Afrofuturism: Black History, Black Futures
Written by GeekGirlCon Manager of Editorial Services Winter Downs.
“It is about elevation. It’s taking what you are and becoming something else. It’s being a butterfly.”
It might seem odd at first to use Black History Month to highlight something called Afrofuturism–I mean, future is right there in the name–but sci-fi and fantasy have long been a way of exploring historical and current social dynamics, and Afrofuturism is no exception. Many people writing on the subject have observed that the movement is at least in part a response by a people who have had vast swaths of their history stripped from them–which is certainly the case for African Americans who are descended from slaves, though Afrofuturism as a movement encompasses much more of the African diaspora than just African Americans.
Afrofuturism spans many genres and media. It’s better described as a cultural aesthetic than as a specific genre, in which an Afrocentric vision is applied to works of science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and magical realism. In addition to Afrofuturist novels and art, there is a long tradition of Afrofuturism in music. Best of all, many of its most noted pioneers are women.
Though the word wasn’t coined until the mid-90s, cultural critics have since defined its roots as going back to the early 20th century and beyond.The movement is so broad that even if Afrofuturism as a term is unfamiliar, you’ve probably heard of at least some of the artists associated with it– writers Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany, or musicians Janelle Monáe and Tricky. Afrofuturist readings have been retroactively applied to older works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, George S. Schuyler, Sun Ra, Ralph Ellison, and the “psychedelic funkadelic” music of George Clinton.
Xenogenesis, by Octavia Butler.
Image source: Ravishly
My first exploration of Afrofuturism was probably about ten years ago when I first started getting into Octavia Butler, and I think her books are a great introduction to the themes and issues often explored in Afrofuturism. Her late-1980s novels Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago (collected as either the Xenogenesis trilogy or as Lilith’s Brood) concern a Black woman, Lilith, who acts as a human ambassador to the alien species, the oankali, who have saved the few remaining humans from an Earth devastated by nuclear war. In exchange for their help, the oankali want to interbreed with humans.
The story follows Lilith’s struggle between maintaining her individual identity among a telepathic species, and the drive to survive at any cost. These issues are strongly reminiscent of the struggles of Black people in the US, especially Black women, existing under a more powerful regime that suppressed African culture and history, and the choice between assimilation/integration and resistance. The oankali might appear benevolent at first glance, but their help comes at a price; they have decided that humans (with their propensity toward violence) should not be allowed to continue as a separate species, and they make all humans infertile except when breeding with the oankali. The second and third books in the trilogy delve more into the social status of the human-oankali hybrids (constructs) once they start being born, and the desperation of the humans who have chosen to remain separate.
The oankali have a third gender, the ooloi, who to the humans are physically repulsive yet sexually arousing, and the body horror evoked in the story will definitely resonate with people who care about issues of gender and race.
Janelle Monáe as Cyndi Mayweather on the cover of her EP Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase).
Image source: Wikipedia
Janelle Monáe is noted for her sci-fi musical (and music-video) depictions of futuristic societies populated by intelligent androids, an oppressed group who fight for recognition and acknowledgement as independent, sentient beings. Her EPs and studio albums so far have all told the story of her android persona Cyndi Mayweather, who she uses to explore themes of individuality and autonomy as a parallel for Black womanhood. In her short film/music video Many Moons, Cyndi is one of many androids–all female, all Black–who are on display in an event that’s part runway show, part auction. Eventually, Cyndi has a breakdown, overcoming her programming–seemingly at the cost of her life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHgbzNHVg0c
Some Afrofuturist artists deal less with analogies for the history of Black people in the context of white supremacy, and more with visions of future/futuristic societies descended from real-world Black cultures. In novels such as Midnight Robber, Jamaican writer Nalo Hopkinson envisions worlds based on Caribbean folklore in which there are high-tech worlds governed by omnipotent, omniscient AI, and barren prison planets covered in bush terrain, all populated entirely by a vivid and diverse cast of Black people. The whole thing is written in a Caribbean-inspired Creole, which is very effective in both evoking the setting and helping readers to step into the minds of the people who inhabit it.
Wakanda in the Marvel animated series Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
Image source: Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes wiki
I’d love to see Afrofuturism gain wider recognition and popularity, to see its vibrant worlds and its incisive social commentary go mainstream. As a big Marvel geek, I’m excited for the Black Panther movie, and in the article “Marvel’s ‘Black Panther’ Isn’t Just Another Black Superhero” NPR’s Charles Pulliam-Moore makes the great argument that the hero, and his home country of Wakanda, an isolationist, highly technologically developed African nation untouched by colonialism, is a radical Afrofuturist vision rarely seen on the big screen. We’ll have a long wait for that, so between now and 2018 there’s plenty of time to catch up on a wide range of Afrofuturist art. What are some of your favorites? Let us know in the comments!
