What is Afrofuturism

My personal definition for Afrofuturism is simply black science fiction or science fiction produced by blacks. In an expanded sense I guess you could say it includes any work that either features black main characters or tackles issues important to the displaced peoples of the African diaspora and other marginalized and transplaced races. If you read online the article “Black to the Future” first published in 1993 and the cultural critic Mark Dery are often credited with creation of the term “Afrofuturism” though I have a lot of earlier works by black authors that discuss black futures currently sitting on my shelves. There is also a lot of other thought about the welfare of black people, marginalized races, and ethnic disadvantaged, in other futuristic novels that occur before this date. These were often in the form of side characters and even stereotypes though that isn’t always true. Uhura from Star Trek is possibly one mainstream example that comes to mind there. So of course the tradition of black science fiction has been around for many years and Afrofuturism as well. Traditionally, the earliest works that are definitively classified as Afrofuturism are said to be either the musical output of George Clinton who many credit with creating the modern version of the movement based in the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s, or the novel The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison first published in .

Origins aside what exactly does Afrofuturism do, What is it’s point? What is this purpose of this website I’ve found you ask? Well, if the point of fiction as Le-guin says is to tell lies to illuminate truth. Afrofuturism tells lies to illuminate a black writer’s version of the truth, or black characters version of the truth, or black readers version of the truth. Like all fiction and storytelling it is a vehicle that is used to entertain, enlighten, attract, and inspire. It’s job to highlight the problems of our world or tell stories from underrepresented people.

  Why read Afrofuturism you might ask? What’s so important about black people mating with aliens, as opposed to just white men mating with aliens? Well as someone who has read a whole lot of science fiction and fantasy, I can say the obvious answer is that some of those aliens could be racial leaders with new technology capable of dominating entire species, planets, and galaxies. Besides that there’s also the legitimate point that the best works of speculation are always built on a kernel of reality. This is true of Orwell’s 1984 which predicted the conformity of the future and of novels like Kindred which deal with the generational effects of slavery. Afrofuturism like all the best art brings to life the situations real or imagined of our past and present and give them to us in vivid detail so that we may get at the naked truth. This gives us new insights. Besides doesn’t everyone want the main character in any book they read to think, and hope and dream and look like them just a little bit.

In my excellent opinion the term Afrofuturism is as good a place as any for all the works by black authors imagining new worlds or new pasts and futures. Under the title Afrofuturism you’ll find comics, adventure stories, gender critiques, war stories, as well as thought provoking and technologically straight-forward Sci-fi. Either way Afrofuturism is black science fiction and includes not only it’s long history noted in the music of the 70’s and 80’s but also its contemporary present with it’s dearth of strong black female authors and even a few brothers working in the genre. On this site I have tried to catalogue the best of it or at least as much of it as I could read and to relate it to other works so that any potential readers could find something that interest them.