Afrofuturism

[B]

So, please explain.

[malice]

it's a black thing, you wouldn't understand

[Superblood Wolfmoon]

This American Life did an episode on it last week. Check it out. Though they sadly left out the greatest musical example of Afrofuturism IMO:

[tragabigzanda]

Kind of silly how this term seems to have just plopped into the national lexicon like a week ago, and suddenly everyone's talking about it. Hasn't Octavia Butler been writing about this since like 1990?

[tragabigzanda]

On second thought, hasn't this basically been a thing since Parliament/Funkadelic?

[tragabigzanda]

Shit...Prince, Timbaland & Missy Elliott, Lawrence Fishburne in The Matrix. I have no problem with the concept, but it always irks me when some new phrase or idea is suddenly deemed popular and worthy of co-opting by white people. #SWAG

[Simple Torture]

Kind of silly how this term seems to have just plopped into the national lexicon like a week ago, and suddenly everyone's talking about it. Hasn't Octavia Butler been writing about this since like 1990?

When we read Octavia Butler it made my white students suuuuuper uncomfortable. It was great!

[tragabigzanda]

Kind of silly how this term seems to have just plopped into the national lexicon like a week ago, and suddenly everyone's talking about it. Hasn't Octavia Butler been writing about this since like 1990?

When we read Octavia Butler it made my white students suuuuuper uncomfortable. It was great!

#SWAG

[96583UP]

Afrofuturism is a cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and philosophy of history that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentrism, and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of black people, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical events of the past. First coined by Mark Dery in 1993, and explored in the late 1990s through conversations led by scholar Alondra Nelson,[1] Afrofuturism addresses themes and concerns of the African diaspora through a technoculture and science fiction lens, encompassing a range of media and artists with a shared interest in envisioning black futures that stem from Afrodiasporic experiences.[2] Seminal Afrofuturistic works include the novels of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler; the canvases of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Angelbert Metoyer, and the photography of Renée Cox; the explicitly extraterrestrial mythoi of Parliament-Funkadelic, the Jonzun Crew, Warp 9, Deltron 3030, and Sun Ra; and the Marvel Comics character Black Panther.[3][4][5]

Afrofuturism 2.0 was coined during an exchange between Alondra Nelson and Reynaldo Anderson at the Alien Bodies conference in 2013; where Anderson noted that the previous definition was insufficient due to the rise of social media and new technology. Following the publication of the co-edited volume Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, in the late 2010s, the Black Speculative Arts Movement, a traveling art, comic, and film convention, released a manifesto called Afrofuturism 2.0 and the Black Speculative Arts Movement: Notes on a Manifesto.[46] The manifesto was written by Reynaldo Anderson at Harris-Stowe State University as an attempt to redefine and refit Afrofuturism for the 21st century. The 2.0 volume and the manifesto defines Afrofuturism 2.0 as "The early twenty-first century technogenesis of Black identity reflecting counter histories, hacking and or appropriating the influence of network software, database logic, cultural analytics, deep remixability, neurosciences, enhancement and augmentation, gender fluidity, posthuman possibility, the speculative sphere with transdisciplinary applications and has grown into an important Diasporic techno-cultural Pan African movement".[46] Afrofuturism 2.0 is characterized by five dimensions to include metaphysics, aesthetics, theoretical and applied science, social sciences and programmatic spaces; and in the twenty-first century is no longer bound to its original definition, as a term once dealing with cultural aesthetics and the digital divide, but has been broaden to be known also as a philosophy of science, metaphysics and geopolitics.[47]

In this manifesto, Anderson acknowledges and accounts for the changes in technology, social movements, and even philosophical changes in modern society while also speculating as to how the Afrofuturist narrative will be changed because of it. This is particularly in regards to the rise and boom of social media platforms.

In conjunction with this, Los Angeles-based artist Martine Syms penned an online article in 2013 called The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto that is composed of a list of tenets that, supposedly, all Mundane Afrofuturists recognize. Though the article is in part parodic and sarcastic, it aims to identify and make light of overused tropes within Afrofuturist works like "magical Negroes" or "references to Sun Ra". Through this identification of "overused tropes" and a later definition of rules to actually subvert these tropes entitled "The Mundane Afrofuturist promise",[48] Syms requests a new, updated vision for Afrofuturist works, which falls in line with the framework of Afrofuturism 2.0.

Afrofuturism 3.0 was coined in 2017 by 96583UP and seeks to redefine the genre simply as blacks doing impressive imaginary things, like flying zeppelins underwater, battling space aliens with poetry, and easily registering to vote in a southern state 50 years after the passage of the civil rights act.

[tragabigzanda]

Obviously

[Jammer XCI]

This American Life did an episode on it last week. Check it out. Though they sadly left out the greatest musical example of Afrofuturism IMO:

This is one of the best albums of all time.