afrofuturism

 

  ON AFROFUTURISM/AFRICANFUTURISM

 

The thinkers of the world are  indebted to Dr. Kim McMillon for conceptualizing and sponsoring

"Afrofuturism Sunday, October 11, November 8, December 3, 2 PM (PST).

 

 The presence of Samuel Delany and Eugene B. Redmond made the November session especially valuable.  Delany was charmingly forthcoming about his pioneering contributions to science fiction and speculative formations, providing unique insights about the literary politics of science fiction and the consequences of D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" (1914/15), the cinematic romance version of Thomas Dixon's 1905 novel The Clansman.  This iconic tribute to the Caucasian mammies of the KKK put a butt-whipping on the myth of the American Dream, and the USA has not yet recovered from it.  Indeed, there is little reason to believe it ever shall recover after we have witnessed  the expanding dystopia of Trump fascism and the calcification of evil and rampant hatreds in a nation in a process of surreal  re-birth.  Redmond's special contribution to the discussion was invaluable information about Henry Dumas and Sun Ra and the long history of African-descended funk signification.

 

Delany and Redmond oriented us to think profoundly  about the gift of Afrofuturism that functions simultaneously as the Golden Calf and the Trojan Horse.  The progressive thinking of David Walker in the nineteenth century and of Frantz Fanon in the twentieth century continues to  give us fair warning: should you fail to critique contradictions and misinformation in contact/combat zones, you are complicit in your wretchedness, your damnation, and your genocide.  Indeed, we are now witnessing the rise of an anti-human global order driven by amoral/ immoral capitalism.  You do not have to be a Marxist or a college-conditioned  intellectual to be intimate with the destructiveness of capitalism. Like COVID-19 and other pandemics ,capitalism is an agent of dreadful evolving and devolving.

 

Delany's mentioning that Mark Dery is credited  with coining the term Afrofuturism in his essay "Back to the Future" (South Atlantic Quarterly, 1993) necessitates examination of what is actually behind three decades of celebrating one mode of creation.  Out of what and from whom  did the concept of Afrofuturism erupt?  Do not confuse the naming of a concept with its genesis.

 

It is germane, as we grapple with Afrofuturism,  to listen in depth to Michael A. Gomez's assertion about formations in the so-called New World ----

 

"It is inescapable that the interplay between culture and sociopolity is extensive and mutually conditioning, whether the society is free or enslaved, and especially in the case of the latter.  One cannot undertake a serious study of acculturation in a society so extremely polarized without taking into consideration these dichotomies" (Exchanging Our Country Marks, 1998, page 172).

 

The everyday practice of Afrofuturism is not be conflated with serious study.  The writings of Delany,  Dumas, Octavia Butler, Charles Chesnutt, Nalo Hopkinson, Ishmael Reed,  Kiini Ibura Salaam, Tananarive Due, Charles Johnson,  Reginald Martin and others who confront the domains of science and technology in many genres provide more speculation from the African Diaspora than a single reader can consume.  We find an excellent sampling in Dark Matter (2000), edited by Sheree R. Thomas.

 

 

 

 

 

For the required serious study, we turn to

·         V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (1988)

·         Manthi Diawara, In Search of Africa (1998)

·         The work of Sun Ra in the production of music, theatre, rooted spirituality

·         The precise scholarship of Alondra Nelson in Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life (2001) and The Social Life of DNA (2016)

·         The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture (2008), edited by Tony Bolden

·         The work of Eugene B. Redmond, Ishmael Reed, Kalamu ya Salaam,  and Amiri Baraka in shaping cultural cognition

 

And for the sake of integrity in the production of knowledge, please (a James Brown please) be very specific in talking about African Futurism of the twenty-first century.  It is frankly disgusting  and irresponsible when oral and print traditions utterly fail to acknowledge diversity among people born in Mali, Liberia, Zimbabwe,  and Algeria and how these peoples articulate their differences.

 

Let us again thank Dr. Kim McMillon for producing a critical and crucial forum.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                            November 9, 2020

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