Research Note: Afrofuturism

"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.

Nicky Manaj: A Retro Robot From a Weirdo Future

"[Nicky Minaj] was a retro robot from a weirdo future, pre-programmed with Queens, Cockney and Caribbean accents, a vision of femininity as if conjured by Rammellzee and Dr. Funkenstein, a Negro Devo diva. She promised to be a Technicolor extension of Outkast, a fragmentation of the spectrum of De La Soul and Flavor Flav, Missy Elliot and Foxy Brown."

Kurt Gottschalk, Burning Ambulance, December 8, 2010.

Research Note: Afrofuturism

"In the early 1990's, Mark Dery argued 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' (Dery 1994, p. 180)."


Jamie Sexton, "A Cult Film By Proxy: Space is the Place and the Sun Ra Mythos", New Review of Film & Television Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3, December 2006, pp. 197-215.

Research Note: Afrofuturism

[...T]he digital divide [is] a phrase that has been used to describe gaps in technological access that fall along lines of race, gender, region, and ability but has mostly become a code word for the tech inequities that exist between blacks and whites. Forecasts of a utopian (to some) race-free future and pronouncements of the dystopian digital divide are the predominant discourses of blackness and technology in the public sphere. What matters is less a choice between these two narratives, which fall into conventional libertarian and conservative frameworks, and more what they have in common: namely, the assumption that race is a liability in the twenty-first century—is either negligible or evidence of negligence. In these politics of the future, supposedly novel paradigms for understanding technology smack of old racial ideologies. In each scenario, racial identity, and blackness in particular, is the anti-avatar of digital life. Blackness gets constructed as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress.

Alondra Nelson. "Introduction: Future Texts," Social Text 71, Vol. 20, No. 2, Summer 2002.

Research Note: Afrofuturism

"Whereas black American identities have often been based upon a recognition of the past (focusing on slavery and dehumanization), they are increasingly being established with reference to the future, in order to counter assumptions that blackness equals opposition to progress (Yasek 2005, pp. 302-303). Interest in black science fiction has grown in tandem with these cultural shifts, a process often referred to as 'Afrofuturism.' Kodwo Eshun has argued that Afrofuturist thinking is concerned with the 'unreality principle,' in contrast to many previous stereotypical notions of blackness, which often equated the black body with nature, or with the urban location of 'the street' (Eshun 1988, p. 4)."

Jamie Sexton, "A Cult Film By Proxy: Space is the Place and the Sun Ra Mythos", New Review of Film & Television Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3, December 2006, pp. 197-215.