Afrofuturism. What is it? Is it an African re-appropriation of Marinetti’s artistic movement, or rather an avant-garde hairstyle fashion sported by black hipsters? It is evident that the composite character of the term carries an elasticity that makes even the oddest interpretations possible. The two components of the term refer both to the vague Western cultural imaginary of Africa, with echoes of Conrad’s colonial darkness that amalgamate the diversity of an entire continent into an ominous space, and to Futurism understood as an avant-garde movement, and, more to the point, as a general orientation towards the future. Through its elasticity Afrofuturism has become an umbrella term that has circulated since the 1990s on the fringes of popular culture, and has surged up and down on waves of hype. Coined in the early 1990s by Mark Dery, but also anticipated under different headers by other cultural observers (Mark Sinker, John Akomfrah, Kodwo Eshun), Afrofuturism has taken on a life of its own.
In his initial formulation of the term Mark Dery addressed the discrepancy between the actual role of African-Americans in the cultural production of the United States and their recognition and presence in public discourses dominated by affluent white males. This circumstance has of course been observed before, but the novelty of Dery’s gesture lay in pointing out that science-fiction, as a genre characterized by narratives of alienation, abduction, reinterpretations of the past, and speculations on the future, offered an ideal field for artistic creation especially for African-Americans. Dery defined Afrofuturism broadly as «speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture – and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.»
This observation had significant effects on the perception of African-American literary history. After realizing that questions of race were rarely thematized in works of science-fiction and that the appearance of African-American characters in such works was scarce, if not non-existent, literary critics came to realize that speculative writing actually was part of the African-American literary tradition from its beginnings, and also that speculative narratives made up an important part of African literatures. In brief, it became evident that there was an unrecognized tradition of its own that has existed for decades on the margins. One of the first publications to acknowledge this tradition was the ‹Dark Matter› anthology, edited by Sheree R. Thomas in 2001, which was followed by a sequel volume and other similar publications. The most recent notable anthology in this context is ‹Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements›, edited in 2015 by Walidah Imarisha. This publication is remarkable as it extends the scope of the genre beyond African-American issues and includes writings by members of other ethnic groups. The anthology’s title refers to Octavia E. Butler, who together with Samuel R. Delany is considered as the most popular African-American science-fiction writers.
Acknowledging the mere fact that there are African-American science-fiction writers and that they discuss issues of race and gender does not really tell us much about the characteristics of Afrofuturism. Lisa Yaszek, an eminent scholar of the genre, proposed three characteristics that broadly define the Afrofuturist writing. According to Yaszek, Afrofuturism might be understood as part of «the black Atlantic intellectual project of reclaiming American history by demonstrating how African slaves and their descendants experienced conditions of homelessness, alienation, and dislocation that embody what Nietzsche described as the founding conditions of modernity». Second, Afrofuturist narratives are involved in speculations on the future with a focus on race, but also in re-interpretations and re-appropriation of an effaced or suppressed past. British-Ghanaian writer Kodwo Eshun calls these speculations «chronopolitical interventions». The third characteristic derives from the observation that many Afrofuturist narratives evolve around the figure of a (male) black genius, who is supposed to avenge racist oppression and make a more just community possible.
With this special issue on Afrofuturism we aim to trace some of the transformations the term has undergone and to present some aspects of its dissemination within diverse cultural spheres. In order to present you the origins of the term, we were able to reprint Mark Dery’s seminal essay ‹Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0› from 1992, together with a retrospective introduction written exclusively for this issue. Furthermore, Mark Dery has contributed a new previously unpublished text called ‹Afrofuturism Reloaded: 15 Theses in 15 Minutes› in which he reviews the mutations of the term and its recent applications, embodiments, and ornamentations in popular culture. In this new essay Dery diagnoses the persisting topicality of the term as a symptom of the persisting discrepancy between the staggering pace of technological development and the continuing lack of social justice for African-Americans. One of his examples is the musician Janelle Monáe, whose android alter ego Cindi Mayweather can be read as a hybrid creation that provokes reflection on the Afrofuturist nexus between the slave and the robot.
Janelle Monáe’s Afrofuturist mythology is also one of the subjects of Dominique Haensell’s essay ‹Fembot Fictions› in which she examines the common tropes of Afrofuturism and feminism. Departing from Dona Haraway’s feminist theorization of the cyborg as a figure that carries the promise of liberation through technological modification of the body, Haensell problematizes this promise by pointing to the eclipsed notions of race and gender in such a reasoning. Janelle Monáe’s android narrative, in contrast, presents the cyborg as a figure of in-betweenness in which past and future are coalesced without becoming uniform.
While Afrofuturism in the North-American context is usually characterized by the traumatic legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the barbarities of chattel slavery, Afrofuturist voices from the African continent address quite different issues, such as ecology, sustainability and problems of postcolonial politics. In his essay ‹From Afrofuturism to AfroSF› Mark Bould shifts our perspective towards the African continent and offers a rich review of current science-fiction literature and film that can be subsumed under the label «AfroSF». Bould also highlights the important question of genre distinction and the ensuing problems of definition as he makes us aware of the risk of subsuming African speculative narratives as Afrofuturism that might read as a neo-colonial move.
In the concluding essay of this special issue ‹Afropunk: Alterity in the Digital Age› Cienna Davis explores the effects of Afrofuturism on the digital sphere of social-media. Davis presents how the subculture «Afropunk» evolved from a black appropriation of the DIY-philosophy of the mainly white punk movement into a digital intellectual community that offers counter-narratives to traditional media stereotypes.
