In this issue of react/review, Thomas Busciglio-Ritter addresses the production and distribution of wallpapers such as “Views of North American” in the nineteenth century, arguing that they are intertwined with a history “of racially charged representation” that constructs and validates a white aristocratic identity. I shift viewpoints to consider elements of this wallpaper that construct and attempt to validate the identity of a nation. From this vantage point, I argue that the Zuber & Co. wallpaper “Views of North America” is representative of a strategic fragmentation of conflict in pursuit of establishing a heritage for the newer nation, the United States. The wallpaper’s eventual installation in the White House in the 1960s showcases a political technique that uses representations of technological and social landscapes to obscure conflicts of exploitation and dispossession. This technique is related to the pursuit of constructing a shared heritage that undergirds a sense of community.

As Angela Pastorelli-Sosa demonstrates in her essay on artist Sydney Cain in this volume, Afrofuturism centers Blackness and Black experiences while sharpening the contours of our imaginations by bridging different temporal planes. Pastorelli-Sosa indicates that Afrofuturism is a powerful tool for an artist’s imagination, and is used to wade into the possibilities of multiple futures and pasts. She artfully demonstrates this feature of Afrofuturism by highlighting how Cain’s spiritual labor allows for new experiences and engagements with the present and the past. Through the process of material extraction, Cain’s drawings become a channel for ancestral intervention. They pull an “invisibilized” people from the past, allowing them to surface in a present landscape, thereby altering our understanding and relationship with space and time.