In our Day of the (Living) Dead, the reanimated are everywhere, from «Pride and Prejudice and Zombies», Seth Grahame-Smith’s inspired mash-up of Jane Austen’s Regency novel of manners and the zombie myth, to «The Walking Dead», a graphic novel about humanity reduced to Hobbesian brutishness in a post-apocalyptic America overrun by the undead, to the
Black to the Future: Afrofuturism (3.0)
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,
Black to the Future: Afrofuturism 1.0
Hack this: 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? Yet, to this writer’s knowledge, only Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, and Charles Saunders have chosen to
Afrofuturism Reloaded: 15 Theses in 15 Minutes.
Why is a term coined 24 years ago – to theorize the dystopian fiction of being black in America, and the radical politics of remembering a dismembered past, and of writing yourself into the future if you’re black, brown, or beige, as Ellington would say – suddenly hotter than a bottle rocket? As lifestyle-section trendspotters,
