We independently assess all our recommendations. Purchases through our links may earn us a commission.
In this article:
- Afrofuturism is a sci-fi subgenre that imagines a future through the lens of the African diaspora.
- Black Panther, the most mainstream Afrofuturistic piece of media, is a great example of the politics and themes that the genre tends to address.
- Some argue that Afrofuturism is one-dimensional and still centers colonialism and Western oppression, leading to the birth of a second, related genre called African Futurism.
- A handful of recommendations for you to check out if you want to see more of Afrofuturism and African Futurism.
There’s a scene at the beginning of Black Panther that still lives rent-free in many of our minds. Or at least, it does in mine.
Killmonger, the movie’s antagonist, stands alone in a sterile white room filled with artifacts from several African tribes and asks a Caucasian museum employee about where each piece comes from. It sounds like a standard museum tour until Killmonger drops the bomb: “How do you think your ancestors got these?”
In that one line, the entire context of the scene changes. It tells us that every piece of art in this room has been sterilized, taken from the context of the cultures that created it while a woman, who is clearly not from that culture, lectures Killmonger on his own heritage. By stealing the past, he’s been robbed of his present-day and future identity.
And that’s Afrofuturism in a nutshell. The idea that the future is the past runs deeply throughout all of its themes, asking us if the sci-fi futures we’re imagining today have room for people of color.
What Is Afrofuturism?
Afrofuturism is a lot of things, but at its core, it’s an interrogation of the present using the future. That can be said of all sci-fi, but so much of sci-fi is eurocentric. The most dominant stories in cyberpunk, a sci-fi subgenre that asks if we’ll still have rampant poverty in the future, speak from a non-POC point of view and tends to exoticize East Asian cultures.
In Afrofuturism, the spotlight is on African diasporic experiences. The term was coined in the 1990s by Mark Dery in his book Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Dery asks why so few African-Americans write science fiction even when, to him, the African-diasporic experience itself is sci-fi.
Dery argues that people descended from Africans enslaved during the time of the Transatlantic slave trade are effectively alien abductees who are experimented on, brutalized, and marginalized.
Afrofuturism is supposed to be a reconstruction of African heritage for the African diaspora that tries to reclaim the past by imagining a future where African voices matter.
J. Marion Sims, the father of modern gynecology, experimented on enslaved African women without anesthesia which was in line with the racist belief that Black people didn’t feel pain to the extent that white people did because they were somehow less human.
Dery calls it a “sci-fi nightmare” that’s further compounded with the erasure of Black history in “official history” written predominantly by non-POC victors. Similarly, African American themes and the concerns of African Americans don’t show up in speculative fiction.
Afrofuturism is supposed to be a reconstruction of African heritage for the African diaspora that tries to reclaim the past by imagining a future where African voices matter. However, as Derry puts it, “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have been subsequently consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?”
Outside of literature, artists like Sun Ra worked on bringing Afrofuturism to music and the big screen. Space Is The Place, a 1974 film directed by John Coney and written by Sun Ra, has Ra traveling back in time to 70s Oakland after discovering a planet where African Americans can create their own civilization.
He opens up the “Outer Space Employment Agency” to find young African Americans, the future of his people, who will help him settle the planet. Ra promises them that “Everything you desire upon this planet and have never received will be yours in outer space.”
With the release of Black Panther in 2018, there’s been a wave of renewed interest in Afrofuturism as a genre. Because it contains many of the core political themes of Afrofuturism and it’s popular enough that you’ve probably seen it at least once, Black Panther makes for a great talking point for the politics of Afrofuturism.
Black Panther and the Politics of Afrofuturism
A quick disclaimer: Black Panther isn’t all there is to Afrofuturism and it certainly does not encompass all of Afrofuturism’s themes. What it does do well is make Afrofuturism and its messages more mainstream so it’s a good place to start if it’s your first time hearing about the genre.
Black Panther‘s Wakanda alone is a powerful statement. It subverts the racist narrative that non-European cultures, especially African cultures, are primitive and in need of “advancement” in the form of white colonization.
Unlike the future portrayed in Space Is The Place, there is no need for an exodus to an interstellar promised land because it is here.
The “benign racism” of the white man’s burden has been used in the past, and unfortunately, the present, as a way of justifying Western imperialism, subjugation, and exploitation of other cultures under the guise of “protection.”
Wakanda also goes a step further than just showing an Africa that would have been fine without “help.” By being the most technologically advanced nation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Earth, it imagines an Africa that went un-exploited by colonists as an Africa that thrives. Unlike the future portrayed in Space Is The Place, there is no need for an exodus to an interstellar promised land because it is here.
But it’s also a promised land filled with anxiety. Just as Western cyberpunk reflects the fear that one day, the U.S. will no longer be the dominant power of the world, Wakanda’s isolationist policies exist out of fear that Wakandans will suffer the same fate as other African nations that have been colonized and enslaved.
Black Panther also grapples with themes of identity, specifically the way that Native Africans and the diaspora perceive and experience African culture. In “Afrofuturism and Black Panther,” a research article by Myron T. Strong and K. Sean Chaplin, the authors present Killmonger and T’Challa as symbols for the schism in African culture as a result of the Transatlantic slave trade.
When T’Challa consumes the magical herb that connects him to his ancestors and gives him the power of the Black Panther, he sees the traditional heritage of his people in the context they originated in.
When it’s Killmonger’s turn to be king, he isn’t welcomed by the Black Panthers that came before him. Instead, he’s in his small apartment in Oakland (the setting of Space Is The Place). This is his “ancestral plane” and it’s here where his own father, N’Jobu, tells him he will not be welcomed in Wakanda because he is “lost.”
Like the artifacts he views earlier in the film, he, too, is removed from the culture he comes from. Wakanda’s indifference to his plight, and the African American plight, makes it clear that they don’t think of him as one of them.
This separation between Native African culture and that of the African diaspora is also reflected in Afrofuturism’s relationship with the people it tries to represent.
Afrofuturism, African Futurism, and Identity
Black Panther is unique in Afrofuturism because it’s one of the few pieces of media that imagines an African people that never have to deal with systematic oppression that non-white people are subjected to. The rest of Afrofuturism is rarely as utopian.
W.E.B Du Bois’ The Comet tells the story of Jim Davis, a Black man who survives a comet that wipes out everyone in New York City except for him and Julia, a White woman. The two of them grow to understand each other better. In a post-comet world where the power imbalance between them no longer matters, Julia begins to abandon her racist beliefs.
That is until they find a group of White survivors who inform them that the rest of the world survived and, in doing so, tells Julia that the systems that reinforce inequality between them also survived. Julia begins turning a blind eye toward the harassment their new companions subject Jim to.
As poignant as themes of oppression are, it’s been argued that it’s also the key problem of Afrofuturism: on their own, they can’t seem to break free from the colonialized way of thinking that says African experiences are tied to Western oppression.
In this view, Afrofuturism perpetuates the idea that Africaness and oppression go hand in hand and creates a sort of public face for Africaness that is dominated by African Americans rather than simultaneously reflecting African culture as it exists today and showing how the rest of the African diaspora experiences Africaness.
To some Native Africans, Afrofuturism gives a false impression that there is no Africa that survived colonialism because, as an American genre, it tends to overshadow other African voices on the global stage.
“Afrofuturism can be very one-dimensional. Globally, the African diaspora is having different experiences, even though we’re all black.”
It’s the T’Challa and Killmonger conundrum in a zoomed-out context. This divide in how Africans and the African diaspora, especially African Americans, experience Africaness has led to the creation of African Futurism, a genre that separates itself from Afrofuturism to put a spotlight on African voices.
“Initially, I and other people I know went around calling ourselves Afrofuturists. We’re only now trying to detangle that identity,” Masiyaleti Mbewe, a Zambian queerfuturist writer and activist, shared. “We noticed that the prefix “Afro-” is the label used all the time to describe anything done by black people. Why can’t we define things ourselves?”
That isn’t to say Mbewe thinks of African American experiences as illegitimate, she makes it clear that both the diaspora perspective and Native African perspective are key to making a holistic vision of what it means to be African and of Africa.
“Afrofuturism can be very one-dimensional. Globally, the African diaspora is having different experiences, even though we’re all black,” Mbewe says, “In the future, when all of us have gone past whatever we’re going through right now, the colonial remnants and whatnot, there should be no concept of gender or race. All of these things should be dismantled.”
Afrofuturistic and African Futurism Media for You to Listen To, Read, and Watch
Sun Ra pioneered Afroturistic music in his jazz albums but the look of Afrofuturism has spread further than the bounds of what counts as Afrofuturistic music. The 90s had a ton of deliciously Afrofuturistic music videos like TLC’s “No Scrub” and Aaliyah’s “We Need a Resolution.”
More recently, there was Doja Cat’s Planet Her album which includes “Get Into It,” a song whose music video pays homage to TLC’s “No Scrubs.” Then, there’s “Woman” which has more explicitly Afrofuturistic visuals that include themes of the Divine Feminine and water. Also, it’s a banger.
Beyoncé’s Lemonade is packed with love letters to African American womanhood. Lauren Jackson goes into why Lemonade is Afrofuturistic in The Past and the Future Merge to Meet Us Here:” Afrofuturism in Lemonade.
Of course, I would be remiss to not bring up the books of Octavia Butler which explore the intersection between race and sex as well as the exploitation of African women’s bodies.
Lilith’s Brood is a series set in a future where Earth has been destroyed but has been restored by the Oankali who have revived the human race, including Lilith Ayepo. Lilith must now decide whether her continued existence, and the existence of the entire human race, is worth a life of subjugation and coercion.
For a more African Futuristic perspective, you can watch Sankofa, a film by Ethiopian filmmaker Haile Gerima. Its title “sankofa” has a deep, symbolic meaning to the Akan people of Ghana.
Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti puts a sci-fi twist on the story of many African immigrants. The titular Binti is the first of the Himba people to go to a prestigious university that she later finds has wronged the Meduse, a terrifying alien race that is more than meets the eye.
Meanwhile, Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone falls on the fantasy-leaning side of African Futurism with themes about how heritage and magic are inexplicably connected.
Both forms of Black speculative fiction offer a rich perspective that’s made all the better when experienced as a whole of a shared heritage.
