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Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of AstroBlackness Authors: Reynaldo Anderson & Charles E. Jones. Lanham Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, 2016 ISBN: 978-1498510509 Price: $75.00 Hardback. Pages: 240
When examining the colorblind genre of science fiction and the possibilities of a post-racial future, there is an erasure of Black people, their history, and their stories. Black people were excluded as full subjects within the genre. The obvious omission of race and Black humanity, led to the creation of Black science fiction (Black SF). Black SF is speculative fiction that utilizes Afrocentric themes and imagery to address the concerns of Black people in the twentieth-century techno-culture (Dery, 1993). Black SF gave Black authors the space and the autonomy to control the space, time, and history of Black people. From the writings and theorizations of prominent Black SF writers across the diaspora, Afrofuturism emerged as a literary and cultural aesthetic in the 1990s. Over the last three decades, Afrofuturism has gained substantial value in academic and popular discourse.
Afrofuturism has become the umbrella term for considering how science fiction, fantasy, and technology can be used to imagine and reimagine lost pasts and new futures for alienated, black others (Anderson & Jones, p.11). Afrofuturism was coined by cultural critic Mark Dery, in his essay, Black to the Future (1993), which was a roundtable discussion with Black scholars Tricia Rose, Samuel R. Delany and Greg Tate. Dery s essay sought to reframe discussions about art and social change through the Black cultural lens of science and technology in the 1980s and 1990s (Dery, 1993, Womack, 2013,). Afrofuturism is as much a reclamation project of a revisionist past as it is an imaginary future (Anderson & Jones, 2016, p.77). Afrofuturism embraced the history of racialization and disrupted it by functioning within the troubled history of the African diaspora and created a space for African Americans to reimagine their Blackness, Black identity, and speculate about their future.
Scholars such as Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones (2016) argue that, the early expression of Afrofuturism was limited to art, music, the digital divide, and speculative literature, and that Afrofuturism has currently matured past that (p. viii). Building upon the old to remake anew, Anderson and Jones are reshaping the boundaries of what...