Afrofuturism was coined in 1993, is entrenched in pan-African history but has everything to do with the future. Our overlooking digital access and equity is a newer part of an old conversation: Imagining a future of state of joy and justice.
That’s from the 2015 essay collection edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles Earl Jones entitled “Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness.”
Below I share a few notes for future reference.
My notes:
- Afrofuturism was coined in 1993 (by Mark Dery)
- The text-only web was hoped to bring true race-less meritocracy, which ignored the digital divide that was there from beginning
- Alondra Nelson: That “race and gender distinctions would be a eliminated with technology was perhaps the founding fiction of the digital age”
- “Astro blackness is an Afro futuristic concept in which a person‘s black state of consciousness, released from the confining and crippling, slave, or colonial mentality, becomes aware of the multitude, and varied possibilities and probabilities within the universe”
- Alondra Nelson, agrofuturisn is about “things to come” and Kwodo Eshun “the histories of counter-futures”
- The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto
- “Afrofuturusm is now a pan-African project”
- Stemming from afrofuturusn 2.0 discussed at Alien Bodies conference at Emory university in 2013
- Philadelphia Afrofuturust Affair founder Rasheedah Phillips
- Sun Ra Black Man in the Cosmos
- James Stewart scholar that early pushed science and technology should be added to black and Africans studies
- Octavia Butler 1979 Kindred science fiction and neo slave
