Afro-Futurism is Change
Authored by Samanda Robinson, Guest Electrician.
All that you touch
you Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.
God is Change
– Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
Taken from the Book of Earthseed, the spiritual dogma created by Octavia Butler’s protagonist Lauren Olamina in her Parable series, one of the main tenets and lasting truth of life is Change. Change is apparent and ever present in this post-apocalyptic travel narrative, as it is in our own real world. In this present moment, Change is taking center stage as we deal with a pandemic and eerily Butler’s words are more than just a futuristic call for action and more prophetic. The genre and aesthetic of Afrofuturism encapsulates Change. Afrofuturism is Change.
A departure from traditional speculative and science fiction, Afrofuturism imagines new possibilities for those of the diaspora and envisions a world or worlds, where these individuals are a part of the future. For many decades, creators of speculative and science fiction, attempted to justify their choice not to include multicultural characters: the future would certainly be post-racial, so race shouldn’t matter in the genre. These creatives were wrong. Creators of Afrofuturism embrace the whole identity of their characters and empower readers through this inclusion. First coined in 1994, the cultural critic Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism in his, “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose” as, “Speculative fiction that treats African- American themes and addressed African American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture – and, more generally, African -American signification that appropriates images of technology and prosthetically enhanced future – might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism’.” Dery then goes on to pose a question for further thought: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures (180)?”
“Speculative fiction that treats African- American themes and addressed African American concerns in the context of twentieth century technoculture – and, more generally, African -American signification that appropriates images of technology and prosthetically enhanced future – might, for want of a better term, be called ‘Afrofuturism’.”
Interestingly enough, for those creators of Afrofuturism, it is much more than just a literary genre; it’s an aesthetic, a lifestyle. And people have been writing in the genre and creating Afrofuturistic music and art before the term was coined in 1994. In the 1960s, the music collective, Parliament-Funkadelic (P-Funk) incorporated elaborate costumes and played with form in their music as they became international sensations while adopting this other worldly aesthetic. In the contemporary, Janelle Monae consistently has embraced the aesthetic. with intersectional intent. What characterizes both of these innovators is their insistence on liberation for their people with unapologetic lyrics and visual elements. Afrofuturism is a tool for activism and liberation. What is more liberating than imagining a world for people who aren’t even given full freedoms in the current one?
“But it is clear that Afrofuturism is a conduit to envisioning these new possibilities and creating counternarratives and counter histories.”
In her introduction to the collection, Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, Walidah Imarisha boldly states, “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction (3).” Of course, not every creator who writes and produces art isn’t concerned solely with liberation and activism, but it is clear that Afrofuturism is a conduit to envisioning these new possibilities and creating counternarratives and counter histories. Saidiya Hartman, in her “Venus in Two Acts” interrogates the representation of enslaved women, the harsh archive that contains their stories and violence they experienced and reading and writing practices that seek to give these women a voice. Towards the end of her text, she offers up Octavia Butler’s Kindred as a fitting example of a narrative that gives Black Venus a voice. This reveals the usefulness and agency that Afrofuturism provides, even in the context of the horrors of American slavery. Afrofuturism is multifaceted and multifunctional. Afrofuturism is Change.
Samanda Robinson is a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of English. She researches the intersection of Afrofuturism/ Black Speculative Fiction and social justice movements. She is a 2017 graduate of Fisk University. You can find her on Twitter @SamandaRobinson.