Week 13: Afrofuturism
I think that when many of us create classes, we create those classes with the intention of reading certain things that we have been meaning to read but that we probably wouldn’t read unless there was a strict deadline and accountability structure put in place. For this class, I was very interested in getting more into the realm of “Afro-Pessimism” and readings on grief, death, and trauma in Black communities, so I used this week to delve deeper into Afrofuturism, AfroOptimism, and the writing of Frank B. Wilderson III and other scholars. Building on the past two weeks discussions, which focused on the relationship between the past, present, and future of Black Communities and Culture, this week we upended this understanding of time as discretely ordered and separate in order to think about time as both nonlinear and relative. Therefore, the opening questions for this week were:
Thinking about the concept of the dystopian present, Is there a hope for a Black digital future?
Are we already living in our future? And if so, in what ways?
What does Afrofuturism have to teach us about the past and the present moment?
In Chapter 5 of the book #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation titled “Creating and Imagining Black Futures through Afrofuturism”, the author Grace Gipson cites Yotasha Womack in defining Afrofuturism as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation” (Gipson 84). In this particular chapter Gipson completes a hashtag analysis of #Afrofuturism and found when studying tweets on the topic that Afrofuturism shows up as “an artistic aesthetic, as a tool for critical cultural analysis, as a platform for analyzing the impact of modernization on cultural production, and as an exploration of Black identity” (88-89). In addition, Gipson utilizes the concept of Afrofuturism to discuss the act of flame keeping, which are “acts of preserving cultural productions and a body of knowledge” (86). For Gipson historical Black texts can be utilized to envision Black futures through this concept of passing on the flame of knowledge and intuition, through the examples of people like Sojourner Truth, Fannie Lou Hamer, W.E.B. DuBois, etc. Specifically, I offered the example of Alexis Pauline Gumb’s work with Black Feminist icons, such as Harriet Tubman to think about the many ways that important figures within movements for abolition and civil rights can be viewed as Afrofuturists in their own right, prophets and dreamers who imagined futures where Black people were free citizens. I encouraged the students in class to return to figures of the “past” in their own imaginings of a Black Digital Future. To think about how they might light their own torches of activism from the eternally burning flames of generations of revolutionary thought.
Although it is not eye opening to remember how revolutionary a concept Black humanity was (and sometimes still is) the fact that humanity was denied to Black folks despite the imaginings of these revolutionary thinkers and activists of the presumed Black past, made an excellent juxtaposition to both AfroOptimism and AfroPessimism. Thinking about where we see Afrofuturist thought in the diaspora, Afro-Optimism tends to come up in discussions of the future of the African continent through a somewhat idealistic imagining or hope for a brighter tomorrow, a belief in the improvement of the sociopolitical climate on the continent and for people of African descent. Pushing back against deficit narratives of poverty & political unrest, Afro-Optimism instills hope in future generations who will be able to create progress and upward mobility moving forward.
In stark contrast to an optimistic approach, the metatheory of Afro-Pessimism speaks to the idea that grief, despair, and suffering are a part of the condition of Blackness through the understanding that Black people have been historically denied access to humanity and citizenship. In this sense, Afro-Pessimism posits that the reality in which we all exist is predicated on the suffering and social death of Black people, who are positioned as intrinsically tied to an inferior position within the world (i.e. the Slave) through this denial of access to all that liberation movements claim to provide for the common man. In outlining these theories to the students, I encouraged them to ponder another question before they engaged in their imagining for the week, which was: Is there a future without human (or nonhuman) suffering? Is there a world in which we are free from Black death and despair and is freedom from suffering actually the work of liberation?
These questions are ones that I thought of quite often in my readings of Afro-Pessimism, and even more so I pondered the question of what it means to be human and who is to say that any of us are (or want to be) human at all? In class, we discussed the potential power that could come from living outside of the confines of the human and imagining the self as another being. From an afrofuturist perspective, many artists and activists have compared themselves to aliens and robots (we specifically discussed Janelle Monae’s work with the ArchAndroid, Outkast and the ATLiens, Parliament Funkadelic, etc). Connecting back to the week on algorithms, we reflected on Ramon Amaro’s “As If” essay in which he also discusses the potential in not being perceived as human by algorithms, the movement and understanding of identity made possible by escaping the hold of such an interpellation. I was also reminded of the many conspiracy theories which claim that Egyptian pyramids (a common imagery within the Afrofuturist aesthetic, SEE Sun Ra), were actually created by intergalactic beings instead of humans of African descent. While this assertion tends to be rooted in anti-Black racism, could it be that the overlap of Afro-Pessimism and AfroFuturism could lead us to believe that the brilliance of Black creativity and culture might be attributed to a lineage from many galaxies far away from here? That I cannot answer, but I do question whether anybody truly wants to identify as human in 2020, as I wouldn’t call “human being” an elite category in this particular timeline, despite what privileges society has chosen to bestow upon it.
I was also pleasantly surprised to come across this column, discussing the complex relationship between the alien, intergenerational trauma, and Black identity. I included a tantalizing quote below for those who might not click the link:
Black Girl Hysteria. It’s a self-made term that captures the cosmic alien stuff the construction of Black womanhood is made of. I am a body that has historically been denied occupying institutional space and yet persists in existing despite the maintenance of these systems. Hysteria comes at the avenue of unapologetically making space where space wasn’t intended to receive or recognize you.This self-reclamation journey makes you not just feel, but understand yourself as an extraterrestrial being. To all my fellow aliens, here is a clarion call in joining me in decolonizing, in occupying space and issuing the extraterrestrial renaissance. - Jalynn Harris
But before I get too caught up in musings on Black post-humanist thought, I also want to mention that the second part of lecture was focused on the reading/listening assignment for this week which is an interview between Moya Bailey and adrienne marie brown. In class I introduced the students to the anthology “Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements” which is an excellent collection and speaks to how speculation is truly the work of activism because all social justice movements are based on imagining another kind of world(s) or the process of creating new timelines of what could be if we all moved towards collectively organizing and manifesting a better vision of the future. The readings for this week truly reflected that although this is the week titled “Afrofuturism”, the entirety of the Black Digital Studies class has been Afrofuturistic, as this space where the students and myself were using our time together to imagine new technologically advanced futures that were considerate of Black Liberation. Each week has been its own speculative exercise and in this sense, we have been building up to the Speculative Futures Workshop for the entire semester.
Specifically, the Speculative Futures Workshop introduced the students to the ways in which science fiction addresses the problems of the present in the context of the future and the many ways that this ideation helps us think critically about technology. Through a discussion of dystopian and speculative fiction within television, film, literature and other artistic forms, we also examined how even in speculative fiction, not all futures are diverse, equitable, or inclusive. As we learned from creative works such as Black Panther and Alisha Wormsley “There are Black People in the Future”, representation matters when it comes to speculations that are constructed both artistically and technologically. Throughout the course, we have worked as a class to think critically about technoculture i.e. the relationship between technology, culture, & politics through discussions on topics such as social media, data and privacy, surveillance, and policing. In exemplifying the relationship between Speculative Fiction and Course Topics, I walked us through an analysis of the Black Mirror episode titled “Black Museum” as an example of Ruha Benjamin’s work with the “carceral imaginary”. This analysis invoked the question, with all of the possibilities of digital tools and technologies, why is it that we continue to imagine a future in which people are imprisoned and cruelly punished? And, What does it look like to imagine a future that is truly abolitionist?
Building on the Black Mirror analysis, some of the options that were given for this workshop was the Speculative Episode assignment, which is a remix of Casey Fiesler’s “Black Mirror Writing Room” exercise. In addition, I wanted this assignment to be a creative opportunity for the students, so not only were they given the option to write their own Black Mirror episode, I also created exercises for the crafting of speculative vision boards, comic strips/zines, a news story or article, and the more traditional writing of speculative fiction through short short stories, poems, and other literary forms. Overall, this workshop was very open ended and I wanted each of the students to feel free to experiment with other art forms and creativity which engaged with Black Studies, Speculation, and Imagination. In response, the students expanded my mind on the possibilities of a collective speculative future through their creative projects and artist statements. The workshop, like the class itself, was everything that I hoped it would be and so much more, and for that I am filled with gratitude on this the penultimate week of the semester!
Readings
Nelson, Alondra. "Afrofuturism: Past-Future Visions." Color Lines 3.1 (2000): 34-47.
