Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (5 page)

But other artists have compared their wrestling with W. E. B. Du Bois's double consciousness or the struggle of being both American and black with alien motifs. Artists from Sun Ra to Lil Wayne have referenced being alien to explain isolation.

Author Saidiya Hartman wrote in her book
Lose Your Mother
about feeling trapped in a racial paradox: “Was it why I sometimes felt as weary of America as if I too had landed in what was now South Carolina in 1526 or in Jamestown in 1619? Was it the tug of all the lost mothers and orphaned children? Or was it that each generation felt anew the yoke of a damaged life and the distress of being a native stranger, an eternal alien?”
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“I think that using alien to describe otherness works,” says Reynaldo Anderson, a professor who writes about Afrofuturism. Anderson is one of many theorists who view the alien metaphor as one that explains the looming space of otherness perpetuated by the idea of race. “We're among the first alien abductees,
kidnapped by strange people who take us over by ships and conduct scientific experiments on us. They bred us. They came up with a taxonomy of the people they bred: mulatto, octoroon, quadroon.”

He adds that the scientific experimentations conducted in the name of race mimic sci-fi horror flicks. Henrietta Lacks was a 1950s Virginia tobacco farmer whose cells were taken without her permission and used to create immortal cell lines sold for research around the world. Named HeLa, these cell lines lived past Lacks's own death and were essential to the development of the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization. They were even sent in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity.

The alien concept has been expanded to explain isolation as well, with studies of “the black geek” in literature and an array of self-created modalities that infer a discomfort in one's own skin. In summer 2012, Emory University's African-American Studies Collective issued a call for papers for their 2013 conference, titled “Alien Bodies: Race, Space, and Sex in the African Diaspora.” Held February 8 and 9, 2013, the conference examined the alien-as-race idea and looked at transformative tools to empower those who are alienated. It explored how “we begin to understand the ways in which race, space and sex configure ‘the alien' within spaces allegedly ‘beyond' markers of difference” and asked, “What are some ways in which the ‘alien from within as well as without' can be overcome, and how do we make them sustainable?”

Afrofuturist academics are looking at alien motifs as a progressive framework to examine how those who are alienated adopt modes of resistance and transformation.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but is truth stranger than science fiction too? Talk about real-time: science fiction has introduced a flash of technologies that our world is catching up to—the Internet, commercial space flights, smartphones, and the discovery of the Higgs boson, or “God Particle”—to name a few. In some ways we've surpassed the sci-fi canon.

Afrofuturism is concerned with both the impact of these technologies on social conditions and with the power of such technologies to end the “-isms” for good and safeguard humanity. Historically, new technologies have emerged with a double-edged sword, deepening as many divides as they build social bridges. Gunpowder was a technology that empowered colonizers and gave them the undeniable edge in creating color-based caste systems. Early forays into genetics were created to link ethnic physical traits with intelligence, thus falsely justifying dehumanization, slavery, and holocausts across the globe.

The Tuskegee experiment, in which innocent black men were injected with syphilis for scientific study, or the use of the immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks are evidence of how profit and the race to discovery must be tempered with strong ethics. “HeLa cells were the first human biological materials ever bought and sold, which helped launch a multibillion-dollar industry,” says Rebecca Skloot, author of a book on Lack's immortal cells. “When [Lack's family] found out that people were selling vials of their mother's cells, and that the family didn't get any of the resulting money, they got very angry.”
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Dorothy Roberts writes about how race is inappropriately used in medical research and to market products. “There are studies
to explain racial divisions in health that are actually caused by social inequalities,” Roberts said in her interview with me for my blog
The Post Black Experience
(
http://postblackexperience.com
). She continued, “Yet you have researchers studying high blood pressure, asthma among blacks, etc., and looking for a genetic cause. However, research shows these [illnesses] are the effects of racial inequality and the stress of racial inequality.”
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Although ethics and emerging technologies is a discussion that all futurists are concerned with, Afrofuturists, in particular, are highly sensitive to how or if such technologies will deepen or transcend the imbalances of race.

The alien motif reveals dissonance while also providing a prism through which to view the power of the imagination, aspiration, and creativity channeled in resisting dehumanization efforts. “The most important thing about Afrofuturism is to know that there have always been alternatives in what has been given in the present,” says Alexander Weheliye. “I am not making light of the history of enslavement and medical experimentation,” he continues, “but black people have always developed alternate ways of existing outside of these oppressions.”

Improvisation, adaptability, and imagination are the core components of this resistance and are evident both in the arts and black cultures at large. Jazz, hip-hop, and blues are artistic examples, but there are ways of life that are based on improvisation, too, that aren't fully understood. “Of all the thousands of tribes on the continent, what they all share is this respect for improvisation,” says Smith. “That idea in and of itself is a form
of technology. In the Western world, improvisation is a failure; you do it when something goes wrong. But when black people improvise it's a form of mastery.”

In Reynaldo Anderson's essay “Cultural Studies or Critical Afrofuturism: A Case Study in Visual Rhetoric, Sequential Art, and Post-Apocalyptic Black Identity,” he talks about the notion of twinness as a form of resistance that pulled on Africanisms but also was uniquely formulated for survival. This survival took place in postapocalyptic times, with the transatlantic slave trade being the apocalypse, he says. Noting that African slaves came from societies in which women and men had equal governing power, Anderson says that “to be a human being an individual should possess both masculine and feminine principles (protector-nurturer) in order to have a healthy community.” This twinness, he adds, was a survival mechanism “that enabled [women] to psychologically shield themselves and their inner lives.” However, he also says that rhetorical strategies include signifying, call-and-response, narrative sequencing, tonal semantics, technological rhetoric, agitation, nationalism, jeremiads, nommo, Africana womanist or black feminist epistemologies, queer studies, time and space, visual rhetoric, and culture as modes of resistance.
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But the point of this alien and postapocalyptic metaphor, says Anderson, isn't to get lost in traumas of the past or present-day alienation. The alien framework is a framework for understanding and healing.

It's the reason that D. Denenge Akpem teaches an Afrofuturism class as a pathway to liberation. “The basic premise of this course is that the creative ability to manifest action and transformation has been essential to the survival of Blacks in the Diaspora,” she says.

The liberation edict in Afrofuturism provides a prism for evolution.

C
an you imagine a world without the idea of race? Can you imagine a world where skin color, hair texture, national origin, and ethnicity are not determinants of power, class, beauty, or access?

Some don't want to imagine it; others are highly invested in the impossibility of it all. But let's just talk about those who crave an end to injustice. Can these well-wishers see it? What does this world look like? What does it feel like? If you can't see it, how do you know when you've achieved it?

The ideal society that the nameless many have fought and died for is a world that many can't imagine. Even those who live the dreams of their predecessors wrestle with leaving familiar notions of identity behind and imagining something new. “There's something about racism that has produced a fatalism that has impacted futuristic thinking,” says professor and author Alondra Nelson. While statements like “We don't know what tomorrow will bring” and “The future is not promised” are often said under the guise of well-meaning advice, they have a deeper reach into black diaspora culture, says Nelson. They're countered by the concept of prophecy, she says, or speaking about hope to create a vision for the future. “It's about future thinking, sustainability and imagination.”

The imagination is powerful. The narrative of hope that spews from change agents working for social equality is no accident. Dr. Martin Luther King, Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., even President Barack Obama centered their missions and speeches on hope. On the surface, hope rings as very altruistic—something simple that anyone can do if they just reshuffle their thinking caps or wish upon a star. But the results of a changed mind backed by a bit of empowerment can turn a conflicted world on its head.

Hope, much like imagination, comes at a premium. The cost is a life where more is expected. Where more is expected, new actions are required. The audacity of hope, the bold declaration to believe, and clarity of vision for a better life and world are the seeds to personal growth, revolutionized societies, and life-changing technologies. Desire, hope, and imagination are the cornerstones of social change and the first targets for those who fight against it. “You can't go forward with cynicism—cynicism being disbelief,” says Jackson, whose catchphrase “Keep hope alive” may be one of the most popular quotes in modern history. “You have to hope against the odds and not go backwards by fear. Dr. King, Chavez, Gandhi were people who removed people from low places and had the hope,” Jackson says.

Imagination, hope, and the expectation for transformative change is a through line that undergirds most Afrofuturistic art, literature, music, and criticism. It is the collective weighted belief that anchors the aesthetic. It is the prism through which some create their way of life. It's a view of the world.

Where there is no vision, the people perish.

Taking on this idea of race as a technology sparked new ideas in me. A deliberate by-product of the transatlantic slave trade enforced by violence and law, race (i.e., the division of white and black and the power imbalances based on skin color) simply didn't exist prior to five hundred years ago. I share this in my talks, and I can see the churning of old thoughts and flickers of new ones when audiences begin to see race as a man-made creation.

As a writer who tends to position everything in a cultural context, I was challenged by writing Rayla Illmatic, a character in a completely different world. I wrestled with how to describe characters physically and how to explain their family histories. If your great-grandmother came to a new planet from America, does its history have any context several billion miles away? This stretched my imagination, and this exercise in transcending familiar boundaries is an experience that Afrofuturists seek and encourage. Artist and professor D. Denenge Akpem, an acclaimed ritual-based artist, argues that the artistic process of Afrofuturism itself facilitates personal growth.

Dr. William “Sandy” Darity, a professor of African American history at Duke University, follows me on Twitter. He's a
Rayla
fan, and when he assembled a panel for the Transcending Race conference at Ohio State University, he asked if I would present my ideas on race, based on the
Rayla 2212
project, and predict how it would play out in the far-off future. Others on the panel, including Darity, presented other “what-if” race scenarios, including the impact of a college faculty that reflected the diversity in the country and the impact of a job guarantee on racial inequities. What began as a sci-fi-inspired challenge quickly morphed into a very real issue.

If a new society were created beyond Earth's stratosphere, who would populate it? Would those nations with space programs be the only ones with access to travel to the new world? Is access dependent on the ability to pay for a space flight? With the prospects of commercial endeavors, who has jurisdiction in a dispute? If the colonization of new lands on Earth were any indication, colonization beyond Earth could spur a host of issues.

I presented in spring 2012, the same time that several private companies, including Virgin Galactic, announced their space-tourism ticket sales to the public and a few days shy of the first commercial space flight to the International Space Center. Later, Darity, who is also a sci-fi fan, created the first Race and Space conference to begin in fall 2013 and asked me to join him in launching it. Our initial work in launching the conference came at the same time that former astronaut Mae Jemison, the first black woman to go into space, announced that she'd won a federal grant for the 100 Year Starship project, which is devoted to spurring the necessary technological and social innovations to travel to distant stars. We asked her to be our guest speaker. From creating self-sustaining energy sources to traveling as “DNA slush,” the Starship project would leave no stone unturned in the path beyond our solar system. The scientific advancements likely would change new inventions for Earth as well. But the psychological impact of space travel was just as important as the requisite tech savvy. “It'd be unfortunate if the crew didn't make it because they couldn't get along with each other,” Jemison said.
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