Welcome to our joyous celebration of Obsidian’s fifty years of continuous publishing! To initiate the festivities, we offer this first issue of volume 50: Obsidian at 50—Looking Forward/Looking Back: Awakening the Archive. In this general issue, you will find two introductory essays by dearly beloved community members—historian and Elder Afaa Michael Weaver (Obsidian editor in chief from 1996 to 2001) and Mobile Homecoming, the experiential archive collective led by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Sangodare Wallace. Their essays herald the vision of volume 50’s project to creatively activate Obsidian’s rich archive and carry this foundation into our future with insight and embodied awareness.

In his essay, “A Light Inside the Nadir,” Afaa notes Obsidian’s critical role in providing Black artists “a space where their cultural needs as literary artists [are] understood, where matters of nuance, vernacular, and resistance [are] given more space,” and in this general issue, we continue to provide such dynamic and crucial space by publishing creative work from contemporary artists across the African Diaspora.

Moreover, as Mobile Homecoming conveys in their astute introduction, “archive is a verb”—a consecrated word that roots all of us—beings across time—in “holy possibility.” Beginning in 50.1 and fully manifesting in 50.2, we join Mobile Homecoming in activating Obsidian’s archive by inviting five writer-editors to steward contemporary Black and African Diasporic artists’ engagements with the five distinct decades of Obsidian’s publication. Each writer-editor has close ties with Obsidian, and guest edits one folio—one for each decade of our platform’s history—to bring forward past Obsidian content and co-create our present moment intergenerationally.

We are deeply honored and immensely proud to continue Obsidian’s legacy of providing space for Black imagination, innovation, and excellence. At this fifty-year juncture, we celebrate and pay respect to those makers who have come before us by lovingly activating their work in our current context, towards an auspicious future.

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