Free Report Sample on Afrofuturism: Redefining History, Technology, and the Future

Afro-futurism is a word coined in 1993 though coherently defined in the modern day as the critical evaluation of the intersection between science, race, science fiction, and imagination, all with black aesthetics and African-centric concepts. With the application of science-fiction and magical realism, writers and artists have portrayed the reality of the African diaspora using various channels and re-imagined the African tradition with countless amounts of exciting and futuristic possibilities. Therefore, Afrofuturism serves the purpose of confronting and soothing the burn of history and its obstinate legacy observed in the 21st century. Afrofuturism overturns the current existing inequities of power through future projections. Therefore, Afrofuturism is a reappropriation of history and a different perception of mainstream outlooks toward culture, technology, and the future.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

It is practicable to state that Afrofuturism presents a space in which the tense association between blackness and technology can be explored and unraveled. Interestingly, black bodies are employed as technology, yet technology is wielded against black bodies. Therefore, in stark reality, based on this, the ideology of the black cyborg has roots. The history of black bodies employed as technology mostly without the consent of the subject precedes the founding of America. Slavery operated under the continuous supposition that black bodies, mainly black female bodies, acted only as a technology of reproduction and production. Hence, the subject becomes an object; the human becomes a machine. Afrofuturism recognizes the thin boundary between machine and man since each can use the other to its advantage.

In Afrofuturism, there is a constant discussion of space and time. As the descendants of aliens pulled across the Atlantic, African Americans have been placed in a position within a broken concept of time whereby space and time lose their context. From this perspective, it is right to agree with Dery’s argument that the likelihood of the future is haunting, and although we cannot change past events, it is still possible to shape the future. The posthumanism period presents a neo-slave story depicted by Janelle Monáe’s Metropolis Worldscape and Octavia Butler’s Kindred. Both artists bring out the existing process of power to enact the rigid hierarchies that thrive and profit off of the objectification of disregarded, enslaved female bodies. The only disparity between the two artists is the presence of a double, time travel and the concept of posthuman workers.

Also, the concept of cyborgs, which blends organic material and technology hardware, has an essential role in Afrofuturism. The combination of organic material and human-made material functions to question the notion of what is human. Thus, when discussing cyborgs, it is about how the body functions currently in society. With humanity's shift to technology as the driving force, individuals without these technologies become hierarchically less. As a result, the metal in the cyborg portrays the rigidity of the current social composition that restricts access to technological power. The commonness of posthuman bodies in Afrofuturist art signifies an effort to reconfigure how gendered and racialized bodies operate within the greater body politic.