Introduction: Looking Blackward
(With Apologies to Edward Bellamy)
In 1992, when I coined the term «Afrofuturism»[1], the advance guard of the Digital Age – early adopters of e-mail, homesteaders on BBS’s (bulletin-board systems, pre-Web, ASCII-based ancestors of social-media communities like Facebook), and consumers and producers of pulp-fiction visions of Things to Come (movies, SF novels, TV shows, comic books, tech-page fabulism about paradigm-shifting technologies) – comprised an insular subculture, one that was lily-white and overwhelmingly male, if the mainstream media was to be believed.
The aspirational bibles of this alt.geek underground, to borrow the UseNet lingo of the day, were the upwardly mobile ‹Wired› magazine and its smart-druggy, cyberslacker cousin, ‹Mondo 2000›. Its natural habitat was the rave, the videogame console, «virtual communities» like the San Francisco-based BBS The WELL, and the virtual realities dreamed up by the cyberpunk novelist William Gibson and realized, in glitchy, zoetrope form, by Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley-based hacker whose hippie-dude dreadlocks, gnomic pronouncements about the future, and more than passing resemblance to Yoda made him irresistible to trend-piece hacks and corporate coolhunters. But to the unwired masses, marooned unawares in the Desert of the Real, the Net was still terra simulacra.
I reached for the term «Afrofuturism» partly out of frustration – make that fury – at the Incredible Whiteness of ’90s technoculture, whose self-appointed oracles struck me, with a very few exceptions, as smug, self-serving, and stupefyingly clueless in equal measure. There was a deafening silence among the so-called digerati, the newsmedia, and elite thinktanks, over, say, the fact that ‹Wired› featured nothing but white guys on its covers. Or that Davos and TED and Ars Electronica were self-congratulatory clusterfucks for a white elite well-rewarded by neo-liberalism. Or that business-page paeans to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs rarely mentioned the labor practices of their Magic Kingdoms. Or the environmental impact of their Insanely Great commodities. Or the paleness and maleness of their management teams.
When I asked myself, «why do so few African-Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other – the stranger in a strange land – would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists?», I was really asking, «why are black people, so much a part of the American experience, so conspicuously absent from the stories we tell ourselves, as a society, about technological utopias and posthuman possibility – our myths of the next five minutes, which are, after all, commentaries on the present»? For me, as a Ballardian, «science fiction» wasn’t limited to paperback novels and rocket operas; it included the offgassings of the digerati: virtual-reality pioneers like Lanier, nanotechnologists like K. Eric Drexler, roboticists like Hans Moravec, capitalist tools like Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab, libertarian rough riders of the «electronic frontier» like the Republican Deadhead John Perry Barlow, unfrozen ’60s zeitgeist-dowsers like Stewart Brand and Timothy Leary, not to mention a motley assortment of bandwagon-hopping transhumanists and smart-drug quacks – all of them pale, male, and unabashedly boosterish about laissez-faire capitalism and «corporate rebels»; all of them more or less blind to the social ills rooted in America’s original sins of race and class.
In the ‹Wired› ’90s, the business-class media outlets and self-congratulatory showcases this overwhelmingly white, exuberantly libertarian boys’ club created for itself seemed never to pass the mike to people of color, rarely to women, and seldom to anyone to the left of Milton Friedman. So when the literary theorist Frank Lentricchia asked me to edit a special issue of ‹The South Atlantic Quarterly›, devoted to what was then quaintly called «cyberculture», I knew I wanted not only to critique the reigning ideology and blinkered cultural consciousness of the digital elite, but to embody an alternative to it by offering a small, staticky megaphone to people of color, women, and liberals and Leftists of all stripes. My essay and accompanying dialogues, ‹Black to the Future›, was an early, exploratory probe, as McLuhan might say – an attempt to tell some of the stories that ‹Wired› wasn’t telling; to broadcast some of the voices that were never heard; and, as important, to ask why elite, white, corporate-cozy technoculture wasn’t making any airspace for women and people of color.
I wanted to raise the question of African-American culture’s relationship not only to the emerging technoculture of the ’90s, but to the foundational myths (in the Barthesian, ideological sense) of that culture, as well – for starters, the unflagging faith that «there’s a big, bright, beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day», as Disneyland’s Carousel of Progress puts it; the quintessentially American faith in push-button solutions to social problems that for much of the nation’s history has fueled its utopian dreams. African-Americans have a radically different relationship to science and technology, in the States – a much more conflicted one than whites, obviously, given the social Darwinism and racial «science» of the Victorian era; forced sterilization and institutionalization under the eugenics laws of the 1920s; the Tuskegee Experiment, and so forth.
Another idea I wanted to get my arms around, using the concept of Afrofuturism, was the parallels between the (entirely white) outlaw hackers and punk roboticists lionized by the (entirely white) cyberpunk authors, on one hand, and on the other black vernacular culture’s long, storied history of cultural hacking and semiotic appropriation, brilliantly theorized by Henry Louis Gates argues in his seminal essay ‹The Signifying Monkey›. «The street finds its own uses for things», William Gibson liked to say. But «street», in American usage, has long been a euphemism for «black». Would African-American SF writers, hip-hop musicians, graffiti artists, visual artists, filmmakers, and cultural theorists appropriate, repurpose, maybe even radically reimagine the new technologies of interconnection, simulation, and mass reproduction to their own politically subversive, idiosyncratically personal, or historically black ends (whatever that means)?
And what about recovering, from the hard drive of our collective consciousness, the erased history of black technoculture, both literal as well as figurative? How, I wondered, do we make room in modernist narratives of scientific progress and technological teleology for W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 short story ‹The Comet›, George S. Schuyler’s serialized stories ‹Black Internationale› and ‹Black Empire› (published in the ‹Pittsburgh Courier› between 1936 and 1938), Ralph Ellison’s ‹Invisible Man›, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, John Sayles’s ‹Brother from Another Planet›, Lizzie Borden’s ‹Born in Flames›, Sun Ra, Hendrix and Miles Davis at their most science-fictional, George Clinton, Afrika Bambaataa, P-Funk, Detroit techno, Rammellzee, Grandmaster Flash, Lee «Scratch» Perry, Jean-Michel Basquiat?
Afrofuturism was intended as a sign on the road to Tomorrowland, directing our attention to the race-blindness of white, free-market futurology, and, simultaneously, back to all those lost histories, drowned out by techno-libertarian, market-friendly rhapsodies about the computer as engine of personal empowerment and free-market «disruption». At its most profound, it’s a way of looking at current events, historical memories, and that consensual hallucination we call the future through the lens of black speculative fiction. Put another way, it’s a political consciousness armed with rhetorical strategies, liberatory myths, critical mythologies, theoretical fictions. Or, if you prefer, it’s a historically literate, politically engaged narrative for imagining possible futures for, and by, black people.
It’s a newsflash from the past that people of color are woefully underrepresented in science and engineering majors, in the tech sector of our economy, and in the upper tiers of tech-sector management. The question of how that came to be has received less scrutiny. Do we imagine for an instant that the politics of representation – who gets to speak, and who must listen; what stories are told, and which ones go untold – plays no role in these statistics? Afrofuturism questions the hidden costs of metaphor, the ideological code underlying the Matrix we call culture.
«Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described», Susan Sontag reminds us, in ‹Notes on Camp›. The act of naming is essential to our collective understanding. A constellation only comes into focus when we connect the far-flung dots of its stars; in an instant, a pattern is revealed. Young black cultural workers, academic theorists, and public intellectuals have taken the concept of Afrofuturism and run with it, making it their own, rewriting the code in ways that make sense of it in light of their historical moment, their cultural context, their lived experience. They beckon us through an intellectual wormhole, into a universe where dark matter is, at long last, visible.
By Mark Dery, January 10, 2016