Afrofuturism’s Association with Post-Colonial Studies and Psychoanalytic Theory

Although there have been a few scholars that have characterized Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston as writers who have contributed to the development of early forms of Afrofuturism, these studies do not approach such early Afrofuturistic works in the context of decolonization mainly due to the heavy interest given on technology and future. This article will focus on how Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and Ellison’s Invisible Man can be categorized particularly as proto-Afrofuturist works because of the writers’ use of decolonized alternative spaces and technological discourse to generate alternative futures. In addition, Octavia Butler’s Kindred will be analyzed as an Afrofuturistic novel to enable readers to have a greater understanding of the context. The protagonists, their state of beings and transformations—both physical and mental—are analyzed accordingly to draw parallelism between the proto-Afrofuturistic and Afrofuturistic works. The analysis also helps to categorize the works of Hurston and Ellison as novels that have contributed to the development of Afrofuturism as a movement. More specifically, this article will focus on a discussion on the key aspects that constitute Afrofuturism including the use of settings in the novels as alternative spaces, as well as the depiction of the characters’ body and language in psychoanalytic theory in terms of alienation and decolonization of the characters within a reading of Afrofuturism.