Content area
Full Text
In 1999 Alondra Nelson, then a graduate student in American studies at New York University, launched an online community dedicated to the study of what might be best described to the uninitiated as black science fiction. Nelson named the forum the "AfroFuturism" listserv after a term coined by Mark Dery in his set of interviews about black artists whose works displayed a uniquely African-American take on futuristic narratives of scientific and technological progress (Dery 1993). As Nelson explains, Dery and his interviewees-scholars Tricia Rose and Greg Tate and novelist Samuel Delany:
claimed that these works simultaneously referenced a past of abduction, displacement and alien-nation, and inspired technical and creative innovations in the work of such artists as Lee "Scratch" Perry, George Clinton and Sun Ra. Science fiction was a recurring motif in the music of these artists, they argued, because it was an apt metaphor for black life and history" (Nelson 2007).
Since the beginnings of the listserv, its contributors have commented on countless aspects of Afrofuturist culture and art, debated its aims and methods, and otherwise shaped the definition of Afrofuturism to the extent that it has become a recognizable field of scholarly inquiry and artistic production.1 Later in 1999 Nelson organized a conference on the subject, "AfroFuturism I Forum: a critical dialogue on the future of black cultural production," at NYU and in 2002 a special issue of Social Text highlighted the subject featuring recent Afrofuturist poetry, prose, visual arts, and scholarship.
While the moniker "Afrofuturism" and the study thereof are relatively new phenomena, we can trace a long legacy of Afrofuturist cultural production. Scholars of Afrofuturism have recognized elements of the project in the work of novelist Ralph Ellison and bandleader Sun Ra as early as the 19505 (Eshun 1998; Weheliye 2003; Yaszek 2005; Zuberi 2004). This vein of artistic production continued through the 19705 with the prose and stage works of Ishmael Reed and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and the disco-funk of George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic up through the 19805 with the street art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and the raps of the Ultramagnetic MCs. Today, the most notable examples of Afrofuturist activity continue to be found in the world of hip hop, where artists like Cee-Lo, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, and...