Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement by Isiah Lavender III

Afrofuturism has always been as much concerned with the past as it is with the future. Whether they are being forcibly transported back to experience the enslavement of their ancestors, like Dana, the protagonist of Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel Kindred; or whether they are upcycling ancient Egyptian imagery into their costume design like performers from Sun Ra to Solange, Afrofuturists keeps a sankofa’s gaze on the past. Isiah Lavender’s Afrofuturism Rising seizes on this historical slippage to advance the idea that Black people in the Americas have always been Afrofuturists. Mirroring the technologizing language of science fiction, Lavender devises three critical terms to describe the transhistorical nature of Afrofuturism: the Black “networked consciousness,” describing a form of Black people as individual nodes within a larger community spirit; the hope impulse, characterized by the constant building toward a better future among Black people in the Americas; and the transhistorical feedback loop, which enables the Black experience to resonate between different historical moments. If these terms sound gimmicky, it is because they sometimes are. Ambitiously conceptualized and meticulously citational, Lavender’s work takes the reader on a whirlwind journey beginning in the seventeenth century and traveling to the 1970s, when the literary prehistory ends and lays the foundation for the advent of the more well-documented Afrofuturist efforts of Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, and Samuel R. Delany.

The early chapters of Afrofuturism Rising include a dizzying range of works written between 1619 and 1903. The first section of the book is largely concerned with slavery as a condition in which “the lived experience of black folks is science fictional” (46). In Lavender’s hands, Solomon Northup’s kidnapping in Twelve Years a Slave becomes an alien abduction, Harriet Jacobs’s “loophole of retreat” and Henry “Box” Brown’s box become pocket universes, Frederick Douglass becomes a cyborg, while quilts and spirituals become encrypted messages. This lens works better for some texts than others—it can sometimes create facile comparisons, as when Lavender likens the “pocket universes” of enslaved people to the kinds of counter-narratives Black people create today through Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram (94). The disadvantage of such a broad historical scope is that it is sometimes difficult for Lavender to provide enough historical context and specificity for many of the texts. For example, in his hasty discussion of revolts of the enslaved in the Atlantic world, which covers the Haitian Revolution, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, the German Coast uprising in Louisiana, and the conspiracies of Denmark Prosser and Gabriel Vesey in mere pages. Although Lavender argues that “ahistoricism becomes a strength” by highlighting the continuity of the past within the present, the fact remains that ahistoricism enables only a superficial analysis of complex historical factors (10).

More effective is Lavender’s move to the twentieth century in part two of the book, “Afrofuturism and Classic Twentieth-Century African American Novels.” In this section, Lavender examines the use of science fictional metaphors and language in nonscience fictional texts like Native Son and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Lavender argues that Hurston’s use of African American folklore and storytelling tradition is a “vernacular technology” through which the residents of Eatonville are represented as being linked through an almost extrasensory perception. Lavender then frames Bigger Thomas’s pathologies as precisely the result of his becoming unmoored from the Black community that was so important in Hurston’s novel, making Native Son a cautionary tale of “termination from the networked consciousness” (142). These are unique and memorable treatments of canonical texts that will prove useful for Black studies scholarship and pedagogy, allowing readers to approach these well-turned pages with new eyes. Additionally, one noncanonical text in this section, Captain Blackman, John A. Williams’s 1972 novel about a Black veteran of the Vietnam War who travels back in time to other sites of Black military engagement throughout American history. Williams’s novel is a fascinating yet understudied object whose position within Afrofuturism is rightly enshrined by Lavender’s extensive and careful analysis. Lavender contextualizes this forgotten text of the Black Arts Movement as a revolutionary tract that uses the speculative tactics of Afrofuturism to propel Black militants toward a final, “flawless victory, a bloodless revolution” (184).

Lavender poignantly centers a key aspect of Afrofuturism—what he calls “the hope impulse”—as an animating force behind all African American literature from the very first narratives of enslaved people to Black cultural productions of the present day. However, to say that African American literature is Afrofuturist because it is hopeful, as Lavender constantly does throughout the book, is somewhat reductive. Lavender’s other critical terms, such as “the transhistorical feedback loop” and “networked consciousness,” also work against his analysis at times by shoehorning the texts into predetermined conclusions rather than considering their individual nuances. However, the book’s missteps are all in the service of building up Afrofuturism not just as an aesthetic but also as an analytic in which “finding the future in the past should be a core tenet” (112). In this way, Lavender’s work complements the recent scholarship of Kara Keeling (2019), Sami Schalk (2018), and Ytasha Womack (2013) by providing their objects of analysis with an origin story deeply rooted in the world of the Americas. Although Lavender’s analysis does not always live up to his aspirations, he opens a discussion about the wider applicability of Afrofuturism as a reading practice that has its own history beyond the 1993 coinage of the word and its 1970s ur-texts. Like Sun Ra, who claimed to be “on the other side of time,” Afrofuturism Rising makes a bold claim for the Black experience as unbounded by linear time.