A primer on afro-futurism, liberation and mythology
The Feb. 24 release of THEESatisfaction’s latest LP, EarthEE, sparked me to think of the tradition it operates in – perhaps more than the album itself. With spacey, transcendent textures, underscored by complex, polyrhythmic percussives, and socially-charged lyrics, the excellent experimental hip-hop album is an apt starting example for discussing a concept that has informed and permeated black arts for the better part of the 20th Century. Supported also by recent musical efforts from Shabazz Palaces (2014’s Lese Majesty) and Janelle Monae (2010’s The Archandroid and 2013’s The Electric Lady), to name a few, “Afro-futurism” – a blending of historical fiction, liberation ideology, and futuristic thought within a cohesively afro-diasporic context – is very much prescient and vital, most specifically in the age of digital capitalism in which the Western world finds itself.
Since humankind progressed from mere survival to awareness of its place on earth and the universe, human beings have looked to the stars and the future, often through strictly ideological lenses. Creation myths, abstractions of nature and time cycles, and narratives in which humanity transcends earthly bondage have informed cultures and philosophies since the birth of thought and ideas; their archetypes have pervaded countless thought frameworks in countless aspects.
But what does one make of positing futuristic imaginations to a massively implicating history of oppression and brutality – specifically, in the context of the devastation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and subsequent diasporic identity formations? These mediations of future and past indeed become subversive within the framework of diasporic thought – taking on its liberation ideology in the forms of music, visual art, conceptual art, and literature.
While the term Afro-futurism itself may be somewhat redundant (coined by subculture theorist Mark Dery in the 1990s), its facets are visionary and important as a cultural current. The fiction writing of Samuel R. Delaney (Nova), Octavia Butler (Kindred), and Nalo Hopkinson (Midnight Robber), among others, has integrated ancient mythologies, from Yoruban and Egyptian traditions, among others, into science fiction to fascinating and illuminating degrees. Jazz composer and philosopher Sun Ra’s transgressive preoccupation with “returning” to the universe has proved foundational, inspiring the socially urgent funk of George Clinton, Parliament-Funkadelic, and Alice Coltrane’s avant-garde jazz. The perceived formal cynicism of the postmodern is certainly at play in the works of these artists, but it is overshadowed by a more cohesive discourse of liberation by way of formal experimentation.
These notions of liberation through mythoi, technoculture, and experimentalism operate in a reciprocal correspondence between the archetypes of the past, the urgency of the present, and the potential for subversion in the future. While many important liberation-centered movements in black arts have been largely localized (early hip-hop’s Zulu Nation in the Bronx, contemporary Caribbean and West African literatures’ consolidation with Yoruban and vodou mythoi, etc.), the universality of futurism’s goal in its pan-African, diasporic situating, envisions a future more broad reaching, more challenging of the demands of cultural production, and more radically dissociative of the colonial narrative.