For ikke så længe siden kiggede jeg på Science Fiction Studies #102, July 2007, der altså er 12 år gammel. Den her gang kigger jeg på et tidsskrift, som ligger gratis på nettet og  er fra sidste år.

MOSF Journal of Science Fiction
Vol 2, No 2 (2018)
Special Issue on #Afrofuturism

https://publish.lib.umd.edu/scifi/issue/view/31/showToc

Jeg læste også der her nummer, da det var nyt.

Aisha Matthews. Foreword to the Special Issue on Afrofuturism

Forskellige definitioner.

Essay

Lidia Kniaź. “A Glitch in the Matrix”: A Reflection on Shabazz Palaces’ “Welcome to To Quazarz” or a New Wave of Afrofuturist Music Videos

Noget om musik-videoer, jeg vist ikke kunne finde.

Melanie Marotta. Nnedi Okorafor’s Afrofuturism and the Motif of Hair

Okorafor har oplevet, at fremmede bare rørte ved hendes “mærkelige” hår. Hår breder sig også i nogle af hendes værker. Bintis hår er vigtigt, bl.a. fordi hun smører sit hjemlands jord i det. Senere bliver hendes ændrede hår tegn på, at hun selv er blevet fundamentalt ændret. Hun kan gemme sig bag sit hår. I “Hello, Moto” bærer hovedpersonen paryk.

Jalondra A Davis. Power and Vulnerability: Black Girl’s Magic in Black Women’s Science Fiction

Abstract – #Blackgirlmagic has become a mode of digital resistance against the devaluing of black women and girls. But it has also raised criticism by black feminists who question the political potential of its focused on glamorized, and often commercialized black femininity, its ableism and centering of beauty and, most of all its reinscription of a strong black woman narrative that trivializes black women’s pain and demands their labor rather than addressing the conditions that necessitate their allegedly superhuman strength (Hobson, 2016). This analysis of Black women’s science fiction proposes a different consideration of magic and Black girls, and identifies an archive of BlackGirlMagic that locates power within vulnerability and otherhuman possibility.

Parable of the Sower er en populær ting at analysere. Brown Girl in the Ring. Who Fears Death.

Amandine Faucheux, Isiah Lavender III. Tricknology: Theorizing the Trickster in Afrofuturism

Abstract – The antithetical convergences of myth and science, nature and technology, male and female, even human and animal create the liminal spaces from which the technological trickster emerges in Afrofuturism. Borrowing ideas from critical race, cyborg, and feminist theories along with thinking from animal studies, this essay outlines a few of the many possibilities of a trickster technology where this mutable and mythic figure triggers the breakdown of race and gender anxieties leading to the end of these interlocking oppressions in one kind of Afrofuture. Trickster technology may be defined as a black character’s pragmatic application of biopolitical knowledge to manipulate the environment to his or her own benefit. Blackness itself effectively counteracts the “racializing assemblages” of the white world that produced “a conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 3). Put simply, we explore types of shape-shifting as a trickster technology which revises ideologies of difference with respect to race, gender, and class to actualize Afrofuturism’s promise of freedom in Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed (1980), and Nalo Hopkinson’s “Ganger (Ball Lightning)” (2001) and Midnight Robber (2000).

‘… with race understood “as a labor-based technology”.’ Ouch.

Ganger: “an electro-sex suit that transforms into a trickster figure with the ability to challenge the two protagonists’ identities.”

Jeg er ikke helt sikker på, hvordan dragterne bliver en “trickster”.

Granny Nanny i Midnight Robber er bl.a. opkaldt efter Anansi, en stor filur. Men vi bliver også snydt af den mindre ai, eshu.

Johan Lau Munkholm. Promises of Uncertainty: A study of afrofuturistic interventions into the archive

Abstract – The concept ‘Afrofuturism’ was a subversive offspring of an enthusiastic celebration of the Internet’s imagined potentiality in the 1990s in white tech-circles. It has since become a multifaceted and complex gathering of artistic expressions, political interventions and imaginative speculation in diasporic culture. In this article, it is especially explored as a temporal disruption of the official archives of history that organize and represent temporality in an ordered and rigid fashion for the benefit of the imperial powers that have historically subjugated the African Diaspora with consequences for the past and the future. The temporal revisionist practices akin to afrofuturistic epistemology are investigated through two figural prisms: The Data Thief from John Akomfrah’s film The Last Angel of History and jazz legend Sun Ra. These figures represent different yet overlapping examples of temporal rebellion against official history by upsetting historical linearity and creating futuristic paths of unknown virtuality. The temporal field that the Data Thief and Sun Ra open for exploratory enquiry is further explored through Walter Benjamin’s meditations on weak messianism and Jacques Derrida’s musings on the archive and spectrology.

Det lyder som om, afrofuturisme også kan indeholde rumvæsner, men de vil nok opføre sig på en anden måde.

Slaver blev bogstaveligt kidnappet af fremmede (alien abduction).

Sarah Olutola. Blood, Soil and Zombies: Afrofuturist Collaboration and (Re-)Appropriation in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring

Abstract – In her Afrofuturist novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson unravels the psychological, cultural and historical trauma of the zombie figure. More than simply a supernatural element of the text, the zombie, and more particularly the latent psycho-social trauma it fantastically embodies, forms the very bedrock of the Afrocentric setting in a way that exposes and critiques the continued suffering of African diasporic peoples under racialized economic structures. While the origins of the zombie document Haitian anxieties surrounding slave labor, the zombie’s contemporary form, in reflecting middle class preoccupations with global capitalist consumption, highlights the ways in which cultural appropriation of Afrocentric culture helps perpetuate a larger systemic cycle of violence that erases black pasts while collapsing black futures into an uncertain present. This paper will explore the ways in which Hopkinson uses her vision of a dystopian Toronto that entraps and vilifies its poor racialized citizens (for the protection of its larger population) to challenge neoliberal global dominance. Through her re-privileging of Afro-Caribbean spiritual systems and knowledge frameworks, Hopkinson suggests that only by challenging and seeking alternatives to the epistemologies inherited by European modernity can we hope to counteract the violence they continuously enact upon global populations and revive hope for the prosperity of black life in the future. However, while her novel implicates cultural appropriation as part of a larger, white supremacist institutional regime, her novel’s framing of Afrocentricity on diasporic Indigenous soil highlights further challenges of Afrocentric representation in Afrofuturist literature.

Zombien symboliserer den fattige. Og på en måde, hvor den fattige er problemet, ikke symptomet på kapitalisme.

Når en tekst placerer afroamerikaneren centralt, risikerer den at glemme indianeren.

John Gordon Russell. Frozen Journey: Science Fiction, Blacks, Race, and the Limits of Speculative Practice

Abstract – This paper examines the pre-afrofuturistic representation of blacks in science fiction, who for much of the genre’s history have been presented through the distorted prism of racial stereotypes. I argue that despite characterizations of the genre as progressively liberal, its engagement with issues of race and racism has largely been, like the larger society of which it is part, characterized by alternating periods of stasis and momentum. When the genre has dealt with race and racism, it has generally preferred to do so in the form of allegory and metaphor in which alien and robotic others substitute for real-world others. Moreover, despite its lofty “sense-of-wonder” pledge to explore vast, uncharted imaginative ideoscapes, when it comes to race, the genre has traditionally been remarkably grounded, rearticulating rather than subverting tired tropes, its depiction of blacks and other people of color mired in predictable clichés not sublime paradigm shattering, visionary splendor, In the end, the treatment of race in science fiction has largely articulated an abstract, intellectual antiracism that does not necessarily apply to an authentic racial tolerance toward actual racial or ethnic groups and by an inability to write beyond the very intolerance it ostensibly critiques.

Silverberg-bashing! Stadig en populær sport.

Star Trek-bashing. Hm. Men korrekt. Hvis man er racistisk overfor borger, så kommer de ikke rendende og klager. (Nyt ord: xenoface.) Og i fremtiden er alle racer lige, på en udpræget amerikansk måde. Fordi det stræber alle jo efter.

Resnick-bashing!

Books in Review

Courtney Novosat, Paul Piatkowski, Tom Lubek. Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness

11 essays. De fleste mangelfulde, lader det til.

Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction

Hm. Terry Carr udgav sig en overgang for at være sort. En detalje i bogens undersøgelse af bl.a. fanzines og fjernsyn.

The Racial Horizon of Utopia: Unthinking the Future of Race in Late Twentieth-Century American Utopian Novels

Det er svært at skrive utopier. Her bliver der bl.a. kigget på forsøg af Delany og Butler.