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"Afrofuturism is a way of looking at the future and alternate realities through a Black cultural lens.”
Ytasha L. Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (2013)
Afrofuturism is an interdisciplinary movement that reimagines the future through the lens of Black experiences and perspectives by weaving together imagination, technology, liberation, Black culture, African ancestral traditions, and mysticism. As a cultural movement, Afrofuturism manifests in a range of media—from literature and music to visual arts and film. According to Womack, Afrofuturism “is an artistic aesthetic, but also a kind of method of self-liberation or self-healing” as it honors the past while imagining new possibilities for the future.
The term "Afrofuturism" was first introduced by Boston-born cultural critic and journalist Mark Dery in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose," published in a special edition of Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press).
Dery wrote,
"Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth- century technoculture — and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future — might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism."
Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture by
"Flame Wars," the verbal firefights that take place between disembodied combatants on electronic bulletin boards, remind us that our interaction with the world is increasingly mediated by computers. Bit by digital bit we are being "Borged," as devotees of Star Trek: The Next Generation would have it--transformed into cyborgian hybrids of technology and biology through our ever more frequent interaction with machines, or with one another through technological interfaces. The subcultural practices of the "incurably informed," to borrow the cyberpunk novelist Pat Cadigan's coinage, offer a precognitive glimpse of mainstream culture in the near future, when many of us will be part-time residents in virtual communities. Yet, as the essays in this expanded edition of a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly confirm, there is more to fringe computer culture than cyberspace. Within these pages, readers will encounter flame warriors; new age mutant ninja hackers; technopagans for whom the computer is an occult engine; and William Gibson's "Agrippa," a short story on software that can only be read once because it gobbles itself up as soon as the last page is reached. Here, too, is Lady El, an African American cleaning woman reincarnated as an all-powerful cyborg; devotees of on-line swinging, or "compu-sex"; the teleoperated weaponry and amok robots of the mechanical performance art group, Survival Research Laboratories; an interview with Samuel Delany, and more. Rallying around Fredric Jameson's call for a cognitive cartography that "seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of place in the global system," the contributors to Flame Wars have sketched a corner of that map, an outline for a wiring diagram of a terminally wired world. Contributors. Anne Balsamo, Gareth Branwyn, Scott Bukatman, Pat Cadigan, Gary Chapman, Erik Davis, Manuel De Landa, Mark Dery, Julian Dibbell, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Pauline, Peter Schwenger, Vivian Sobchack, Claudia Springer
Learn more about Afrofuturism & Otherworldliness in Music at the Lewis Music Library, from March 4 to March 16, 2025.
A new exhibit celebrates the visionary contributions of Afrofuturist artists across various genres and mediums. From the cosmic jazz of Sun Ra and the psychedelic funk of Parliament-Funkadelic and George Clinton, to the neo-soul of Erykah Badu and the sci-fi narratives of Octavia E. Butler, these artists have pushed the boundaries of creativity and imagination.
This resource guide was designed alongside Lewis Music Library's Afrofuturism programming, part of MIT's Artfinity Festival 2025. Please explore the companion Libguide dedicated to Afrofuturism & Otherworldliness in Music to learn more.
