As you know, what I'm obviously gonna be talking about
with you today is race and science fiction.
In particular, I wanna talk about Afrofuturism.
So without any further ado, let's move on.
All right, great.
As I'm sure you guys know by now,
either just from your own sort of travels
through science fiction or from this class,
was sort of a history as usual that we tell
about race and science fiction.
And that story is that science fiction
is pretty much the creation of white Europeans
and Americans in the late 18th
and then in the 19th centuries.
And that it's not until the collapse
of European colonial projects
and the American civil rights movement in the 1960s
that we begin to see people of color enter the genre.
And it's a neat and clean story, except that it's not true.
One of the things that we're finding now
in recent scholarship is that science fiction
has been a global phenomenon almost since its inception.
We've seen science fiction coming out of Brazil
as early as the 1830s and coming out of China and Japan
by the 1860s, or yeah, 1860s.
So in short, I think that really what we wanna start doing
is thinking about how any time a nation
or an ethnic group actually begins to participate
in industrial culture,
then naturally its authors turn to science fiction
as the premier story form of technoscientific modernity
as a way of making sense of this culture's engagements
with these new ways of doing economics
and politics and science and technology.
More specifically, what we find is authors of all color,
I would certainly include white authors in this,
use science fiction to explore the necessary relations
of science, society, and race,
and to stake claims for themselves
and for their communities in the global future imaginary.
And as we're gonna see, that becomes especially important
in the case of Afrofuturism.
And so that's exactly what we'll be looking at today
is this tradition, it's about 150 years old,
tradition of speculative fiction written by black people
that is generally called Afrofuturism,
and so that's what I'll be calling it in this talk.
All right, so first of all,
let me start off by giving you a definition,
a working definition of Afrofuturism.
Afrofuturism is speculative fiction or science fiction
written by both Afro diasporic and African authors.
It's a global aesthetic movement,
and it encompasses art, film,
literature, music, and scholarship.
Mark Derry talks about it,
I've got a nice quote up here
that hopefully you can see on the PowerPoint,
as a, quote, process of signification
that appropriates images of technology
and a prosthetically enhanced future
to explore the hopes and fears that people of color face
in a high-tech world.
Now, there's sort of, as far as I can tell,
really two basic goals with Afrofuturism
that we wanna be thinking about.
The first thing that Afrofuturist artists wanna do,
with three goals,
one is they wanna tell good science fiction stories.
And I think if you speak with any black science fiction
author from anywhere around the globe,
they'll tell you that's sort of first and foremost
what they're interested in.
But there are two political goals or cultural goals
associated with Afrofuturism as well.
First is that Afrofuturist artists
are interested in recovering lost black histories
and thinking about how those histories
inform a whole range of black cultures today.
They also wanna think about how these histories
and cultures might inspire new visions of tomorrow.
All right.
So I wanna talk a little bit more about this here.
A lot of scholars, including non-science fiction scholars,
think about Afrofuturism as an extension
of the historical recovery projects
that black Atlantic intellectuals have engaged in
for well over 200 years now.
As Toni Morrison has written about
and spoken about eloquently,
these kinds of historical recovery projects
show how African slaves and their descendants
experienced conditions of homelessness,
alienation and dislocation
that very much anticipate what Nietzsche described
as the founding conditions of modernity.
And so you can start to see then
why it is that science fiction makes sense
because if you wanna think about black people
as being sort of in some ways
the primary subjects of modernity,
those who've sort of had the most intense experiences
and engagements with it,
science fiction has this grammar
that allows us to speak about modernity,
stories about travel through time and space
and stories about encounters with the alien other
are ideal ways to bring those historical experiences
to life for new audiences.
And I think if you think a little bit
just to sort of jump myself here for a moment,
if you think about Derrick Bell's story,
how much that story, the lead character go lightly
is always engaging African-American history
to try to confront and make sense of this uncertain future
which he does and as we all know,
doesn't end all that well.
All right, the next goal for Afrofuturists
is maybe a slightly more positive one,
not just to sort of remember the bad past
but to use stories about the past and the present
to reclaim the history of the future.
And especially what Kojo Eishan talks about,
some of you might know him,
he's a British, African-British music critic
who's done a lot of really great work on Afrofuturism.
And he talks about how histories of the future
have been hijacked by what he calls the futures industry.
And the futures industry is sort of his term
for the place where technoscience,
fictional media and market prediction meet.
But what you tend to see in mainstream media
again and again and again,
is the sense that blackness is a catastrophe.
Black spaces are zones of absolute dystopia
where either capitalism hasn't had a chance to intervene yet
or where capitalism has failed.
So, and once you start thinking about this,
you really do see this again and again in the media.
Black cities are always depicted in dystopic ways.
Africa itself, right?
I mean, it's this gigantic continent
with lots of different ecosystems and cultures
and nations and people and events and histories.
And yet it's always treated somehow
as like the place of dystopia, drought, AIDS, famine.
You just, you never hear,
or you rarely hear as much about positive things again,
unless it's a capitalist intervention.
What Kojo Ashen sees Afrofuturism as being important for
is that it's that kind of storytelling allows authors,
it gives them a public means by which to intervene
into those bad futures that are written
by the futures industry and to challenge them,
change them, write all together, new ones.
And he riffs a bit on W.E.B. Du Bois,
who some of you might know,
he was an African-American sociologist.
He actually wrote science fiction as well.
And Du Bois talked about double consciousness,
that black people always live under the consciousness
of being both African-Americans and just Americans.
And Ashen sees, what he sees as valuable
about Afrofuturism is that it has the ability
to enhance double consciousness
and create even a triple or quadruple
or quintuple consciousness to give us a sense
that there are a lot of different ways
to think about being black,
to think about the relations of science, society and race,
and to think about futures that might be in full color
rather than whitewashed or black hole despair type futures.
All right, so now what I wanna do
is now that I've given you a little bit of background
on the goals of Afrofuturism,
I wanna take you through a brief history
of Afrofuturism, can give you
some reading recommendations here.
And if you want, later on, I would be happy to email you.
I actually have a written list of reading recommendations.
I'd be happy to send that along to Lars
or to post it up to the website.
So the first period I wanna talk about here
is a long one, obviously,
and we're gonna talk about United States Afrofuturism,
which happens from about 1850 to 1960.
This period, as you know, obviously marks
the establishment of science fiction
as well as Afrofuturism, and both were popular genres
with a lot of similarities at the beginning.
Both science fiction and Afrofuturism
were generally written at first
by respected mainstream writers
who were experimenting with a variety of emergent genres.
So for example, you write, of course,
the most famous ones would be Mary Shelley,
who's playing with the Gothic
and with sort of a proto-science fiction in Frankenstein,
H.G. Wells, who perfects the future war story
with stories like the Battle of Dorking
and, of course, War of the Worlds.
And then in the United States, Edward Bellamy,
who updates the utopia to speak to the industrial age
and sort of creates a new form, the techno-utopia,
with books like Looking Backwards.
We see something very similar happening
in the United States, Afrofuturism, at this point in time.
So for instance, Charles Chestnut is a mainstream writer
who wrote some short stories like the Gooford Grapevine,
which was a Gothic commentary on U.S. racism,
and it's about white northerners who come to the South
and have to deal with sort of the history of racism
and of slavery as it sort of is all entwined
within Vineyard that the northerners are buying.
Sutton E. Griggs's Imperial Imperium
is a future war story where U.S. blacks take up arms
against their white oppressors.
It's a fascinating story
and it's a particularly interesting story
because throughout most of the story,
one protagonist who's much more peaceful
and looking for an integrated solution to racism,
he tries every techno-scientific means necessary
and he tries in particular to educate blacks
to become engineers and agricultural experts
and to show that they can be
modern techno-cultural citizens.
And then finally that fails and black people pick up arms.
And I said, well, by one means or another,
we're going to make a place for ourselves in this future.
And then finally, another story from this period
that's really important is Edward A. Johnson's
New Light Ahead for the Negro,
which was a scientific agricultural utopia
predicated on black knowledge and industry.
So that's a story where that works,
where blacks essentially remake America
as a more productive and more racially integrated country
precisely by leveraging the techno-scientific knowledge
that they gained as slaves
and then the education they gain as freed men
and freed women and use that to build a better South
and then eventually a better United States.
Sorry, I almost lost my computer there.
Okay, so that takes us through the roots of Afrofuturism.
The genre continues to develop in the early 20th century.
And in some ways it's interesting
because it's very much, I don't know if you're familiar
with the American racial policy
at the turn of the last century.
There was a policy in place called separate but equal.
And of course it wasn't, it was separate,
but it wasn't at all equal.
And it was a way right to sort of keep most resources
in the hands of whites and away from blacks.
A little bit different on the literary scene.
We do find that black and white authors
are publishing in different venues.
So for instance, you've got whites, authors are publishing
primarily in white owned and operated magazines
like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories
and Astounding Science Fiction.
Meanwhile, Afrofuturist authors are publishing primarily
in black owned and operated newspapers
like The Crisis and the Pittsburgh Courier.
What's interesting though is that this wasn't a kind
of separate but equal policy that was enforced by whites
but instead seems to have been chosen by black authors
as far as the historical record reveals
at this point in time.
And there's gonna be a number of reasons for this.
One thing that Samuel Delaney talks about
when he's done a little work on this
is that a lot of black authors seem to have avoided
the genre magazines because they looked really frivolous.
And I mean, if you look at the pictures I have up here,
you can see how The Crisis,
it has a kind of science fictional cover.
It has this gigantic woman holding the sun up
over a little tiny city.
And I mean, that really is a lot like a lot of 1950s
sort of campy Hollywood science fiction movies
but there's something about it, right?
It's a sort of dynamic art form is very much part
of the modernist art movement.
It sort of signals high literature
rather than genre literature.
And of course, Amazing Stories,
you have tiny men fighting gigantic bugs.
And so you can see where maybe some authors might've felt
if you're gonna try to publish a story
about black revolution, black technoscientific genius,
it may not have been taken particularly seriously
in magazines about little tiny white people
fighting gigantic bugs, okay.
The other reason that black authors don't seem
to have been publishing in the genre magazines
at this point in time is simply because there were indeed
a number of stories that were relatively racist.
Not all of them were by any stretch of the imagination,
but more often they were than weren't.
And the famous example of this is Stanley G. Weinbaum's
Martian Odyssey, a story from I think 1932.
That if you haven't read Martian, did you guys read,
I don't know if you read Martian Odyssey or not,
but, oh, you did, great.
Okay, so then you might remember,
this is a story that's often cited
as really important in science fiction history
because it's sympathetic to the alien other
and tries to find connections between humans and aliens.
And up until that time,
you didn't see that many stories like that.
Of course, the problem with the story, as you might remember,
is that the humans who populate Weinbaum's story
know that the Martians, they encounter intelligent
and irrational beings,
precisely because their knowledge classification systems
are more sophisticated than those of African people on earth.
So suddenly to be human,
you have to be not black, essentially.
And so again, you can see why people like Du Bois
or Chestnut or Griggs might not have learned
to publish in these magazines.
It just didn't seem like it was gonna be
a particularly hospitable place.
Too many battles to have to fight.
So the main issue here that we see through these stories
is will there be a future for black people?
And what is it that black people will have to do
to secure a future where they're free citizens?
And so as Afrofuturists are publishing,
these are the stories they're looking at.
And so the goal of the Afrofuturist author then
is going to be to tell thrilling stories
about black people who use science and technology
to do amazing things, survive disasters,
start revolutions, and build brave new worlds.
So really quickly, let me tell you about three
of my favorite stories,
and I think three of the most important stories
out of this period of US Afrofuturism.
The first is Martin Delaney's,
Blake or the Huts of America.
This was published in the Anglo African Magazine.
It was a serialized story.
And this is a great story.
It's an alternate world where African American slaves
revolt against their white Southern masters
and establish a free black state in Cuba.
Once they're there, what they plan to do is use
all the knowledge that they've gained as slaves
to build their own cotton empire
and undermine the United States South
and then the United States sort of grip
on the cotton industry and make themselves
into technological world players.
What I like best about the story
isn't actually so much the story itself,
which like many utopias and dystopias
kind of goes on and on and on.
But what's interesting about it was that Delaney
and his friends actually really were going to do this.
All the proceeds from Blake went into a fund
that was going to be used to send free blacks
back to Liberia where they were going to partner
with African farmers and build a cotton empire
and then undermine the South and do away with slavery
by getting an economic strength gold
on the South essentially.
So I like that this is a book that's about something
black people were really going to try to do.
So it becomes sort of science fictional
at two levels I think.
Another story out of this period
that I think is really interesting and important
if you haven't read it before is W.E.B. Du Bois' The Comet.
Like I said, Du Bois is most famously known
as a sociologist and one of the first modern theorists
of race relations.
He actually wrote a couple science fiction stories
about this as well.
And the one that I really enjoy and that I enjoy teaching
is The Comet, which is from a collection of stories
that Du Bois published in 1920.
And The Comet is a great story.
It's a disaster story where a comet that passes
through the Earth's atmosphere seems to release
a poison gas and it seems like it kills everyone
except one black man who's down in a bank vault at the time.
And when he comes up at first, of course,
he's horrified by this situation,
but the longer he's by himself on the Earth,
the more he kind of starts to like it
because all of the sudden he has access to cars
and goods that he couldn't have before.
He can go and eat at restaurants
he wasn't allowed into before.
And so all of a sudden it's seeming like,
maybe this disaster wasn't quite so much
of a disaster at all.
And then eventually he ends up meeting up
with a white woman, a photographer and a feminist too.
And the two of them, at first they see each other as aliens
and literally, I mean, that's how Du Bois writes about it,
as being alien and blood and culture,
but they overcome their differences.
They work together, they pull their technical know-how
and in the end they decide they're gonna create
a new race together.
It ends up not working out because of course,
what we learn eventually is that The Comet,
the poison gas didn't kill everyone, the whites come back.
And in fact, what's happened is that the black man's child
has been killed.
So the only person who ends up dead
are black babies in this story.
So clearly it's a much more pessimistic story
than some of the other stories you see
in Afrofuturism at this time.
And it seems like what Du Bois is saying to us
is that it's going to, the only way that race relations
in America will ever be fixed is through a catastrophe
that wipes everyone out.
So interesting story, kind of fun,
has a lot of purple prose, it's fun to read with students.
It gets really kind of big and crazy after a while.
And then the last story out of this period
that's really important is Charles Schuyler's
Black International and Black Empire.
Schuyler was a journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier
and the story actually ran in the Courier.
The Courier is the largest owned,
black owned and operated newspaper in the world.
And that's still true today actually.
And it's cool because they ran the installments
from this story side by side with news articles.
And there was no distinction made
between the news articles and the fiction.
And clearly a discerning reader would know the difference,
but at the same time, it's kind of exciting.
You'd be reading your newspaper
and you'd be reading about the Great Depression,
the war in Europe, et cetera.
And then all of a sudden there's a story
about black revolution and it's a really exciting story.
This is an alternate world where Afro diasporic people,
and it really is an international group
of black people come together and they pool their scientific,
military, artistic and business talents
to enact a global revolution against the white nations
that have enslaved and impressed them for so long.
They do this and it's kind of a bloodbath.
It's really, it's exciting.
They do this by decimating the United States
with biological warfare, bombing Europe into submission.
And by the way, the leader of the Air Force
is a black woman.
So that's kind of interesting.
In 1938, that's early to be sort of thinking
in these kind of feminist terms,
but she does it and she does a great job.
And then finally they establish
a utopian black empire in Africa.
So it's a book that bounces back and forth
between scenes of sort of rampant and gleeful destruction.
And then also there's then sort of building
of this utopia in Africa, basically in Liberia, I think.
All right, so that gets us through
the first period of Afrofuturism.
The next period I wanna talk about
is contemporary United States Afrofuturism.
So about 1960 to the present.
This is the period I think more people are,
this is the period people are more familiar with,
but I think it's worth going back through it
and talking a little bit about it more
now that you have some historical context
and theoretical context for it.
So this is the period essentially when Afrofuturism
and mainstream science fiction integrate with one another.
We see black authors in this period,
publishing in all the same venues
as their white counterparts.
So in all the major science fiction magazines
with all the major publishers,
this is the period when major African-American authors
like Sam Delaney and Octavia Butler,
Jewel Gomez and Charles Saunders all start publishing as well.
By the end of the 20th century,
Afrofuturism is very much recognized
as a sub-genre within science fiction.
You have things like, you have anthologies,
like Sherry R. Thomas's Dark Matter.
There's actually two of those,
Dark Matter and then Dark Matter Reading the Bones.
You have author societies like the Carl Brandon Society,
which is a society for thinking about race
and science fiction.
We've got a picture up there
of some of the recent recipients
of Carl Brandon Society Awards.
And then we also have,
there are conferences in the United States
like Black to the Future.
There are online sites.
I'll talk a little bit more about those in a minute.
Some of you might know there are Facebook sites
for Black Science Fiction Society.
They have their own version of Facebook as well.
And then there are things like the WorldSF blog.
So you've really seen this explosion of interest
in matters of race and particularly Afrofuturism.
And often it's of course black authors
who are taking point on these things
and putting them together.
What's also interesting though about this period
is that by the 1990s, you also see white authors,
at least in the United States,
are beginning to use Afrofuturism as well.
And it's always, of course, this parallels feminism,
where when feminist authors first started writing
overtly feminist science fiction,
a lot of mainstream and male authors
were hesitant about that and skeptical
that you could really do feminism in science fiction.
And then, you know, over the course of 40 years,
even I think the biggest holdouts have started using
some of the insights of feminism in their science fiction.
Again, something similar happening with race.
So we have white authors like Paul de Filippo
and Kathleen Anne Goonan, who draw from the history
of slavery and the civil rights movement,
which they participated in as well,
to make sense of issues that might emerge
in biologically engineered futures.
So it becomes, I think what's interesting then
is Afrofuturism becomes a way not just to talk about
the future of science, society, and race,
but also to think about the ways we would create new races
or create new kinds of social or cultural divisions
with new sciences and technologies.
And so it's been really, I think, a fruitful vocabulary
for science fiction authors of all different colors.
Now, the main issue in contemporary US Afrofuturism is
what will the future be like?
So at this point, everyone assumes, yes, indeed,
there will be a future for black people.
And there might even be a future in full color,
but what futures or futures might it be
that that will come up with?
And so the goal of the Afrofuturist author at this point
is still to tell thrilling stories that grip us,
but also to create alternate worlds and new futures
by extrapolating from the Afro diasporic past.
So three stories here, two of which you read,
I think that are really key.
So first is Octavia Butler's Blood Child,
which was published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction magazine
in 1984, and then it's been anthologized
in a variety of places since then.
As you know, this is a future where humans who have left
Earth to colonize the stars are enslaved by bug-like aliens
who use human men to carry their eggs to term.
Slavery has just ended recently for humans,
and the two races are coming to a point
where they're forced to admit their interdependence
and are learning to replace ignorance and violence
with education and love, right?
And I mean, the story, it's a happy ending, right?
This is a love story.
It ends like a Hollywood movie.
The lovers are in each other's arms.
There's a baby on the way.
You can hear the music swelling practically.
It's kind of funny if you think about it that way,
or at least positive, a good thing.
Other stories are more pessimistic.
So for instance,
Derrick Bell's Space Traders, right,
which really warns us that history might repeat itself
and not in a happy way if we don't pay attention
and learn from the past.
I don't know if you guys had a chance to watch it,
but as you know, it was made into a short film
for HBO's Cosmic Slop in 1994.
You can go watch that on YouTube
if you haven't done that already.
At this point, right in the story,
we know America is in decline and the aliens show up
and they promise to solve the country's problems
if we hand over all our black people.
It's told from the perspective
of a conservative black presidential advisor
who tries to talk the president out of this deal
because he does know his history
and he understands how history is going to repeat itself.
But of course, it doesn't work out.
And in the end, what's that last line?
It's so great.
It's like, and so black people went into the future
the way they came into America in the past
and really makes clear how history is repeating itself.
And then finally, a set of novels
that if you can get ahold of and read,
I really recommend, they're really fun.
Stephen Barnes's Lion's Blood and Zulu Heart.
These are from the early 2000s.
This is an alternate history in which Africa
rather than Europe becomes the center
of technoscientific development.
So for a variety of reasons set in the far, far past,
the Greek philosophers,
instead of philosophy and art-reaching,
it's pinnacle, I guess, in Greece and Rome,
everyone moves down to Africa.
And so Greek philosophy combines
with African military power.
And by the 19th century,
it's Northern Africans who have colonized the new world.
Meanwhile, Europe stays tribal.
And so the Africans who go to the new world
and who need someone to run their plantations,
sure enough, go ahead and use tribal Europeans
as slave labor.
So what is really interesting to me
about this set of novels is how Barnes imagines
that history might simply repeat itself,
that faced with this certain agricultural
and ecological and technoscientific situation,
the conquerors, regardless of who they are,
are going to sort of behave in the same way.
And that power will replicate itself regardless of race.
The other thing that's sort of interesting about this story
is that it doesn't matter who's in control
of the United States,
the Buffalo and the Indians all get killed.
So another way in which history ends up repeating itself.
All right, so that gets us
through the United States Afrofuturism.
Now, of course, the thing is it's not like Afrofuturism
has been just part of the United States,
just like science fiction is more than the United States.
And in fact, what we see is that since the 1960s,
Afrofuturism has become an increasingly global phenomenon.
This is something that people have talked about less
in science fiction studies.
So if you do any reading on Afrofuturism,
you won't see as much on the global aspects of it.
This is something I'm starting to work on.
And a few other people are here and there,
but it's still pretty new stuff.
So this is cool and fun
and you're getting cutting edge scholarship, so enjoy.
All right, so what we see with global Afrofuturism
is that authors from around the globe,
from the Caribbean, from Canada, from Africa,
especially from Ghana, from South Africa and from Kenya,
I think, are using all the traditional publishing venues.
You still see many of these authors publishing
in Western science fiction magazines
and publishing in regular science fiction imprints.
But we're also seeing a real explosion
of science fiction online,
and especially for African and Afro diasporic authors.
So there's a number of really important
Afro diasporic venues online.
The State of Black Science Fiction 2012, that's on Facebook.
So if any of you are on there, you can go ahead and join.
We'd love to see you there.
And then the Black Science Fiction Society,
the World Science Fiction Blog.
Again, these are all really interesting places
where there's a lot of lively interchange
between science fiction producers and fans
and really trying to think through the relationship
between the West and the rest,
as some authors put it in their fiction
and just in their everyday exchanges with one another.
We're also seeing specific online venues
coming out of Africa itself.
My favorite one right now is Jungle Gym,
which is a bi-monthly African pulp magazine,
I think based basically in South Africa,
but publishing authors all over the continent.
Story Time, which is a weekly genre fiction
published by African writers.
And a place called Three Butte,
which is an online anthology devoted
to questions of African modernity.
If you're interested in getting to any of these,
again, I'd be happy to send you the URLs
or you can just go start Googling around yourself
and they're very easy to find.
So the main issue that we're finding in Afro diasporic,
in a global Afrofuturism and especially Afrofuturism
coming out of Africa, is again,
these questions of what the future will look like.
Obviously these are authors who assume
that there will indeed be a future for black people,
but when they're thinking about it,
it's not just a matter of thinking
about black versus white futures,
but instead thinking about again,
the West versus the rest,
which I think is an easy way to think about this.
So the goal of the global Afrofuturist author
is going to be to create truly strange new futures
by combining elements of the West and the rest.
All right, and this works out actually differently
for Afro diasporic and African authors.
So for instance, Afro diasporic authors,
what you see is doing a much more sort of postmodern,
very meta form of science fiction in some ways.
So we might think about Caribbean Canadian author,
Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber.
This is a story where intergalactic
and cross temporal colonization is enabled
by a combination of advanced computing networks,
nanotechnology, and Caribbean storytelling practices.
And it's that combination that becomes key.
Hopkinson's heroine survives life
in an extraordinarily hostile world
and even negotiates a peaceful new future
for humans and aliens,
precisely because she can put white,
and I'd put this like an air quotes, right?
So white science and black storytelling practices together,
but she does this in productive new ways
and it allows her to sort of think her way
past some of the impasses her father
and other people in her world have found themselves at.
So this is one thing that is really interesting.
Global Afrofuturism tends to be very positive
in the long run in ways that we don't necessarily see
in US Afrofuturism.
And I'm not sure why that is entirely,
but there tends to be a real sense
that these pasts and presents can be remixed
into productive new futures.
Another great example of this, and I love this,
this is probably my favorite book in the world,
is African Canadian author Minister Fast,
obviously that's not his real name,
but Minister Fast put out a book in 2004
called Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad.
And you should read it if for no other reason
than because it has this great title.
The story though is actually also really fantastic.
It's about two African Canadian geeks
who must combine everything they've learned
from science fiction and comic books
with ancient African scientific and military practices
when they discover that one of them is the linchpin
in a 7,000 year old struggle between good and evil.
And it's interesting.
I taught this book in class last semester
and I was surprised.
My students had a really hard time with it at first.
And I was shocked because my students
are all science fiction fans.
And while they're not African Canadian science fiction fans,
I thought that would be sort of easy for them
to sort of get on board with the book,
but they found it really challenging
until they found a way to frame
the experience of reading the story.
And finally, one day a group of them came in and they said,
I get it, I know what the story is about now.
It's Star Wars set 20 years ago in the past
in Canada with black people.
And if you think about it that way, it becomes,
again, I think that really gets at the heart
of Afrofuturism and sort of remixing
of different kinds of culture
and messing with issues of time and space.
And it's a story set long ago in a galaxy
that seems very far away to them.
Okay, finally, of course, I wanna talk about
Afrofuturism coming out of Africa.
And this is not necessarily a new phenomenon.
We've seen science fiction coming out of Africa
since at least 1960.
My guess is it may have been there earlier
and we just aren't finding it yet for a variety of reasons.
But there's been a real explosion in the last few years,
of course, enhanced by the internet, no doubt.
My favorite author, someone to watch for
is a Ghanaian author named Jonathan Doetze,
whose book, Virus, is coming out in installments.
Virus is actually a shorter version,
is a short first chapter out of a larger novel
he's publishing called Accra 2057.
He's publishing in parts of it on his website.
Parts of it are on Are You Serious's website?
I don't know if you guys know him or not,
but he's one of the original modern primitives
and a real promoter of global techno culture.
And then it's also the actual novel will be released from,
I wanna say Warner aspect in the next year or two,
but I can't remember which publisher, exactly.
So we'll come out from a Western publisher,
but it's also coming out as a hyperlinked comic book
out of Tribute, which is one of those African websites
I had mentioned earlier.
And so this is a panel from the Tribute version,
the comic book version.
So Doetze is really thinking about this
as a multimedia novel and as a novel
that really does combine the West and the rest.
And that is being published simultaneously
in different venues in both Africa and across the globe.
So that's cool.
The story itself is, we'll feel very familiar to you.
It's the adventures of a teenage girl from rural Ghana
who uses the computer installed in her head
to become an illegal information runner
in the glamorous but dangerous underworld of Accra 2057.
So you should know this story.
What's amazing about it is on the one hand,
when you're reading it,
you learn tons about Ghanaian history and culture,
but it's so easy to absorb it
because you know the story.
You've read it in Neuromancer,
you've seen it in The Matrix.
It's a very familiar story.
And this is something that African genre writers
actually are talking about a lot.
The editors of Jungle Gym are very eloquent about this.
There's a great online interview with them.
And I said, one of the things that you really notice
is that whereas Afro diasporic science fiction,
so science fiction is being written
by descendants of the African diaspora,
it tends to be very postmodern, very meta,
very intellectually very clever.
And you really are thinking all the time about,
oh, what is this author doing with Star Wars,
with the space opera, whatever.
African science fiction, it's pretty straightforward.
If someone says I'm writing a cyberpunk story,
they're writing a cyberpunk story.
And if someone says I'm writing a space opera,
it looks like 1930 Stanley G. Weinbach space opera,
except it's always populated by African people
with African histories, with African issues,
some of which will be familiar to Westerners,
some of which won't.
But it becomes really easy to absorb the whole totality
of it because you understand the narrative form
in which it's being presented.
And so I think that's really interesting,
how we're seeing a sort of return
to these very clean, simple story forms
in some ways to convey a larger,
maybe more complex political message
and aesthetic message as well.
Okay, and so this takes us now to my conclusion.
All right, great.
So now that we've talked a little bit
about some of the theoretical
and aesthetic underpinnings of Afrofuturism,
and then talked about its history,
its past and present and its future,
I hope that what you can see
is that science fiction is really functioning.
I think the important thing here is to see
how science fiction is functioning as a global language
that allows people to speak the experience
of technoscientific life across centuries,
continents, and cultures.
As I hoped have shown here today,
this is certainly true of the Afro diasporic
in African speculative forms
generally called Afrofuturism.
There's a tendency in the mainstream media
to treat black people
as the victims of a completely dystopic modernity.
Afro diasporic people are often the descendants of slaves
upon whose back modern nations were built,
and Africans themselves are the victims
of colonization practices
that have wrought nothing but disease and famine.
Of course, as Afrofuturism itself shows,
modernity is a lot more complicated than that.
In early Afrofuturist stories, slavery produces misery,
but it also produces technoscientific brilliance.
In later stories,
this actual tales of slavery and colonization,
the history of modernity's bad past
becomes the source of inspiration
for imagining what truly new
and at least slightly better futures might look like.
And that is what I find so compelling about Afrofuturism.
Like all the best science fiction,
it gives us hope that there are different ways
and better ways to be citizens of the modern global world.
Thank you.