History is a candle burned from both ends: the past is auto-dafé; the future, an inferno.
The present feels the slow cancellation of the future and mourns the loss of its past. There is no hope in sight. The present, turning its head towards its past and then its future, finds itself flanked by catastrophe. Finding ourselves cornered along with it, we must ask ourselves a question: ”Is a better future possible?”
Afrofuturism asks a question relevant to our current cultural impasse: ”Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of history, imagine possible futures?”(Drery 180)
But what is Afrofuturism? Cultural theorist Kodwo Eshun in his article Further Considerations on Afrofuturism (2003) observes that Afrofuturism ”studies the appeals that black artists, musicians, critics, and writers have made to the future, in moments where any future was made difficult for them to imagine”(Eshun 294). He cites the music of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, Lee ”Scratch” Perry, and Parliament-Funkadelic throughout as paradigmatic examples of this phenomenon. Fleshing out his definition, Eshun observes that Afrofuturism ”does not stop at correcting the history of the future. Nor is it a simple matter of inserting more black actors into science-fiction narratives” as these are only dots in a pointillist tableau that reveal to us that ”Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision”(Eshun 298). Afrofuturism suggests that Black existence and science fiction elucidate one another.
Unmentioned in Eshun’s Further Considerations on Afrofuturism, the essay ”Black to the Future” is the specter haunting Eshun’s piece. The term Afrofuturism did not originate with Eshun but with a white critic named Mark Dery in his essay ”Black to the Future.” The piece was a triptych of conversations designed to ”constitute a map of one small corner of the largely unexplored psychogeography of Afrofuturism”(Dery 187). Dery interviewed three prominent black writers: Greg Tate, a critic; Tricia Rose, a history professor; and Samuel Delany, an author who is ”often spoken of as the first African-American science fiction writer”(Delany 73). Each, in turn, addressed Dery’s overarching question: ”Why do so few African Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other–the stranger in a strange land–would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African American novelists?”(Dery 179-180).
We can see from Eshun’s definition of Afrofuturism that Dery’s question is predicated on the assumption that there is a clean delineation between African-American writing and science fiction writing. Eshun’s definition suggests that rather than thinking of science fiction as a genre that black artists do/ don’t participate in, it’s more productive to view science fiction as a hermeneutic. Science fiction is an optical instrument that allows us to better see the present. This is why Eshun stresses that ”science fiction is neither forward-looking nor Utopian”(Eshun 290). Citing Samuel Delany, Eshun argues that science fiction presents ”a significant distortion of the present”(Eshun 290). It’s a magnifying glass. Afrofuturism, then, is the realization that if science fiction is a looking glass then black art is the object of observation that allows us to better understand the structure of the observing instrument. Afrofuturism shows us ”that science fiction was never concerned with the future, but rather with engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present”(Eshun 290).
Samuel Delany in his conversation with Mark Dery notes that ”the historical reason that we’ve been so impoverished in terms of future images is because, until fairly recently, as a people we were systematically forbidden any images of our past”(Dery 191).
Delany goes on:
”I have no idea where, in Africa, my black ancestors came from because, when they reached the slave markets of New Orleans, records of such things were systematically destroyed. If they spoke their own languages, they were beaten or killed. The slave pens in which they were stored by lots were set up so that no two slaves from the same area were allowed to be together. Children were regularly sold away from their parents…that some musical rhythms endured, that certain religious attitudes and structures seem to have persisted, is quite astonishing”(Dery 191).
The funeral pyre of history created a present that is suspicious of imagining better futures. Eshun characterizes this phenomenon as ”futurism fatigue”(Eshun 288). He observes that ”Because the practice of countermemory defined itself as an ethical commitment to history, the dead, and the forgotten, the manufacture of conceptual tools that could analyze and assemble counterfutures was understood as unethical dereliction of duty”(Eshun 288). This ever-present feeling tells us that to dream of a better future is to ignore our duty to the past. The candle burns from both ends.
Where do we go from here? Philosopher Cornel West has frequently discussed consonances between Black music and the work of Russian writer Anton Chekhov; these comments allow us to better see the problem before us. West reminds us that the blues is ”a tradition that says I want to be unflinchingly honest and candid about catastrophe, and not just in the sense of extreme moments in life”(West xxi). Chekhov shares the blues’ concern with ”the steady ache of misery in everyday life, the inescapability, ineluctability of coming to terms with the effects of the catastrophic”(West xxi). For both:
the catastrophic is not to be reduced to the problematic. Philosophers are interested in solving problems, whereas with the Blues and with Chekhov there’s no resolution at all. Fundamentally it’s going to be about the quality of your stamina, your perseverance. The question is, what kind of strength, what kinds of resilience are you going to be able to muster in order to make it until the worms get your body? (West xxi)
The question we face currently is the same: what kind of strength will allow us to see the present soberly. What kind of strength will allow us to endure?
Works cited:
Delany, Samuel. ”Racism and Science Fiction.” Atheist in the Attic, PM Press, Oakland, CA, 2018, pp. 73–94.
Drery, Mark. ”Black to the Future.” Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 1994, pp. 179–222.
Eshun, Kodwo. ”Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 2003, pp. 287–302. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949397. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.
West, Cornel. ”The Poet of Catastrophe.” Chekhov in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2023, p. XXI–XXVI.