Afrofuturism

Afrofuturism refers to a flourishing contemporary movement of African American, African, and Black diasporic writers, artists, musicians, and theorists. Afrofuturism comprises cultural production and scholarly thought—literature, visual art, photography, film, multimedia art, performance art, music, and theory—that imagines greater justice and a freer expression of Black subjectivity in the future, or in alternative places, times, or realities. It also offers speculation about a world wherein black people are normative. Afrofuturism can also imagine dystopic worlds to come, with contemporary injustices projected into, and often intensified in, the future. However, Afrofuturist works do not always look to the future but, rather, often unsettle notions of linear time. More broadly defined, Afrofuturism reimagines not only new forms of temporality, but also new Black experiences and identities via science and speculative fiction or other artistic and intellectual means. It often does so by exploring both the potential and the pitfalls of technoculture and posthumanism. Although the movement has certainly exploded in recent years, especially since 2000, its intellectual and aesthetic underpinnings can be traced back to mid- and late-19th century African American novels that imagined alternative realities and communities for Black people in the contexts of enslavement and then racial oppression of the Post-Reconstruction era. Such historic imaginings find their counterpart in current Afrofuturist work that addresses the fallout from the 2016 US presidential election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and global uprisings against police violence and white supremacy. In these contemporary contexts, Afrofuturism offers a robust intellectual, political, and artistic framework for critique and resistance, and for the representation of a more just world, one that centers and values Black people and their well-being.