Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (20 page)

Coleman is now one of the teaching artists at the MoCADA, which is known for innovative workshops and exhibits. For the past twelve years, they have hosted a culminating art exhibit for the Artists-in-Schools Program, their twenty-to-thirty-week arts partnership with public schools in the neighborhood. They typically work with seven schools a year. “Most of our students' schools don't have art programs,” says Ruby Amanze, MoCADA director of education. The theme of the culminating art show changes from year to year, and the 2012 theme was a new one for the museum and the students: Afrofuturism.

The children were asked to visualize the future and to create collective art projects. One group of students created a large door symbolizing a passageway into the future. Another used photography to depict how they wanted to be remembered in the future. Others recreated what black music would sound like. While the artwork was intriguing, the processes that led to the creation of the work were incredible. “Although it's a visual art program, 80
percent of the focus includes a historical focus,” says Amanze. She adds, “At one school the teacher asked the boys how they would feel if the girls told their history and wrote out the boys. The boys were really upset at the thought of it.” But the discussion compelled many of the children to give some serious thought to the future, their connection to the future now, and the impact of the past.

“I use Afrofuturism to get students to talk about their future,” says Coleman. “[Many] have a difficult time seeing a future. For some reason, the future is a blur, as if they live in the land where time stands still.” But she stimulates their minds. “I ask them why companies are building space stations. I ask them about the idea of people being intergalactic tourists and who will be able to afford it,” she says. “We talk about running out of water. I think they understand that there are dire issues that we have to address in the world. I'm hoping that by having these conversations, they will begin to think about what they can do for themselves as individuals and collectively how they can build a new society. I think it can open up a lot of possibilities.”

Rasheedah Phillips launched the AfroFuturist Affair in 2011. A member of the Black Science Fiction Society, she wanted to create a community of artists in Philadelphia who could gather and share their work. The event began as an open-mic featuring writers and poets but soon evolved into a larger community of shared interests. Phillips hosted a charity and costume ball as well as an Afrofuturism lecture featuring women performance artists.
When I spoke with her, she had just completed a workshop with recently released inmates who were in a work-reentry program.

“It was amazing,” she says. “Part of my mission is to spread the word about what Afrofuturism is beyond groups of intellectuals. I wanted to introduce this to people who might not have access to this audience.” Phillips won a micro-grant for the AfroFuturist Affair and, while presenting at the awards dinner, was asked to share her work at a reentry program. The participants in the reentry program ranged from their mid-twenties to late fifties. Most were men, a few were women. Most were black.

“I opened the workshop by asking them what was their favorite sci-fi-themed book or TV show,” says Phillips. “I asked them to tell me in one sentence how they saw their future or what they thought would happen a hundred years from now.” Then she talked about racism in science fiction and how they felt about not seeing their image in media. “They were so into it,” she says. “They really schooled me, and in terms of breaking down core concepts, they were on top of it.”

Next Phillips talked about breaking cycles and looking to the past and present to identify patterns that no longer worked in their life. She used the metaphor of a time machine and asked what they would change in their life. “They really connected with that aspect,” she says. “They really liked discussing their past and how to change the patterns and cycles and work to build a future.”

W
hile I was doing research for this book, family friends and art collectors Linda and Leonard Murray suggested that I take a look at the poster art created by MacArthur Fellow Kerry James Marshall for the African Festival of the Arts. The festival is a robust extravaganza held each year in Chicago's Washington Park and is produced by Africa International House. The Murrays work with the festival each year and when they learned I was working in Afrofuturism, they figured that Marshall's commissioned work would be up my cosmic alley. When I asked what the poster depicted, they had a difficult time explaining it, but in short described the work as the “Black Jetsons.”

I rushed over to their home to take a look, and the poster was pretty amazing, to say the least. It highlighted a loving family of four living in a space station decked out in African art with a snazzy, to-die-for panoramic view of the Milky Way out their living room window. The kids, a young boy and girl, are seated on a sofa studying Earth via a hologram that hovers over their coffee table. The parents are both in African-accented garb. The father with long dreads playfully wraps his arms around the mother, who is sporting a large head wrap. The family are art collectors as well, and this cozy space pad is decorated with Dogon masks and Yoruba sky art along with a healthy spread of plants. This far-out family moment was one of a kind. Marshall named it
Keeping the Culture.

After learning about the poster, I was invited by Africa International House president Patrick Saingbey Woodtor and art dealer John A. Martin to discuss Afrofuturism and how
Keeping the Culture
fit into the aesthetic before a group of art collectors.
Afterward, participants, most of whom were unfamiliar with the term, were taken by the futurism and culture in the piece. To my surprise, they were also inspired to share personal stories of their own; true stories of futuristic technologies they'd witnessed long before they hit the market, family stories of time travel, or unique ideas they had on space travel and critical technologies they wanted to invent. Some debated whether the hovering image of Earth was indeed a hologram or a time travel portal. These unassuming crowds of collectors were bound in their Afro-surreal cultural ties to technology and the imagination, a realization triggered by
Keeping the Culture
and having Afrofuturism defined.

Marshall is one of the great artists of our times, and his works are housed in the top collections and museums around the world, including the Smithsonian. At one point, Marshall says his aim was to create as many quality works with black people as possible and to have them posted in the far corners of the world. His success, with his works featured globally, has done just that. But for
Keeping the Culture
, Marshall challenged the conventions about the future. “I just thought it would be interesting to link the idea of the historical past with black people and the diaspora but also look at how that past can be carried along with the people who are evolving toward the future,” he says. He purposely combined traditional African art tied to the sky and mysticism along with holograms and space stations, to bridge the idea of an African origin with the transference of culture and family values into a space-friendly future. “It struck me that you rarely see images of black people projecting themselves into the future. When you do, it's almost always the post-apocalyptic type of future where the person is very isolated.”

Marshall believes contemplating the future is important. “It comes down to do we really imagine ourselves to be in the future? And if we imagine ourselves into the future, how are we going to be when we get there?” he asks. “Can we be agents of the future or will we be objects of the future, like we were objects of commerce when black folks were brought to the New World?” He's an advocate of the strategic use of the imagination and urges Afrofuturists to ponder how they can have a collective technological advantage that helps shape the world and alleviate disparity. We must be “in front of the developing of the material realities that shape the future,” he says. The influencers of the future aren't those who create the next high-profile phone, but rather those who determine whether we'll be using phones in the first place, he adds.

Afrofuturism is a great tool for wielding the imagination for personal change and societal growth. Empowering people to see themselves and their ideas in the future gives rise to innovators and free thinkers, all of whom can pull from the best of the past while navigating the sea of possibilities to create communities, culture, and a new, balanced world. The imagination is the key to progress, and it's the imagination that is all too often smothered in the name of conformity and community standards.

On the one hand, Afrofuturism encourages the beauties of African diasporic cultures and gives people of color a face in the future. But from a global vantage point, the perspective contributes to world knowledge and ideas and includes the perspectives of a group too often deleted from the past and future. Sometimes Afrofuturists address otherness dead-on, while some simply give life to the stories that dance in their mind. But all are aware that
the future, technology, and the scope of the imagination have unlimited potential that culture can inform.

Yet the inequities that plagued the past and play out in the present cannot be carried into the future. Afrofuturism provides a prism for examining this issue through art and discourse, but it's a prism that is not exclusive to the diaspora alone. Whether by adopting the aesthetic or the principles, all people can find inspiration or practical use for Afrofuturism to both transform their world and break free of their own set of limitations. The myths of the Dogon or the stories of Samuel Delany can and do enrich lives all over the world. The musical approaches of DJ Spooky or the
Black Kirby
art show provide the cognitive dissonance that many need to rewire their limited view of the world. Good ideas transcend time, space, and culture. To quote the film
V for Vendetta
, ideas are bulletproof.

While teaching yoga to a group of fifth-grade African American girls, for some reason I brought up the rover on Mars. I talked about space tourism and asked how many would be willing to take a ride. All hands shot up. One said she was going to ask her mom to start saving money so they could buy a ticket. Today the tickets are around ninety thousand dollars. But one day, not too far off, the prices will go down, space tourism will be commonplace, and the fact that we lived in a time when it was not will sound like we lived in the age of the dinosaurs when we retell it. Perhaps this young girl, inspired by space travel, will create the latest flying car upgrade. Or maybe, as she's mapping out her Mars trip, she'll write a story about her future, her interstellar travels, and the life force she brings to this red planet neighbor. Perhaps, with a desire to improve the world's conditions, she'll link into
a larger group of people in a shared vision of sustainability and equality. Starting with her imagination and implementing ideas through her actions, she'll live the future. The future is ours. Yes, the future is now.

1.
Ingrid LaFleur, “Visual Aesthetics of Afrofuturism,” TEDx Fort Greene Salon,
YouTube
, September 25, 2011.

1.
Ytasha Womack, “Dorothy Roberts Debunks Myth of Race,”
Post Black Experience
,
http://postblackexperience.com/tag/dorothy-roberts/
(Accessed January 10, 2012).

2.
Kodwo Eshun,
More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction
(UK: Quartet Books, 1998), 175.

3.
Saidiya Hartman,
Lose Your Mother
(New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008).

4.
Sarah Zielinski, “Henrietta Lacks Immortal Cells,”
Smithsonian Magazine
,
www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html
(Accessed January 22, 2010).

5.
Ytasha Womack, “Dorothy Roberts Debunks Myth,”
Post Black Experience
,
http://postblackexperience.com/tag/dorothy-roberts/
(Accessed October 17, 2011).

6.
Reynaldo Anderson, “Critical Afrofuturism: A Case Study in Visual Rhetoric, Sequential Art, and Post-Apocalyptic Black Identity” (2012).

1.
Jeremy Hsu, “Former Astronaut Will Lead 100 Year Starship Effort,”
Tech News Daily
,
www.technewsdaily.com/5774-astronaut-lead-100-year-starship.html
(Accessed May 21, 2012).

2.
Center for Black Studies, “AfroGeeks: Global Blackness and the Digital Sphere,” University of California Santa Barbara,
www.research.ucsb.edu/cbs/projects/afrogeeks04.html
(Accessed March 1, 2012).

3.
Mark Dery, “Black to the Future,” in
Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 180.