do next? How do you get off a detention center in the deepest reaches of space? How do you get home? And what does home look like now? I didn’t know. So where to go from here? It didn’t flow out of me the way the first issue did. But it was 2018 by now, halfway through 45’s first run, and there was no shortage of inspiration for what a dystopian future would look like. And the thing that stuck with me, in my daily life, and also in my writing practice for this series, was that… bear with me a sec…

45 actually wasn’t The Big Bad.

Don’t worry, I haven’t lost my mind. He’s bad. SO fucking bad. But he’s just a man. Or demon, in our case. So… maybe not THE BIG Bad. What’s worse than him? Glad you asked.

What’s worse is what he gives permission to exist on a much bigger scale.

On the daily, he unleashes hordes of rabid nationalist xenophobic transphobic white supremacists that eat away at every corner of society.

Because hate is infectious.

When you see someone acting on their basest, most inhuman instincts with no repercussions, and then even being rewarded for it… it gives those instincts and actions permission to exist. Anywhere. Everywhere. And the fallout spreads.

So it eventually dawned on me that this was clearly where DIVIDE was headed. The President wasn’t the only monster. The monster was in a whole heckuva lot of us. If we let it in. And what lets it in? Hate. That feeling that the thing wrong with your life is that someone else took something from you (even though they didn’t). Someone you don’t understand, and so you fear them.

Everything flowed from that. Read on and you’ll see what I mean. More to come.

FYI, as promised, I’m putting the rest of the series behind the paywall. I know, I know. Don’t worry, the curatorial justice series and other case studies on narrative power building we’re doing here will all remain free. But comics ain’t free to make, kids, so they ain’t free to read neither. Yet. I mean, eventually I’ll probably drop the paywall on these, but if you want to read along week by week, you know what to do below. As always, thank you so much for your support!

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Today I’m sharing the first chapter of my graphic novel DIVIDE, as well as a little context for the inspiration behind the book, how we hoped to use it to build narrative power, and a little bit of work-in-progress behind-the-scenes stuff, for you folks that are into how the comics sausage is made. It’s a bit of a long read, so if you’re not into that, feel free to just scroll to the comics!

I’ll share the whole graphic novel, chapter by chapter in the coming weeks, but… wait for it… I’ll be putting those behind the paywall. I know, I know, but the time has come. So if you’re digging this series (or even if you’re not), please subscribe!

See you in the future!

- K

It was on January 27, 2017 that 45 signed the executive order for the first Muslim ban. That was also the day I wrote the first issue of DIVIDE.

If you’ve been reading this Substack, you know I’m a lifelong science fiction and comics reader. And in those early days of 45, I dove into the genre even deeper -- perhaps this time with a more escapist bent. It didn’t work, obviously, because it clearly led my mind to a futurist extrapolation of this budding war against Muslims, immigrants, and well… pretty much everyone. My parents are Pakistani immigrants who lived through the Partition, so family separation is an issue that cuts to the bone. But in those early days of 45, I was also a newish parent (our kiddo was 2 at the time) and so the deep fear of being separated from my family in any way was stronger than ever. The terror that 45 wouldn’t stop at immigrants, and that sooner or later, we’d all be criminalized was very real. That’s the premise of DIVIDE.

It was a dystopian anxiety-fueled fever dream, and here and now in the year 2025, it’s insane to me that so much of what was in that book is now coming to pass, but here we are. It makes me think a lot about how to effectively communicate the big implications of seemingly small decisions (like a vote), but we’ll get to that later.

Anyway, back in 2017, I just kept writing the thing, not knowing where it was leading. Because it made me feel better to exorcise those deepest darkest fears about where we were headed as a society. I’d never made a comic before, so all of this was pretty speculative, until I met David Gordillo at the 2019 San Diego Comic Con. We met at the Comics Creators Connection, this really awesome networking event for comics writers and artists. We had a five minute conversation, and David showed me his portfolio, I was floored, we exchanged emails, and now here we are 6 years later and we’ve been working together on a slew of projects ever since.

A few months later, in early 2020, the first issue was done. I didn’t have a publisher for it yet, and didn’t even know then how to get one. So I reached out to Andy Schmidt, who founded Comics Experience and had also started a printing business. So I hired them to run off a couple hundred copies, mainly just so I could hold it in my hand and share it with friends.

Real talk, I couldn’t imagine trying to sell it to anyone, or running a Kickstarter or anything like that. Because by then it was the summer of 2020, we were barely a few months into a pandemic, and people were losing their jobs, and the film industry was shutting down, and George Floyd had just been murdered and we were all locked indoors and getting sick, but we were hitting the streets in protest anyway, and there was an election around the corner and OMFG, how can you try to sell comics at a time like this?!

Deep breath.

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I’d always wanted DIVIDE to be a tool for political progress, but it just seemed smarmy to try and use the dystopia all around us to try and sell floppies. So I thought long and hard about it, and decided instead to just give the comic away, all couple hundred of them. But with a catch.

See, by now, the 2020 election was fast approaching, and one of favorite get out the vote orgs at the time, SEED THE VOTE, was doing really great work to get folks to the polls or to mail in their ballots in record numbers. But organizing takes time and money, of course, so I decided to start a GoFundMe for to raise money for them. And if you donated, I’d send you a free copy of the comic. Or if you were local, I’d drop it off in person.

Side note: those deliveries were a real pandemic highlight for my family. It was Halloween afternoon and my wife and kiddo and I all dressed up in thick polyester Pokemon bodysuits and drove around in 90 degree LA heat hand delivering comics to people’s doorsteps. It was a rare moment of joy in those times. Check it out:

Things turned out for the better in that election. It felt like the world was starting to “get back to normal”, for better or worse. And as we all know now, it was for better AND worse. But the pandemic abated at least, and we were all able to start getting back into the world to some degree. But xenophobia, Islamophobia and creeping fascism didn’t just go away, of course. So as 2020 lurched toward 2024, David and I (and our creative collaborators Lesley and Simon and Sean and Jason), just kept going. The dangers were still very real for us and we felt that DIVIDE was still an important story to tell.

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By 2022, the book was picked up by CEX Publishing, and the first issues started hitting the shelves of your local comic shop. And by 2023, we were wrapping production and getting ready to put together a trade paperback. We were able to put in a rush order with our printers and the book was going to come out in the summer. Of 2024. Right before the next election. It was like deja vu all over again.

My version:

It is 2017 and Trump just got elected and enacted a Muslim ban and I am writing Divide #1 for the first time.

It is 2020 and Trump is running for reelection and I am printing Divide #1 for the first time trying to raise money to GOTV and get his ass out of the white house. And succeeding.

It is 2024 and I am publishing the Divide graphic novel to sway hearts and minds to keep Trump out of office. And failing.

Sigh.

Obviously, it didn’t work out. Not that I expected one comic book to sway an election. There were way too many chaotic elements in 2024 that were bigger than all of us.

But no matter what happened in that election, we were always going to still have work to do. People were always going to need stories to help them envision a trajectory toward something much better than either of our subpar candidates had to offer. That’s what scifi has done for the readers for generations.

So in spite of everything wrong in the world, I think DIVIDE still means something today, even if that first issue reads a bit more like a documentary now than it does a scifi comic. As we’re seeing, less than a year into the current administration, things can always get worse. If we let them.

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And to be sure, cultural work like comics and films and TV may not get massive numbers of people to the polls or pressure our reps to stop sending weapons to genocidal maniacs, or anything like that. But we know that stories matter. They mean something to people. And as I know personally, one good story can change someone’s life and make them want to dedicate it to something meaningful. So even though some parts of DIVIDE might read more like a documentary now than the paranoid dystopian fever dream it once was, maybe it’ll matter to some random reader in the world, and maybe it will nudge them to do something important. I hope so. Read on and tell me what it means to you - even if you don’t dig it :)

In the weeks to come, I’m going to post the rest of the series, chapter by chapter. And I’ll be sure to share some more anecdotes and WIP stuff as I do. Those posts will be shorter, I promise! See you in the future.

Love,

Karim

<3 <3 <3