How can “we” gain more time to save this planet? And who exactly is “we”? Astro–Blackness is a recent form of thinking and artistic practice that brings together the major issues of our time—climate change, migration, digitalization. In the second part of the interview with Magdalena Taube and Krystian Woznicki, cultural scientist Tobais c. van Veen reflects on how the future can be imagined under these conditions.
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The 1990s was also for me a crucial moment: I think the first time the term Afrofuturism popped up on my screen was by way of Mark Dery and the first time I got an idea that this has an intricate history was by way of John Corbett. Dery’s Flame Wars (1994) and Corbett’s Extended Play (1994) are still essential books in my personal library.
The cultural theorists and writers I just mentioned were already discussing “black futurism” because of the persistence of black sf motifs in literature, comix and music– particularly the performative black technopoetics of Sun Ra, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Parliament/Funkadelic, Grace Jones, Ramm:ell:zee, and Afrika Bambaata. What I wish to point out is how Dery’s initial discussion treated Afrofuturism in provisional terms. I read his essay as positing the term “Afro-futurism” as a provisional title for a movement to come that would encompass the diverse expressions of the black speculative arts from across the Afrodiaspora. It certainly resonates with Amiri Baraka’s 1974 writings on “AfroSurrealism,” though Afrofuturism shifts our attention to science fictional motifs. As contemporary pop culture articles rarely undertake much research beyond Dery’s provisional definition, itself crafted from a series of interviews with Tate, Rose and Delany, I want to emphasize that today, the term operates not just as a descriptor but as an action, as an energetic verb, in the shaping of black agency – it has been adopted by evolving movements, arts, and peoples, everywhere put into purpose by practitioners, defined anew in different contexts, and mobilized to particular ends. It has also been modified and challenged – D. Scot Miller has further developed Baraka’s line of thought in “The AfroSurreal Manifesto” (2009), and Valorie Thomas has posited “Afrxfuturism” to address intersectional, queer black feminism and the “diasporic vertigo” of the crossroads (see Thomas 2018). Thus it exhibits all manner of historical and cultural tensions that are constitutive to its momentum – emerging political tensions between black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and cosmopolitanism, for example, as well as contesting struggles for equity and equality, recognition and identity that play out along axes of essentialism, accelerationism and constructivism.
The renewed global mobilization of speculative blackness in the 21C has been coined by Reynaldo Anderson as “Afrofuturism 2.0” (2015). If I may summarize from Anderson, crucial to the 21C formation of Afrofuturism are three points: (1) it contributes to the unfolding of a posthumanity that refuses to be bound to white Enlightenment universalism (with or without progress narratives); (2) it operates by way of chronopolitics, what Eshun calls the Afrofuturist “program for recovering the histories of counter-futures” (2002, 288), whereby Afrofuturism reinvents the past to infiltrate black futures into the unfolding of the present; and (3) it proliferates the invention of “black identity frameworks and technocultural assemblages” that decolonize the imaginary and overthrow slave mentality, opening up black existence, and posthumanity more generally, to what John Jennings calls “Astro-Blackness” and its modes of cosmic black consciousness, including black feminist, queer and intersectional identities (Anderson and Jones 2016, vii). Indeed, Anderson and Jones position Astro-Blackness as addressing the transition of a “nation-state bound analog notion of blackness” to “a digitized era toward and in tension with post-digital perspectives as a global response to the planetary and near planetary challenge facing black life” (2016, viii). It is worth noting here that Anderson and Jones already consider Afrofuturism 2.0 as enmeshed with and addressing “migration, human reproduction, algorithms, digital networks, software platforms, bio-technical augmentation and . . . racialized identities that are increasingly materialized vis-à-vis contemporary technological advances” (2016, vii–viii). Addressing these planetary challenges has been central to the philosophy, politics and creative arts around Afrofuturism – precisely because its perspective turns to the exoplanetary, be it Dr. Octagon’s Jupiter or Sun Ra’s Saturn, so as to view the globe in its Alien Nation, as both adoptive home and self-manufactured hell. Afrofuturism is an exoplanetary politics. It distantiates us from being beholden to the assumed special function of the human. As Sun Ra once said on Nuclear War (1983), “don’t you know / if they push that button / your ass gotta go / what you gonna do / without your ass?”
Exploring further the climate change-migration-digitalization nexus, I wonder what kind of impulses you consider – from the context of Afrofuturism – to be most innovative with regards to forging alternatives and forms of cooperation in the era of planetary unrest?
Afrofuturism has operated as black secret technology. As I have argued elsewhere (2013), it infiltrates popular culture through an excess that cannot be contained in the symbolism of its black aliens and androids, precisely because its operations transgress allegory as they approach the praxis of becoming(s). This is its ontotemporal counterpower. If we are thinking of forging alternatives, the Afrofuturist alternative commences at the level of what it means to be a being on this planet – which is to say, what it means to become some/thing other than an object of white supremacy, something other than an expendable resource to capital. It is here that Afrofuturism offers not just significant thought and art but praxis in the development of black posthumanism – or better, exhumanism. Ditto with the call to enact innovative forms of cooperation: we need to think of who is joining whose cooperative, and for what purposes beyond liberal tenets of equality or socialist tenets of economic equity. I want to point out that the infiltration of Afrofuturism into the popular unconscious by way of black popular music, remix culture and science fiction marks but one of the sociopolitical forces of its versatile imaginary, yet perhaps its most potent: it seeds Afrofutures that destabilize the unthought aspects of whose future is at stake. When Afrofuturism, even as an “aesthetic,” enters popular discourse, its black speculative futures and revisionist histories tend to question whose worlding of the world “we” are speaking of – whose social movements, whose politics, whose “we”?
For sure, this question always needs to be raised!
I say this, at the very least, to signal how Afrofuturism draws attention to the futures but also pasts and presents of blackness, the black imaginary, and race in general to political struggle, all of which converges on critical issues of class – namely who has had access to its supposedly universal subject. As I suggest elsewhere, Afrofuturism questions the primacy of class as the basis for sociopolitical organisation (see van Veen and Anderson 2018), by critically understanding race as a white supremacist order-function that classifies the anthropocene into humans, subhumans, and nonhumans. In short, one cannot be part of a revolutionary class if one is excluded from the category of the human to begin with.
Afrofuturism draws attention to the uneven deployment of racialization as a structural means to determine who or what is disposable. So if thinking how to position class – not its analytic negation but its strategic supplement, as necessitated by its exclusionary history – Afrofuturism proffers something of an escape plan from the hierarchy of humanism and its Great Chain of Beings, most of whom are relegated to the necropolitics of the labour pit. “Break the chains of being – embrace becoming” might make for an unwieldly philosophical meme, but it is also to say you have to work on yourself, become-otherwise, in order to conscientiously entangle and become-with kinfolk. Before cooperating with the other(s), who/what other(s) are you becoming? Whose future are “we” all cooperating towards? Instead of the burden being placed upon Afrofuturism to respond to this question, perhaps “we” should also ask, in turn, how contemporary European social movements can address future(s) of blackness, indigeneity, and racialization beyond the parameters of migrant, climate, digit.
So when I am speaking here about Afrofuturism, it is in the context of the cultural and sociopolitical struggles of an Afrodiaspora forcefully dispersed through centuries of European and American slavery and colonization. Afrofuturism contends with this history, seeking to counteract its destructive effects by way of the myriad practices of speculative blackness that first and foremost decolonize the imaginary. I see its ontotemporal politics as a decolonizing force in social, economic, artistic, and performative spheres but also in philosophical, technological and scientific modes, and I see these forces as immanently entwined through popular culture. The underlying effect of these forces is that Afrofuturism shifts the event horizon of the hitherto impossible. If Sun Ra, a black alien Pharaoh, can walk the Earth, then this opens up all manner of portals and means of exodus from Earthbound ideologies. At the very least, it ought to draw attention to the relationships between black tactical media and becoming, sound and race, as profoundly entangled modes of political engagement.
This all may seem overly fantastical, beyond reason, and inapplicable to social justice campaigns – but at stake is nothing less than recovering/reinventing neglected ways of becoming on this planet that entwine blackness with indigenous and ecological pathways that open onto a multiplicity of sustainable posthumanism(s). Nor is this a romantic or nostalgic gesture: recovering the past signals its reinvention, the clinamen that separates Afrofuturism from Afrocentrism, in the holding open of an imaginative blackspace that refuses orthodoxy. At stake is curtailing the capitalist decimation of planetary time so that there is more time, other time (for the other), to act otherwise, to be and become otherwise. At stake is nothing less than the dismantling of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, in the radical dreaming of a planet Earth to come where we are no longer bound to being human.