Vi har allerede haft Akademikere og afrofuturisme og Nyere akademikere og afrofuturisme. Den her gang ser vi på et par artikler, der strækker sig over forskellige kilder og årstal.

CR The New Centennial Review Volume(2) · June 2003 – Kodwo Eshun. Further Considerations on Afrofuturism

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/27225560_Further_Considerations_on_Afrofuturism, gratis

Abstractish – Imagine a team of African archaeologists from the future—some silicon, some carbon, some wet, some dry—excavating a site, a museum from their past: a museum whose ruined documents and leaking discs are identifiable as belonging to our present, the early twenty-first century. Sifting patiently through the rubble, our archaeologists from the United States of Africa, the USAF, would be struck by how much Afrodiasporic subjectivity in the twentieth century constituted itself through the cultural project of recovery. In their Age of Total Recall, memory is never lost. Only the art of forgetting. Imagine them reconstructing the conceptual framework of our cultural moment from those fragments. What are the parameters of that moment, the edge of that framework? […] To conclude: Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken. The manufacture, migration, and mutation of concepts and approaches within the fields of the theoretical and the fictional, the digital and the sonic, the visual and the architectural exemplifies the expanded field of Afrofuturism considered as a multimedia project distributed across the nodes, hubs, rings, and stars of the Black Atlantic. As a tool kit developed for and by Afrodiasporic intellectuals, the imperative to code, adopt, adapt, translate, misread, rework, and revision these concepts, under the conditions specified in this essay, is likely to persist in the decades to come.

“Power now deploys a mode the critic Mark Fisher () calls SF (science fiction) capital. SF capital is the synergy, the positive feedback between future-oriented media and capital. The alliance between cybernetic futurism and “New Economy” theories argues that information is a direct generator of economic value. Information about the future therefore circulates as an increasingly important commodity. It exists in mathematical formalizations such as computer simulations, economic projections, weather reports, futures trading, think-tank reports, consultancy papers—and through informal descriptions such as sciencefiction cinema, science-fiction novels, sonic fictions, religious prophecy, and venture capital. Bridging the two are formal-informal hybrids, such as the global scenarios of the professional market futurist.”

Et nyt begreb, jeg ikke er stødt på før. I det hele taget er den her artikel lidt abstrakt. Lidt teoretisk. Og samtidig et stykke fiktion noget af vejen.

Heldigvis er der også konkrete eksempler. Kunstnere: Georges Adeagbo, Meshac Gaba.

Nogen siger, at fremtiden er grum for afrikanere. Og udtalelser af den slags kan gå i opfyldelse. Afrofuturisme er et forsøg på at sige noget andet.

Flere navne: Sun Ra. The Last Angel of History. Juan Atkins, Derrick May. Osv.

Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1 (March 2010), pp. 107-109 – Review: Feminism, Afrofuturism, and the Redefinition of Science Fiction. Reviewed Work: Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory by Marleen Barr – Review by: Ritch Calvin

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40649589

Bogen indeholder både essays og fiktion.

Er sf af sorte “i virkeligheden” fantasy? Hvem definerer virkeligheden?

De 3 vigtige essays, gratis:

https://saciesite.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/afro-future0afemales0ablack-writers0achart-science-fiction_s-newest0anew-wave-trajectory.pdf

Indhold, fiktion

Scenario 2, 2018, Afrofuturisme, Barbara Hilton

http://www.scenariomagazine.com/product/afrofuturism/

Afrofuturism is on the rise. It is both a genre and a way of thinking that blends Afro-culture, science fiction, magical realism, technology, and traditional African mysticism. It takes many forms, and tells many different stories, but one common feature is that Afrofuturists fight for equality and black people’s right to a place in the future. This issue’s main feature takes a closer look at the cultural movement and its frontline fighters.

Bladet findes både på dansk og engelsk. Jeg har læst artiklen på dansk. 🇩🇰🇩🇰🇩🇰

Diverse fakta + interview med ca. 3 eksperter.

• Ytasha Womack, manuskriptforfatter, forfatter, afrofuturist.
• Osborne Macharia, fotograf.
• Niels Dalgaard, ph.d i nordisk litteratur, ekspert i science fiction, forfatter og redaktør på det danske science fiction-tidsskrift Proxima. 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

SFRA Review, vol. 327, Winter 2019, pp. 48-51. – “Afrofuturism’s Specter: Alternate History, Racial Capitalism, and Nisi Shawl’s Everfair.” Sean Guynes

https://seanguynes.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/afrofuturisms-specter.pdf gratis

Everfair is about the creation of a multi-racial, intergenerational, queerfriendly, disability-championing, anti-colonial state in Central Africa, in and around the land formerly known as the Belgian Congo, and which is today in our world occupied by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. The novel spans the years 1889 to 1919, telling the story of the initial impetus behind the creation of Everfair by the British socialist Fabian society, together with a black American orator and former slave (modeled on George Washington Williams), and some money from a black missionary society, all the way up to the integration of indigenous tribal governments into the new state, and the decolonial revolution that the socialists, Christians, and indigenous Africans of Everfair lead against King Leopold of Belgium, with the novel ending shortly after WWI and a series of treaties that ratify Everfair’s existence in the international legal sphere.

“I want to […] suggest that Afrofuturism, particularly in the American black diaspora, is at its core a response to formations of racial capitalism.”

“Shawl’s novel charts the birth of a utopian Afrofuturist project by asking not “what could be, in the future, if” but instead “what if” the most devastating genocide in modern African history had become the cause for anti-colonial struggle and decolonization half-a-century early.”

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.

Cultural appropriation. Det er et lidt svært begreb for mig. Er det noget, jeg er udsat for? Lad mig se.

Danny Kaye synger om København. Fuck sådan en som mig, der helst vil kalde byen København, men kan leve med “Copenhaygen”. Men næ nej, det ender med at blive “Copenhahgen”.

Nåh ja. Der var også det der med sengen. Men det var vist ikke hans idé.

Jeg vil ikke begynde at lave en liste over de film og serier, der lader skuespillere tale dårligt tysk, dansk, svensk osv.

Vi behøver ikke tale korrekt kode

Mifunes sidste sang er på nogle måder en bemærkelsesværdig film. Men det er også en film om, at Lolland er fattigt, sølle, langt ude på landet. Faktisk ved festlige lejligheder også evnesvagt, ildelugtende og manipulerende. Mums. Som eksil-lollik: Det er altså ikke det eneste, man kan sige.

ETA: Jeg havde nær glemt, at som trekkie og i det hele taget fan af science fiction, så er der fordomme om mig. Hm. Men kan man tælle det med? Nå jo. Når “jeg” er med i Big Bang Theory, fordi jeg er morsom.

Okay, det er ikke helt afrofuturisme det her. Det er bare mig, der prøver at forestille mig afrofuturismes grundlag. Ligesom i det tidligere indlæg Er jeg med?

Anmeldelse af Midnight Robber, af Nalo Hopkinson.

Skitse: Oho. Like it starting, oui? Don’t be frightened, sweetness; is for the best. I go be with you the whole time. Trust me and let me distract you little bit with one anansi story.

Toussaint er en planet, der bestyres (tror jeg) af Marryshow Corporation. (Via et dimensionsslør kan man komme til planetens fætter, New Half-Way Tree, der ikke er nær så velordnet.)

Tan-Tans far er borgmester. Mor er måske far utro.

Huset har en ai, kaldet eshu. (Den er ikke så smart og forstår fx ikke jalousi.) Planeten har en ai, kaldet Granny Nanny, Granny Nansi’s web, Grande Nanotech Sentient Interface eller Grande ‘Nansi Web. Mennesker kommunikerer med begge dele via noget indbygget. Desuden kan man synge til GN, via nannysong. En lille gruppe fravælger alt det her computer-snavs.

Tilsyneladende er alle på planeten sorte. Forbrydere bliver sendt til fætter-planeten.

Tan-Tan leger, at hun er Midnight Robber, en fiktiv (?) person. Det bliver ekstra vigtigt, da far forlader mor.

Er det science fiction? Ja.

Temaer: Jeg vidste lidt om bogen på forhånd. Granny Nanny osv. (som man kunne kalde cyberpunk) fyldte en del i hovedet på mig. Automatisering er helt normalt, og eneste undtagelse er kokke og andre kunstnere, der arbejder frivilligt. (Obs. Det er okay at være kok. Det er ikke okay at løbe foran en rickshaw.) Jeg blev overrasket, da vi pludselig forlod alt det.

Jeg vidste også godt, hvad forbindelsen er mellem Tan-Tan og bogens titel. Igen kom det bag på mig, at det spillede en mindre rolle.

Det var til gengæld en stor overraskelse, at Tan-Tan har elendige forældre. At hendes far på et tidspunkt lader en duel afgøre sit forhold til moderen. At en intelligent art på New Half-Way Tree så åbenlyst bliver udsat for racisme. Og at Tan-Tan får ptsd eller noget i den retning. Øv.

Er det godt? Nemlig. Som jeg antyder, skal man dog kunne leve med et (for os) uvant engelsk. Og så skal man ikke tænke så meget over, at vi 2 gange kommer over i et nyt hjørne af verden via flugt.

(Og hvor går man hen efter den titel?)

Er Nalo Hopkinson afrofuturist? Tja? Afrofuturism: Synecdoche is Not the Same as Solidarity.

Ret nyt tweet.

Samantha Bee snakker afrofuturisme! Black Future Month.

Er Nnedi Okorafor afrofuturist? Noget af tiden. In Conversation: Nnedi Okorafor on Venom, George R.R. Martin and Why Artists Can’t Have Mentors.

I øvrigt har jeg læst Report From Planet Midnight. En god, lille bog. Den indeholder bl.a. et essay, der oprindeligt var en tale, med visse teater-elementer. Så noget af talen er hun ikke sig selv, men et rumvæsen, der ikke kan forstå vores måde at tale om race på.