Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (14 page)

New York lawyer and educator Edward A. Johnson also was inspired by
Looking Backward
and wrote the book
Light Ahead for the Negro
in 1904. A work of utopian speculative fiction, Johnson's book depicts an African American at the turn of the twentieth
century who visits America in 2006. Blacks in the South can read, and the coveted forty acres and a mule have finally been distributed. The book shows how the post-racial world evolved over the century. A decade later, in 1917, Bellamy was elected the first African American to serve in the New York State legislature.

Francis E. W. Harper was a social reformer, feminist, and one of the most popular poets of her time. Her book
Iola Leroy
, published in 1892, takes place against a feminist backdrop in which the races are unequal. Iola, the main character of the story, is a pro-slavery Southern belle who learns that her mother was a slave of mixed heritage, therefore meaning that Iola, too, is a slave. “The rest of the novel captures her adventures, and concludes with the establishment of Harper's version of the ‘ideal polity'—women active as doctors and activists, large schools taught by married women, and an area in which former slaves can live peacefully and productively. In the context of 1892 and Reconstruction South, this image was indeed a fantastic utopia,” writes author and librarian Jess Nevins.
⁴

In 1902 Pauline Hopkins, one of the most influential black editors of the early twentieth century, wrote
Of One Blood
, a book that was serialized in the
Colored American.
Protagonist Reuel Briggs, who has little interest in African American history, travels to Ethiopia on an archaeological expedition and discovers the ancient city of Telessar, inhabited by the descendants of the Ethiopia of 6000 B
CE
and owners of advanced crystal-based technology and telepathy technology.

George S. Schuyler was a Rhode Island–born journalist who both criticized organized religion and was known for more conservative views. He was not a fan of most literature from the Harlem
Renaissance nor was he an admirer of Du Bois. His book
Black No More
profiles a scientist who discovers how to turn black people white. The satire includes a horrid description of the lynching of the money-grubbing inventors by a crowd of whites that painstakingly recreates the gruesome lynchings of black men in the South. In his series “Black Internationale” and “Black Empire,” published in the
Pittsburgh Courier
between 1936 and 1938, is the story of Carl Slater, a journalist for the fictional
Harlem Blade
who covers a global battle between white people and people of color. A wealthy intellect leads the battle, gathering top minds in the black diaspora who are frustrated with inequality. The brilliant collective, called Black Internationale, brings the United States to its knees with biological warfare, liberates Africa from its colonizers, and launches air raids that crush Europe. A young, white, female stockbroker aids the movement and becomes head of the European espionage unit.
⁵

The idea of using sci-fi and speculative fiction to spur social change, to reexamine race, and to explore self-expression for people of color, then, is clearly nothing new. The black visionaries of the past who sought to alleviate the debilitating system and end the racial divide used these genres as devices to articulate their issues and visions.

This tradition continued with Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, and Nalo Hopkinson, all of whom merged issues of race, class, sex, sexuality, culture, and identity to make sense of the changing times. Their worlds included people of color, but the issue of otherness was wrapped in a sci-fi space saga that zapped from shape-shifters to gender benders to alien pods, time travel, and killer bodysuits.

Nalo Hopkinson was born in 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica, to a Jamaican mother and Guyanese father. She has lived throughout the Caribbean and South America with stints in the United States and Canada. One of the foremost speculative fiction writers of modern times, she's edited anthologies and published dozens of books and short stories. Caribbean dialect and culture are entrenched in many of her stories, and she candidly deals with postmodern issues of culture, race, and sex.

Brown Girl in the Ring
was her first novel. Published in 1998, the dystopian tale depicts a rebel-led Toronto under siege, and the book was hailed for depicting the Carribean community in Toronto and adeptly writing in dialect. The story combines Carribean mysticism and futuristic medicine and includes a disturbing plot involving organ harvesting. But the terror of the city leads the main character to discover some of the old ways and traditions of her grandmother. The book
Sister Mine
follows formerly conjoined twins Makeda and Abby, daughters of a demigod and a human mother. One has magical powers and the other does not, but the two must reconcile to help find their father who disappeared mysteriously.

Hopkinson's short story “Ganger (Ball Lightning)” is a sci-fi story that almost reads like a dark comedy. Published in the anthology
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
in 2000, Hopkinson's story plays off Isaac Asimov's 1940s robot stories. Cleve and Issy are a married couple who don't talk anymore. They buy full-bodied sex suits in hopes of saving their marriage only to have the suits turn on them.
⁶

“She's a powerful writer with an imagination that most of us would kill for,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning author Junot Díaz. “I have read everything she has written and am in awe of her
many gifts. And her protagonists are unforgettable—formidable haunted women drawn with an almost unbearable honesty—seriously, who writes sisters like Nalo? Takes courage to be that true.” According to sci-fi scholar Gary K. Wolfe, Nalo's family-centered dramas inspired other writers to go beyond sci-fi norms and build on family relationships, too.
⁷

By age twenty-six Samuel Delany had written more than eight sci-fi books and won three Nebula Awards. Algis Budrys, a critic with
Galaxy
magazine, declared that Delany, fresh off the release of
Nova
, was “the best science fiction writer in the world.” He is one of the most decorated and best-known science fiction writers in the world, credited with influencing cyberpunk as well as Afrofuturism. Some of his later books include intense sexuality that Delany himself has called pornography. He is an inductee in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and has won four Nebula Awards and two Hugo awards. He has more than twenty novels to his credit.

However, in his essay “Racism and Science Fiction,” Delany questions the desire of science fiction institutions to group him with former students Butler and Hopkinson, noting that outside of their race, their work, backgrounds, ages, and perspectives are drastically different. However, the Harlem-born legend adds that the best way to end the “pre-judging” in science fiction worlds is to encourage more nonwhite readers and writers to participate and discuss issues at conferences. When some 20 percent of the audience is composed of people of color the landscape for writers and readers will change, he writes.

When Delany's essay was published in 2000, Afrofuturism as a defined genre had taken root and cadres of writers were looking
to Delany, Butler, Hopkinson, and others as literary hallmarks in a genre that was all too dismissive of diversity. In 1999, the Carl Brandon Society was created to increase diversity in speculative fiction. One of its tenants is to “fantasize for its own sake and as an agent of social change.” The society offers an Octavia Butler scholarship, honors accomplished writers, and provides supports for new work. More than a decade later, the diversity of sci-fi work and the creators in fiction has given rise to writers like Nnedi Okorafor and N. K. Jemisin, but there are countless others emerging as well. Words inspire visuals. Afrofuturism's visual aesthetic is a playground for the imagination.

I
mages are powerful. Although the image-making process isn't shrouded in smoke and mirrors like in the old days of Hollywood, and anyone can pull up an editing tutorial on YouTube or watch behind-the-scenes footage on Netflix, the fact remains that most consumers don't process film, videos, photos, paintings, billboards, postcards, and images as a creation by someone else. Viewing images is a pretty passive affair. For many, an image is a statement of fact, even when the image is fictitious.

If I ask you to imagine an alien, chances are that you won't imagine anything. The first wave of images will be flashbacks from movies, comic books, and video games. Whether it's the big, hollow-head ghostlike figure from the alien documentaries or the monstrous humanlike giant in the blockbuster
Prometheus
, it's highly likely that the first pictures to hit your brainwaves will be plucked from popular images in media. I'm placing special emphasis on the word
popular
, because it's the repetition of an image that embeds it in the collective consciousness as a shared emblem.

Images aren't these stand-alone silhouettes. Each comes with a belief system and set of personalized traits. Some of these beliefs are projected by the creator and others are projected by the viewer, but even in this clash, there is a basic consensus, a space where fiction meets some aspect of reality. A drawing of a single smiling fairy can be interpreted as cute, sweet, and sometimes mischievous, in part because the interpretations are based on rehashed stories of the past. But such smiling innocence would never denote the makings of a murderer or the day-to-day work of a stockbroker. There's simply no reference for that association to take place. Fairies aren't killers, and fairies aren't stockbrokers.

Fairies also aren't black. Fairies aren't Latino. Fairies aren't Asian. Fairies aren't men. Fairies aren't overweight. Fairies aren't bald. Despite the fact that stories of fairies can be found throughout the world, from Africa to Southeast Asia, of fairies of different sizes, sexes, hair textures, and personalities, fairies in the larger media world have one uniform look and accepted set of qualities: She's a she, she's petite, she's white. If she doesn't look like Thumbelina or Tinker Bell and can't fit in a size-negative taffeta skirt, she's not a fairy.

Disney wrestled with how to tell a modern story of a black princess, finally putting out
The Princess and the Frog
in 2009. Although I didn't see any official statements saying this, I'd guess that one of the greatest problems when trying to develop the project was that the image of the princess with the sashaying Cinderella hoopskirt and Rapunzelesque hair derived from European folktales is not associated with the image of black women. Although we're talking about a cartoon and playing in the world of fiction, the challenge, I'm sure, was to make the image of a black princess connect with audiences. To make the fantasy work, creators had to work with preconceived images and twentieth-century realities. And yet, there have been black princesses (not as many with hoopskirts and Rapunzelesque hair, of course) in real life since the beginning of time.

Historically, those who fight for equal rights are also fighting for control over their image as well as the development and depiction of their culture. Photos, films, drawings, and visual media
at large have both intentionally and unintentionally perpetuated class, sex, and ethnic stereotypes. For decades traditional media and the gallery world were visual-media gatekeepers. If your work didn't filter through their lens of approval, it fought for survival anywhere.

Visual media is the medium of choice for widespread propaganda.
The Birth of a Nation
is recognized for being the first large-scale Hollywood picture, but the story—a propagandist tale of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction—also embedded the stereotypes of blacks in cinema for nearly a century. The relationship between media, the visual arts, and the dangerous stereotypes so many work to unravel is a serious one. I committed to working in media one day during my junior year in high school when I realized that the books, TV shows, films, and art I soaked in were the only windows to the larger world beyond my day-to-day teen life. Although I was a kid steeped in well-rounded black images, history, and a big heap of positive thinking, not everyone else was.

Images are powerful.

That is why the NAACP, long a forerunner in advocating for diversity in Hollywood, hosts its annual Image Awards show. It's the reason that every time a reality show, film, or sitcom with black characters hits the screen, people debate the merit of the image of blacks in media via message boards, Twitter, and in cafes. It's the reason that, at one point, leaders and fans hoped that hip-hop stars who had the glare of the spotlight upon them might take up the banner for equal rights. It's the reason that art shows are often heralded for untold views of black life. Unfortunately, in the black American experience, images have often been
used to frame our lives, how we come to understand ourselves, and how others relate to us. No one's life should be dictated by a flashing photograph or a cartoon.