Afrofuturism : Introduction

Black Kirby, “Afrofuturism,” GLAM Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning - Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, accessed September 26, 2022, https://glamportal.auctr.edu/items/show/2768.

The term Afrofuturism was first coined by author Mark Dery in his 1994 article, “Black to the Future.” Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture—and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.” He also highlights a central tension within Afrofuturism: can a community whose history has been deliberately erased, and whose efforts have been consumed by the search for traces of its past, envision new and possible futures? (Dery, 1994)

Author Ytasha Womack offers a broader perspective, describing Afrofuturism as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation” (Womack, 2013). Whether expressed through literature, visual arts, music, or grassroots organizing, Afrofuturism redefines culture and reimagines blackness for both the present and the future. As both an artistic aesthetic and a framework for critical theory, Afrofuturism blends science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magical realism with non-Western philosophies. (Womack, 2013)

In 1967, Ebony Magazine described actress Nichelle Nichols who played Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek series as “.... the first modern day “Negro Astronaut”, a triumph of modern day-TV over modern day NASA”