AfroFuturism: Fact, Fiction or Fantasy Panel Discussion
Word Up!
Words and expressions can have a heyday. They can be buzzworthy. Extra popular. Used frequently and with special emphasis.
In recent years, but especially in 2021 into 2022, the term “AfroFuturism” has garnered a lot of press in the media. It has found its way into discussions of music, fine and visual art, dance, museum exhibitions, comic books, and much more. On February 24, Routes Magazine hosted a panel on AfroFuturism. Ronn Bunn, Owner, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Routes gathered together a panel including Dr. Reynaldo Anderson, Dr. Damion Kareem Scott, and two correspondents from Routes, Sandhi Smalls-Santini and Ellen Levitt.
Carnegie Hall is one of the many organizers of a multi-faceted AfroFuturism Festival. Routes continues to report on several of the many concerts offered as part of the program. And, most recently Publisher and Editor Ronn Bunn stopped by The Black Angel of History: Myth-Science, Metamodernism, and The Metaverse exhibition at Zankel Hall. Curated by Dr. Reynaldo Anderson (featured in the Routes panel) and the Black Speculative Arts Movement, the exhibit showcases 36 artworks and five videos by 23 emerging, mid-career, and acclaimed Afrofuturistic artists, writers, performers, and designers.
Clive Gillinson of Carnegie Hall states that
It’s been exciting to see how AfroFuturism embraces such a diverse array of art forms and the intrinsic role it plays in pop culture.
The festival offers a thriving aesthetic and cultural movement that looks to the future through a African-American cultural lens and brings together not just art, music and science fiction but also politics and technology.
A famed musician who is often cited as a pioneer in Afrofuturism is the late Sun Ra. Routes published an exclusive on the Sun Ra archive that included jazz and personal writings that touched upon the past, present and hopes for the future.
But Sun Ra himself didn’t coin the term AfroFuturism; it was actually coined in 1993 by writer Mark Dery in his essay “Black to the Future” and can be viewed as a philosophy of science and history, as synthesized by peoples of African descent. It also brings into play alternate and speculative history, magic, and crossing back and forth between ages in time. AfroFuturism was born long before Dery labeled the trend. Alice Coltrane’s music, Octavia E. Butler’s novels, the outrageous outfits of Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, and more, followed the futuristic innovations of jazz composer, pianist, and poet Sun Ra.
A prominent entry into the AfroFturism canon is the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s period room “Before Yesterday We Could Fly.” Once again Routes paid a visit to the hallowed halls of The Met to experience and share the new addition with its readers.
Is AfroFuturism akin to a wide-ranging Comic Con devoted to many things African and African Diaspora? Marvel Comics created the character Black Panther that first appeared in 1966. It became an Academy Award winning movie in 2018 and resurrected the AfroFuturism movement. Carnegie Hall’s event, which runs from Feb-Mar 2022, have exhibitions of literature and film with 80+ events across NYC. They entreat attendees to
Take a journey to… an ever expansive aesthetic and practice… to imagine alternate realities and a liberated future viewed through the lens of Black cultures.
This is clearly an invitation to escape… escape what…the continued persecution and victimization of African-Americans?
AfroFuturism is actually a tribute to African insights and innovations that have laid the groundwork for the advancement of all human life on this planet. According to “They Came Before Columbus,” scholars in Timbuktu, Mali taught that the world was “round like a gourd” and if you walked in a straight line and could walk on water, you would wind up where you began. Ivan Van Sertima, , Ibn Fadl Al-Umari, a renowned Egyptian scholar, wrote that in 1311 Mansa Abubakari II, King of the Mali Empire, abdicated his throne to sail across the Atlantic Ocean with a large entourage in ships built with the help of Egyptian ship designers. They were never seen in Mali again. But there is evidence that Abubakari II reached the “New World” in 1312 and renamed places in Haiti after themselves like Mandinga Port, Mandinga Bay and Sierre de Mali.
Twentieth Century European ethnographers discovered ancient scrolls in Egypt with blueprints for large ships made of papyrus. They built replicas of the paper ships, but omitted a rope that stretched from stem to stern because they thought it was an unnecessary decoration. Every one of their experimental ships ended up eventually sinking after becoming waterlogged. But Norwegian adventurer and ethnographer, Thor Heyerdahl, differed with the consensus. He built the ships according to the specs and included the rope. Thor didn’t understand the cord, but decided it should not be ignored. Then in 1970, Heyerdahl successfully sailed across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to Barbados in his papyrus boat, discovering that when the boat got waterlogged, pulling the cord wrung the water out and made the boat navigable again.
Africa gave gifts of inventions and philosophies that still boggle the modern world. AfroFuturism is not fairy tales and wishful thinking. It is a celebration of what was and what will be again.
Each blade of grass tells a story. Tomorrow will come and yesterday will be again. We come and we go and we come again. (Abiodun Oyewole)