The Cookout: A Guide to AI (Ancestral Intelligence) is a comic workbook and guide for storytellers, community organizers, researchers, and other leaders. The book is based on my academic book, Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal Our Culture (MIT Press, 2025). The comic book narrative is an Afrofuturist tale set in a corporate dystopia that helps readers understand how media and technology can harm, and the guide offers prompts for them to write in and brainstorm how to work collectively towards repair.
The rest of the book narrates a future we can create together: The Cookout as a Black and indigenous platform for reimagining supply chains for stories and knowledge. Each chapter reimagines an aspect of how corporations cultivate stories and knowledge. These chapters are instructive and interactive. I ask the questions we must answer to host a Cookout. I briefly share how I answered them and invite you to write in and do the same.