september-2018

66 / HERITAGE / Afrofuturism
HERITAGE WILDLIFE / 67
Alamy
“If you’re going to imagine yourself
in the future, you have to imagine
where you’ve come from”
WHO WOULDN’T WANT to visit
Wakanda, the fictional world of the film,
Black Panther? Here, a king leads a lush,
technologically advanced African nation
that has never been colonised, and
whose teen princess is the genius who
runs the nation’s science programme
while designing fashionable armour.
Wakanda also has war rhinos. Grossing
over US$1.3 billion worldwide, Black
Panther captured the cultural zeitgeist.
It also sparked renewed interest in
“Afrofuturism”, which opens the door
for black creators to enter the world of
science fiction (sci-fi). This genre often
features allegories for real life, emphasising
important issues facing society.
Afrofuturism provides the same platform
for African-Americans to bring
their iconography, language, history,
myth and lore to craft powerful stories.
Album artwork for
Janelle Monáe’s album
Dirty Computer.
JUCO Photo / Art & Motion
THE INCITING INCIDENT
Cultural critic Mark Dery coined
the term in his 1994 essay, Black to the
Future. It featured conversations with a
sci-fi writer, a fellow critic and an academic
to explore the ways in which sci-fi
is uniquely suited to tell the truths of the
forced alienation of black people in the
US. But it’s also a moving dialectic that
achieves something more: through a
telling discussion between Dery and
Samuel R. Delany (the sci-fi writer) it
shows how Afrofuturism also promotes
humanity and the individuals within it,
not the subjugated races it has become.
In his earlier works, Delany deliberately
downplayed the issue of race, for
which he received some criticism. But he
had a good reason for doing so. “Now
part of what… I see as the problem is the
idea of anybody’s having to fight the fragmentation
and multicultural diversity of
the world… by constructing something so
rigid as an identity, an identity in which
there has to be a fixed and immobile
core… that is structured to hold inviolate
such a complete biological fantasy as race
– whether black or white,” he says. Delany
was one of only a handful of black
people who wrote sci-fi back in the mid
1990s, yet his writing sits with the work
of sci-fi behemoths like his friend and
peer William Gibson, who wrote the
cyberpunk thriller Neuromancer.
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT
Dery identified a broad range of
artists whose work bore elements of
Afrofuturism: “Glimpses of it can be
caught in Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings
Black Panther’s cultural references
Director Ryan Coogler’s choices in costume and architecture can be traced back to actual
geographical locations and communities. This gives curious Africans in the diaspora who’ve
never travelled to the continent actual reference points to existing tribes, cultures and practices
that they can be proud to associate with. The Queen’s crown is from the Zulu in South Africa; the
force-field blankets, Lesotho; the mining tribe’s bulbous clay-moulded hairstyles are indigenous to
Namibia’s Himba tribe, while lip extension is practiced by groups in Chad, Tanzania, Mozambique
and Ethiopia. The three main leads; Black Panther, Nakia and Okoye had a hidden message: they
wore black, green and red, respectively. These are the colours of the Pan-African flag.
such as Molasses, which features a pieeyed,
snaggletoothed robot; in movies
such as John Sayles’s The Brother from
Another Planet and Lizzie Borden’s
Born in Flames; in records such as Jimi
Hendrix’ Electric Ladyland and George
Clinton’s Computer Games.” He also
lauded composer, keyboardist and
poet, Sun Ra and his “intergalactic
big-band jazz”. In the 1950s, Sun Ra
merged Egyptian mythology with
cosmic philosophy and performed on
stage in bold and stylish African-themed
spacesuits. Sun Ra is now widely
regarded as a pioneer of Afrofuturism.
Tricia Rose, the academic interviewed
by Dery, explains Sun Ra’s approach,
“If you’re going to imagine yourself in
the future, you have to imagine where
you’ve come from; ancestor worship in
black culture is a way of countering a
historical erasure.” Indeed, Africans
were essentially robbed of their heritage
during the transatlantic slave trade, so
it stands to reason that regaining it
should be of paramount importance,
and therefore, that it should feature
heavily in Afrofuturist productions.
(See text box on Black Panther.)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison,
which is regarded as an early work of
Afrofuturism, references that historical
deletion by showing the unjust consequences
black people have since endured.
This 1953 National Book Award winner
features an unnamed protagonist
reflecting on the various ways he’d
experienced social invisibility. “The
opening and closing scenes of Invisible
Man hold forth the possibility of a
different relationship between technology,
race, and art: by hiding out under New
York City and stealing electricity to
power his turntables, Ellison’s protagonist
creates a space outside linear time
where he can begin to rewire the relations
between past and present and art and
technology,” writes Lisa Yaszek in her
essay, An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph
Ellison. >