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
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,
Fembot Fictions
«That’s why, my brother, You and I Shall be Impressed with Aeronautics and all such Acrobatics when they Bring us a Breathing Martian or a Ten-eyed Hairy drummer from the Moon…» These are the words of Sissie, the sharp-tongued, keen-witted protagonist of Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‹Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint›. The
From Afrofuturism to AfroSF
In the mid-1990s, Mark Sinker, Mark Dery, John Akomfrah and others concocted a mutagenic virus called «afrofuturism». It spread like wildfire and changed everything. It made the invisible visible, and taught us to see differently. It rewired our synapses, encoding a counter-history in our minds. Where previously there had been the work of disparate authors,
Afropunk: Alterity in the Digital Age
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
