Afrofuturism

In this paper, educational pathways emerge from the nexus of ancient narratives and future possibilities. Such imaginings are as much attributed to African American intellectual traditions as to contemporary Afrofuturisms, including those born in histories of Blackness. The overlay of what was and what is not yet is significant because it engenders educational potentialities that are central to aesthetics and onto-epistemological wondering. The author uses seminal dialogues from scholars like Sojourner Truth, Mary McLeod Bethune and Anna Julia Cooper as a springboard for envisioning Afrofuturisms in which schooling functions to transgress the assemblages of violence and capital of shame that pervade classrooms and corridors contemporary education. Not unlike the call of Sylvia Wynter, Sun Ra, bell hooks, Octavia Butler and other Afrofuturist activists of the feminine, this paper (re)imagines schooling from the roots of its past and the future conditional they portend.

This article explores space imagery in the music of George
Clinton and David Bowie and argues that different horizons of Black and
white terrestrial experience give rise to divergent astral imaginaries.
Analysis of song lyrics, liner notes, and statements by the artists in light
of their social contexts and the theoretical lens of Bakhtin’s grotesque
body shows that Bowie models white imaginations of evolutionary
transcendence in contrast to Clinton as provocateur of a Black
carnivalesque seeking liberation from lived inequality.

The essay that launched Afrofuturism. Introductory essay, in which the term is coined and theorized in depth, followed by interviews exploring the idea with leading African-American cultural theorists. From the collection FLAME WARS, edited by Mark Dery, 01/1994; Duke University Press., ISBN: 0822315408.

This essay explores the culturally subversive and incredibly unique enigma that is Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is understood in terms of its inherent delineation from any attempts by a universal cultural modernity to categorise it within the structures of conventional discourse.

Instead, I adopt a deconstructive approach to Afrofuturism’s exploration.
In this essay, I discuss Afrofuturism in relation to theories of Decoloniality, and, in turn, explain the history and rationale behind its subversion to conceptions of a universal modernity. I then explore the methodology and importance of autonomous subjectivity formation in Afrofuturism.

The next chapter discusses Afrofuturism and music, using Detroit techno as a case study. The final chapter covers Afrofuturism in relation to hauntology, with a particular focus on the parallels between Afrofuturist and Intercultural cinema.

The aim of this essay is to broaden the reader’s understanding of Afrofuturism through the contextualisation and explanation of the issues that Afrofuturism seeks to transcend, and the examination of the means with which this transcendence is to be achieved.

In his 1996 essay, ‘Music and Identity’, sociologist and music critic Simon Frith argued that identity was not a thing but a process. That our identities came from the outside, not the inside; subjectivity, a question of doing rather than being. Taking its cue from this short epigraph the purpose of this essay will be to address the conceptual legacy of Afrofuturist music through the hydrophonic frequencies of Drexciya, an electronic music duo from Detroit active during the 1990s and early 2000s. Often referred to as the darker edge of Afrofuturist music, their eponymous neo-nautical mythology and posthuman soundwaves have created a sonic fiction of techno Afro-becoming that has persisted well beyond their operative years. An aural wormhole, siphoning from past to future and back again. Looking at the work of Paul Gilroy and his seminal work of cultural theory, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), alongside sonic theories of Afrofuturist affect and post-structuralist cultural studies, I wish to underscore Frith’s aforementioned hypothesis: that the production of identity is non-essentialist in character, in so far as Drexciya’s sub-aquatic politics affirm the privileged position of music in constructing new forms of techno-subjectivity in the dystopian realm of late capitalist social hegemony. That Drexciya provide a model for future subject becomings anchored in the dark soul of the present.

This paper focuses on the intertwining themes of creativity, sacrifice, and radical imagination in two pieces of contemporary Black Speculative fiction, "Book of Martha" (2005), by Octavia Butler, and "El is a Spaceship Melody" (2018), by Maurice Broaddus. In these short stories, survival within the context of both race and gender is tied to sacrifice, specifically the sacrifice of creativity. The idea of radical imagination provides a lens to examine the intersection of race and gender in the two pieces of short fiction and the persistence of creativity through recognizing internalized norms, interrogating reproductive futurity, and defining what it means to be human.

RESUMO: O presente trabalho representa o cruzamento dos Estudos Culturais com os Estudos do Currículo e do Lazer. Nesse cruzo, discutem-se estratégias de formação curricular e subjetivação no mundo pós-colonial, a partir da relação entre os conceitos de des-locamento e entre-lugares de Stuart Hall e Homi Bhabha. A noção de currículo, segundo Marlucy Paraíso, articulada com a diáspora dos povos africanos, na leitura de Paul Gilroy, pavimentam o estudo que propõe uma aproximação entre experiências pessoais descritas por Hall, Ebony Thomas e o autor deste artigo, para perceber o Afrofuturismo como uma alternativa para a construção de formas de currículo para o Lazer, as quais, ao invés de aprisionar, reativem forças, comprometendo-se com as relações étnico-raciais. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Afrofuturismo. Atividades de lazer. Processos de subjetivação.

Taking Octavia Butler’s Patternist series as its primary source of inquiry, this paper examines the ontology of power, intersubjectivity, and social reality through the science and speculative fiction tropes of body-swapping and self-transmutation. Butler’s re-invocation of American slavery opens new possibilities for understanding the nature of being and the definition of humanity, while encouraging new perspectives in postmodernist thinking, most notably centered on the belief in the socially constructed nature of identity. More broadly, this paper places such dialogues in conversation with theories on Foucaldian power structures, Cartesian duality, and phenomenology, ultimately concluding that the socially constructed nature of the self obfuscates the truly human desires, such as that for power, which transcend the demographic differences defining current social realities.

To analyze the short film Bluesman (2018) this work brings together the concept of Sankofa-originally from the writing of Akan peoples from West Africa-with the concept of Afrofuturism through a methodology that articulates the ideas of circularity and inversion. We start by observing the trajectory of Brazilian rapper Baco Exu do Blues under the "exulic" perspective explained by Sàlámì (King) and Ribeiro (2015); then we discuss the peculiarity of racial issues in Brazil from the concept of "racism by denial" proposed by Lélia Gonzalez (1988); and we conclude using the concept of Afrofuturism to point out decolonial elements identified in the narrative proposed by the work, using the narrative itself as a guide to observing the game of inversion of meanings that is proposed with the notions of before, during and after in the course proposed by the short film. The methodology used is also circular and based on the proverbial ideogram Sankofa: looking for the past, projecting it in the present and providing a future. Therefore, Bluesman's descriptive analysis gains decolonial significance by articulating epistemologies outside the Eurocentric axis to highlight the logic of resistance present in the narrative proposal and in the themes addressed by the work, a logic that seeks the reverse of the sense indicated by hegemonic thinking.

Some have viewed the internationally acclaimed blockbuster hit, the Black Panther film, as feminist; meanwhile, others have highlighted its aspects of African culture focusing on its traditional elements and Afrofuturistic aspects. One of the main characters, Actress Lupita Nyong’o, who played Nakia said that Black Panther signifies a balanced representation of women and men, and she later alluded to feminism as she explained the balanced idyllic gender representation between the sexes. This study found that the roles of the leading women characters in this Afrofuturistic film —the top characters were derived from the IMDB’s list—represented Africana womanism. The women at the heart of this study are warriors including Nakia, a War Dog of Wakanda; Okoye, the first lieutenant of the Dora Milaje and Ayo, a member; Princess Shuri, the head of Wakanda’s technological division; the Queen Mother of Wakanda, Ramonda, who was King T’Challa and Princess Shuri’s mother; and the Merchant Tribe Elder and the Mining Tribe Elder of the Wakandan Tribal Council. The egalitarian relationship between the women and the men in the film, and the representation of the women, showed a revisioning of African history in the recreation of an Afrofuturistic present. Thereby, the women’s portrayal emerged from the wider egalitanian Wakandan society, which depicted a mythological African utopian nation, and yet, simultaneoulsy reignited an African historical reality.

Afrofuturism is a storytelling genre that appears in multiple media types, including books, films, television, comics, music, and art. Drawing from genres such as science-fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism, and other speculative genres, Afrofuturism re-envisions the past, present, and future in order to show what the Black community does and can look like in imaginative and yet intensely real ways. Afrofuturism challenges its audiences' ideas about race, gender, science, and technology, as well as those audiences' assumptions about the past and expectations about the future. The fluid nature of Afrofuturism (Brooks, 2018) makes it difficult to define, but this fluidity allows for compositional flexibility and playfulness. Afrofuturism explore issues that also defy borders and definition, such as disability, sexuality, and gender (Brooks, 2018, Faucheux, 2017; Schalk, 2018). After surveying Afrofuturist works across media types, I found that Afrofuturism provides a rich resource for college literacy instruction, especially the teaching of composition and rhetoric. I argue that professors can incorporate Afrofuturism in their classrooms to create learning spaces in which all their students can practice thinking and writing more critically and fluidly, but also highlight how Black people have been and are creators of knowledge and stewards of literacy. Additionally, I provide pedagogical examples of how to incorporate Afrofuturism into the classroom beyond inclusion in the reading list.

In this paper, I address the issue of Community in Afrofuturism, based on the thought of Achille Mbembe, united under the label of ‘thought of the in-common’. According to the latter, if the need for community stems from a ‘will of life’, the Community-to-come must be based on a ‘radical utopia’, whose requirements are the dressing of wounds sustained in the course of history, and the overcoming of antagonisms, among others. The central argument of the article is that the question of Community is at the heart of Afrofuturism: it accompanies its emergence and the struggle for its recognition, and arises in its fiction. It is therefore important to see how this ‘will of life’ manifests itself through the history of Afrofuturism, on the one hand, and, by analyzing Binti, a novel by Nnedi Okorafor, how this question is addressed in Afro-Futurist fiction, on the other hand.

In this essay, I contend hyperempathy syndrome constitutes a kind of new materialism avant la lettre, prefiguring problems we are perhaps only now in a position to address academically. In other words, if both current scientific and philosophical conceptions of life attest that beings are always already co-constituted by their surroundings, we can no longer rely on a model of subjectivity and personhood that presupposes clear, bounded individuation. Before the popularization of affect theory and new materialism, Octavia E. Butler’s hyperempathy—a condition causing possessors to have an embodied response to visual perception of others’ emotions—provides a speculation on the consequences of the felt, interconnectivity of beings that “sympoiesis” characterizes. Against assumptions that interconnectivity necessarily precipitates more ethical modes of being in the world, Butler challenges static claims about shared substance and experience by providing a more complex depiction of what it means to feel as others do. I argue that Butler’s presentation of hyperempathy demonstrates that sharing experience is not a panacea for human and non-human relations but a restaging of the politics of identification and institutional power on another dimension.

In the post-Civil Rights late 1960s, the Black Panther Party (BPP) artist Emory Douglas created visual messages mirroring the US Western genre and gun culture of the time. For black people still struggling against severe oppression, Douglas’s work metaphorically armed them to defend against daily injustices. The BPP’s intrepid and carefully constructed images were compelling, but conversely, they motivated lawmakers and law enforcement officers to disrupt the organization aggressively. Decades after mainstream media vilified Douglas’s work, new generations celebrate its prescient activism and bold aesthetics. Using empathetic strategies of reflecting black communities back to themselves, Douglas visualized everyday superheroes. The gun-carrying avenger/cowboy hero archetype prevalent in Westerns did not transcend deeply embedded US racial stereotypes branding black people as inherently dangerous. Douglas helped the Panthers create visual mythology that merged fluidly with the ideas ...

Over the past decade or so, Afropolitanism has become a hotly contested term within literary studies, celebrated for its capacity to articulate an experience of transnational mobility and success in the West as well as criticized for how it elides the everyday experience of individuals on the continent and for its alleged lack of political critique. Many of these debates focus on the intended audience for Afropolitan texts, which, because of the location of publication houses and distribution networks, remains primarily the Western reader. My purpose in this introduction to alternative networks of Afropolitanism, however, is not to rehash this well-covered debate. Instead I would like to examine the shifting worlds of Afropolitanism as they manifest themselves through an engagement with East Asia, and with China in particular.

Oltre a un complesso sistema di rapporti di potere di natura sociale, politica ed economica, il colonialismo ha prodotto anche un apparato di costruzioni discorsive relative alla nerezza e ha svolto una funzione centrale nel processo di strutturazione dell’identità italiana come bianca in modo omogeneo. Tali costruzioni hanno plasmato uno specifico immaginario ancora oggi pervasivo che reifica specifici processi di razzializzazione.
Attraverso una prospettiva intersezionale, il volume rintraccia l’articolazione delle categorie sociali del genere e della razza in relazione alla cultura visuale contemporanea. In particolare, l’indagine si focalizza sul modo in cui la razza viene visualizzata e, dunque, sulla stretta relazione tra la perce-zione delle categorie razziali e i processi visuali. Attraverso l’analisi di una serie di immagini proprie della cultura di massa italiana contemporanea (pubblicità e fotografie), viene mostrato come tali fonti ripropongano un immaginario coloniale relativo alle rappresentazioni delle donne nere, che pone i soggetti all’interno di specifici processi di ipersessualizzazione e di negazione dell’agency. La visualità è dunque un campo all’interno del quale si riproducono le costruzioni razziali e di genere, ma si configura anche come uno spazio in cui tali costruzioni possono essere contestate. In quest’ultima direzione si situano pratiche artistiche “controvisuali”, come il progetto di Karima 2G, cantante italiana di origine liberiana che sviluppa un’autorappresentazione dirompente e oppositiva della nerezza.

In negotiating the representation of the black female as grotesque within Afrofuturism, spectacles in popular culture, such as Kanye West's video, strike an uncanny similarity to images produced by black women artists. The author grapples with such questions and phenomena by examining the respective works of Wangechi Mutu and Shoshanna Weinberger as they relate to black women's grotesqueries in Afrofuturism. Much like Minaj's performance, Mutu and Weinberger simultaneously enjoy and critique aberrations of the "ideal" beauty.

Recent interest in Afrofuturism, as well as the appearance of the Black Lives Matter movement has sparked renewed interest in the political and aesthetic innovations of the Black Arts and Black Power movements, which has in turn given rise to a renewed interest in all facets of Black Speculative Literature (see for example Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones’ important edited collection "Afrofuturism 2.0," published in 2016). However to date there has been no thorough discussion of how these Black Speculative Literature movements all work together to form a collective aesthetic resistance to traditional western hegemonic literary aesthetics, aesthetics that have used philological and high theory approaches to literature in order to determine which authors and texts are worthy of canonization. My paper will address the way Black Speculative Literature not only critiques traditional aesthetics, but critiques the very concept of Western canonization in general. Specifically, I will be looking at Kendrick Lamar’s album "Black Panther," and analyzing the way it works as a collaborative poetic effort, not only with other musicians, rappers and poets, but also the way it is a cross-media collaborative effort with the film "Black Panther," the Black Panther comic book as written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Coates’ own protest literature in the Atlantic and in book form. I will argue that this collaborative effort is just one example of how Black Speculative Literature challenges traditional concepts of high art aesthetics, the concepts of canonization and authorship, and Western traditions in art, while still embracing, adopting and signifying on many of those traditions. In conclusion, I hope to shed light on the way that the Black Power and Arts movements have paved the way for the current moment in black political and aesthetic movements, and draw a line of revolutionary thinking between the two.

This article examines W.E.B. Du Bois's short story The Comet in the light of the Afrofuturist movement, a transnational and interdisciplinary, theoretical and literary-cultural enterprise which has endeavoured to rethink the history of Black civilization in order to imagine a different, better, future. A remarkable example of post-apocalyptic, speculative and proto-Afrofuturist short fiction, The Comet functions as a fictional counterpart of the influential key concepts – double consciousness, the color line and the veil – previously introduced by Du Bois and it also foreshadows further critical issues and tropes that would be developed later, namely Fanon’s psychology of racism and Ellison’s metaphor of invisibility. Moreover, as a proto-Afrofuturist work of fiction, the story prefigures the post-apocalyptic worlds of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler and becomes a parable in which the supernatural element of the toxic comet allows for interesting speculations on the alienation experienced by people of African descent.

The essay draws on Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de mémoire to examine the role of memory in moments of liberation and their potential intervention in the development of new cultural structures. In Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind, Anyanwu functions as a lieu de mémoire that defies historical amnesia, acting as a voice of resistance to Mary’s recreation of Doro’s colonial forces in a post-colonial context. Anyanwu’s represents both a connection to the past and the potential for liberation from these structures of domination at a critical moment in the creation of a new governing system.

Global capitalism and its ongoing demand for ever more oil render life in the Niger Delta precarious. Exploitative conditions and ecological devastation are repeatedly resisted by activists in the Niger Delta, as well as by writers of diasporic ecocritical literature. This essay focuses on two short stories by Nnedi Okorafor, representing critical African-futurist cultures of resistance to oil’s local and global devastations. Set in rural Niger Delta communities, “Spider the Artist” and “The Popular Mechanic” locate the petroviolence of the Niger Delta within global circuits of petroleum production and consumption by focusing on the pipeline in all its networked visibility and materiality. These stories center local pipelines, connecting them to the global supply chain of oil consumption. Okorafor’s use of the speculative enables both a critical view of global oil’s predations, and irruptions of African-centered feminist agency and futurity. These two stories present female protagonists who confront the violent environments of their petroleum-ravaged communities, and craft modes of resistance, pleasure, and possibility. If the pipeline is a metonym for the global web of petromodernity, Okorafor’s fiction hacks the pipeline.

Achille Mbembe posits the radical notion that, in the twenty-first century, Africa will constitute the planet’s main cultural and philosophical event, as the diaspora of the post-colony embraces its African voice and disassembles the dominant Western narratives that were imposed upon it. Creative thinkers and practitioners like Sunu Gonera, Okwui Enwezor, Oswald Macharia, Azu Nwagbogu and Wanuri Kahiu, among many others across the continent, are reimagining the traditional with future awareness and a sense of opportunity. Afrofuturism, in its contemporary incarnation, has become one important trajectory in this regard, that incorporates a range of elements that include culture, tradition, language, aspiration, fantasy and technology. This paper interrogates how the work of certain creative people in Africa are expressing this by developing innovative ways to help address aspects of the issues facing Africa. Further, it proposes that this transformative process exemplifies how the mechanisms of social design are employed as spaces of inclusivity that are not subject to the whims only of consumerism. The paper contextualises African creative thinking as made manifest in the work of a selection of African creatives, followed by presenting views of extant African creativity. The link to Afrofuturism, speculation and cultural significance is proffered, a model is developed and then deployed, and extended into the space of social design proposing how this inclusive design and engagement approach might redefine Africanity and cultural ownership.

The events around the Mauerfall provided conditions for encounters between Detroit techno producers and a nascent Berlin scene celebrating a new – short-lived – openness. Cemented in Berlin’s Wende era, techno reached across decades-old geopolitical barriers between divided Berlin and the Fordist heartland of the American Dream. This essay argues that the music brought together enthused communities to live out energetic experiments in conditions informed by past suffering and hope for the future. In Berlin, displaced Cold War identifications met the placelessness of Detroit techno’s utopian-dystopian form. Detroit techno and re-unification met on this territory, where a social imaginary of radical difference strongly appealed, and experiments with social forms seemed possible. The music had long explored a placelessness that left behind earlier struggles, connecting it with the “transitional” experience of the Wende. Berlin’s nascent club scene became the place to play out Detroit techno’s alienated relation to identity. The article foregrounds alienation within Detroit techno and techno’s break with the past via Afrofuturism. In Berlin, Detroit techno becomes a trace of the future in a setting dedicated to the future’s exploration.

Self-identified Afrofuturist, R&B singer, and now actress Janelle Monae has garnered both popular and academic attention for her musical creation of the alternate cityscape Metropolis via multiple studio-released recordings and videos. The futuristic city is the landscape for the tale of Cindi Mayweather, or Monae's vision of the subversive electric lady, calling on the cyborg trope that Monae revisits in each trip to Metropolis and one that is frequently invoked by other Afrofuturists. Using technology and metaphors of technology to layer and remix histories, Monae's songs and videos add new voices to previous African American approaches to art and activism. Her work echoes and challenges efforts like the Black Arts Movement, turning up the volume on queer tracks in response to the heterosexist loops of the Black Power movement. However, her stories are not simply tales of a highly technological utopian world.

In der Interviewpassage, die dem Text folgt, der den Begriff des Afrofuturismus prägen sollte, antwortet Tricia Rose auf die Frage Mark Derys, ob die Frau* mit der Waffe der technofeministischen Imagination der Cyborg nach Donna Haraway entspräche: »I think feminist mothers are the most dangerous muthafuckahs out there; if I were to be really hardcore; I could say that feminists who refuse to have children ain’t threaten shit after a certain point!«1 Das Gebären von Kindern als ultimative Waffe des Feminismus zu begreifen, ist geradezu verblüffend – insbesondere in Hinblick auf Haraway, deren Appell »Make Kin Not Babies« in »Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene« unmissverständlich ist.2 Und doch macht die diskursive Verlagerung der Waffe in den Uterus der Frau* nicht nur aus technofeministischer, sondern auch aus afrofuturistischer Perspektive Sinn....

In this article, the focus is on Black Panther: a nation under our feet, a comic book series written by American public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates. The point of departure is Coates's idea of 'the Mecca', a term he uses in his earlier non-fiction. It refers to a space in which black culture is created in the shadow of collective traumas and memories. We argue that in a nation under our feet the fictional African country of Wakanda functions as a metaphorical Mecca. This version of Wakanda is contextualised in terms of the aesthetics of Afrofuturism and theories on the influence of ideology in comic books. The central focus of the article is how this representation of Wakanda questions the idea of a unified black people and how Wakanda, like the real world Meccas described by Coates, display internal ideological and political struggles among its people. We argue that the various characters in a nation under our feet represent different and conflicting ideological positi...

This essay analyses Nnedi Okorafor's 'Who Fears Death' within the framework of Ernst Bloch’s theories of utopianism. Okorafor’s feminist fantasy forms a radical counter-narrative to Eurocentric perceptions of Africa by breaking down the diametrically opposed categories of tradition and modernity, magic and science, superstition and rationality, while also probing into some of the most contentious issues of modern African history, such as female genital mutilation and ethnic cleansing. As a “critical dystopia” (Moylan), 'Who Fears Death' opens up an oppositional space that is both critical and transformative.

“Sun Ra deemed ‘Space is the place’ for the discovery of a self liberated from the earthly weight of prejudices and carnal inequities.” Norment, C. (2007), Pathways to Unknown Worlds, p.23. In this is essay, Aaron Sandhu has analysed and critically evaluated the influence Sun Ra had on the afrodiapsora and the philosophical ideologies of afrofuturism through his seminal work, ‘Space Is The Place’, within the framework of modernity and counterculture society.

Most criticism considers W.E.B. Du Bois mainly as a historian and a sociologist, and Langston Hughes  essentially as a poet, yet some aspects of their multifaceted output require closer scrutiny. This book examines these seemingly marginal features – Du Bois’s short fiction and poetry, foreshadowing contemporary phenomena such as Afrofuturism and hip hop, and Hughes’s interdisciplinary approach and passionate interest in blues and jazz. Still relevant today, the literary contribution of these two remarkable men has had a crucial impact on the development of civil rights activism from the 1960s up until today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

In this article I explore the influence of Afrofuturism on Olivia Wenzel's play Mais in Deutschland und anderen Galaxien. The play focuses on the black German protagonist Noah by showing scenes from his life, ranging from his childhood in East Germany to his problems as an adult. In a post-modernist style, the play does not follow one narrative thread and there is no authoritative perspective. Most importantly, Wenzel's inclusion of fantastical characters, space travel, and a non-linear narrative adds an element of Afrofuturism to the text. In a self-referential move, one of the play's narrative threads is a comic book story that Noah writes about himself and his mother called Mais in Deutschland und anderen Galaxien, and this is where the fantastical characters and space travel emerge. At the conclusion of both the comic and the play, Noah's fictional self sprouts wings and flies into space, escaping the stifling structures that determined his life and his relationships on earth. I argue that these Afrofuturist elements allow Wenzel to challenge the notion of a homogeneous black German subject, by positing the possibility of multiple galaxies and diverse ways for Noah to experience his self that do not necessarily coalesce to form a unified subject.

In diesem Artikel wird die Rolle des Afrofuturismus in dem Theaterstück Mais in Deutschland und anderen Galaxien von Olivia Wenzel untersucht. Das Theaterstück fokussiert auf den afrodeutschen Protagonisten Noah, indem es verschiedene Szenen aus seinem Leben zeigt, von seiner Kindheit in der DDR bis zu seinen Problemen als Erwachsener. Im postmodernen Stil hat das Stück keine einsträngige oder einheitliche Handlung und es gibt keine verlässliche auktoriale Perspektive. Am wichtigsten ist, dass Wenzels Stück phantastische Figuren, die Raumfahrt, und eine nicht-lineare Erzählung umfasst, Strategien, die dem Stück ein afrofuturistisches Element verleihen. Ein Handlungsstrang entfaltet sich als ein Comicbuch, das Noahüber sich selbst und seine Mutter schreibt, welches Mais in Deutschland und anderen Galaxien heißt. Am Schluss des Comicbuches, der auch der Schluss des Stückes ist, wachsen dem fiktionalen Noah Flügel und er fliegt auf ins All. Auf diese Weise entkommt er den erdrückenden Strukturen, die sein Leben und seine Beziehungen auf der Erde bisher bestimmt haben. Ich argumentiere, dass diese afrofuturistischen Elemente es Wenzel erlauben, die Idee eines homogenen afrodeutschen Subjekts in Frage zu stellen, indem sie die Möglichkeit vielfacher Galaxien schafft. Wichtig ist auch, dass Noah auf vielfache Art und Weise sein Selbst erfährt, was zu keinem einheitlichen Subjektbegriff führen kann.

Mark Dery, "Wired Man's Burden: The Incredible Whiteness of Being Digital," in _AfroGeeks: Beyond the Digital Divide_, ed. Anna Everett and Amber J. Wallace (Santa Barbara: U.C. Santa Barbara, Center for Black Studies Research, 2007). This paper was based on my May 21, 2005 keynote lecture of the same name at the 2005 Afrogeeks conference (“Global Blackness and the Digital Sphere”), masterminded by Anna Everett, director of the UCSB Center for Black Studies, and hosted by UC Santa Barbara. Other participants included Dick Hebdige, Alondra Nelson, and Mendi and Keith Obadike, among others.

Critical Black Futures imagines worlds, afrofutures, cities, bodies, art and eras that are simultaneously distant, parallel, present, counter, and perpetually materializing. From an exploration of W. E. B. Du Bois’ own afrofuturistic short stories, to trans* super fluid blackness, this volume challenges readers—community leaders, academics, communities, and creatives—to push further into surreal imaginations. Beyond what some might question as the absurd, this book is presented as a speculative space that looks deeply into the foundations of human belief. Diving deep into this notional rabbit hole, each contributor offers a thorough excursion into the imagination to discover ‘what was’, while also providing tools to push further into the ‘not yet’.

This bibliography forms the source list for a Hip-Hop independent study I am working on with a student over summer 2019. This study approaches Hip-Hop as a performative archive of critical Black folklore containing the sacred myths, cosmological expressions, ancestral rites, and nonlinear/otherwise-oriented vernacular time practices of Black Diaspora peoples in the global Americas. Additionally, this study traces the specific genre-genealogies of U.S.-based Hip-Hop alongside Jamaican sound system culture with its reggae, dub, and dancehall aesthetic production technologies.