Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture

Copyright © 2013 by Ytasha L. Womack
All rights reserved
First edition
Published by Lawrence Hill Books, an imprint of
Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-61374-796-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Womack, Ytasha.

Afrofuturism : the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture / Ytasha L. Womack. — First edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61374-796-4 (trade paper)

1. Science fiction—Social aspects. 2. African Americans—Race identity. 3. Science fiction films—Influence. 4. Futurologists. 5. African diaspora— Social conditions. I. Title.

PN3433.5.W66 2013

809.3'8762093529—dc23

2013025755

Cover art and design: “Ioe Ostara” by John Jennings
Cover layout: Jonathan Hahn
Interior design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN
Interior art: John Jennings and James Marshall (
p. 187
)

Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1

I dedicate this book to Dr. Johnnie Colemon, the first Afrofuturist to inspire my journey. I dedicate this book to the legions of thinkers and futurists who envision a loving world.

I
would like to thank the stellar Lawrence Hill Books team: Cynthia Sherry, Michelle Schoob, Caitlin Eck, Mary Kravenas, and the many others who devoted their time and passion to bringing this book to light. Special thanks to John Jennings for his thoughtful insights and enlightening art. Thanks to John Jennings, Reynaldo Anderson, Shawn Wallace, and Stanford Carpenter for their willingness to throw mental softballs in the game of Afrofuturism mind chatter. I thank the many Afrofuturists, including Alondra Nelson and D. Denenge Akpem, who shared their work and ideas with me. I thank Linda and Leonard Murray, John Martin, Patrick Saingbey Woodtor, and Kerry James Marshall for their support. Thanks to curator Christine Mullen Kreamer for her heartfelt contributions. Thanks to Craig and Cory Stevenson for their artistic contributions. I thank my mom, Yvonne Womack, who willingly embarked on the Afrofuturism journey and gave me my first space suit. I thank my dad, Lloyd Womack, who unknowingly encouraged the cosplay imagination. I truly thank Susan Bradanini Betz, who believed in this project from the start and championed its existence.

W
ho are you?” the Cheshire cat asked Alice in the mindbending
Alice in Wonderland
. As a kid, I found the scary disappearing kooky kitten and his prickly questions nightmarish. When I got to the page where those glow-in-the-dark eyes in my Disney-friendly child-version storybook appeared, I'd flip the page faster than Gabby Douglas on the balance beam. Frightening, albeit intriguing. When Morpheus gives Neo the red pill/blue pill option, prefacing that he will find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes,
The Matrix
viewers know this is another tornado ride to Oz. No, Dorothy, you're not in Kansas anymore. And for those who adopt the Afrofuturist paradigm, the ideas can take you light-years away from the place you call home, only to return knowing you had had everything you needed from the start.

Readers, our future is now. Fortunately, there are guideposts on this worded journey through the cosmos, key archetypes that anchor the imagination on this spaceship ride dubbed “freedom”: the Dogon's Sirius star, the fabled mermaid, the sky ark, a DJ scratch that blares like a Miles Davis horn, an ankh, a Yoruba deity, an Egyptian god, a body of water, a dancing robot, an Outkast ATLien. And there's electricity, lots of electricity,
nanotechnology, and plants. Someone may shout, “Wake up!” Others will echo chants of hope. Maybe you'll hop into a parallel universe with a past that reads like a fantasy or a future that feels like the past. But no trek is complete until you spot a sundial-sized headdress or that psychedelic wig. We like really big hair or no hair at all. Call it the power of the subconscious or the predominance of soul culture gone cyberpop, but this dance through time travel that Afrofuturists live for is as much about soul retrieval as it is about jettisoning into the far-off future, the uncharted Milky Way, or the depths of the subconscious and imagination.

Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Octavia Butler are sides of that Giza-like pyramid you find. Although the controls on the spaceship match your video game console, your life is not a video game. You are in cyberspace. Satellite maps don't work here. You cannot “check in,” although you can click “like.” No hyperlinks. If lost, get down to get up, go up to get down. If you must communicate, invent a communication device with a social media platform, and you'll be heard. Take photos, lots and lots of photos. Like every good hero, you have a digital soundtrack. But most important, you have nice reading material to smooth the ride. Oh, and you'll need sunglasses, really cool sunglasses.

Stay Spacetastic,
Ytasha

W
hen I was in the fourth grade, I was Princess Leia for Halloween. Leia, the princess and born leader of the rebel forces in
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
, was my heroine in elementary school. It is a distinct memory, because wearing all white with a wooden sword on your hip in a rainstorm and trying to explain that you're a cosmic princess to candy-giving neighbors isn't a memory you forget. With two giant braids twisted into coils and pinned neatly on either side of my head, I found the idea of being a galactic princess with guts and brains to be pretty cool. Later, I would fully understand the myth of the Force and the archetypical battles between ego and light that render
Star Wars
fans so enthusiastic. But as a kid, I was a bit more infatuated with lightsabers and Ewoks and just glad that Luke and Leia didn't fall in love, because they were Jedi siblings.

While it was fun to be the chick from outer space in my imagination, the quest to see myself or browner people in this space age, galactic epic was important to me. Through the eyes of a child, the absence of such imagery didn't escape me. For one, I secretly wished that Lando Calrissian, played by sex symbol Billy Dee Williams, hadn't lost the
Millennium Falcon
in a bet—then maybe he, and not Han Solo, would have had more screen time navigating the solar systems. I wished that when Darth Vader's face was revealed, it would have been actor James Earl Jones, the real-life voice behind the mask, and not British thespian David Prowse who emerged. Then again, I also wished that Princess Leia and not Luke had been the first sibling trained in the way of the Jedi, and then I could have carried a lightsaber at Halloween instead of my brother's wooden sword.

While it would be easy to dismiss these wishes as childhood folly from yesteryear, it's in wishes like these—all a result of the
obvious absence of people of color in the fictitious future/past (remember, it was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away)—that seeds were planted in the imaginations of countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceships too. With the diversity of the nation and world increasingly standing in stark contrast to the diversity in futuristic works, it's no surprise that Afrofuturism emerged.

No surprise either that with Princess Leia a few solar returns behind me, I would create
Rayla 2212
, a multimedia series with music, books, animation, and games that follows Rayla Illmatic. Rayla is a rebel strategist and third-generation citizen of Planet Hope, an Earth colony gone rogue some two hundred years into the future. Her nickname is Princess, and she's charged with finding Moulan Shakur (note the Disney and Tupac shout-outs), a mysterious scientist who trains her to find the Missing. The journey takes her across worlds and lifetimes. And she's a browner woman. She's balancing her go-hard attitude with a penchant for love, she quotes twentieth- and twenty-first-century pop culture song lyrics like they're Shakespeare, and she wields a nice, shiny double-edged sword.

Friends and colleagues have joked that the 3-D animated image of Rayla reminds them of me.

No kidding.

I was an Afrofuturist before the term existed. And any sci-fi fan, comic book geek, fantasy reader, Trekker, or science fair winner who ever wondered why black people are minimized in pop
culture depictions of the future, conspicuously absent from the history of science, or marginalized in the roster of past inventors and then actually set out to do something about it could arguably qualify as an Afrofuturist as well.

It's one thing when black people aren't discussed in world history. Fortunately, teams of dedicated historians and culture advocates have chipped away at the propaganda often functioning as history for the world's students to eradicate that glaring error. But when, even in the imaginary future—a space where the mind can stretch beyond the Milky Way to envision routine space travel, cuddly space animals, talking apes, and time machines—people can't fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down.

It was an age-old joke that blacks in sci-fi movies from the '50s through the '90s typically had a dour fate. The black man who saved the day in the original
Night of the Living Dead
was killed by trigger-happy cops. The black man who landed with Charlton Heston in the original
Planet of the Apes
was quickly captured and stuffed in a museum. An overeager black scientist nearly triggered the end of the world in
Terminator 2
. On occasion, the black character in such films popped up as the silent, mystical type or maybe a scary witch doctor, but it was fairly clear that in the artistic renderings of the future by pop culture standards, people of color weren't factors at all.