Latham 2014

Afrofuturism
Oxford Handbooks Online

Afrofuturism
De Witt Douglas Kilgore
The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction
Edited by Rob Latham
Print Publication Date: Nov 2014

Subject: Literature, Literary Studies - Postcolonial Literature, Literary Theory and Cultural
Studies
Online Publication Date: Oct 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199838844.013.0044
Abstract and Keywords
Can we imagine a future in which the African diaspora is seen as central to the flow of
events? This chapter seeks to answer that question through a history of Afrofuturism as a
critical term and a critique of the concept as deployed by black and white science fiction
writers. The word is presented as a heuristic that makes visible black artistic production
of futures that seek escape from dystopian erasures that seem real. The idea captures
stories about science, technology, and culture other than those that limit future history to
Eurocentric extrapolations. Kilgore argues that the term has allowed both a
reconsideration of canonical African-American literature as well as an extension of
science fiction’s ability to see prophetically across racial and cultural divides.
Keywords: African diaspora, Afrofuturism, science fiction, Future History, dystopian, Eurocentrism, African-
American literature, race
IN the final decade of the twentieth century, the future seemed ever more imminent. The
great expansion of computer- and Internet-based technoculture had produced a renewed
interest in the nature and character of tomorrow’s world. Fiction writers and cultural
journalists traced the advent of a virtual or digital future that they believed would usher
in a more prosperous, just, and democratic order (see Gilder). Less sanguine
commentators pointed to a potential digital divide, a technological separation that could
reproduce old divisions between rich and poor, black and white in a new global space (see
Norris). Underlying both prospects lay the tacit assumption that any future would be
defined and directed by a Euro-American majority; people of color would fit into those
futures merely as an afterthought.
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Afrofuturism
Still, amidst the general technofuturist ferment of the era, the position and prospects of
African Americans attracted the attention of a number of cultural critics. In his 1994
collection of essays Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, editor Mark Dery
included a chapter of his own, entitled “Black to the Future,” in which he developed the
term “Afrofuturism.” This neologism, which referred to a mode of African-American
science fiction that was contingent upon but critical of the nation’s Futurist imaginary,
was defined by Dery as follows: “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes
and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century
technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates
images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (180). Dery positioned the
concept in opposition to histories and futures in which blacks play minor roles or
disappear entirely. In Euro-American Futurism, the ability to imagine things to come is
the property of a dominant class distinguished from the rest of the human species by race
—a situation Dery recognizes by asking, “Isn’t the unreal estate of the future already
owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers—white to a man
—who have engineered our collective fantasies?” (180). For Dery, Afrofuturism was a way
around the racial exclusion encoded in the various media of mainstream Futurism.
While the term had actually been coined the year before by a British music
(p. 562)
journalist (Eshun 299; Bould 180), it was Dery’s usage that gained critical traction,
especially in the United States. Identifying Afrofuturism as a material practice within
American culture, Dery cast a broad net: not only was it a growingly significant minority
voice within SF, but it could also be found in fine and street art, art-house and
documentary film, and most especially in music (182). Indeed, subsequent Afrofuturist
scholarship has been dominated by explorations of Futurist aesthetics and narratives in
various forms of black music culture (see Weheliye; Zuberi). Producing material evidence
for a popular Afrofuturism, Dery also cited Milestone Media’s ambitious and hopeful
experiment in creating comics written and drawn by African-American creators for a
mainstream audience (182). Thus, Dery’s Afrofuturism, while staking a claim within
literary culture, displayed its significance most fully and richly in the visual and
performing arts. This emphasis tracked Dery’s own interests but also validated his
impression that Afrofuturism is a transgeneric cultural force and, as such, may be
discovered “in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points” (182).
In a version of the original article republished in Marleen Barr’s anthology Afro-Future

Females (2008), Dery teases out the implications of Afrofuturist artistic production,
arguing that it is a form of hacking, a technoperformative way of cracking a complex
cultural code, as well as a survival skill that is “quintessentially black” (13). It is an
Afrocentric form of Futurist expression authored by black creators who eschew SF’s more
metaphorical approach to the social and political realities of racial difference. In his
initial search for work that could serve as models for Afrofuturism, however, Dery had
included Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames (1983) and John Sayles’s The Brother from
Another Planet (1984), films written and directed by whites. Afrofuturism thus forces us
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Afrofuturism
to pay attention not only to the authorship and control of Futurist meaning-making but
also to the specific communicative spaces within which raced artists intervene in the
construction of racial identity.
Afrofuturism makes visible an aspect of African-American expressive culture that had

been noticed before but with only a fleeting recognition of its relevance to either the
black community or the general culture. A decade prior to its establishment as a distinct
cultural form, for example, Thulani Davis, in a Village Voice article, defined the future as
primarily a white affair, with no place for black communities and only a little room for
black individuals. She recognized African-American writers such as Delany and Ishmael
Reed as exceptions that proved the rule, seeing their experimental play with racial
categories and modes of recognition as irrelevant to the street-level vibrancy she
cherished in contemporary African-American culture—the customs of a community
surviving and thriving on its own terms. Her general assessment of the state of the
American Futurist imaginary c. 1983 was contained in her article’s title, “The Future May
Be Bleak, but It’s Not Black.” Davis hoped for but did not see artistic representations of a
future we might now term Afrofuturist, one in which Euro-American culture and
whiteness are presumed to be neither preeminent nor directive of history.
Davis’s pessimism and Dery’s relative optimism were founded on two foundational
suppositions: that black expressive activity in speculative or science fiction is relatively
(p. 563) recent and that it is rare. Dery framed his initial investigation of black Futurism
with the question: “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?” (179–80). He went on to locate the
black community as the inhabitants of “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; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies” (180).
What is interesting here is the conflation of black people with the horrors they face: like
Earthlings in any number of SF B-movies, they are arrayed against an invading force
intent on alienating and subjugating them. Dery’s implication is that, if creative
engagement with this situation is limited to the protocols of social realism or historical
recovery (if, in other words, the techniques of SF are eschewed), then black literature has
little or nothing to say about the technoscientific episteme in which we now live.
Yet Afrofuturism does have a literary pedigree that is rather longer than Dery
acknowledges. This became evident with the publication of Sheree R. Thomas’s first Dark
Matter anthology in 2000, which showed that the fantastic is an old and familiar register
in African diasporic writing. Covering a broad spectrum of material, both chronologically
and generically, Dark Matter presented a cornucopia of speculative thought and narrative
emerging from black communities in the New World, charting both a substantial tradition
and a vibrant contemporary practice of black writing in SF and fantasy. In her followup
collection, Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004), Thomas indicated that her overall goal
was to showcase stories motivated by the desire to change or influence the future (ix–x).
This represents a core value of Afrofuturism: to imagine futures directed by the survival
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Afrofuturism
and even the resurgence of black people and their cultures, experiences, and designs.
The anthologies’ 29 pieces of fiction rebut Dery’s impression of scarcity, replacing it with
a richness that Thomas sees as generative of a deeper understanding of the diverse
histories of speculative fiction.
An important part of the first anthology’s project were the essays that Thomas included
by Butler, Delany, Charles R. Saunders, Walter Mosley, and Paul D. Miller, which
collectively offered a historical and prophetic manifesto for black involvement in SF.
Noting that there has been an Africanist discourse among white writers in the genre,
Saunders insists that blacks must tell their own stories or else have them told by others:
“Just as our ancestors sang their songs in a strange land when they were kidnapped and
sold from Africa, we must, now and in the future, continue to sing our songs under
strange stars” (404). Afrofuturism is here defined as responsible storytelling, a challenge
to remember a past that instructs the present and can build a future. For Walter Mosley,
SF is a genre in which it is possible to throw off the chains of a realism that can imprison
groups and individuals in facts as they are; he argues for SF’s appeal to African
Americans, heralding black creative efforts in the field that “will be the beginning of a
new autonomy” (407). Miller’s contribution indicates the wide range of literary and
musical references that seed an Afrofuturist sensibility (409), offering not only Butler and
Delany as guides but also Ursula K. Le Guin and J. G. Ballard, as (p. 564) well as Sylvia
Plath and Countee Cullen (411). For Miller, science fiction is an integral part of the
artistic education that supports his own hip-hop-inflected experiments as “DJ Spooky,” the
name under which he is more widely known. Finally, Butler’s essay looks forward to the
possibility that humanity may meet another sentience, creating a crisis in which we must
finally confront the aliens that we are to one another (416). Each essayist projects an
Afrofuturist sensibility that seeks to recover, change, and extend black identities beyond
their mundane limits while retaining the histories and accomplishments of the African
diaspora. The essays promote an opening-up of black expressive efforts to the not-yet, in
order to exploit what Ernst Bloch might call the utopian surplus of contemporary
technoculture (see Kellner).
Is imagining futures for peoples of African descent, especially if conventional doomsday

scenarios do not limit these futures, evidence of a resurgent black nationalism? Does it
constitute a simple exchange of a black future for the white futures that Daniel Bernardi
has identified as a persistent trope of SF’s historical imaginary? While this is certainly
possible, an ethic of racial exclusivity is not central to Afrofuturist thought. Rather, the
focus is on crafting an expressive mode that may also be taken up by artists from across
the racial spectrum. The price of the ticket is an intimate engagement with black
complexity, a self-reflexive recognition that it is inextricable from an artist’s own identity
and the futures he or she might foretell.
Caribbean-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson demonstrates this aspect of Afrofuturism by

using it as the nodal point in the dialogue she curates between black and white authors in
her anthology Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003). Writers of both races share roughly equal
space, showing what they can do with the dramatic political histories and rich storytelling
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Afrofuturism
traditions that the diverse peoples of the New World have created. Hopkinson offers the
rationale behind this project in the introduction to another of her anthologies, So Long
Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004), co-edited with Uppinder
Mehan. “If I were to edit such an anthology on my own,” she writes in her Introduction, “I
would likely have chosen to include white writers, since I feel that a dialogue about the
effects of colonialism is one that white folks need to have with the rest of us” (8). Thus,
Afrocentric speculative fiction is cast as a mode of communication between readers and
writers who occupy different points in what Delany calls the racial “system” (381); it
becomes part of the “social vigilance” he sees as necessary to the creation and
maintenance of “anti-racist institutions and traditions” (396–97).
This gesture betokens a generosity of spirit or, at least, a nonessentialist brand of

Afrofuturism that focuses attention on “black” expression as a linguistic and cultural field
for which raced bodies serve only as a conveniently visible sign. Thus, any writer or
creator who is drawn to and can credibly operate within the field may be seen as
Afrofuturist, no matter what identity they occupy through racial custom. This indicates
that Afrofuturism can be viewed as less a marker of black authenticity and more of a
cultural force, an episteme that betokens a shift in our largely unconscious assumptions
about which histories matter and how they may serve as a precondition for any future we
might imagine. Afrofuturism also helps SF gain a social and historical depth (p. 565) and
sophistication it has often lacked, despite (or perhaps because of) the genre’s claim to
represent a “disinterested” paradigm of scientific reason.
It is worth remembering how often in SF the idea of a future controlled by an African-

derived regime has been entertained and dismissed as dystopian, sometimes in the most
egregiously racist of ways. In Robert A. Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold (1964), for
example, a postholocaust America is dominated by an African tyranny that has
institutionalized cannibalism and enslaved whites. An alternative to this sort of narrative
is one in which Africa survives into the future but never quite escapes its colonial past, as
in Mike Resnick’s Kirinyaga (1998). This latter approach is more interesting because it at
least takes African history and culture seriously enough to offer detailed individual and
cultural portraits. Yet it still conforms to the sort of “American Africanism” analyzed by
Toni Morrison, by which she means a form of white literature that serves “to allay
internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation” (38). Resnick’s vision of Africa is
strongly influenced by the tradition of hunter-naturalists or safari writers such as
Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway. Resnick was the editor of St. Martin’s
“Library of African Adventure” in the early 1990s, and he authored a column entitled “Ask
Bwana” in the fanzine Speculations during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Saunders has
compared his work to that of Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan: “Each of them has
taken the worst his times offered about Africa, and either ignored or discounted the
positive aspects of the continent’s history and culture” (403).
The cultural canvas of Afrofuturism is so large that it is possible to miss significant details
as we take in the overall picture. This is especially true when considering Afrofuturist
fiction. The critical tendency is to sweep the broad range of African-American literature
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Afrofuturism
into view as a way of substantiating the claim that we have identified a significant thread
of artistic production, yet this approach may divert our attention from how Afrofuturism
emerges from and is in conversation with the generic traditions of science fiction. This is
especially crucial when discussing the work of black SF writers like Delany, Butler,
Hopkinson, and Steven Barnes, whose reading and writing are so strongly identified with
SF, its protocols and potentials.
An alternative approach would be to consider science fiction as the repository of a

positive, even radical, strand of Afrofuturist speculation predating the prominence of
modern Afro-diasporic writers. This thread of Afrofuturist writing can be traced as far
back as the mid-nineteenth century, functioning as a political counter to the prevailing
assumptions fostered by white-supremacist ideology. In books such as Herrmann Lang’s
The Air Battle: A Vision of the Future (1859), T. Shirby Hodge’s The White Man’s Burden:
A Satirical Forecast (1915; pseudonymously penned by Roger S. Tracy), and Margot
Bennett’s The Long Way Back (1954), white authors imagined an Africa of advanced
civilizations who could assist a fallen West or defeat its imperial ambitions. More recent
fiction in this vein—such as Mack Reynolds’s “North Africa” trilogy (1961–78), A. M.
Lightner’s The Day of the Drones (1969), Michael Moorcock’s The Land Leviathan (1974),
and Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain (1988)—were written in the context of the
anticolonial and Civil Rights movements that became prominent in the second half of the
twentieth century. Not only is this work in conversation with white (p. 566) debates about
race, but it is also informed by a more finely tuned awareness of black history and
politics. Such work may be taken as evidence that, even as it articulated a hegemonic
Euro-American Futurism, SF also contained sites of critical resistance that have made a
counterhegemonic Afrofuturism possible, even necessary. What the popularity of
Afrofuturism as a term has done is to make it possible to see these gestures of opposition
to the dominance of white futures, both inside and outside the genre.
Very few of the writers who have been typed as Afrofuturist see themselves as part of a
movement or even a school. For example, even as he recognizes his popular status as the
“first African-American science fiction writer,” Delany also remarks that he “wear[s]‌ that
originary label as uneasily as any writer has worn the label of science fiction writer
itself” (383). For scholars of the African diaspora, American studies, and SF studies,
however, Afrofuturism has been exciting news. During the late 1990s, a flurry of critical
activity made the term part of the nomenclature of both technoculture and pop-culture
studies, where it functioned as a way of organizing and bringing into focus an aspect of
black cultural production that had as yet received little attention. As a result, a broad
range of work produced in a number of media was identified as newly worthy of study
within this emerging field.
In the late 1990s, Alondra Nelson, then a graduate student at New York University,
started an online forum called “AfroFuturism” that helped generate debates among
creators and critics. Shaped, in part, by the participation of Hopkinson, Thomas, and
Nnedi Okorafor, the group shared ideas about “sci-fi imagery, futurist themes, and
technological innovation in the African diaspora” (Nelson 9). Their concern was to
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Afrofuturism
establish a constructive conversation about the relationship between black communities

and technoscience that went beyond racialized notions of a digital divide. The work of the
AfroFuturism listserv seeded a 2002 special issue of Social Text, a major academic
journal. Edited by Nelson, the issue introduced Afrofuturism into the discourse of the
academy, speaking in particular to critics receptive to new ways of linking literature and
culture to political action. At a time when it was attractive to imagine a “postracial”
cybernetic future, the articles in the issue countered by arguing that fantasies of a race-
free world “smack of old racial ideologies” (Nelson 1), silencing those black voices “with
other stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come” (9).
This special issue followed closely on the heels of Kodwo Eshun’s book More Brilliant
Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (1998), which built upon Dery’s ideas about
black musical culture by focusing on contemporary jazz, hip-hop, funk, and experimental
music, as well as science fiction. More Brilliant Than the Sun engages with the work of a
wide range of African-American musicians, including Miles Davis, Pharaoh Sanders,
Rammellzee, Funkadelic, Sun Ra, and Alice Coltrane. While Eshun does not explicitly use
the term Afrofuturism, he does operate in its spirit. As a writer, he exchanges the formal
rhetoric of academic scholarship for a style that evokes a funky “computronic” stance.
The biographical blurb for the book refers to him as “a concept engineer, an imagineer at
the millenium’s end writing on electronic music, science fiction, technoculture,
gameculture, drug culture, post war movies and post war art” (n.p.). Eshun’s critical
positioning, coupled with his self-conscious use of a speculative-fictional style, (p. 567)
shows the imbrication of a black writer/scholar in an Afrofuturist vocabulary even as he
surveys the range of black artistic production indexed by term.
A subsequent essay, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” (2003), carries forward

Eshun’s stylized investigation of black SF through a structure that alternates a critique of
science fiction as linked to what he calls the “futures industry” (290) with a fictive
extrapolation in which archaeologists from a future United States of Africa pick through
the cultural detritus of the twentieth century. This device allows Eshun to both create an
Afrofuture that would make a credible short story for an SF magazine and to construct
specific priorities for Afrofuturist discourse. Through both structure and statement,
Eshun provides a strong rationale for why SF must be seen as a critical medium for black
thought and expression:
It is not that black subjectivities are waiting for science-fiction authors to

articulate their lifeworlds. Rather, it is the reverse. The conventions of science
fiction, marginalized within literature yet central to modern thought, can function
as allegories for the systemic experience of post-slavery black subjects in the
twentieth century. Science fiction, as such, is recast in the light of Afrodiasporic
history. (299)
Eshun clarifies the Afrofuturist project as a recasting of the black subject in modern
terms, a process of continual renewal that involves shedding the sticky past of colonialism
and slavery.
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Afrofuturism
Also at issue is the state of Africa as we imagine global futures. Eshun argues that the
continent is always already the object of a “market futurism” that sees it as the “zone of
absolute dystopia” (292). Thus, “Afrofuturism’s first priority is to recognize that Africa
increasingly exists as the object of futurist projection” (291). Afrofuturism must intervene
to combat this discourse of Malthusian pessimism; to do so constitutes a “chronopolitical
act” (292) that “expos[es] and refram[es] . . . futurisms that act to forecast and fix African
dystopia” (293). Eshun does sound a cautionary note with reference to the faults of
“vernacular futurologies” that generate reversals mirroring the white-supremacist
ideology they react against (296–97); however, he sees Afrofuturism as mature enough to
become “a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of
intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken” (301).
By the mid-2000s, scholars in SF studies found Afrofuturism useful as a way of

reimagining the field—and American literature more generally. Lisa Yaszek, for example,
offers a history of Afrofuturist storytelling, relating it to genre scholarship’s slender
engagement with black SF over the past generation. Yaszek’s aim is to develop
Afrofuturism as a potent conceptual lens through which a particular strand of African-
American literature may be read, allowing her to recapture a literary history that
demonstrates black investment in representing the imbrication of science and technology.
Afrofuturism permits her to read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), for instance, as
part of a tradition in black writing that includes the speculative fiction of Butler,
Hopkinson, George Schuyler, and W. E. B. Du Bois. She sees Ellison’s novel as (p. 568) “a
particularly compelling example of Afrofuturism because it invites readers to think about
how the rhetoric of the futures industry impacts people of color” (47). The novel thus
gains a political and aesthetic relevance that would be otherwise difficult to perceive,
prompting us to see African-American writing as a form of science fiction that charts the
future in ways that are both subtle and complex.
Afrofuturism gained prominence in SF studies with the 2007 publication of a special issue
on the subject by Science Fiction Studies, the major journal in the field. Edited by scholar
Mark Bould and fiction author Rone Shavers, the issue draws together six essays that
establish the limits and potential of Afrofuturist writing, past and present. Isiah Lavender
suggests the concept of “ethnoscapes” as a new interpretive tool allowing critics to read
the racial environments constructed within specific SF stories, while Darryl A. Smith
presents black SF as a robust critique of the Euro-American Futurism represented by
typical scenarios of the “Singularity.” Mark Bould recovers the revolutionary black-power
SF that, he argues, has been hidden by the “hegemonic definitional structures and
practices” of academic SF studies, the popular SF genre, and the mainstream literary
canon (220). Sherryl Vint argues that realist protocols are not sufficient for
understanding what “neo-slave narratives” tell us about African-American history and
culture, and Nabeel Zuberi, treating musical Afrofuturism, claims that Afrofuturism must
broaden its range to “engage in greater dialogue with those looking at Atlantic or African-
American experience from Asia and the South” (297).
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Afrofuturism
Jillana Enteen’s contribution to the issue, “‘On the Receiving End of the Colonization’:
Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Nansi Web,” may be taken as representative of current scholarship in
Afrofuturism. Enteen presents Hopkinson as an Afrofuturist visionary who “fashions
unconventional scenarios premised on technological development” that provide
“unorthodox versions of yet-to-come societies” (263). This represents the utopian core of
what might be called Afrofuturism’s political project. Through a reading of Hopkinson’s
novel Midnight Robber (2000), Enteen argues that the author’s Afro-Caribbean approach
to cyberpunk refashions that subgenre’s conventions of a white-corporatist future that
cast black history and language as exotic. She describes Hopkinson’s creation of a
cyberfuture that foregrounds the inventions of Caribbean culture as a kind of
“hacking” (274). Hopkinson’s Afrofuturism gives Enteen a way of critiquing the racial and
masculinist investments of cyberpunk, yet that critique does not amount to a dismissal of
the form. Her broader aim is to demonstrate how Afrofuturist fiction participates in the
generic protocols of cyberpunk’s futures, all the while challenging its tendency to confine
the broad range of human invention within stereotyped notions of racial or cultural
difference. In Enteen’s usage, Afrofuturism is not simply a distinct subgenre of SF, to be
discussed in isolation from debates and practices in the wider field. Instead, she reads
Hopkinson’s work as a part of—rather than apart from—the fiction produced by
paradigmatic authors of the cyberpunk movement such as William Gibson and Bruce
Sterling. At the very least, she argues, the inclusion of Afrofuturist fiction “in the
cyberpunk canon supplies scenarios that expand [the subgenre’s] seemingly unilateral
vision of carnivorous corporate machines bent on annihilating humans and human
practices” (276). In her hands, Afrofuturism provides (p. 569) a critique of the genre’s
unconscious investments, as well as a renewal of its potential as both a mode of political
speculation and an expression of contemporary technoculture.
Cultural forms prove themselves not only by satisfying programmatic aims but also by
demonstrating a broad appeal. Catherine S. Ramírez, a specialist in Chicana studies,
illustrates this point by acknowledging her debt to Afrofuturism in her consideration of
the invisibility of Mexican Americans in science fiction and the centrality of SF cinema to
her childhood in Southern California. The theories, practices, and commitments indexed
by the term “Afrofuturism” inspired her to conceive the complementary notion of
“Chicanafuturism”—a cultural modality that “explores the ways that new and everyday
technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and
culture” (187). Afrofuturism thus becomes a model for how other peoples of color might
view the futuristic art they create, allowing them to become conscious of their own
imbrication in a technoscientific culture and to resist erasure from the narratives it
sponsors. The growing alliance of historically subordinated Futurisms has recently
culminated in an anthology entitled We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial
Speculative Fiction Anthology (2013), edited by Fabio Fernandes and Djibril al-Ayad.
Afrofuturist writers and scholars organize their work around at least three basic
assumptions: that peoples of African descent, their ways and histories, will not disappear
in any credible future; that the future, indeed, will be one in which the peoples of the
African diaspora operate as the directors and beneficiaries of technological progress; and
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Afrofuturism
that the cultural meaning of blackness will continually change as generations advance.
This last point links Afrofuturism with other contemporary debates concerning the
emergence of a “post-black” art. In the late 1990s, artist Glenn Ligon and museum
curator Thelma Golden developed the idea that African-American art may have entered
such a phase. Golden gave the concept wider currency as the framing device for a 2001
exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem (Touré 31–32), using the term to mark a
transition between black artists whose work was defined by the racial exclusions and
battles of the past century and a millennial generation whose work operates within a
society where segments of black culture have been incorporated into mainstream popular
culture (41). Whatever we make of this claim, the exhibition showed that some artists
could create inspiring work that reconfigures narratives about race and identity in ways
largely unavailable to racial politics in the last century (see Golden). As a form that seeks
an imaginative engagement with Afro-diasporic history through science fiction,
Afrofuturism may be seen as part of the new twenty-first-century black aesthetic that the
term “post-black” attempts to describe.
An important question to confront, therefore, is the SF genre’s reputation as a repository

of boys’ adventure stories descending from colonialist histories of racial exploitation and
exclusion (see Rieder). Obviously, if this history is accepted at face value—that is, if no
counterhistories to it are imagined or constructed—then any writer of color operating
within the genre is open to having the “authenticity” or “seriousness” of his or her work
questioned (see Tucker 50–53). After all, how can any genre contaminated by such
baggage be of use in forecasting or validating the histories and potentials of peoples who,
as Hopkinson has said, “are on the wrong side of the strange-looking ship (p. 570) that
appears out of nowhere” (“Introduction” 7)? Addressing this assumption in So Long Been
Dreaming, Hopkinson argues that, precisely because of this history, the tools provided by
a Eurocentric culture not only belong to anyone who has been taught them but also can
be used to transform meaning within the genre. Glossing her Caribbean reimagining of
the Red Riding Hood story, she notes that “[i]‌n my hands, massa’s tools don’t dismantle
massa’s house . . . [I]n fact, I don’t want to destroy it so much as I want to undertake
massive renovations—then build me a house of my own” (8).
Thus, the specific investments of Afrofuturist practice vindicate the spirit of the form,
making it a constructive way of framing the future as complex and contradictory rather
than destructive. Science fiction is claimed as a powerful tool that, in Hopkinson’s words,
“makes it possible to think about new ways of doing things” (9). Those new ways include
not only a demolition of racial hierarchy but also an articulation of futures in languages
other than English, using points of cultural reference other than those descending from a
European tradition. Uppinder Mehan, Hopkinson’s co-editor on So Long Been Dreaming,
expands on this point by arguing for the necessity of postcolonial futures that allow the
descendants of racial and colonial oppression to see “how life might be otherwise” (270).
Afrofuturism can be viewed within this more general political and aesthetic project,
imbricating the experiences of the African diaspora with those of colonized peoples in
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Afrofuturism
Asia, South America, and elsewhere. We thus arrive at a Futurism with the potential to
evade exclusive investment with a particular population—in theory at least, a Futurism
that has no country.
Whatever we make of such claims, Afrofuturism is still a minority discourse, a single

current within the broad river of science fiction—and speculative literature more
generally. The brute fact of the matter is that SF remains predominantly white in terms of
its writers and readers. It should not be surprising, therefore, that narratives organized
around black identities and histories represent a relatively small part of generic
production. What Afrofuturism has helped us to appreciate, however, is that the work of
this group is no longer invisible or inconsequential. Like older currents in science fiction,
such as the New Wave, feminist utopia, cyberpunk, or, more recently, the New Weird and
steampunk, Afrofuturism can be defined as a distinctive subgenre, marked by a particular
interest and a general approach. As we have seen, it also inspires a robust scholarship
that has opened up a fertile critical terrain, mapping accomplishments, limitations, and
potentials. If, to paraphrase Langston Hughes, black authors and scholars of SF have
faced a racial mountain, then they have scaled a good way up it.
Works Cited
Bernardi, Daniel. Star Trek and History: Race-ing Toward a White Future. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998. Print.
Bould, Mark. “Come Alive by Saying No: An Introduction to Black Power SF.” Science
Fiction Studies 34.2 (July 2007): 220–40. Print.
Butler, Octavia E. “The Monophobic Response.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative

Fiction from the African Diaspora. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Warner, 2000. 415–
16. Print.
Davis, Thulani. “The Future May Be Bleak, but It’s Not Black.” The Village Voice
(p. 571)
(Feb. 1, 1983): 17–19. Print.
Delany, Samuel R. “Racism and Science Fiction.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative
Fiction from the African Diaspora. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Warner, 2000. 383–
97. Print.
Dery, Mark. “Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0.” Afro-Future Females: Black Writers
Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory. Ed. Marleen Barr. Columbus: Ohio
State UP, 2008. 6–13. Print.
_____. “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia
Rose.” Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Ed. Mark Dery. Durham, NC: Duke
UP, 1994. 179–222. Print.
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Afrofuturism
Enteen, Jillana. “‘On the Receiving End of the Colonization’: Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Nansi
Web.” Science Fiction Studies 34.2 (July 2007): 262–82. Print.
Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.” CR: The New Centennial

Review 3.2 (Summer 2003): 287–302. Print.
_____. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet, 1998.
Print.
Gilder, George. Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American
Life. New York: Norton, 1992. Print.
Golden, Thelma. “Introduction.” Freestyle. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001.
14–15. Print.
Hopkinson, Nalo. “Introduction.” So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction

and Fantasy. Ed. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp,
2004. 7–9. Print.
_____, ed. Mojo: Conjure Stories. New York: Warner, 2003. Print.
Kellner, Douglas. “Ernst Bloch, Utopia, and Ideology Critique.” Not Yet: Reconsidering
Ernst Bloch. Ed. Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan. New York: Verso, 1997. 80–95.
Print.
Lavender, Isiah, III. “Ethnoscapes: Environment and Language in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo
Jumbo, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, and Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17.” Science
Mehan, Uppinder. “Final Thoughts.” So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science

Fiction and Fantasy. Ed. Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal
Pulp, 2004. 269–70. Print.
Miller, Paul D. “Yet Do I Wonder.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the
African Diaspora. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Warner, 2000. 408–14. Print.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. 1992. New
York: Vintage, 1993. Print.
Mosley, Walter. “Black to the Future.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from
the African Diaspora. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York: Warner, 2000. 405–07. Print.
Nelson, Alondra. “Introduction: Future Texts.” Social Text 20.2 (Summer 2002): 1–15.
Print.
Norris, Pippa. Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty, and the Internet
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Afrofuturism
Ramírez, Catherine R. “Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin.” Aztlán: A Journal of

Chicano Studies 33.1 (Spring 2008): 185–94. Print.
Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan UP, 2008. Print.
Saunders, Charles R. “Why Blacks Should Read (and Write) Science Fiction.” Dark
Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. Ed. Sheree R.
Thomas. New York: Warner, 2000. 398–404. Print.
Smith, Darryl A. “Droppin’ Science Fiction: Signification and Singularity in the

(p. 572)
Metapocalypse of Du Bois, Baraka, and Bell.” Science Fiction Studies 34.2 (July 2007):
201–19. Print.
Thomas, Sheree R., ed. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African
Diaspora. New York: Warner, 2000. Print.
_____. “Introduction.” Dark Matter: Reading the Bones. Ed. Sheree R. Thomas. New York:
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Vint, Sherryl. “‘Only by Experience’: Embodiment and the Limitations of Realism in Neo-
Slave Narratives.” Science Fiction Studies 34.2 (July 2007): 241–60. Print.
Weheliye, Alexander G. “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular

Music.” Social Text 20.2 (Summer 2002): 21–47. Print.
Yaszek, Lisa. “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction, and the History of the Future.” Socialism and
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Zuberi, Nabeel. “Is This The Future?: Black Music and Technology Discourse.” Science
De Witt Douglas Kilgore
De Witt Douglas Kilgore is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at

Indiana University. He is the author of Astrofuturism: Science, Race and Visions of
Utopia in Space (Pennsylvania, 2003) and the co-editor of a special issue of Science
Fiction Studies on the work of Octavia E. Butler. His recent publications include
essays on racial reformation in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels and Marvel Comic’s
Black Panther.
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Afrofuturism

Oxford Handbooks Online

Print Publication Date: Nov 2014

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

In a version of the original article republished in Marleen Barr’s anthology Afro-Future

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

Afrofuturism makes visible an aspect of African-American expressive culture that had

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

Is imagining futures for peoples of African descent, especially if conventional doomsday

Caribbean-Canadian author Nalo Hopkinson demonstrates this aspect of Afrofuturism by

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

This gesture betokens a generosity of spirit or, at least, a nonessentialist brand of

It is worth remembering how often in SF the idea of a future controlled by an African-

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

An alternative approach would be to consider science fiction as the repository of a

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

establish a constructive conversation about the relationship between black communities

A subsequent essay, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” (2003), carries forward

It is not that black subjectivities are waiting for science-fiction authors to

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

By the mid-2000s, scholars in SF studies found Afrofuturism useful as a way of

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

An important question to confront, therefore, is the SF genre’s reputation as a repository

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

Whatever we make of such claims, Afrofuturism is still a minority discourse, a single

Butler, Octavia E. “The Monophobic Response.” Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative

(Feb. 1, 1983): 17–19. Print.

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

Eshun, Kodwo. “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.” CR: The New Centennial

Hopkinson, Nalo. “Introduction.” So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction

Mehan, Uppinder. “Final Thoughts.” So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

Ramírez, Catherine R. “Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin.” Aztlán: A Journal of

Smith, Darryl A. “Droppin’ Science Fiction: Signification and Singularity in the

Weheliye, Alexander G. “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular

De Witt Douglas Kilgore

De Witt Douglas Kilgore is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

Subscriber: Freie Universitaet Berlin; date: 11 January 2019

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