Unit 1 - Futurities Week 2: Afrofuturism MDSB14

Human, Animal, Machine Wednesdays, 9 - 11AM Humanities Wing, Room 214 Instructor: Kanika Lawton (they/them) [email protected]

2Lecture slides will now be available a few minutes before class for you to follow along with during class

These slides are now under Modules on Quercus (You are still expected to come to class each week)

Note on lecture slides 3Your first reading reflection is due next Friday, September 20th at 11:59PM EST • Submit on Quercus; emailed reading reflections will not be graded

Write on one text and one media object from the “Futurities” unit

2-3 double-spaced pages, 12pt font (Times New Roman preferred), properly cited (Chicago Style

preferred)

Visit me after class, during office hours, book an appointment, or email me if you have any questions

First reading reflection

What can science fiction offer to marginalized communities? 5Cultural aesthetic, form of history, and art, film, literature,

and music movement that explores the intersection of

Afrodiasporic cultural production with science and

technology

Associated with science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy,

and magical realism Coined by Mark Dery in his 1993 essay “Black to the

Future,” which explored common tropes in African

American science fiction

Expanded in the late 1990s by writers like Alondra Nelson Afrofuturism Kaylan F. Michael 6For Nelson, “Afrofuturism can be broadly defined as

‘African American voices’ with ‘other stories to tell about

culture, technology, and things to come’ that are

concerned with ‘sci-fi imagery, futurist themes, and

technological innovation in the African diaspora”

(“Introduction: Future Texts,” 9)

A form of forward and backward thinking; Afrofuturism

pulls from the painful past and present to imagine better

futures through a Black cultural lens

Afrofuturism David Alabo One of the most influential pieces of media on Afrofuturism is

The Last Angel of History (dir. John Akomfrah, 1996), a docu-fiction

film about its origins, influences, and trajectories

8Distinct from Afrofuturism Africanfuturism is a cultural aesthetic and science fiction

subgenre rooted in African culture, history, mythology, and

perspectives rather than focusing solely on the African

diaspora Centered on those of African descent and located in Africa Coined in 2019 by Nnedi Okorafor Africanfuturism David Alabo 9Traces some of the historical and conceptual trajectories of Afrofuturist thought, especially at the

intersection of race and technology after the late-1990s “digital boom” • The “digital boom” promised a “placeless, raceless, bodiless near future enabled by

technological progress,” (1) but this isn’t the case for everyone The “digital divide” is a code word for technological inequality between white people and people of

colour, especially Black people, who are assumed to be unable to “keep up” with high-tech society • This obscures the fact that uneven access to technology is a symptom of economic inequalities

that predate the Internet

“Forecasts of a utopian (to some) race-free future and pronouncements of the dystopian digital divide

are the predominant discourses of blackness and technology in the public sphere” (1)

• For both narratives, race is a liability

Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts” For Nelson, one of the founding myths of the digital age is

that racial (and gendered) differences would be eliminated

Even if technology could emancipate humans from their

physical bodies and past experiences, this ”radical

humanism” would only free some humans

“Bodies carry different social weights that unevenly

mediate access to freely constructed identity” (Nelson,

“Introduction: Future Texts,” 3)

10 The myth of a “placeless,

raceless, bodiless” future

Kaylan F. Michael 11 Combines speculative fiction on a team of future African archaeologists with meditations on

Afrofuturism, from its “founding trauma” to its future Eshun speculates that the United States of Africa (USAF) archaeologists would be surprised to discovery

that so much Afrodiasporic subjectivity is produced through “the cultural project of recovery” (458)

“In our time, the USAF archaeologists surmise, imperial racism has denied Black subjects the right to

belong to the enlightenment project, thus creating an urgent need to demonstrate a substantive

historical presence. This desire has overdetermine Black Atlantic intellectual culture for several

centuries. To establish the historical character of black culture, to bring Africa and its subjects into

history denied by Hegel et al., it has been necessary to assemble countermemories that contest the

colonial archive, thereby situating the collective trauma of slavery as the founding moment of

modernity” (458) Eshun, “Further considerations on Afrofuturism” 12 Countermemories “counter,” or move against, “official” histories (i.e., Western, colonial histories) that

displace marginalized communities

• Countermemories place these communities “back into” more robust histories Speaking with Paul Gilroy, Toni Morrison argues that African slaves during the Atlantic Slave Trade were

the first modern subjects • The modern world, or modernity, is built on slavery

For Eshun, critique of modernity must also extend to the future

Countermemories and the origins of modernity 13 If countermemories are “an ethical commitment to history,

the dead, and the forgotten,” (459), counterfutures (futures

that “counter” Western, colonial ideas of the future that

also displace marginalized communities) become suspect

since many African artists are disenchanted with futurism In the mid-20th century struggle against colonialism in

Africa, colonial revenge and violence made African utopias

seem impossible This changed by the early-21st century with the rise of

digital technologies

Counterfutures David Alabo 14 For Eshun, “the field of Afrofuturism does not seek to deny the tradition of countermemory. Rather, it

aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality

towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective” (459) • Or, creating better futures also relies on understanding the past

Power nowadays is both predictive and retrospective; certain futures get endorsed, while others—and

those within them—get discarded • E.g., Africa is always seen as a site of dystopia, or a place with no future

Afrofuturism works to fix this dystopia into other, better futures “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” (463)

The proleptic and retrospective 15 Afrofuturism isn’t just about correcting “the history of the future” or adding more Black voices to

science fiction; rather, “Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science fiction writers

envision. Black existence and science fiction are one in the same” (Eshun, “Further considerations on

Afrofuturism,” 466)

Science fiction can serve as allegories for the experiences of post-slavery Black subjects “Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counterfutures created

in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of

manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be

undertaken” (468)

What can Afrofuturism do? Part of a series of essays on the Black radical tradition, political

thought, and social critique under capitalism, in the neoliberal

university, within public policy, and in the “undercommons” (general

antagonism to the conditions of contemporary life) In this essay, Harvey and Moten talk about logistics to actually talk

about displacement, shipping/being shipped, and

the Atlantic Slave Trade

16 Harvey and Moten, “Fantasy

in the Hold” 17 “To work today is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to

move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without

purpose, to connect without interruption” (Moten and Harvey, “Fantasy in the Hold,” 87) Logistics wants to get rid of the subject altogether

• Marx calls this the automatic subject (capital that exists without human labour); it is also known

as human capital

• But this is a fantasy; every time logistics tries to move away from the human, it buttresses

against it

Where did logistics get the idea it can move bodies without dealing with humans? With its origin in the

Atlantic Slave Trade

The logics of logistics

18 From slavery to prisoners shipped to settler colonies to mass migrations to indentured servitude and

migrant workers nowadays, “logistics was always the transport of slavery, not ‘free’ labour. Logistics

remains, as ever, the transport of objects that is held in the movement of things. And the transport of

things remains, as ever, logistics’ unrealizable ambition” (Harvey and Moten, 92) Modernity itself is in logistics’ hold, but logistics can’t hold everything it puts there • “There are flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship” (94) • Or, there has always been forms of resistance and ways to resist Modernity in logistics’ hold

19 Moving across the Atlantic is unsettling • “The hold’s terrible gift was to gather dispossessed feelings in common, to create a new feel in

the undercommons” (Harvey and Moten, 97) This feeling is hapticality, or “the touch of the undercommons” (98) • It is “the feel that what is to come is here” and “the capacity to feel through others, for others

to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you” (98) “Thrown together touching each other we were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were

supposed to produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home. Though forced to

touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed in that space of no space, though refused sentiment,

history, and home, we feel (for) each other” (98) Hapticality

Hapticality is a form of love for the shipped/as the shipped 21 Science fiction short film by Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu

Title is Swahili for “Breath”

Set in East Africa 35 years after the WWIII, or “The

Water War”

• Harsh conditions, lack of water, and radiation

confines citizens inside their enclosed community

Follows a museum curator who receives a soil sample from

an anonymous sender. Believing that life is possible outside

of the community again, she attempts to leave

Pumzi (2009) Some questions to consider:

1. How does race impact technology? For example, what are your

thoughts on the “digital divide”? 2. Why are countermemories, counterfutures, and other/alternate

ways of thinking about history and the future so important?

3. What are the dangers of ignoring the past by only thinking

about the future? 23 For next week, please watch In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain

(dir. Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, 2015) and complete the assigned readings

by Parikka and Rifkin

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