The experience of the African forcibly transplanted into the western world is nothing short of otherworldly. Motifs of extreme alienation and cultural dislocation typically faced by white protagonists in the science fiction genre closely parallel the experiences of the African diaspora in the New World. Afrofuturism asserts that the fantastic and terrifying science fiction tales that fascinate audiences of space and time travel, alien abduction and mutation has deep resonance in the body memory of those descendent from enslaved Africans; those today forced to shout «black lives matter!» in the land of their birth where they are treated as alien «others».
Representations of African-Americans in US old media (TV, radio, print) have historically reinforced negative stereotypes of blacks as servile, grotesque, ridiculous, and carnal. Strategic imagery of black excess and inhumanity in the mainstream media have sustained the political alienation, social dehumanization and economic subordination of blacks. Rather than accepting historical dehumanization as a permanent position of abjection or despondency, Afrofuturism instead embraces the «nonhuman otherworldliness» of the African diasporic experience as a dynamic and innovative position of freedom central to black subjectivity and to the construction of utopian black futures.
Afrofuturist scholar Kodwo Eshun has stated that «it’s in the music that you get the sense that most African-Americans owe nothing to the status of the human». Blues, jazz and rock and roll exemplify music and cultural production as the dominant means of black subjectivity thriving in the US. Hip hop, originating in post-industrial urban ghettos to creatively empower black and brown youth to avoid gangs and violence, is another great example of the musical exploration of what Alexander G. Weheliye refers to as nonhuman otherworldliness. Over the decades, however, the hyper-visibility of hip hop in the mainstream media has relied heavily upon what hip hop scholar Tricia Rose refers to as the «trinity of commercial hip hop» – the gangsta, the pimp and the ho – to sell contemporary reworkings of longstanding racial stereotypes of blacks as inherently dangerous, criminal and lascivious. While music has provided African-Americans with the space to explore otherworldly creative endeavors, old media networks of distribution have had the power to largely determine the influence of black cultural offerings.
James Spooner disrupted popular hip hop imagery in 2003 releasing a documentary film ‹Afro-Punk: The Rock and Roll Nigger Experience› exposing viewers to the double marginalization of being black within the primarily white punk scene and being a punk within the African-American community. Over time, Afro-Punk, a small but growing black punk community, transformed into AFROPUNK (AP), an online cultural movement «celebrating the creativity and freedom of spirit in alternative Black culture» by exhibiting music, art, film, fashion and more that are excluded from mainstream representations of blackness. Today, with an extensive online presence, AP’s most active online community on Facebook has over 600’000 likes.
Between the original documentary and the present online cultural movement, it is clear that social networking services like Facebook have provided space for the previously marginalized experiences exhibited in the film to unite and re-imagine blackness and cultural identity through online computer-mediated communication. Against the hyper-visibility of commercial hip hop within old media, AP utilizes new media to subvert damaging mainstream (mis)representations of blackness and to expand the diversity of black subjectivity and creative cultural expression. I argue that Afropunk is an Afrofuturist project stimulating cultural and political discussions to challenge disempowering regimes of truth that produce homogenous cultural understandings of black excess, pathology, and inhumanity. And while the artist and visionary Sun Ra has become a pioneer of Afrofuturism with his proclamation that «Space is the Place» for a utopian Black future, it appears that in the twenty-tens, cyberspace is the place for revisiting black history, constructing a (digital) black public sphere and combining the nonhuman otherworldliness of black subjectivity with black technological agency to imagine utopian black futures.
New Media & African-Americans Online
Old media in the US has principally been controlled by white males in a profit-oriented structure to disseminate information to a presumably passive public in a one-way model of communication. Alternatively within new media, the digital technologies that enable such new media practices as emailing, texting, blogging and surfing the net circulate information in a two-way, interactive model of communication reliant upon user agency. This changing media infrastructure offers unique opportunities for marginalized people to subvert and contest the disempowering regimes of truth historically proliferated through the mainstream old media outlets.
The majority of research pertaining to African Americans online refers to the discourse of the «digital divide» in which race is viewed as a primary factor in determining who lacks access to Information and Communication Technologies. While African-Americans lag behind whites in overall internet use and home ownership of broadband internet, the sense of black online, technological deficit contained within this discourse does not hold up between demographics and across technological platforms. Recent Pew Research observing technology trends among African-Americans indicates that 98% of blacks between the ages of 18 and 29 have broadband and / or a smartphone. Black adults also exceed white adults (their presumed «technological superiors») in social network use. In addition, various recurring online social phenomena like Black Twitter, the rising cross-national Black Lives Matter movement (coined online) and #blackout Fridays on Tumblr reveal the presence of a digital black public sphere as a reckoning force in the social media landscape. The popularity of the digital divide discourse attempts to affirm historical linkages between Africans and primitivism by overemphasizing black technological deficit and in-access without acknowledging demographic differences, variances across platforms and the productive values African-Americans are finding online. These studies elucidate an adept appropriation of online technologies by black users matching Afrofuturist themes of black technological agency and illustrate the significance of social networking and computer mediated communication in the daily lives of African-Americans.
AFROPUNK Online
Facebook fan pages like the AP page are open for all Facebook users to view, like, share and comment upon. Given the original documentary and AP’s mission statement, the page would appear to attract socially conscious, tech-savy black people who identify with alternative black cultural expression and DIY ethic. However, the 600’000 FB users joining into the online AP community are not limited to those who identity as black, and those who are black do not inherently align themselves with AP’s foundational ethics. This produces an intermittent sense of racial and / or political ambivalence within discussions on any given AP Facebook post. Despite some inconsistencies, the number of likes, shares and supportive comments on AP’s posts confirm the value users find in the online cultural movement. To assess the ethos of AP’s online community, I will now consider the themes of radical politics, beauty and music on their Facebook page.
Radical Politics: AP moves beyond the tokenized, colorblind and post-racial rhetoric that has come to dominate America’s cultural understanding of black intellectuals and civil rights leaders of the past, honoring the radicalism of those whose work has contributed to the development of radical black political consciousness and critical analysis of the African diasporic experience from the cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall to the self-proclaimed «black, lesbian, feminist, mother, warrior, poet» Audre Lorde. Many of these warriors of black consciousness are excluded from the history books, but their legacies are reintroduced on AP for those online who may not have been exposed to their contributions in the classroom.
The Facebook page also provides a space for the discussion of contemporary issues facing the African diaspora. Posts regarding the unjustified murders of Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and Mike Brown have provided a space for African-Americans to express their anger at the devaluation of black life in the American justice system while raising poignant questions about whether America’s legal system was ever meant to protect the rights of African-Americans. AP’s posts falling under the theme of radical politics speak to a re-education of a black public sphere online.
Beauty: Reminiscent of the «Black is Beautiful» movement of the 1960s, AP evokes the symbolic power of the afro which stands up firmly against dominant regimes of beauty with daily postings of «Afro of the Day». Blog posts and video tutorials for natural hair and locks assert the cultural significance and meaning within black hair. Beyond hair, «AP Fashion» also showcases African diasporic indie fashion designers who push the boundaries of traditional fashion codes. Finally, the feature «Tattoo of the Week» generates respectful admiration for black people who find meaning in the application of art to the skin.
Posts fitting under this theme encourage an embrace of the natural characteristics that have historically marked African-Americans as other. From this position of alterity, or rather nonhuman otherworldliness, AP also encourages further experimentation and innovation of as the norm has never been truly available to black subjects in Western society. The extreme otherness and alterity that blackness has come to represent within Western society makes the level of African-American self-acceptance and creative self-expression a radical act against regimes of white supremacy, hegemonic notions of beauty and the politics of respectability.
Music: AP pays homage to groundbreaking black music artists of the past from Nina Simone to Bad Brains while also promoting independent, alternative black artists of the present who are unintelligible to mainstream representations of blackness including queer rapper Le1f and black female punk rocker Tamar-Kali. This circumvents traditional music distribution and promotional networks of mainstream music. And despite America’s historical erasure of African-Americans from traditional genealogies of rock and roll, AP posts re-appropriate rock and roll as a black musical tradition. Within a country that often devalues African-Americans as the destitute objects of Europe’s colonial history and relegates black cultural expression to compensatory expressions employed to creatively cope within unfavorable socioeconomic position in society, the content on the AP Facebook page evokes the pleasure that African-Americans derive from creative expression in all musical genres, artistic styles and expressive cultures. For a closer look at the topic of music, which has figured so centrally to black subjectivity in the US, I conducted a discourse analysis of the comment thread of a particularly relevant AP post which asked the online community, «Where are all the Black People» on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 2013. Using a dyadic analytic, I then discerned six primary categories of discussion: «Trolling / Colorblindness», «Who Gives a Fuck / Why We Should Give a Fuck», and «New Media Infrastructures / Praise of Afropunk».
The use of «colorblind» rhetoric within an online space devoted to the black experience with a point of view that rather obviously revolves around punk ideology and radical racial politics not only constitutes «trolling», but also speaks to the blindness at which Facebook users are able to like Facebook pages. Comments within this dyad represent a minority, but they detract from the productiveness of the space illustrating the potential dangers of the lack of accountability that users have in online, digital space.
For the next dyad, the general attitude within the comment thread was a collective disregard or abhorrence for mainstream music. While this attitude fits quite neatly into the punk’s anti-mainstream, anti-establishment position, the comments on the other end of this dyad («Why We Should Give a Fuck») provide the historical evidence for contextualizing the appropriation of black culture in the mainstream by white performers and media owners. This comment thread has provided an online environment for the sharing of information about the unfairness and damaging effects of cultural appropriation and expressing disdain for a media system that fails to represent the interest of those implicated.
The final dyad looks more optimistically at the novel scenario in which new media and digital technology support black creative agency and expression online, forming an alternative to old media’s command of mainstream culture. Finally, commenters praise AP for providing the space for the promotion of alternative black artists, not solely for the purposes of attaining mainstream success, but in providing the network for such artists to reach a captive audience that respects their originality without the same objectifying eye of the mainstream.
Concluding Thoughts
«I was a black punk fan in the early 80s… but was always the only black person there. Going to the [AP fest] over the weekend as an «elder» … really warmed my heart. Almost teared up actually seeing this younger generation of alt black music weirdos looking so beautiful and freaky! So engaged and vibrant! Such great energy was in the air! I’m glad they have a community, something I never had back in the day. Such solidarity, instead of the usual outsider feeling.»
Beyond solely converging online, the fast-growing AP community joins together in the tens of thousands internationally for Afropunk festivals in Brooklyn, New York and Paris, France. I use the above quote from a commenter on ‹The Village Voice› blog reflecting on the Brooklyn festival to illustrate the transformation from alienation within «alternative» white punk spaces to feelings of solidarity amongst «black weirdos» made possible with the web. Amongst a like-minded physical and digital black public sphere, we see that AP offers blacks an alternative to abjection from white normativity by igniting the creative, radical potentials of alterity within black weirdoes everywhere. And rather than solely turning to the stars to imagine utopian black futures, the African diaspora can turn to the web where digital communities like Afropunk encourage experimentation with nonhuman otherworldliness.