MDSB14 Week 2
Unit 1 – Futurities
Week 2: Afrofuturism
- MDSB14
- Human, Animal, Machine
- Wednesdays, 9 – 11AM
- Lecture slides will now be available a few minutes before class for you to follow along with during class
- These slides are now under Modules on Quercus
- (You are still expected to come to class each week)
- Note on lecture slides
- Your first reading reflection is due next Friday, September 20th at 11:59PM EST
- Submit on Quercus; emailed reading reflections will not be graded
- Write on one text and one media object from the “Futurities” unit
- 2 – 3 double-spaced pages, 12pt font (Times New Roman preferred), properly cited (Chicago Style preferred)
- Visit me after class, during office hours, book an appointment, or email me if you have any questions
First reading reflection
- What can science fiction offer to marginalized communities?
- Cultural aesthetic, form of history, and art, film, literature, and music movement that explores the intersection of Afrodiasporic cultural production with science and technology
- Associated with science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, and magical realism
- Coined by Mark Dery in his 1993 essay “Black to the Future,” which explored common tropes in African American science fiction
- Expanded in the late 1990s by writers like Alondra Nelson
Afrofuturism
- Kaylan F. Michael
- For Nelson, “Afrofuturism can be broadly defined as ‘African American voices’ with ‘other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come’ that are concerned with ‘sci – fi imagery, futurist themes, and technological innovation in the African diaspora” ( “Introduction: Future Texts,” 9)
- A form of forward and backward thinking; Afrofuturism pulls from the painful past and present to imagine better futures through a Black cultural lens
Afrofuturism
- David Alabo
- One of the most influential pieces of media on Afrofuturism is The Last Angel of History (dir. John Akomfrah, 1996), a docu – fiction film about its origins, influences, and trajectories
Distinct from Afrofuturism
- Africanfuturism is a cultural aesthetic and science fiction subgenre rooted in African culture, history, mythology, and perspectives rather than focusing solely on the African diaspora
- Centered on those of African descent and located in Africa
- Coined in 2019 by Nnedi Okorafor
Africanfuturism
- David Alabo
- Traces some of the historical and conceptual trajectories of Afrofuturist thought, especially at the intersection of race and technology after the late – 1990s “digital boom”
- The “digital boom” promised a “placeless, raceless, bodiless near future enabled by technological progress,” (1) but this isn’t the case for everyone
- The “digital divide” is a code word for technological inequality between white people and people of colour, especially Black people, who are assumed to be unable to “keep up” with high – tech society
- This obscures the fact that uneven access to technology is a symptom of economic inequalities that predate the Internet
- “Forecasts of a utopian (to some) race – free future and pronouncements of the dystopian digital divide are the predominant discourses of blackness and technology in the public sphere” (1)
- For both narratives, race is a liability
Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts”
- For Nelson, one of the founding myths of the digital age is that racial (and gendered) differences would be eliminated
- Even if technology could emancipate humans from their physical bodies and past experiences, this ”radical humanism” would only free some humans
- “Bodies carry different social weights that unevenly mediate access to freely constructed identity” (Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts,” 3)
The myth of a “placeless, raceless, bodiless” future
- Kaylan F. Michael
- Combines speculative fiction on a team of future African archaeologists with meditations on Afrofuturism, from its “founding trauma” to its future
- Eshun speculates that the United States of Africa (USAF) archaeologists would be surprised to discovery that so much Afrodiasporic subjectivity is produced through “the cultural project of recovery” (458)
- “In our time, the USAF archaeologists surmise, imperial racism has denied Black subjects the right to belong to the enlightenment project, thus creating an urgent need to demonstrate a substantive historical presence. This desire has overdetermine Black Atlantic intellectual culture for several centuries. To establish the historical character of black culture, to bring Africa and its subjects into history denied by Hegel et al., it has been necessary to assemble countermemories that contest the colonial archive, thereby situating the collective trauma of slavery as the founding moment of modernity” (458)
Eshun, “Further considerations on Afrofuturism”
- Countermemories “counter,” or move against, “official” histories (i.e., Western, colonial histories) that displace marginalized communities
- Countermemories place these communities “back into” more robust histories
- Speaking with Paul Gilroy, Toni Morrison argues that African slaves during the Atlantic Slave Trade were the first modern subjects
- The modern world, or modernity, is built on slavery
- For Eshun, critique of modernity must also extend to the future
Countermemories and the origins of modernity
- If countermemories are “an ethical commitment to history, the dead, and the forgotten,” (459), counterfutures (futures that “counter” Western, colonial ideas of the future that also displace marginalized communities) become suspect since many African artists are disenchanted with futurism
- In the mid – 20th century struggle against colonialism in Africa, colonial revenge and violence made African utopias seem impossible
- This changed by the early – 21st century with the rise of digital technologies
Counterfutures
- David Alabo
- For Eshun, “the field of Afrofuturism does not seek to deny the tradition of countermemory. Rather, it aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective” (459)
- Or, creating better futures also relies on understanding the past
- Power nowadays is both predictive and retrospective; certain futures get endorsed, while others—and those within them—get discarded
- E.g., Africa is always seen as a site of dystopia, or a place with no future
- Afrofuturism works to fix this dystopia into other, better futures
- “Afrofuturism studies the appeals that Black artists, musicians, critics, and writers have made to the future, in moments where any future was made difficult for them to imagine” (463)
The proleptic and retrospective
- Afrofuturism isn’t just about correcting “the history of the future” or adding more Black voices to science fiction; rather, “Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science fiction writers envision. Black existence and science fiction are one in the same” (Eshun, “Further considerations on Afrofuturism,” 466)
- Science fiction can serve as allegories for the experiences of post – slavery Black subjects
- “Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counterfutures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken” (468)
What can Afrofuturism do?
- Part of a series of essays on the Black radical tradition, political thought, and social critique under capitalism, in the neoliberal university, within public policy, and in the “undercommons” (general antagonism to the conditions of contemporary life)
- In this essay, Harvey and Moten talk about logistics to actually talk about displacement, shipping/being shipped, and the Atlantic Slave Trade
Harvey and Moten, “Fantasy in the Hold”
- “To work today is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without purpose, to connect without interruption” (Moten and Harvey, “Fantasy in the Hold,” 87)
- Logistics wants to get rid of the subject altogether
- Marx calls this the automatic subject (capital that exists without human labour); it is also known as human capital
- But this is a fantasy; every time logistics tries to move away from the human, it buttresses against it
- Where did logistics get the idea it can move bodies without dealing with humans? With its origin in the Atlantic Slave Trade
The logics of logistics
- From slavery to prisoners shipped to settler colonies to mass migrations to indentured servitude and migrant workers nowadays, “logistics was always the transport of slavery, not ‘free’ labour. Logistics remains, as ever, the transport of objects that is held in the movement of things. And the transport of things remains, as ever, logistics’ unrealizable ambition” (Harvey and Moten, 92)
- Modernity itself is in logistics’ hold, but logistics can’t hold everything it puts there
- “There are flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship” (94)
- Or, there has always been forms of resistance and ways to resist
Modernity in logistics’ hold
- Moving across the Atlantic is unsettling
- “The hold’s terrible gift was to gather dispossessed feelings in common, to create a new feel in the undercommons” (Harvey and Moten, 97)
- This feeling is hapticality, or “the touch of the undercommons” (98)
- It is “the feel that what is to come is here” and “the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you” (98)
- “Thrown together touching each other we were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed to produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home. Though forced to touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed in that space of no space, though refused sentiment, history, and home, we feel (for) each other” (98)
Hapticality
- Hapticality is a form of love for the shipped/as the shipped
Pumzi (2009)
- Science fiction short film by Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu
- Title is Swahili for “Breath”
- Set in East Africa 35 years after the WWIII, or “The Water War”
- Harsh conditions, lack of water, and radiation confines citizens inside their enclosed community
- Follows a museum curator who receives a soil sample from an anonymous sender. Believing that life is possible outside of the community again, she attempts to leave
Some questions to consider:
- How does race impact technology? For example, what are your thoughts on the “digital divide”?
- Why are countermemories, counterfutures, and other/alternate ways of thinking about history and the future so important?
- What are the dangers of ignoring the past by only thinking about the future?