Month: February 2025

Afrofuturism? What’s that?

In August 2024, my wife, daughter, and I visited the National Museum of African History & Culture in Washington, DC. My wife and I have never been to the museum, although I was a charter member for several years before its 2016 opening. Conversely, my daughter had gone twice,  once for school and once with a church group.

The primary newish exhibition was about Afrofuturism, a term I’d never heard of before planning the trip. We went to it first. The exhibit ended two weeks after we visited, so we were lucky. (It ran from March 24, 2023, to August 18, 2024, and can still be accessed, in part, online.)

However, after seeing the exhibit, I still had difficulty explaining to somebody else what Afrofuturism is. I did have a good sense of WHY there was Afrofuturism, and it was because we – black people are still here, despite it all.

What?

What does Wikipedia say? “Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and history that explores the intersection of the African diaspora culture with science and technology. It addresses themes and concerns of the African diaspora through technoculture and speculative fiction, encompassing a range of media and artists with a shared interest in envisioning black futures that stem from Afro-diasporic experiences. While Afrofuturism is most commonly associated with science fiction, it can also encompass other speculative genres such as fantasy, alternate history, and magic realism, and it can also be found in music.”

So, I decided to buy Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures in the museum shop to augment my understanding. There are four main chapters, and several essays written by different authors are included within.

Space

Chapter 1 is Space Is The Place. One of the first images in the museum display and also in the book’s introduction is the final panel of Judgement Day, a 1953 Al Feldstein/Joe Orlando story from EC Comics’ Weird Fantasy #18, in which Tarlton is a representative from “Earth Colonization.” He visits Cybrinia, “the planet of mechanical life,” to see if the blue and orange robots are ready for “inclusion in Earth’s great galactic republic.”

An essential character in Afrofuturism is Lieutenant Nayato Uhura from Star Trek. She was played by Nichelle Nichols, who also came up with her character’s Swahili name.  Famously, she wanted to quit after the first season, but she was convinced to stay on by MLK, Jr.  She subsequently formed the “company Women in Motion, which NASA contracted to help recruit more than 8000 people, including some of the first African American Asian Latino and female astronauts.” Many women, starting with Mae Jemison, credit Nichelle’s efforts for them entering the space program.

Futurists

Chapter 2 is Speculative Worlds. Interestingly, the notion goes back at least to Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784)

Her Poems of Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, were released two years before her emancipation in 1773, the first book published by an African American poet. Thomas Jefferson and others underestimated her fervent imagination, capable of composing such lines as

celestial Salem blooms and endless spring

calm and serene thy moments glide along

and may the muse inspire each future

Martin R Delaney (1812-1885), a writer, “soldier abolitionist, publisher position, and advocate for black resettlement in Africa,” originally published Blake or the Huts of America as a serial in the Anglo African magazine from 1859 to 1862; the book tells the story of Henry Blake, who escaped slavery in the South, flees to Canada, then travels to Africa and Cuba. In action, Blake resembles both Denmark Vesey and Josiah Henson, two historic figures well known for efforts to achieve freedom for themselves and others.

William Edward Burghardt DuBois was a towering figure. He was asked to curate the American Negro exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition. “DuBois developed colorful hand-drawn charts, graphs, and maps that illustrated the social realities of African Americans. These infographics were surrounded by documentary photographs, books, and patents attributed to African Americans. By visually demonstrating the accomplishments of the post-emancipation generation, Dubois [claimed] that African Americans’ achievements deserve to be seen in the same light as other vaunted achievements of the 19th century.”

Funny books

My best college friend Mark used to drive us to a store so he could pick up comic books, which I thought was a very strange thing for an adult to do. But one day in 1972, I discovered Luke Cage, Hero for Hire #1, which I purchased, which started two decades of funny book collecting.   There was also a Luke Cage live-action program in the 2010s. 

In one of the early video clips at the museum, the speaker said he didn’t know that he needed to see the movie The Black Panther and that it needed to exist until he saw it. I understood that because I had the same experience.

In a caption: for Black Panther (2018), “production designer Hannah Beachler constructed the aesthetics of Wakanda, the technologically advanced African nation where the movie takes place. Beachler traveled throughout Africa for eight months, researching the continent’s culture, architecture, clothing, food, and transportation. 

“The fictional African nation of Wakanda [is] powered by the imaginary element vibranium, concealed from the outside world and never conquered.” For a continent that had long been colonized, this was massive.

There is also a section, Dialogues in Space: Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany.

Art

Chapter 3 is Visualizing Afrofuturism. The book cover is Android/Negroid #14 by Wayne Hodge (2015): “The series combines collage and photography by merging photographic portraits with illustrations of machinery and technology. Hodge explores the relationships between race, history, and science fiction.”

There Are Black People in the Future is a series of billboards that started in Pittsburgh and have spread worldwide.

The chapter focuses on fashion and art, such as Commemorative Headdress of Her Journey Beyond Heaven by Kenya, which uses “mass-produced items to draw attention to material consumption beauty standards and black cultural identity. “

Music

Chapter 4 is Musical Futures, which namechecks, among many others, Jimi Hendrix,  Nona Hendryx of LaBelle, Vernon Reid of Living Colour, and especially Sun Ra. Writer Stanley Nelson says without Sun Ra, it is hard to understand George Clinton, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe, Raz G, Kamasi Washington, Shabaka Hutchings, Black Panther, Lovecraft country, and Afrofuturism itself. Cover art and costumes (see Nona Hendryx’s outfit) are elements of Afrofuturism.

The Order Of The Pharaonic Jesters – Sun Ra

Welcome To The Terrordome – Public Enemy

One Nation Under A Groove – Funkadelic (George Clinton)

Space Children – Labelle

Metropolis – Janelle Monáe  

Cult of Personality – Living Colour

The book helped me better understand Afrofuturism. There was a certain repetition, inevitable, with a half-dozen writers covering similar territory. Nevertheless, I recommend it; the visuals in this book are tremendous. At 200 pages, it’s a relatively quick read.

HeLa

Finally, this picture of Henrietta Lacks was not in the book but in the exhibition .”She died in 1951, aged 31, of an aggressive cervical cancer. Months earlier, doctors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, had taken samples of her cancerous cells while diagnosing and treating the disease. They gave some of that tissue to a researcher without Lacks’s knowledge or consent. In the laboratory, her cells had an extraordinary capacity to survive and reproduce; they were, in essence, immortal. The researcher shared them widely with other scientists, and they became a workhorse of biological research. Today, work done with HeLa cells underpins much of modern medicine.”

I wondered how someone whose cells had been exploited for so long would be Afrofuturism. Ultimately, her immortality, a scientific miracle, was also successful in achieving the future for her family when they settled the case’s outcome.