“If your main squeeze has just decided to walk out on you, booze and Vasopressin are the ultimate in masochistic pharmacology; the juice makes you maudlin and the Vasopressin makes you remember, I mean really remember. Clinically they use the stuff to counter senile amnesia, but the street finds its own uses for things.”
– William Gibson, “Burning Chrome” (1982)
PART I: A FUTURE THAT’S WHITE FOR YOU
Where’s the subaltern in science fiction? Where are the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free? Often, in obscurity. It’s no coincidence that speculative discourse in Euro-America doesn’t challenge but instead reproduces contemporary — and sometimes ancient — socioeconomic, ethnoracial, and geopolitical inequalities, because the past and the future are written to favor the winners of history. Consequently, despite the realities of diaspora and migration, the demographic consequences of colony and empire, and the internal heterogeneity of “culture” that results from these processes, Euro-American constructions of the future are pregnant with Asimovian fixations toward space colonies, planetary fiefdoms, and galactic empires sustained by the hard power of rayguns, laserbeams, and toxic masculinity. Unsurprisingly, the serfs of the space age — the denizens of imperialistic futures — feature not.
For its apparent rejection of these sociopolitical reductions, though, the cyberpunk movement has been celebrated since its inception in the 1980s. As Sam Delany points out when he asks “Is Cyberpunk a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?” the movement emphasized “working class heroes [and] the streetwise cynicism of its major and minor characters,” which posited “new, possible relations between science fiction and the world.” Despite that cyberpunk emerged better equipped to address the paranoia of disaffection underpinning the rapid emergence of new technologies in the 1980s, even the prescient hedonism of, say, Philip K. Dick’s narco-securocracies was often conveyed through the eyes of the police, not the policed (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), through culture producers, not culture consumers (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said). So even as the Gibsonian multinational became the contested zone of vicious anti-globalization skepticism, the cyberpunk movement’s characters, subjects, and themes — the alienation of the white, heterosexual “everyman” — was broadly indifferent toward those most exploited and affected by global capitalism, the true deviants of today’s gritty dystopia: the female, the colored, the migrant, and the queer.
In contrast to cyberpunk’s indifference, the Afrofuturism movement — which simmered in the second half of the 20th century and bubbled up in the 90s — take us further into the margins, subversively interpreting the Black experience as a matrix of technological innovation and, concurrently, appraising technology as the instrument of personal reinvention and the rearticulation of ancestral histories that transcend the self. Indeed, in “Black to the Future,” the essay that coined the movement’s name, cultural critic Mark Dery asks: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out… imagine possible futures?” No — if the past is never reclaimed.
But Afrofuturism is concerned with not only the future and the past, but also the future through the past. Although Dery’s original concern was Afrofuturism’s written materials, these dynamics are more salient in the music and visual arts that simultaneously and subsequently emerged. Recognizing that Black bodies have long been the subjects of technology (e.g., the burglary of Henrietta Lacks’s DNA, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment), Afrofuturism’s multimedia narratives transform these bodies into agents in control thereof. Therefore, Dery writes, hip-hop emerges from the “misuse” of turntables, the music paired with moves that are “funky and mechanical at the same time.” And precisely this symbiosis of organic and synthetic motifs captures the Hegelian dialectic embedded in Afrofuturist discourse, where the future corresponds to the synthesis of the unspoiled pre-abduction past (the thesis) and the gruesome post-emancipation present (the antithesis). Hence, Afrika Bambaataa’s Universal Zulu Nation hip-hop awareness group — whose name reclaims the past to denote a utopian pan-African ethos — and the eclectic, futuristic-cum-traditional costumes he and his co-performers donned at shows.