Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture
McGill University (Canada)
Unlike the requisite dryness of much scholarly work, Womack takes a conversational approach. Afrofuturism is viewed as a positive means to overcome barriers presented by systemic racism and socioeconomic inequality, not the least because the book is tied together by Womack’s narration of her own experiences in the field—from her days discovering other “AfroGeeks” as a university student to speaking at various exhibitions and conferences as the author of the Rayla 2212 series of science fiction novels. Her reflections lend a personal aura to her ongoing encounters with all the unusual suspects of Afrofuturism.
The book’s concise and digestible chapters, grouped together by approach and media format, cover all the expected bases—science fiction literature, music, comics, film, music videos, black inventors and technologies—as well as a taste of the unexpected, including the cosmogony of the Dogon, the contemporary healing practices of Malidoma Somé in Africanist religion and ritual, D. Scot Miller’s Afrosurrealism manifesto, Afrofuturist curators and exhibition organisers including “The Afrofuturist Affair”, and a chapter devoted to “The Divine Feminine in Space” (a.k.a. women in Afrofuturism). Womack provides a basic overview of Afrofuturist media production and its artists as well as its outliers, fielding through the Afrodiasporic speculative and science fiction of Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany and Nalo Hopkinson, as well as Afrofuturist musical traditions from Sun Ra and Lee “Scratch” Perry to George Clinton, Grace Jones to Erykah Badu and Janelle Monáe. In regards to speculative fiction, Womack (much to my delight) discusses African American literature of the 19th century as the forerunner to later 20th century developments, providing a summary of earlier authors including George S. Schuyler and Sutton E. Griggs while emphasizing how “the black visionaries of the past . . . used [speculative and proto-science fiction] as devices to articulate their issues and visions” (124). (These earlier references, as well as Womack’s passing attention to Africanist and Egyptian cosmogonies, suggest that there is still much work to be done in unearthing the deep roots of Afrofuturist approaches.)
Womack undertakes the particularly vital task of developing an inventory of Afrofuturist works that have not been covered in previous publications—a kind of minoritarian approach that balances out the erstwhile attention to the stars. She draws attention to a number of exhibits and conferences that have taken place throughout the United States featuring artists who have since picked up on the term “Afrofuturism” and utilised it to inform their work. Womack also briefly outlines “Afrofuturist critical theory” as a growing movement within scholarship to advance Afrofuturist concepts as critical tools, turning to the work of Kodwo Eshun, Alexander Weheliye, D. Denenge Akpem and Reynaldo Anderson, among others. This is where Afrofuturism offers a different sort of avenue for thought, in which Afrofuturist philosophical approaches provide a platform for discussing the concepts articulated throughout its diverse media (or implied by its practices).
In a chapter called “Project Imagination”, Womack discusses the production of “futurist” technologies by Afrodiasporic inventors. In conversation with Alondra Nelson, Womack turns to sociological accounts of technologies invented by people of colour. This approach is particularly useful, for it demonstrates the ways in which “Afrofuturism” has been put to use to not only retroactively describe Afrodiasporic futurism but to articulate the project of reclaiming and rewriting whitewashed histories of technological production, including contemporary accounts of Afrodiasporic technological production.
Yet—and here I will turn to some suggestive criticism, which I hope the author forgives me for—while Womack lists a number of interesting technologies whose invention involved people of colour (including “the modern computer”—a claim that is perhaps more complex than she lets on, for also at stake here is an assumption of individualism over the complex collective production involved, including the role of technological actants (see Latour 2007)), her summary does not provide backgrounds of the inventors nor give detail of the inventions and their conditions of production. When turning to a book such as this, I expect most readers want to know more about these things and the people behind them, including basic references for dates and places. Passing over names and details leaves black history in the shadows—a peculiar absence given the book’s stated aims. Unfortunately this particular example stands in for the digestible but at times breezy structure of the book.
I give Womack the benefit of the doubt, however, insofar as she has crafted the text for a popular readership. That said, I wish Womack had spent more time explicating various works as well as questioning her often intriguing sources. Why not? Populism shouldn’t neglect the role of inspiring pedagogy—lessons we can draw from Freire, Fanon and Malcolm X, but also from W.E.B. Du Bois, whose The Souls of Black Folk (1994 [1903]) combined personal reflections with criticism and speculation. I would love to see Womack probe ambiguities and question stated intentions. It is evident that a number of interesting interviews lay behind this book, but for the most part they are dispersed across chapters just as they are often quoted without comment. I would love to see longer engagements with the various artists and theorists. When she does take the time, mainly in her later chapters, Womack begins to develop her perspectives and the work of others to great effect. Perhaps we can understand this book, then, as sketching out the call signs for an Afrofuturist book to-come.
My second criticism concerns technology, or rather Womack’s approach to it. At times, she seems to equate Afrofuturism with the ideologies of Silicon Valley and its techno-libertarian capitalism—what was critiqued in the 1990s on the Nettime listserv as “the California Ideology”—where new technologies are the stepping stones to social, racial and economic liberation. A number of such quotes abound: “Today technology enables a greater ability to create and share images across the world. Social media, websites, music downloads, digital cameras, low-cost sound engineering, at-home studios, editing equipment, and on and on” (134). Womack continues in the same vein, emphasizing increasingly easy-access media production and internet distribution, before ending with “Two years ago, a still photographer shot my family reunion photo. A few months ago, a cousin shot the whole bunch (more than a hundred) with her iPad” (134). Unfortunately such well-worn celebrations of what used to be called “cyber-capitalism” reflect an unfortunate trend of reducing radically futurist approaches to the uncritical adoption of widespread consumer communications technologies. While I do not doubt the impact of digital technology, this seems all the more reason to question it in the context of Afrofuturism (the references here are also thoroughly corporate: “iPad” and “Instragram”, instead of say, “Linux” and “BitTorrent”). Is it possible to think Afrofuturism as critical of the technologies that doubtless enable it? What are the downsides to such technologies when they have just as well been used to conduct surveillance and covert operations against Afrodiasporic peoples—or people in general—agitating for change? Elsewhere, Womack performs a similar theoretical move when she equates Afrofuturology with the populist ideologies of “hope” that, for example, echoed from the campaign of President Obama. How does “hope” reconcile with a cyclical futurism in which, as Womack iterates, “the right words and actions can speak the future into existence, [just as] the same can recast the past” (153)? Part of Afrofuturism’s resilience is that it avoids the wishful thinking of utopianism by inventing rituals and techniques of temporal direct action (or what Kodwo Eshun calls “chronopolitics” (2003)). Ideologies of hope appear a far cry from Eshun’s militant reflections on Afrofuturism’s posthuman despotism—“characterized by an extreme indifference to the human” (1999: 00[-005])—or Sun Ra’s final act of destroying Earth in Space Is the Place (1974).[i]
Another question lays beneath the skin of the text, as it were: the complexities behind Afrofuturist articulations of “race”. Here I do not wish to criticize Womack on this point, by any account, but rather read her text as indicative of a tension within Afrofuturist scholarship. The question as to whether “Afro”-futurism is essentially tied to black bodies, or whether its imaginary force achieves an escape velocity from defining identity/subjectivity through “racial” markers is a paradox that strikes through Afrofuturism and its scholarship, Womack included. On the one channel, Womack emphasizes the importance of black representation in science fiction, in which the “obvious absence of people of color in the fictitious future/past”, and the dearth of blackness in mainstream science fiction film, television and literature provoked the imagination of “countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceships” (6)—a childhood she likewise identifies with. In her discussion of Afrofuturist scholarship, Womack places emphasis on the role of representation, in which scholars are apparently “dedicated to the study of works that analyze dynamics of race and culture specific to the experiences of black people through sci-fi and fantasy works” (23).
On the other channel, as Womack emphasizes, and following her similar meditations in Post-Black, Afrofuturists not only redefine contemporary as well as past/future “notions of blackness” (9), but articulate how race is “a creation too” (27). She approvingly quotes artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith, who says “blackness is a technology. It’s not real. It’s a thing” (27). This approach would seem to suggest, then, that scholars should not just look for representations of blackness, “specific to the experiences of black people”, but to ways in which blackness has been constructed as a particular “technolology” that Afrofuturism unearths through its alien, android and other post-human identities. At the limit is Eshun’s approach that attempts to reject “all notions of a compulsory black condition” in the rendering unrecognizable of “blackness” (1999: 00[-004; -001]).
These two positions reflect a constitutive tension to Afrofuturism, one that cannot, I believe, be erased—precisely by definition of Afrofuturism. It is also what keeps Afrofuturism perpetually relevant in its transformational dialectic of cyclicity that distorts the mirror of capitalist temporality.[ii] Either way, this tension ought to be meditated upon explicitly, precisely as the poles of this tension can be read temporally as well as strategically: while black representation remains significant to the present, Afrofuturism dreams of a post-human future just as it revisions the past (as Alien Nation, through time-travel, as Public Enemy’s “Armageddon bin in effect”, etc.). But any hint of a teleological utopianism is more complex than it appears: Afrofuturism’s mission (as also articulated by filmmaker Cauleen Smith) is to invade the present with futures revisioned from the past.
What role does “race” play in the post-human, which is to say, in a future/past strategically repurposed to the present? We may turn to a sentence reflecting this tension, in which Womack notes her fascination with “the growing number of artists . . . who were developing art exploring people of color and the future. . . . and all utilizing black characters or aesthetics to deconstruct images of the past to revisualize the future” (22). The question remains, however, as to whether blackness is to be deconstructed in the very same “revisualization” operation, and if so, what the effects are upon its sociological referents in black bodies. As Womack writes, “the notion of bending time erases the prism of race-based limitations that all too often lace the present and define the recent past” (154). But does this simply translate, as D. Denenge Akpem suggests, into “self empowerment” (154)? Or is there not a technology of self/other transformation at stake? These remain avenues of thought that, though hinted at in Afrofuturism, as well as in Post-Black, remain mostly unexplored. In closing, I’d like to simply emphasize that I’d love to hear Womack think through these and other questions. This hasn’t been the book for it—but perhaps it is to be had in the future.
As usual in many books published in today’s market, the text is in need of some fact-checking. Wallace D. Fard Muhammad, and not Elijah Muhammad, was founder of the Nation of Islam (and in 1930); Mark Sinker was a journalist at British music magazine WIRE, and not American technoculture’s Wired. These are minor points, but worth considering if citing the text.
DuBois, W.E.B. 1994 [1903]. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover.
Eshun, Kodwo. 1999. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet.
———. 2003. “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism”. CR: The New Centennial Review 3(2): 287–302.
Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Womack, Ytasha. 2010. Post-Black: How a New Generation is Redefining African American Identity.Chicago: Chicago Review Press.
Coney, John. 1974. Space Is the Place. USA: North American Star System. <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072195>.
[i] Regardless of whether it is Ra or the Overseer who destroy Earth, Ra is certainly complicit in it; these appear to be the “raised stakes” of the tarot-based cardgame, and Ra appears ultimately indifferent to its annihilation.
[ii] See “Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Monáe”, this issue.