The Decade Afrofuturism Reshaped Science Fiction — and the World
The aesthetic and political revolution isn’t merely alive; in the 2010s it went mainstream, and is fully thriving
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The past decade has been surprisingly kind to Black creatives who traffic in the weird — but to make that case, I have to take you to prison.
Back in February, scheduled to perform poetry in the sterile cafeteria-ready chapel of a medium-security prison, I was approached by an inmate. Like most of my conversations with inmates, this one began with questions.
Having been in the prison off and on for several months doing workshops, I was used to questions; these exchanges can feel like interrogations at times, but you have to keep in mind that inmates don’t have newspapers left on their doorsteps (or have doorsteps). They don’t have regular access to the internet. Family visits are not a given. They hear about things in the world in snatches and bits, but rarely possess the access or freedom to dig deeper into the developments they hear about.
This time, the conversation started with the greatest hits: How places in the city have changed, what rappers they might be missing out on. The question that really got us going, however, was “What’s this Afrofuturism I keep hearing about?”
At the time, the world outside of the prison was coming up on the one-year anniversary of the movie Black Panther. Considering how many reviews and interpretations I had seen around the movie’s release, I shouldn’t have been surprised that some of it was bound to creep past even a prison wall, and the term “Afrofuturism” with it. But still.
I said to him, “Man, did you ask at the right time.”
As an aesthetic and philosophy that places the Black experience at the center of speculative art, Afrofuturism isn’t hard to find. In its current state, it is the creative evolution of late-’80s political and cultural Afrocentrism — the Public Enemy albums you like didn’t come out of nowhere — but it has been a lot of things in the past. So many, in fact, that it’s often easier to…
