Why is a term coined 24 years ago – to theorize the dystopian fiction of being black in America, and the radical politics of remembering a dismembered past, and of writing yourself into the future if you’re black, brown, or beige, as Ellington would say – suddenly hotter than a bottle rocket?
As lifestyle-section trendspotters, corporate cool-hunters, cultural theorists, celebrities eager to show they’re au fait with youth culture, and – better late to the party than never – glitter-bearded hipsters close in, is Afrofuturism in danger of becoming that most dreaded of social-media diseases, a fad?
What do we talk about when we talk about Afrofuturism?
«If there is an Afrofuturism, it must be sought in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points», I wrote in 1992, in the essay (‹Black to the Future›, published in ‘93) in which I coined the term.
What did Jada Pinkett Smith have in mind when she referred, in a fist-pumping speech about black female empowerment, to her daughter Willow as her «little Afro-futurist»? What does the Philadelphia-based menswear brand Ikiré Jones’s mixture of traditional Nigerian textiles, Belle Époque dandyism, and black hipster style add up to «an Afro-futurist take on the modern suit»?
‹The Black Panther›, the latest Marvel Comics franchise to roll off the assembly line, is a mighty thewed African superhero, tribal chieftain of the mysterious nation of Wakanda, Oxford-trained physicist, inventor of technologies so advanced they’re indistinguishable from magic, and «one of the eight smartest people on the planet». Does that make him an Afrofuturist? If so, is his conjuring power, as an icon, diminished by the all-too-familiar association of blackness with nature and the irrational? Unlike, say, Batman or Iron Man, prosthetic gods whose heavy metal exoskeletons are miracles of techno-industrial ingenuity, the Panther’s powers derive in part from the mythical mineral Vibranium, which is woven into his uniform. Likewise, his mystic communion with the Panther God, which endows him with the strength, speed, and superhuman senses of a jungle cat, is made possible by his ingestion of a rare heart-shaped herb. Is there a little too much H. Rider Haggard in his deep-in-the-heart-of-darkest-Africa exoticism?
Or is that what Afrofuturism does – contest the positivist, rationalist, materialist biases of the Enlightenment project by reasserting the value of intuition and the unconscious; of pre-industrial, mythic modes of modeling the world; of a holistic sense of our interrelatedness with nature, as opposed to an alienation from the natural world that places it under the sign of the Feminine, the better to clear-cut it, strip-mine it, frack it, fuck it? Greg Tate suggests as much in his book-in-progress, ‹Kalahari Hopscotch, or: Notes Toward a 20-Volume History of Black Science and Afrofuturism›. «Having ceded the racial ground war to Enlightenment-era imperialism somewhere back in the 17th century», he writes, «black futurism determined that the fiery realms of the symbolic and the mythic and the rhetorical and the spiritual and the wickedly stylish, sonic, and polyrhythmic would become our culture’s bailiwick, raison d’être, and culturally triumphalist battleground».
Is Storyboard P, the post-postmodern dancer from Brooklyn, an avatar of Afrofuturism? The unchallenged master of the street style known as «flex», he draws on Michael Jackson, ‹West Side Story›, breakdancing, and the jaw-dropping «flash dancing» of the 1930s tap team, the Nicholas Brothers, to embody what might be called technological affect. Stuttering, flickering, jump-cutting, deliquescing, morphing, he’s cinema made flesh, incarnating the idiomatic characteristics of hand-cranked silents, stop-motion animation, CGI. He has a passing acquaintance with ballet, but his real influences are ‹The Matrix’s› «bullet time», ‹Terminator 2’s› liquid-metal shapeshifter, ‹Crouching Tiger’s› gravity-defying swordfighters. His moniker, Storyboard, underscores his desire to step through the screen, to merge with the virtual, to become a special effect – and, consciously or not, to master, through the mockery of flawless mimicry, the machine whose Fordist, Taylorist logic orders our lives. «Mutant», he calls his version of flex, a term whose racial subtext – remember those Atom-Age pulp fictions about monstrosities begotten by exposure to just the sort of carcinogenic or radioactive waste disproportionately located near communities of color? – is not lost on him, just as he knows it’s bullet time all the time in some New York neighborhoods, where Whole Foods has yet to plant civilization’s flag and Kombucha is not yet the beverage of choice. «I know how to dodge bullets», he says.
Is Janelle Monáe the poster girl for Afrofuturism? In the video for her song «Many Moons» (from her sci-fi concept album ‹Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase)›, she plays the state-of-the-art Alpha Platinum 9000 android Cindi Mayweather. The setting is a retro-futuristic nightspot whose spacetime coordinates lie somewhere between The Cotton Club and Fritz Lang’s idea of Studio 54, in a skyscraping mega-city ruled by technocrats. The scene is the «annual android auction» – a slave market, by any other name, especially when we recall that the etymological origin of the word «robot», coined by Karel Čapek in his 1920 play ‹R.U.R.› (Rossum’s Universal Robots), is the Czech «robotnik» («slave»), from «robota» («forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery»), a close cousin to the German «Arbeit», for «work», which sets us free, as every wage slave knows. Monáe rocks a 1940’s pompadour I like to see as an allusion to Rachael, the femme-fatale replicant in ‹Blade Runner›, and saddle shoes I like to read as a shout-out to the original blerd (black nerd) Steve Urkel, the science-fair geek emasculated by his mastery of technology in the ’90s sitcom ‹Family Matters›.
In the German Expressionist silent that inspired ‹Metropolis: Suite I›, the industrialist overlords create a robotic fifth columnist, an evil simulacrum of the labor organizer Maria, to infiltrate the proles. Monáe inverts that trope; her android is a hip-hop Harriet Tubman for the age of the New Jim Crow, as the legal scholar Michelle Alexander calls it, rousing the «robota» (a metaphor, we assume, for the black underclass) with a «cri de cœur» in which she chants, «Cybergirl, droid control / Get away now, they trying to steal your soul… Street fight, bloody war / Instigators, third floor… Plastic sweat, metal skin / Metallic tears, mannequin… White house, Jim Crow / Dirty lies, my regards.»
Yet Cindi Mayweather is perversely polyvalent, undercutting the humanist underpinnings of identity politics even as she preaches black liberation. «When I speak about science-fiction and the future and androids, I’m speaking about the ‹Other›», says Monáe. «The future form of the ‹Other›. Androids are the new black, the new gay, or the new women.» The Rachael of the replicant-rights movement, Cindi looks forward to a post-anthropocentric world in which intelligent machines are created equal, too. «I love speaking about the android because they are the new ‹Other›», Monáe told MTV. «People are afraid of the Other and I believe we’re going to live in a world with androids because of technology and the way it advances.»
This, then, may be one of the reasons Afrofuturism is striking a sympathetic chord in the mass mind, right about now. The Extensions of Man, as McLuhan called our technological prostheses, are increasingly intelligent yet, for the moment, subservient; Siri is the new Butterfly McQueen. As we outsource more and more of our cognitive functions to our software servants, we can’t quite suppress the creeping uneasiness that the Internet of Things may one day mount an insurrection. Obvious as the parallels to antebellum America are, they are lost, unsurprisingly, on the overwhelmingly white TED talkers, Silicon Valley rhapsodists, and Apple polishers who pass for technology pundits in our papers of record. They are, however, not lost on black cultural workers like Monáe or, for that matter, scholars like Greg Tate. Stolen literacy opened a book of revelation for slaves like Frederick Douglass, transforming them from cotton-picking robots and domestic ‘droids into fully human beings who dreamed of freedom. Tate admonishes «Marx’s disciples [to] reconsider the riot of ruptures that must occur when the theory must entertain the fact that commodities can speak, not as a speculative-fictional ‹what if?› but as an incontrovertible and undeniable biological fact.» In stark contrast to the anti-anthropocentric trend in contemporary philosophy, epitomized by object-oriented ontology, which takes the Foucauldian assault on Enlightenment humanism to sci-fi extremes by refusing to privilege humans over objects, Afrofuturism is all too aware, as Tate reminds us, that objects can have inner lives. Consequently, it is less concerned with knocking the human off its ontological perch than it is in forging alliances with Others of any species, human or posthuman; androids, cyborgs, or hopeful monsters of human-machine miscegenation.
Simultaneously, and paradoxically, Afrofuturism is in the air because the 21st century, a metonym for the future for as long as we can remember, is at last upon us, and while the head-whipping acceleration of techno-social change makes us feel as if we need a new tense – the «future present» – to describe the vertigo of everyday life, the chasm, for black Americans, between technological progress and social justice – tantalizingly dangled, forever deferred – is surreal. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, they have seen the future, brother, and it’s murder, whether in the form of «officer-involved» shootings – the official euphemism for state-sanctioned homicide, dutifully parroted by the media – or unnatural deaths in police custody, or at the hands of race-crazed vigilantes on Neighborhood Watch or by a trigger-happy citizenry so ideologically Balkanized and demographically isolated and politically powerless that the only way out of this place, for many, is one of two speculative fictions: the alien abduction evangelicals call the Rapture or the zombie apocalypse that survivalist «preppers», right-wing anti-government wingnuts, and Aryan supremacists seem to take at least half-seriously.
Americans of African descent have no special love for the survivalist fantasy of returning to the American frontier, a paradise regained of rugged individualism and rough justice where a man like ‹The Walking Dead’s› Rick Grimes can stand tall against the mongrel hordes and Make America Great Again at the business end of a six-gun. For them, the apocalypse happened a long, long time ago, when across the Atlantic’s gulf alien intellects, «cool and unsympathetic», regarded them with «envious eyes» (as the Martians regard the Earth in ‹War of the Worlds›), prelude to beaming them aboard slave ships and transporting them across the wounded galaxies to a prison planet, a nightmare that in some respects has never ended. As Sun Ra said, «It’s after the end of the world; don’t you know that yet?»
Afrofuturism speaks to our moment because it alone – not the ahistorical, apolitical corporate precogs at TED talks; not the fatuous Hollywood franchises that have nothing to say about our times – offers a mythology of the future present, an explanatory narrative that recovers the lost data of historical memory, confronts the dystopian reality of black life in America, demands a place for people of color among the monorails and the Hugh Ferris monoliths of our tomorrows, insists that our Visions of Things to Come live up to our pieties about racial equality and social justice. «We need images of tomorrow; and our people need them more than most», writes Samuel R. Delany in his essay ‹The Necessity of Tomorrow(s)›. «Without an image of tomorrow, one is trapped by blind history, economics, and politics beyond our control. One is tied up in a web, in a net, with no way to struggle free. Only by having clear and vital images of the many alternatives, good and bad, of where one could go, will we have any control over the way we may actually get there in a reality tomorrow will bring all too quickly. And nothing gives such a profusion and richness of images of our tomorrows – however much they may need to be revised – as science fiction.»
Greg Tate tells a story about one of his students at Brown University, where he teaches a course called «The History of Afrofuturism and Black Science Fiction»: «One of my students said that he just liked the word ‹Afrofuturism› ‘cause it made him optimistic, open, and that just said to me that there’s still a sense of a kind of terminus to the existence of people of African descent, that dystopic sense, that sense of being erased, eradicated, genocided, you know, and this term postulated the possibilities for him that bred a kind of blind optimism. It was like a talisman; it had kind of spell-like properties. You can never underestimate the value, the conjuring power, of certain words. What people make of them has to do with the degree to which they want to pursue creating and imagining the future.»
Hope is a speculative fiction.
© Mark Dery; all rights reserved.