"Engaging with new technology, possibilities of alien life-forms, and the future as a spatial-temporal location is a common practice among any class of people who might call themselves 'futurists': science-fiction (sci-fi) and speculative-fiction (spec-fic) writers, cosmologists, certain religious leaders, and so forth. As many similarities as there are among futurists, there are an equivalent amount of differences: stylistics, themes, utopian/dystopian results, particularities, etc. For as long as they have been producing literature, art, and music Blacks have had some share in creating the futurist canon in, but certainly not limited to, the United States. A recent group of academics have, in the last couple of decades, begun arguing that a distinct Black essence has run through the long lineage of Black futurist artists. This 'Afrofuturism' came into prominence in the 1970s and has continued as a relatively popular aesthetic genre to the present day, inspiring a slew of critics to ponder what social conditions led to its rapid increase in popularity and production and what this futuristic bent means for Africana Studies and other fields of cultural studies."
Chuck Galli, "Hip-Hop Futurism: Remixing Afrofuturism and the Hermeneutics of Identity," page 26.
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