Afrofuturism is a term that I wish black people would leave in the past. It sounds alluring enough right? The march of progress, spurred by an unexterminable African diasporic imagination coupled with the blaring thrust of technological development. Okay, maybe not that alluring after all! But when we truly examine the term, its origins, it present relevance, we can see that it is nothing more than a genre/episteme born of the white amerikan academic world contained by the limits of nationalism, and the anti-black speculations that we have no history.
When first thinking about Afrofuturism, I hastened to explore its origins because I thought, ‘Well who cares who coined the term and where it came from, what does it actually mean TODAY?” But an exploration of the original article in which it was coined is extremely relevant to that latter inquiry, which I will address as well.
Afrofuturism was coined by a white amerikan critic Mark Dery who wondered why more African-Americans did not write science-fiction, because the genre seemed so apt to relate (to the other, always to the other– namely the white western world) our experiences. As he writes:
“This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African-Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers readily come to mind).”
Already we can see how Dery has to bend the terminology of what is conventional to science-fiction, “descendants of alien abductees” to talk about the abduction of Africans, relegating the horrors of the middle-passage to being a “sci-fi nightmare.” I’m most interested by the always present neglect to explode the idea of being an ‘African-American.’ The experiences of our ancestors cannot be disconnected from the experiences of Africans in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Canada for instance, and yet the containment of these borders is always present. But I did not expect this from a white amerikan academic, obviously. We already see here how genre/episteme and a bordered notion of blackness/africanness are at work in the origins of this term.
Dery sees science-fiction, a bastardized and minor literature at the time he was writing, as a mirror to the African-American experience. And I want to probe the idea of genre and nationalism again here. That our experiences in this land could be contained by the marker of ‘African-American,’ and that ‘Science-Fiction’ could standalone as some clearly defined genre. But more on this soon.
We must turn our attention to the most glaring and backwards of his passages. Dery defines Afrofuturism as such:
Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture– and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future– might, for want of a better term, be called “Afrofuturism.” The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?
To address his troubling antinomy first: It would seem then that Afrofuturism rests on the assumption that African-Americans have no past (a Hegelian treat), and thus the thrust towards an Afrofuture is an attempt at salvaging what scraps the empire that abducted us has left for us of that past. I place this squarely within the empire because Dery has placed us squarely within the rigid borders of ‘African-American.’ Or that we do have a past, and the natural telos, which posits us grasping that fractured past at the end of our aesthetic inquires through the tailor-made genre of Science-Fiction, will allow us to finally step into that identity of African-American, and be the best citizens we can be. I’d hope that my reader can now see the glaring holes in such a term, but if they still cannot, let us explore some of the figures most associated with Afrofuturism.
The largest problem with Afrofuturism is that the actors it forces to play the role cannot be held by such genres/epistemes/borders. Sun Ra for instance, someone who gets associated with Afrofuturism often but never once uttered the word. Sun Ra exists outside of the genres/epistemes of Science-Fiction, of African-American. The man was born on Saturn, and in the brief 79 years he spent visiting us here on Earth, he completely undermined and exploded the fact that this country, the USA, is a land built on myths and ruses.
Samuel Delaney’s supposed Afrofuturist mega-novel Dhalgren works in similar ways. It reveals that central to the land and the project of the USA is the inescapable reality of anti-blackness, and it doesn’t spend 800 pages trying to resolve that or recover some kind of African past that we can use to guide us in the future.
George Clinton’s mothership is about the destruction of Amerikan empire. The mothership burns down the empire and waits for the flames to cool off, having a funk dance party all the time.
This shit seems less about the future to me and more about laying clear the contradictions of the world that has to end for black people, and burning shit down as it stands now. But we will always be relegated to the future, we will always be made purely aesthetic objects for consumption, people will call Ra, Clinton, Perry and Delaney idiosyncratic and wacky, crazy and drugged out. But I honestly don’t believe that they were ever leading us towards a future. They were showing us what has been done to us, and through a black imagination that is unbounded, taking active steps to end the world as such. Not so that we could complete the project of being an African-American, and not to recover some idea of the African past (which we never lost, but just becomes submerged, for some, in some places). Because I don’t believe that African-Americans have a future. I believe that it’s a horizon line in which slave uprising and the destruction of racial civilization would mark not a recovery but something beyond Africa and even beyond blackness.
And what of the term today? Surely it has tried to encompass the black/African diasporic experience beyond the borders of just Amerika but where does that lead us to? Wakanda? A supposed haven outside but inside racial civilization STILL? No, all Afrofuturism has the possibility of doing is enclosing the black subject within the parameters of this world. It does not seek to end the world, but to move more harmoniously in it, and thus, it is nothing but a neoliberal attempt at sanitizing our rhythms, movements, echoes. We must move on.