Hack this: Why do so few African-Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other – the stranger in a strange land – would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists? Yet, to this writer’s knowledge, only Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, and Charles Saunders have chosen to write within the genre conventions of SF. This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African-Americans are, in a very real sense, 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; official histories undo what has been done to them; and technology, be it branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, or tasers, is too often brought to bear on black bodies.
Moreover, the sublegitimate status of science fiction as a pulp genre in Western literature mirrors the subaltern position to which blacks have been relegated throughout American history. In which context, William Gibson’s observation that SF is widely known as «the golden ghetto», in recognition of the negative correlation between the genre’s market share and its critical legitimation, takes on a curious significance. So, too, does Norman Spinrad’s glib use of the phrase «token nigger» to describe «any science fiction writer of merit who is adopted… in the grand salons of literary power».
Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture – and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future – might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism. The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, don’t the technocrats, SF writers, futurologists, set designers, and streamliners – white to a man – who have engineered our collective fantasies already have a lock on that unreal estate? The African-American SF writer Samuel R. Delany has suggested that «the flashing lights, the dials, and the rest of the imagistic paraphernalia of science fiction» have historically functioned as «social signs – signs people learned to read very quickly. They signaled technology. And technology was like a placard on the door saying, Boys Club! Girls, keep out. Black and Hispanics and the poor in general, go away!» What Gibson has termed the «semiotic ghosts» of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Frank R. Paul’s illustrations for Hugo Gernsback’s ‹Amazing Stories›, the chromium-skinned, teardrop-shaped household appliances dreamed up by Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and Disney’s Tomorrowland still haunt the public mind, in one guise or another.
But African-American voices have other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come. If there is an Afrofuturism, it must be sought in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points. We catch a glimpse of it in the opening pages of Ralph Ellison’s ‹Invisible Man›, where the proto-cyberpunk protagonist – a techno-bricoleur «in the great American tradition of tinkerers» – taps illegal juice from a line owned by the rapacious Monopolated Light & Power, gloating, «Oh, they suspect that their power is being drained off, but they don’t know where». One day, perhaps, he’ll indulge his fantasy of playing five recordings of Louis Armstrong’s version of «What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue» at once, in a sonic Romare Bearden collage (an unwittingly prescient vision, on Ellison’s part, of that 1981 masterpiece of deconstructionist deejaying, «The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel»). Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings such as «Molasses», which features a pie-eyed, snaggletoothed robot, adequately earn the term «Afrofuturist», as do movies like John Sayles’s ‹The Brother From Another Planet› and Lizzie Borden’s ‹Born in Flames›. Jimi Hendrix’s ‹Electric Ladyland› is Afrofuturist; so, too, is the techno-tribal global village music of Miles Davis’s ‹On the Corner› and Herbie Hancock’s ‹Headhunters›, as well as the fusion-jazz cyberfunk of Hancock’s ‹Future Shock› and Bernie Worrell’s ‹Blacktronic Science›, whose liner notes herald «reports and manifestoes from the nether regions of the modern Afrikan American music / speculative fiction universe». Afrofuturism manifests itself, too, in early ’80s electro-boogie releases such as Planet Patrol’s «Play at Your Own Risk», Warp 9’s «Nunk», George Clinton’s «Computer Games», and of course Afrika Bambaataa’s classic «Planet Rock», records steeped in «imagery drawn from computer games, video, cartoons, sci-fi and hip-hop slanguage», notes David Toop, who calls them «a soundtrack for vidkids to live out fantasies born of a science-fiction revival courtesy of «Star Wars» and «Close Encounters of the Third Kind».
Techno, whose name was purportedly inspired by a reference to «techno rebels» in Alvin Toffler’s ‹Third Wave›, is a quintessential example of Afrofuturism. The genre was jump-started in the Orwellian year of 1984 in Detroit, appropriately enough, a city equally famous for Motown and the mechanical ballets of its spot-welding robots. The Ur-tune, «Techno City», was hacked together by Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May, a band of button-pushers who went by the name Cybotron. Matthew Collin notes that their world-view was «shaped by playing video games, by watching Ridley Scott’s ‹Blade Runner›, and by the idea of a new computer world replacing industrial society as framed in both Kraftwerk’s records and futurologist Alvin Toffler’s book ‹The Third Wave›». According to Collin, the portentous chords and robotic clangor of their music reflected Motor City’s moribund economy, its dark passage from the birthplace of the auto industry to its burial ground. Atkins, Saunderson, and May appropriated «industrial detritus to create sparse, kinetic funk with drums like thunderbolts, yet mournful and deeply romantic, as if the machines were whispering a lament about what it was like to be young and black in post-industrial America». At the same time, they were young enough to be perversely fascinated by the very technologies that had downsized the American dream for factory workers in black Detroit. «‹Berry Gordy built the Motown sound on the same principles as the conveyor belt system at Ford’s›, explained Atkins. ‹Today, they use robots and computers to make the cars. I’m probably more interested in Ford’s robots than Berry Gordy’s music›.» But Afrofuturism bubbles up from the deepest, darkest wellsprings in the intergalactic big band jazz churned out by Sun Ra’s Omniverse Arkestra, in Parliament-Funkadelic’s Dr. Seuss-ian astrofunk, and in dub reggae, especially the bush doctor’s brew cooked up by Lee «Scratch» Perry, which at its eeriest sounds as if it were made out of dark matter and recorded in the crushing gravity field of a black hole («Angel Gabriel and the Space Boots» is a typical title).
The Rastafarian cosmology, like the Nation of Islam’s, with its genetically engineered white devils and its apocalyptic vision of Elijah Muhammad returning on a celestial mothership, is a syncretic crossweave of black nationalism, African and American religious beliefs, and plot devices worthy of a late-night rocket opera. Perry – arguably the preeminent practitioner of the audio juju known as dub – incarnates the Afrofuturist sensibility. Erik Davis asserts that «what is most important about Perry and his astounding musical legacy is how they highlight an often ignored strain of New World African culture: a techno-visionary tradition that looks as much toward science-fiction futurism as toward magical African roots». Davis writes: «This loosely gnostic strain of Afro-diasporic science fiction emerges from the improvised confrontation between modern technology and the prophetic imagination, a confrontation rooted in the alienated conditions of black life in the New World.» He quotes the African-American critic Greg Tate: «Black people», says Tate, «live the estrangement that science-fiction writers imagine.»
Which explains the seemingly counterintuitive conjunction of black dance music and SF imagery in hip-hop. The cultural critic Tricia Rose argues that South Bronx hip-hoppers like Afrika Bambaataa embraced the robotic synth-pop of Kraftwerk because what they saw reflected in the German band’s android imagery was «an understanding of themselves as already having been robots». Rose says: «Adopting ‹the robot› reflected a response to an existing condition: namely, that they were labor for capitalism, that they had very little value as people in this society. By taking on the robotic stance, one is ‹playing with the robot›. It’s like wearing body armor that identifies you as an alien: if it’s always on anyway, in some symbolic sense, perhaps you could master the wearing of this guise in order to use it against your interpolation.»
Afrofuturism percolates, as well, through black-written, black-drawn comics such as Milestone Media’s ‹Hardware› («A cog in the corporate machine is about to strip some gears…»), about a black scientist who dons forearm-mounted cannons and a «smart» battle suit to wage guerrilla war on his Orwellian, multinational employer. Milestone’s press releases for its four titles – ‹Hardware›, ‹Blood Syndicate›, ‹Static›, and ‹Icon› – make the Manhattan-based company’s political impulses explicit: a fictional metropolis, Dakota, provides a backdrop for «authentic, multicultural» superheroes «linked in their struggle to defeat the S.Y.S.T.E.M.» The city is a battlefield in «the clash of two worlds: a low-income urban caldron and the highest level of privileged society».
‹Icon›, an exemplar of Afrofuturism that sweeps antebellum memories, hip-hop culture, and cyberpunk into its compass, warrants detailed exegesis. The story begins in 1839, when an escape pod jettisoned from an exploding alien starliner lands, fortuitously, in the middle of a cotton field on Earth. A slave woman named Miriam stumbles on «a perfect little black baby» – in fact, an extraterrestrial whose morphogenetic technology has altered it to resemble the first lifeform it encounters – in the smoldering wreckage of the pod and raises it as her own. The orphan, christened Augustus, is male, and echoes of the Old Testament account of Moses in the bullrushes, the fay changelings of European folklore, and the infant Superman’s fiery fall from the heavens reverberate in the narrative’s opening passages.
Like his Roman namesake, Augustus is a «man of the future»; the man who fell to Earth is seemingly deathless, outliving several generations of his adopted family and eventually posing as his own great-grandson – Augustus Freeman IV – in present-day Dakota. A rock-ribbed conservative who preaches the gospel of Horatio Alger and inveighs against the welfare state, Freeman is a highly successful attorney, the only African-American living in the city’s exclusive Prospect Hills neighborhood. His unshakable belief in bootstrapping is challenged, however, when he takes a homegirl from the projects, Rachel «Rocket» Ervin, under his wing. A juvenile delinquent and Toni Morrison (!) fan, the streetwise teenager opens Augustus’s eyes to «a world of misery and failed expectations that he didn’t believe still existed in this country». She calls on him to use his otherworldly powers to help the downtrodden. When he does, in the guise of a mountain of bulging abs and pecs called Icon, she joins him as his sidekick. «As the series progresses», we are told, «Rocket will become the world’s first superheroine who is also a teenage, unwed mother».
The New York graffiti artist and B-boy theoretician Rammellzee constitutes yet another incarnation of Afrofuturism. Greg Tate holds that Rammellzee’s «formulations on the juncture between black and Western sign systems make the extrapolations of [Houston] Baker and [Henry Louis] Gates seem elementary by comparison». As evidence, he submits the artist’s «Ikonoklast Panzerism», a heavily armored descendant of late ’70s «wild style» graffiti (those bulbous letters that look as if they were twisted out of balloons). A 1979 drawing depicts a Panzerized letter «S»: it is a jumble of sharp angles that suggests the ‹Nude Descending a Staircase› bestriding a Jet Ski. «The Romans stole the alphabeta system from the Greeks through war», explains Rammellzee. «Then, in medieval times, monks ornamented letters to hide their meaning from the people. Now, the letter is armored against further manipulation.»
In like fashion, the artist encases himself during gallery performances in Gasholeer, a 148-pound, gadgetry-encrusted exoskeleton inspired by an android he painted on a subway train in 1981. Four years in the making, Rammellzee’s exuberantly low-tech costume bristles with rocket launchers, nozzles that gush gouts of flame, and an all-important sound system.
«From both wrists, I can shoot seven flames, nine flames from each sneaker’s heel, and colored flames from the throat. Two girl doll heads hanging from my waist and in front of my balls spit fire and vomit smoke… The sound system consists of a Computator, which is a system of screws with wires. These screws can be depressed when the keyboard gun is locked into it. The sound travels through the keyboard and screws, then through the Computator, then the belt, and on up to the four mid-range speakers (with tweeters). This is all balanced by a forward wheel from a jet fighter plane. I also use an echo chamber, Vocoder, and system of strobe lights. A coolant device keeps my head and chest at normal temperature. A 100-watt amp and batteries give me power.»
The B-boy bricolage bodied forth in Rammellzee’s «bulletproof arsenal», with its dangling, fetish-like doll heads and its Computator cobbled together from screws and wires, speaks to dreams of coherence in a fractured world, and to the alchemy of poverty that transmutes sneakers into high style, turntables into musical instruments, and spray-painted tableaux on subway cars into hit-and-run art.
Rammellzee’s Afrofuturist appropriation of the castoff oddments of technoculture is semiotic guerrilla warfare, just as his «slanguage» – a heavily encrypted hip-hop argot – is the linguistic equivalent of graffiti «tags» all over the mother tongue. In an essay on English as the imperial language of the Internet, the cultural critic McKenzie Wark argues for the willful, viral corruption of the lingua franca of global corporate monoculture as a political act. «I’m reminded of Caliban and Prospero», he writes. «Prospero, the Western man of the book, teaches Caliban, the colonial other, how to speak his language. And Caliban says, ‹You give me words, that I might curse you with them.› Which is what happens to imperial languages. The imperial others learn it all too well. Make it something else. Make it proliferate, differentiate. Like Rammellzee, and his project for a Black English that nobody else could understand. Hiding in the master tongue. Waiting. Biting the master tongue.» Wark’s analysis resonates with Tricia Rose’s notion of hip-hop countersignage as «master[ing] the wearing of this guise in order to use it against your interpolation».
African-American culture is Afrofuturist at its heart, literalizing Gibson’s cyberpunk axiom, «The street finds its own uses for things.» With trickster élan, it retrofits, refunctions, and willfully misuses the technocommodities and science fictions generated by a dominant culture that has always been not only white but a wielder, as well, of instrumental technologies. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. reminds us that Black people have always been masters of the figurative: saying one thing to mean something quite other has been basic to black survival in oppressive Western cultures… «Reading», in this sense, was not play; it was an essential aspect of the «literacy» training of a child. This sort of metaphorical literacy, the learning to decipher complex codes, is just about the blackest aspect of the black tradition.
Here at the end of the 20th century, there’s another name for the survival skill Gates argues is quintessentially black. What he describes as a deconstructionist ability to crack complex cultural codes goes by a better-known name, these days. They call it hacking.
© Mark Dery; all rights reserved.
1 ‹Black to the Future›, the essay in which I coined the term «Afrofuturism», and in which I took what I called a «first, faltering step» toward theorizing it, was written in 1992. It was first published in 1993, in ‹Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture›, a special issue of ‹The South Atlantic Quarterly› that I guest-edited. It served as an introduction to the themes, historical, sociological, and theoretical, that I and my interviewees – Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose – improvised on, in the three interviews that followed it. My essay, and the accompanying interviews, were included in the book version of ‹Flame Wars› published by Duke University Press in 1994.