Afrofuturism is back on everyone’s lips – at least since the Hollywood blockbuster “Black Panther” (2018) became one of the most successful films in history. But behind the idea lie decades of research, political and creative work that always involves developing ideas for alternative futures. In this two–part MORE WORLD interview, cultural scientist tobais c. van Veen talks about Afrofuturist authors who deal with the complex issues of planetary collapse, neo–fascism, white supremacy, and climate change. The questions were asked by Magdalena Taube and Krystian Woznicki.
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I wonder whether and how you see Afrofuturism as an approach embedded in or part of outright political strategies (and social movements) to go about addressing climate change, migration and the digitalization complex or any of these planetary challenges?
We first have to understand what is meant by Afrofuturism – because the reply I want to make here is that Afrofuturism is already an evolving global episteme that proliferates its own political strategies and social movements. A good example of the latter is the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM), which in 2019 had sixteen gatherings planned across five countries (including Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, the U.S. and Canada). So though one can think Afrofuturism as an “approach,” often identifiable by way of its black science fiction “aesthetics” (and key here is the entanglement of aesthetics with politics), it cannot be embedded without investing or engaging in the unfolding effects of an Afrofuturist worldview, from ethics, politics and being to temporality – or at least, not without the violence of taking everything but the burden (to sample Greg Tate). The founder of BSAM, Reynaldo Anderson, positions Afrofuturism in the lineage of anticolonial and anticapitalist pan-African politics, for example, while others see Afrofuturism as intersecting Afropolitan and cosmopolitan approaches. So we need to approach Afrofuturism as its own formation, its own discourse, its own toolkit, its own movement of movements that takes as its origin the “routes and roots” of the black Atlantic and their call-and-response interplay of decolonial and anti-imperialist music, politics, and art (to sample Paul Gilroy).
If we approach Afrofuturism in this manner, we see that its radical black imaginary encompasses multiple science and speculative fiction (sf) texts – such as Octavia E. Butler’s Parables of the Sower/Talents (1993/1998) – that speak to, anticipate, and offer strategies for issues such as global planetary collapse, neofascism, white supremacy and climate change. Indeed, the role of black sf, as in all sf, is crucial to charting new futures for a dying planet. What makes black sf particularly insightful is how it often conceives of black identity as already alien(ated), and black existence as already dystopic – and thus its post-apocalyptic speculative narratives are especially potent for reconfiguring relationships of capitalism, racism and patriarchy, for imagining all the pitfalls and potentials of what may come (and what has already come to pass). Afrofuturism is thus immanently political by way of how it enters and reconfigures time itself as a space of immanence: it is concerned with disseminating alternative Afrofutures, though its “futurism” is non-linear, in the mode of the Ghanian concept of Sankofa, which means “to go back and fetch it.” The futurism of Afrofuturism is a cylical/spiral process that re-turns and re-purposes ancestral futures buried in the past (Sankofa), often returning to the ethnogothic symbols and motifs of composite traumas that re-centre the act of claiming the future, a narrative process John Jennings and Kinitra Brooks describe as “Sankofarration” (in Brooks 2017). At the same time, the political immanence of Afrofuturism is concerned with critiquing and displacing the ongoing hegemony of white fantasies that masquerade as the only reality there is.
How does Afrofuturism address digitalization?
Afrofuturism has been at the forefront of crafting critical and creative responses to digitalization. In the ’90s, Afrofuturism was positioned by Alondra Nelson (2002) and others as a means of addressing the neoliberal discourse of the “digital divide” that pegged equality and progress to a limited understanding of technological access. What Afrofuturist perspectives reveal – then as now – is how Afrodiasporic cultures have a long history of creatively repurposing technologies to undertake experiments in modes of life, expression, and liberation, as one can see in the black accelerationist theses of Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant Than the Sun (1999). Writing at the apogee of ‘90s rave culture, Eshun sought to amplify the affective forces of black electronic music that destabilize boundaries between blackness/body/machine and android/alien. When dealing with Afrofuturism, I am thinking of the black speculative framework in which remix culture, turntablism, mash-ups and hip-hop take place. So we can think of how Afrofuturism profers modes for hacking the digitalization of everyday life, particularly by challenging capitalist modes of copyright and property.
How about in the context of music and film?
Since the invention of Jamaican sound systems and Bronx block parties, the DJ has become the new griot, the sonic storyteller and future historian that repurposes cultural archives and creatively mis-uses recording technologies to articulate new modes of social belonging. What is at stake here is not a Luddite rejection of technology nor an uncritical embrace of Silicon Valley proselytizing, but the tinkering, hacking and ab/using of the sociotechnical sphere, as part of an Afrofuturist program of counter-reality production and historical revisionism, deploying science fiction takes on Afrocentric narratives as imaginative sites of intervention. Eshun’s films with Otolith Group are demonstrative in this respect, as is John Akomfrah’s Last Angel of History (1996), Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (2010), Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust (1991) and, if I may say so, my own short film Lost Alien (2018), that blends documentary techniques with silent and surrealist filmmaking to capture the Afrofuturist cosplay of ZiggZaggerZ the Bastard as a photosensitive black alien stranded on a sunlit planet. And of course – to turn to the question of migration – Afrofuturism addresses, and seeks to redress, the “forced migration” of Atlantic slavery and its dystopic aftershocks that perforate contemporary black existence – what Public Enemy calls “armageddon been-in-effect” (see Sinker 1992; van Veen 2015). In this respect Afrofuturism complements Afropessimism, by recognising social death as an aftershock of slavery – though as the starting point for a speculative blackness that seeks to evade and defeat its necropolitics.
Is there an Afrofuturist renaissance underway?
It is interesting to see how the term has reappeared in 21C pop culture to describe Hollywood superhero franchises such as Marvel’s Black Panther. And I say “reappear”: the term had critical and imaginative currency in the 1990s as part of black cybertheory, particularly through the Afrofuturism listserv founded by Alondra Nelson and Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky. But before proceeding, I want to sound a note of caution – for much rests on how one perceives Afrofuturism. Today, Afrofuturism is being profitably incorporated into entertainment and spectacle, precisely through the troubling – which is to say celebratory and enjoyable – mythologies of superhero franchises and their saviour narratives of manifest destiny. Of course that Black Panther is pivotal to underscoring this very point demonstrates its value in circulating black radical dreamings of a future otherwise to white rule. It is also an example of how the black imaginary and black representation can secure Hollywood significant revenue – a prospect with both positive and negative social effects.
But what I want the reader to know is that well before Black Panther there have been some three decades of scholarship, literature, music and art on the sociopolitical forces of black speculative praxis, most of it well before Hollywood decided to make a film out of a comic that, though influential and at times profound, particularly with recent narratives from Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nnedi Okorafor, was nonetheless begun by two white men, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. This is not to discredit Lee and Kirby’s attempt to craft a nonwhite superhero – months before the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was founded in Oakland by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966! – but it is also to flag, before I continue, my own whiteness in responding to these questions, and the underlying whiteness of the prime example of Afrofuturism today, and what is at stake here in critically positioning what we mean by Afrofuturism before placing it in dialogue with other struggles, themes, and movements.
With this in mind, let me briefly revisit something of the history and reception of the term “Afrofuturism,” which though initially coined by Mark Dery in 1992, was already being discussed at the time, in so many words and under different monikers, by Greg Tate, Amiri Baraka, Mark Sinker, Tricia Rose, Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, among others.