CRITICAL Perspective
FEBRUARY 2022
A Lifestyle & Business Magazine
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How Afrofuturism Can Help the World Mend
A COMET STRIKES New York City, killing almost everyone in sight. A survivor named Jim Davis, a Black man, searches the rubble for others, eventually finding and rescuing a white woman named Julia. They share their shock and grief, soon realizing they might be two of the only remaining people on Earth. The circumstances force Julia to reconsider her precomet racism: “How foolish our human distinctions seem—now.” Jim and Julia quickly develop an intimate bond. Soon after, they encounter a group of white men, Julia’s fiance among them. They tell her that only New York was destroyed, that the rest of the world remains intact. In an instant, Julia relapses into her pre-comet white life. She’s indifferent as her companions hurl racial slurs at Jim. Suddenly he is unimportant to her, and she never looks in his direction again. So ends “The Comet,” a relatively obscure but profoundly consequential short story by W. E. B. DuBois. Though best-known for his searing analyses of history and sociology, DuBois’ foray into fantasy in 1920 is among his most reflective works, ruthlessly blunt in its stance on racism’s inevitability. Most importantly, “The Comet” helped lay the foundation for a paradigm known as Afrofuturism. A century later, as a comet carrying disease and social unrest has upended the world, Afrofuturism may be more relevant than ever. Its vision can help guide us out of the rubble, and help us to consider universes of better alternatives. When most people think of Afrofuturism today, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Wakanda comes to mind, an African country that hides advanced technology from the world. Within Wakanda, Afrofuturism manifests most explicitly in the awardwinning fashion and set design, a hypnotic blend of African traditional art and dress, cyberpunk, and space opera. While highly visible examples like Black Panther certainly qualify, Afrofuturism has more traditionally lived in subgenres of literature, philosophy, music, fashion, and other aesthetics. Dubbing something Afrofuturistic, says renowned sociologist Alondra Nelson, is “very much in the eye of the beholder and this is a good thing. Afrofuturism should be a big tent of expanding borders of the possibilities for Black life.” Expansive as it is, Nelson, a professor at the
Institute for Advanced Study and pioneering scholar of Afrofuturism, offered a tidy yet illuminating definition: Afrofuturism describes “visions of the future— including science, technology and its cultures in the laboratory, in social theory, and in aesthetics—through the experience and perspective of African diasporic communities.” In all of Afrofuturism’s many forms, questions are projected about the Black experience into the future. As technology is a cultural instrument through which we understand and build the future, Afrofuturistic ideas often involve imaginations or analyses of how technology intersects with Black politics or aesthetics. As Nelson notes, “A facet of Afrofuturism that should not get overshadowed is Black people’s longstanding, innovative, and critical engagement with science and technology.” The most resonant and front-facing Afrofuturistic relics are in the arts, namely speculative fiction, music, and fashion. Like DuBois’ “The Comet,” Afrofuturistic sci-fi grapples with how race and difference manifest in future worlds. This is as true in the 20th century works of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany as it is of the recent novels of N. K. Jemisin and Nnedi Okorafor. Okorafor has said she didn’t read much traditional science fiction growing up because she “couldn’t relate to these stories preoccupied with xenophobia, colonization, and seeing aliens as ‘others.’” Her African mythology-inspired Binti trilogy and her other works are couched in a different understanding of history, which doubtlessly influences her conception of the future: “My science fiction has different ancestors— African ones.”
“The Comet,” a relatively obscure but profoundly consequential short story by W. E. B. DuBois. Though best-known for his searing analyses of history and sociology, DuBois’ foray into fantasy in 1920 is among his most reflective works, ruthlessly blunt in its stance on racism’s inevitability. “
The most popular Afrofuturist authors write deftly at this margin, where they are just as future-obsessed as their peers, but with different takes on questions about who gets to play which roles in these futures. For example, Jemisin’s Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2010) is a story about empire and slavery that plays out in a supernatural realm of deities and monsters. Butler’s 1979 classic Kindred famously features an African-American writer who travels between modern Los Angeles and a Maryland plantation during the antebellum period. In music, acts like Sun Ra and Parliament Funkadelic built their looks and sounds on a marriage between Black culture and futuristic iconography. For Afrofuturist artists, technology is an essential part of the sound. Play Parliament's acid-infused take on the Motown sound in "I Bet You" and feel the future course through your veins. “These are masters of craft, originators of new sonic (and therefore social) worlds,” says Nelson. “They all break, deform, and remake standard uses of music technology, genre and even expectations of race, gender, and sexuality.” Afrofuturism’s importance also transcends the arts, and insofar as it can be described as a political identity or ideology (Nelson and other scholars leave open this possibility), then it provides a lens through which we can view the present and future. We could have asked the Afrofuturist of 1985 what they thought about the War on Drugs. We could ask those in 1995 about Sub-Saharan Africa’s experience with the HIV pandemic, and in 2005 about the War on Terror. Why do we care about what the Afrofuturist has to say? And why would we suspect that their answers would differ from that of an average futurist? It is because the Black experience is defined by a historical struggle for existence, the right to live, to be considered a person, to be afforded basic rights, in pursuit of (political, social, economic) equality. Because of this, the Afrofuturist can see the parts of the present and future that reside in the status quo’s blind spots. Futurists ask what tomorrow’s hoverboards and flying cars are made of. Afrofuturists ask who will build them? And does their commercial use fall out of their utility in military or law enforcement?
Futurists labor over questions about the nature of Android consciousness and empathy. Afrofuturists ask how race might be wired into Android consciousness, whether the android world might be as divided as ours is. These are simple but nontrivial questions. Their answers contain the necessary details for building science fiction worlds that are truly convincing (which is one of the sole charges of good science fiction), or real worlds that science fiction makes us aspire to. We can ask analogous questions of modern society, speculating what our world will look like after experiencing a triad of world-changing current events: the largest pandemic in a century, a social movement that challenges the institutions of policing and criminal justice, and an upcoming presidential election that almost certainly serves as a referendum on democracy in the United States (and the legitimacy of white nationalism-driven fascism globally). We should ask Afrofuturism what it thinks of these events. While the specific answers might enlighten, real insights are found in the act of answering, as it forces us to reconsider and augment our predictions with layers that were missing.
Black Lives and Cybernetic Cops While Covid-19 has offered no consistently good news, the Black Lives Matter movement, which reemerged internationally following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, has laid the groundwork for productive, practical conversations about policing and the purpose of criminal justice. Some of the loudest voices have focused on defunding the police, a concept that isn’t a slogan, but rather, a set of policy proposals for reconsidering how police departments are organized and financed. Other criminal-justice related considerations have come along for the ride. In response to the protests, a groundswell of support has grown for limiting the use of facial recognition software. Mathematicians have even urged their colleagues to boycott work on policing algorithms. While the state of the world may have changed little in the month-plus since the Black Lives Matters protests began, the discourse around the just use of technology is encouraging. Here, we can point to Afrofuturist works like poet and scholar Jackie Wang’s “The Cybernetic Cop,” a 2018 multimedia performance and essay that uses imagery from 1987’s Robocop to articulate the perils of technology-driven policing.
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Ibrahim Fernandez on Instagram: “#afrofuturism
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LIFE AFTER
In partnership with afrikaiswoke.com
In 1908, WEB Du Bois wrote Princess Steel, a short story in which an African-American Sociologist creates a device enabling him to transcend time and space. He finds a kidnapped African Princess made from steel separated from her mother. This short story can be interpreted as a metaphor for the sense of Cultural alienation and dislocation caused by Slavery. It seems inescapable that the origins of Afrofuturism lie in the sense of Cultural alienation from within the African diaspora. From this perspective, Afrofuturism may be defined as an effort to reconstruct a new Black identity within the inescapable framework of a fundamentally Western Cultural experience. Afrofuturism is therefore not the product of direct African Cultural experience, but can be understood as an effort to reclaim the self-esteem that would have been ingrained by possessing the imagined African identity that could have potentially emerged from an African Cultural experience uninterrupted by the Cultural alienation and dislocation occasioned primarily by Slavery. The negative effect of Slavery on Black Self-esteem has been explored extensively, and in Willie L Morrow’s, 400 Years Without A Comb, the concept of Black beauty that arose during Slavery in which natural ‘nappy’ hair was viewed as ‘ugly’ is a simple and effective example of the negative Psychological effects of Slavery on the Black Psyche or as Morrow terms it, the ‘inferiority seed’ that was implanted which Afrofuturism seeks to uproot. One of the implications of the origins of Afrofuturism is therefore that in reclaiming lost identity and self-esteem within the context of Cultural dislocation, at the outset, Afrofuturism’s outlook and motifs naturally and invariably emerged out of the actual Cultural experience of its alienated Creators i.e. African-Americans experiencing Western Culture by virtue of the inescapable inertia of Historical events.
A manifestation of this phenomenon is perhaps the use of Western Industrial technological Motifs in combination with African aesthetics in the conception and creation of Afrofuturist expression…This is natural and hardly surprising.
In my view, the overall intent of Afrofuturism is to address the interruption in the process of Black identity formation resulting from the violent Cultural dislocation caused by Slavery. For this reason, an integration of Afrofuturism rooted in the diaspora Cultural experience of alienation with an Afrofuturist outlook based primarily on the African experience may result in Afrofuturist expression that encompasses the current Universe of the contemporary Black experience.
Afrofuturism versus Afrifuturism? Ultimately whether such a strict distinction actually exists between ‘Diaspora’ and ‘African’ Afrofuturism is a matter of interpretation. Nevertheless, if Afrofuturism is a Cultural mechanism for reclaiming Black Self esteem, then it may be helpful for it to transcend its origins in alienation in order that it may base its claims to contemporary Black self-esteem and identity from both the reservoirs of African Cultural alienation and African Cultural experience because both can contribute in equal measure.
Before being uprooted by Slavery and experiencing its negative Psychological effects, Slaves belonged to some of the most glorious African Empires that were eventually destroyed by Colonial Conquest…Check out our entry on some of these great Pre-Colonial African Kingdoms and the AntiColonial resistance Wars they fought in order to preserve the identity and self-esteem that was eventually destroyed by Slavery and Colonial Conquest. Afrofuturism 2.0 The Rise Of Astro Blackness also explores the origins of Afrofuturism and the reinvention of Black Identity. To continue the conversation, Join our New Facebook Group Afrifuturism Connect to share your creations and discuss African Futurism and Afroturism. The video discussion below captures Afrofuturism’s potential to provide a basis for Cultural autonomy and synthesis through Pan-Africanism.
SDMNEWS’S founder as well as myself believe we are Africa gift to the western world. The difference between the Afri and Afro is applied application of Blackness. The Alchemy of the soul, where the Blackness dwells. The soul becomes integrated with the Afri (endogenous self, divine feminine) with our Afro divine masculine (indigenous self) from this integration, we see our oneness. Symbol above: The Afro within the Afri concept of America inside the Continent of Mother Africa. This symbol is ingrained and branded within every Afro comb Willie Morrow ever created ~ Cheryl Morrow/Publisher
Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek's
1. Martin Luther King, Jr. Convinced Her to Stay on
2. She's a Fashion Icon
Star Trek After the first season of Star Trek, Nichols left the show for a Broadway play. A few days later, MLK encouraged Nichols to stay on Star Trek, calling her stereotype-busting character an inspiration. Nichols recalls King saying, "This is why we are marching. We never thought we’d see this on TV." Inspired by his words, Nichols rescinded her resignation. The rest is TV history.
Before Nichols, women in scifi generally looked like conservative housewives. Uhura brought a bit of the swinging '60s to the 23rd century with her miniskirts and thigh-high boots. Her fashion style would go on to influence other intergalactic franchises, from the 1970s Battlestar Galactica to the 21st century's Star Trek reboot.
3. She Made History With a Kiss Nichols will always have a place in TV history thanks to the kiss she shared with Captain Kirk (William Shatner). When she and Shatner locked lips, it marked the first kiss between a white man and a black woman on television. (Yes, an alien race coerced them to do it but it still counts.)
5. She Helped Name Uhura Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry took inspiration from the book Uhuru, which Nichols was reading when they met to discuss her role. Roddenberry wanted to give the character an African heritage and liked the sound of the word "uhuru" (which means "freedom"). Nichols suggested "Uhura.” Enough said.
4. She Inspires Real Life Space Explorers
6. She Can Sing
Nichols partnered with NASA on a program to recruit minority astronauts, who included Sally Ride (the first woman in space) and Colonel Guion Bluford (the first African-American in space). Astronaut Mae Jemison has even cited Uhura as a role model.
Nichols has quite the musical resume: She's performed with Duke Ellington and in productions of Porgy and Bess and Carmen Jones. In one Star Trek episode, Uhura serenades crew members with a soulful tune accompanied by Spock on the Vulcan lyrette.
The Comet Is Coming
thecometiscoming.bandcamp.com/album/prophecy
King Shabaka elaborates on the cosmic side of the band and the connection to Sun Ra in the same article, when describing the crystal that dominates the cover of their Prophecy EP. He says, "The other thing about the crystal, metaphorically speaking, is the whole Sun Ra thing of creating your own myths. The thing I like that Sun Ra says a lot is the fact that societies that can create their own mythological structures are the ones that have their own agency. To the point at which you can dictate the terms of what's real and what's not real. The crystal in the hand forces you to create your own myth".
What we know now is that Black people have enough knowledge, spiritualty and Black energy to revolutionize themselves. Here are some tips to AfroFuturize your Keratinetic FRO…
SWAHILI FOR BALANCE
OUR AFRO-NATURE IN ARCHITECTURE
African decor can be hugely dynamic, creative and inspiring. Colours can be evocative of the sunburnt earth; deep, verdant rainforests; softly wistful savannah plains; burnt orange sunsets or pinkly-purple sunrises and vibrant splashes of raw hues reminiscent of crazily energetic African market places.
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