25 Years of Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Thought: Roundtable with Tiffany E. Barber, Reynaldo Anderson, Mark Dery, and Sheree Renée Thomas

Introduction and Transcription by Tiffany E. Barber

Afrofuturism is an aesthetic and political mode of contemporary black expression that has gained considerable currency in popular and academic discourse since its introduction in the early 1990s. Cultural critic Mark Dery first used the term in his oft-cited essay "Black to the Future" to describe "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" (1994, 180).¹ Dery's notion of Afrofuturism engendered a troubling antimony considering that a shared black past has been "deliberately rubbed out," giving rise to an inexhaustible yet exhausting search for evidence to redress the trauma of this loss (180). Given this devastation, is the imagination of (black) futures possible? Furthermore, he asks, "Isn't the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers…who have engineered our collective fantasies?" (180).

The assumption of a mutually beneficial relationship between racial and technological progress has inspired problematic visions of raceless, placeless, genderless and bodiless futures. Imaginings of race-free futures, or worlds in which racial difference no longer matter, abound in the predominantly white genres of science fiction literature and film. Considered a form of redress to these discursive currents, Afrofuturism combines science fiction elements to imagine alternate worlds with regard to racial politics and belonging. In so doing, it is seen as a way to make sense of the past and its relevance to our black political present.

Within Afrofuturism, the realities of captive slavery and forced diaspora are likened to the instances of bodily transformation and alien invasion that appear in science and speculative fiction novels and films. Robots, cyborgs and androids as well as interstellar adventures and time travel all feature prominently in the otherworldly, intergalactic narratives at the core of Afrofuturist visual, literary and sonic texts. Afrofuturist works also aim to subvert science fiction tropes to highlight and complicate issues of racial difference and representations of blackness that are often left out of generic plots or eclipsed altogether. These issues and representations include the structured absence and token presence of black characters and actors, themes of racial contamination and racial paranoia as constitutive of a postapocalyptic future, and the traumatized black body as the ultimate signifier of difference, alien-ness and otherness.

In select writings by scholars such as Alondra Nelson, Kodwo Eshun, Nettrice Gaskins and Ruth Mayer, Afrofuturism is a revisionist discourse in which racialized, gendered bodies use technology to reparative ends—an ethos of "cosmic liberation" and "possibility in a world meant to destroy any and all forms of black life," as Shanté Paradigm Smalls puts it² (see also Mayer 2000; Eshun 2003). But Afrofuturism is about more than reclaiming the past, according to Lisa Yaszek; it is "about reclaiming the history of the future as well" (2005, 300). As the term has become more mainstream, scholars and authors have looked to the canon of African American letters to extend Afrofuturism's purview. Sheree Reneé Thomas's two World Fantasy Award-winning Dark Matter anthologies (2000; 2004) position famed sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois as a speculative fiction writer—a novel intervention—by putting his short story, "The Comet," in conversation with other black speculative fiction pioneers and their writing. In the time since the two volumes were published (the second volume from 2004 included a second speculative work of Du Bois'), a third story was discovered in Du Bois' archives. Over the past 7 years, a new wave of scholarship and critical sensibilities about Afrofuturism have emerged, troubling well-worn visual and literary tropes such as magical or mutant black characters, and interstellar travel and outer space as the ideal routes to liberation. Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones define this 2.0 version of Afrofuturism as "the early twenty-first century technogenesis of...