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202 CLA JOURNAL The Data Thief, the Cyberflaneur, and Rhythm Science: Challenging Anti-Technological Blackness with the Metaphors of Afrofuturism Cassandra L. Jones Among the many notable aspects of Black Panther (2017) is the fictional, and secret, African nation of Wakanda, rich in vibranium, an equally fictional element that fuels all Wakandan technology. Not only has this nevercolonized nation been able to retain control of their natural resource and the wealth it engenders, Wakandans have developed technologies more advanced than those of any other nation. While Black Panther stands out as an exciting addition to the superheroes of the Marvel universe—and the film is replete with Africana people in a gamut of roles as warriors, leaders, farmers, heroes, and villains—it likewise represents an important development in the representation of blackness as technologically adept. Shuri, spearheading Wakanda’s cutting-edge research program, creates an array of stunning new technologies that empower the embattled Wakandan leader, T’Challa, and the Dora Milaje in their attempt to save Wakanda. Even in the second decade of the 21st century, this remains a fairly revelatory representation of blackness and black technological prowess. We have seen filmic images of Africana people as individually adept, outliers in an otherwise white landscape, in the films of the 1980s and 1990s. In these films, lone black men—from Richard Pryor in Superman 3 and Clarence Gilyard Jr. in Die Hard to Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park—held positions of technological power (and dubious morals). However, even franchises like The Matrix, which take place in highly technological futures populated with large numbers of people from various races, pit machines against humans while racializing that technology as white. Self-replicating white agents seek to destroy the last bastion of humanity, Zion, the heart of which is a “primitive” cave location flooded with markers of blackness and other forms of non-whiteness, thereby highlighting the distinction between embodied humans as symbolically black and the world of the machines as white. Black Panther’s contrast with this fairly common depiction of blackness as the antithesis of technology is part of what makes the 2017 film such a striking departure. That this representation occurred in an Afrofuturist film is no surprise. Although often discussed as only an aesthetic or literary field of study that examines black science fiction, fantasy, and myth, perhaps overly concerned with popular culture as some critics have maintained, Alondra Nelson defines Afrofuturism CLA JOURNAL 203 as “the intersection between African diasporic culture and technology through literature, poetry, science fiction and speculative fiction, music, visual art, and the Internet […] maintain[ing] that racial identity fundamentally influences technocultural practices” (“Afrofuturism”). Afrofuturism equally includes an examination of Afrocentric metaphysics, theoretical and applied science, social sciences, and programmatic spaces (Anderson and Jones). Asking us to imagine possible black futures while never losing sight of the connections of the past and present to these futures, Afrofuturism examines the many realms with which these therapeutic imaginings intersect.1 In many ways, Afrofuturism began as a recuperation of neglected black voices engaging with the technologies of their day and imagining those of the future. However, as Afrofuturism has grown in scope and visibility, multiple theoretical voices have contributed metaphors for understanding the links between black historiesof engagementwithscienceandtechnologyandtheimaginaryexploration of these in literature, music, and artwork, blurring the boundaries between what might be considered inspirational fiction and literal engagement with technology. Outside the realms of scholarship specifically exploring the relationship of race and technology, technology is often described as objective and ahistoric, a tendency that elides the racism from the level of the institution down to the very codeinformingthemachines.TheseAfrofuturistmetaphorsdrawdeepconnections to the past, rendering visible the rich fibers connecting black history and culture with the history of technology. This article explores these metaphors from three major contributors to Afrofuturism—John Akomfrah’s “data thief,”Anna Everett’s “black cyberflaneur” and “Afrogeek,” and Paul D. Miller’s “rhythm science”—and their power to combat the construction of blackness as not just disconnected from technology but as the very anti-thesis of it. Among these three, the first to appear is Akomfrah’s 1996 poetic documentary, The Last Angel of History. The short film explores the utopian view...

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