Afrofuturism: Home

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.

Afrofuturism was coined in a 1994 article entitled,“Black to the Future” by author, Mark Dery. Afrofuturism is defined 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”

Dery notes that Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: 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?  (Dery, 1994) Ytasha Womack describes Afrofuturism as “ an intersection of  imagination, technology, the future, and liberation. (Womack, 2013) Whether through literature, visual arts, music or grassroots organizing, Afrofuturism redefines culture and notions of blackness for today and the future. Both an artistic aesthetic and a framework for critical theory, Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs. (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”