Afrofuturism

The word "Afrofuturism" was coined in 1993, by the cultural critic Mark Dery, in an essay titled Black to the Future. But the coining of the word and the beginning of the thing are separated by four decades, and that gap is the first thing to understand about this movement. Dery did not invent Afrofuturism. He named something that had already been alive and developing for half a century — in music, in literature, in visual art — and that naming let people see, retrospectively, that a long scattered tradition had been one tradition all along. Afrofuturism is, for this reason, unlike almost every other movement in this publication. It is not a style that appeared, peaked, and passed. It is a continuous, seven-decade current, and its most famous public moment — the global blockbuster of 2018 — was not its beginning but a surfacing.

To understand the movement, begin with a question it was built to answer. Science fiction, as a popular genre, spent much of the twentieth century imagining the human future — space travel, advanced technology, new worlds — and imagining it, overwhelmingly, as white. Black people were largely absent from these futures, or present only at the margins. For a people whose history in the Americas began with the Middle Passage and slavery, this absence carried a specific and brutal implication: that Black people belonged to the past, to history's wreckage, but not to the future being imagined. Afrofuturism is, at its core, the refusal of that implication. It is the insistence — across music, fiction, art, and film — that Black people are in the future, are central to it, and have always had a relationship with the cosmos, with technology, and with the imagination of other worlds.

The musical origins are usually traced to one extraordinary figure: the jazz composer and bandleader Sun Ra. Born Herman Blount in Alabama in 1914, he renamed himself after the Egyptian sun god, claimed to have been transported to Saturn, and built, from the 1950s onward, a body of work — recordings, performances, and eventually the 1974 film Space Is the Place — that fused jazz with cosmic philosophy, ancient Egyptian imagery, and elaborate science-fiction mythology. His band, the Arkestra, performed in costumes of glittering metallics and pharaonic headdresses. Sun Ra's argument, made through decades of music and spectacle, was that space was not an escape but a homeland — that for a people stolen from one continent and brutalized on another, the cosmos itself could be the place of belonging. In the 1970s, George Clinton extended this cosmology into funk: Parliament-Funkadelic arrived on stage in a literal spaceship, the Mothership, and built an entire mythology of Black liberation through outer space and pure rhythm.

The literary tradition is anchored by Octavia E. Butler, one of the major American novelists of the late twentieth century. Across novels written from the 1970s until her death in 2006 — Kindred, the Patternist sequence, the Xenogenesis trilogy, the Parable books — Butler used science fiction to think with unmatched seriousness about power, hierarchy, survival, bodily autonomy, and the long shadow of slavery. Kindred (1979), in which a Black woman in 1976 is pulled repeatedly back in time to a pre-Civil-War plantation, remains one of the most-taught works of American fiction precisely because it uses the machinery of science fiction to make the past viscerally, physically present. Alongside Butler, the critic and writer Samuel R. Delany had been producing formally radical, intellectually demanding science fiction since the 1960s. Together they established that the genre could carry the full weight of Black thought about history and the future.

What does Afrofuturism look like? Its visual grammar, developed across all these decades and media, has a recognizable vocabulary. It fuses African visual traditions — Egyptian iconography, West African textile and adornment, pan-African pattern — with the imagery of science fiction and the cosmos. It favors rich metallics, gold above all, set against the deep colors of deep space. It treats adornment as a form of technology: textile, beadwork, headdress, and pattern presented not as "traditional craft" in a museum sense but as sophisticated, advanced, future-facing design. And it consistently places the cosmos in the role of homeland — space travel functioning as a metaphor for diaspora, for the search for belonging, for a destination beyond the reach of the history that produced the movement.

The contemporary flowering has been broad. The musician and filmmaker Janelle Monáe built an entire body of work — the Metropolis suite, The ArchAndroid, Dirty Computer — around an Afrofuturist android mythology exploring identity, freedom, and difference. The British artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah produced essayistic films that are central to the movement's critical seriousness. Visual artists including Wangechi Mutu and others have brought Afrofuturist imagery into major museums and galleries. And in 2018, Marvel's Black Panther brought the aesthetic to the largest audience it had ever reached. The film's fictional nation of Wakanda — an African society never colonized, technologically the most advanced on earth — was a precise dramatization of the Afrofuturist proposition. The costume designer Ruth E. Carter, drawing meticulously on a wide range of real African cultures and reframing their visual languages as advanced and future-facing, won an Academy Award for the work; she would win a second for the sequel. It is important to be exact about what Black Panther did and did not do. It did not invent Afrofuturism, and treating 2018 as the movement's starting point erases Sun Ra, Butler, Clinton, Delany, and seventy years of work. What the film did was make a long, deep, and continuously developing tradition visible, all at once, to a global mass audience.

Afrofuturism's place in this publication's map of movements is therefore a particular one. In lineage it draws on the symbol-rich visual traditions of Africa — the linguistic, proverb-bearing systems of Adinkra and West African textile among them — and reframes them as the design language of an imagined future. In spirit it stands beside Solarpunk as one of the few movements founded on hope and construction rather than critique or nostalgia, and against Cyberpunk, whose dark, corporate, dystopian future it implicitly answers with a different proposition entirely. But the deepest point is the one to end on. Afrofuturism is not, finally, a visual style that can be lifted and applied. It is a sustained act of imaginative reclamation — a seven-decade insistence, made in music and books and paint and film, that the future belongs to everyone, and that a people written out of the future by others can, and will, write themselves back in.