Imagine a future in which the diverse fabric of humanity, with its multicolored threads, is shaped to create tightly woven tales of heroic galactic adventures and tragic post-apocalyptic dystopias. It can be found in Afrofuturism. With this description “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,” Mark Dery defined what would eventually become a burgeoning field of study and a social movement of African Diasporic artists, scholars, and activists, who set out to challenge the representation of black bodies by non-black writers, to explore blackness by dismantling prescriptive notions of black identity, and to project black narratives into a future space, a Black Space.
Recommended Reading:
Anthologies and Collected Essays:
Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, Ytasha Womack
Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, Reynaldo Anderson & Charles E. Jones, [eds.]
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora, Sheree R. Thomas, [ed.]
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan, [eds.]
Afrofuture Females, Marleen S. Barr, [ed.];
Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text, Alondra Nelson, [ed.]
The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, Futurism, and the Speculative, Sandra Jackson & Julie E. Moddy-Freeman, [eds.]
Authors:
Steven Barnes, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Tananarive Due, Kodwo Eshun, Jewelle Gomez, Andrea Hairston, Nalo Hopkinson, Walter Mosley, Nnedi Okorafor, Rasheedah Phillips, Charles R. Saunders
Nisi Shawl, Alexander Weheliye, And, many more...
In his seminal 1994 essay, Black to the Future, Mark Dery coined the term "Afrofuturism." In interviews with a triad of African American writers, Dery posited that mainstream speculative fiction failed to include people of color in its narratives. Working from an overlooked fact that a body of speculative works created by diasporic artists has existed for years, we could call the stories that address African American cultural themes, replete with ubiquitous technology, in a science fiction setting, Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism could thus be seen as giving a voice to the people whose past had once been told for them or who historically had been excluded from the mainstream SF future.
A genre dominated by the white male voice, early Science Fiction (SF) focused on alien encounters and "future-war stories" as a metaphor for The Cold War, rapidly advancing technology, and post-WWII social upheaval. Socially progressive stories at the time often employed "alien other" tropes to depict marginalized groups in an attempt to confront race and racism in contemporary society. More conservative SF used the trope to caution against the perceived danger posed by immigrants and racial minorities. "Most race-related SF stories, such as William D. Hay's Three Hundred Years Hence, were racist and focused on black/white relations mainly, with an occasional nod to anti-Semitism and equally bigoted "yellow peril" themes."