✊🏿 Afrofuturism, the Art of Coming Home
On why, against our better judgment, we continue to identify "ourselves" with the Modern Era.
👋 Hi, Ed & Chris here. In the Atlas of the Long Now, we interpret our rapidly changing world. We do this with the historic-futuristic glasses of the long-term thinker and the toolbox of the speculative maker. We reinterpret the past, and research the present in search of new sustainable and inclusive futures.
To begin with:
‘There is nothing more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past.’
– Alain LeRoy Locke
And:
‘‘The first thing to do is to consider time as officially ended.’
– Sun Ra, Space is the Place
Today, we look through the lens of Janelle Monáe’s funky mix of Black Feminism, Afrofuturism and Queer Scifi Extravaganza, at how we, against our better judgment, continue to identify ourselves with the Modern Age – the most recent historical period in Western history. We’ll explore what this exactly means, and how we may let go of this historical identification, and what could take its place.
A few years ago we were made aware of Janelle Monáe’s work by Dan Hassler-Forest, an occasional collaborator of ours and an inspiring speaker who writes all sorts of well-researched studies on speculative fiction. We were immediately intrigued by Monáe’s subversive, transgressive, popsugar, scifi weirdness. And, especially, how her voice became part of a powerful new cultural momentum for Afrofuturism, Queerness, Feminism, Black Activism and other alternative futures.
And because we’re also fans of Dan’s many insights into the speculative arts, and he recently published a new book on Monáe – highly recommended for anyone who isn’t put off by media-theoretic abracadabra – here we want to share with you some long-term insights that came to mind while reading it (which, in fairness, we’re still working on) and the prolific googling it subsequently led to.
Afrofuturism, the Art of Coming Home
In 02010, Janelle Monáe broke through with The ArchAndroid, her futuristic debut album. It was the conceptual follow-up to the EP Metropolis: The Chase Suite. In both albums, the listener is taken on the messianic adventures of her robot alter ego Cindi Mayweather. Also on her follow-up album from 02013, The Electric Lady, we follow Cindi Mayweather in her quest to free the robots of Metropolis from some kind of secret society that is trying (with time travel) to suppress love and freedom.
In 02018 her project Dirty Computer is released, which consists of both an album and a music film. Both tell the story of Jane 57821, a non-binary android who rebels against a totalitarian, homophobic regime – New Dawn. Androids who do not conform to official sexual mores are labeled Dirty Computers. When Dirty Computers are arrested their memory is erased. Eventually this also happens to Jane 57821. The musical film consists of fragments of her memories just before they are erased.
Also in her collection of short stories, The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories Of Dirty Computer, which came out last April, we follow the love-starved but often tragic adventures of Jane 57821 and other Dirty Computers. Again, time and identity are luxury goods, “dirty” memories are erased and you can illegally buy new ones. In the world of Dirty Computer, access to the past is a weapon.
The science fiction in The Memory Librarian is about more than just robot love. When looking at the dystopian world of Dirty Computer – where identity and past are erasable – it is not difficult to see an analogy to the situation in which the African-American community currently finds itself (and other communities in the West with a background in the transatlantic slave trade).
Just as Jane 57821 is having her identity and past taken away by New Dawn, African Americans are also being denied a historical identity rooted in a meaningful past. This, of course, is no accident. In an interview with Zora, following her starring role in the feature film Antebellum (02020), Monáe said:
‘The romanticization White people have of the antebellum South is horrific. People still have weddings on plantations. People are still trying to relive their Civil War dreams by going to reenactments. It’s just crazy to me. The president is trying to take the 1619 Project out of schools. The project deals with what Black people have contributed to this country, beginning with slavery. He said, talking about slavery is traumatizing for kids. That’s just more erasure and more whitewashing of our history to promote more romanticizing when America was great for White people.’
The 1619 Project, to which Monáe refers, is a 02019 long-form journalism project by The New York Times Magazine that seeks to understand the history of the United States through the lens of slavery.
The project led to a lot of angry reactions, especially from conservative quarters. When California wanted to include the project in its standard curriculum, then-President Trump threatened to cut off federal funding. Not long after, he established the 1776 Commission, with the goal of developing a patriotic curriculum-a curriculum that says only positive things about America’s past.
Also, in July 02021, Florida banned the ideas of Critical Race Theory from being used in teaching.(Critical Race Theory is a field of research, often activist, dating back to the 1960s that examines the concept of race in American social life.) Texas also introduced a law last year that can be used to make the history of slavery unmentionable in schools.
The United States is not the only place where the incorporation of the history of slavery into the canon of history is met with great resistance.
Last Friday, July 1, was Keti Koti, a holiday originally from Suriname. Keti Koti celebrates the official abolition of slavery in the colonies on July 1, 01963. Keti Koti means “chains broken” in Sranantongo. In 02021, a petition was presented to the House of Representatives requesting that July 1 be made a national day of remembrance and celebration and that the Dutch government should apologise for its role slavery’s history. This led to a motion by Jetten that was rejected.(Read the debate between Jetten, Rutte and Simons.)
The outcome of the debate reflected the sentiment in Dutch society. According to a survey by Een Vandaag last year among approximately 30 thousand people, 59 percent do not like the idea of Keti Koti becoming a national holiday. Also, according to most of those surveyed, apologies are not in order. One participant writes:
‘How can you apologise for something from centuries ago that you yourself are not involved in at all? I don’t feel responsible for it and I don’t want to be called to account for it!
In itself, not a strange sentiment; the sins of the fathers are not those of the son, and so on. (Although the sons often still benefit – from those sins.) Also, it may be improper to measure past actions by today’s values. (Although slavery was also quite controversial in the 18th and 19th centuries.)
But these arguments all miss the main point: Apologies are not just a mea culpa of institutions that were closely involved in the transatlantic and/or East Asian slave trade – apologies are, above all, an official recognition that slave trade is indeed an essential part of Modern Dutch history.
By embracing Keti Koti as a national holiday, we (the Dutch) make the history of the slave trade part of our common historical identity and thus say to those whose ancestors were enslaved that they are allowed to join society. That they belong. That their past is our past and, more importantly, that our past is also their past. That they may identify with Modern Western history.
Incidentally, the Municipality of Amsterdam apologised last year and this year the Province of North Holland and De Nederlandsche Bank apologised. Klaas Knot, DNB director, began his apology speech with the habit of the founders of De Nederlandsche Bank, many of whom were slave owners, to regard enslaved people as cattle. Knot then mentioned that his predecessors had opposed the emancipation of enslaved people for years. Read his speech here.
In the article ‘Further Considerations on Afrofuturism’, from 02003, Kodwo Eshun, a British-Ghanese curator, writer and artist writes:
‘(…) imperial racism has denied black subjects the right to belong to the enlightenment project (…).’
By continuing to deny the history of slavery, by refusing, for example, to include Keti Koti as a national holiday, we de facto exclude large groups of people from the Western civilization project. By denying the dark sides of Modern Western history, we are actually saying to those whose ancestors were taken from Africa as slaves: you may not participate in Western civilization – you may not identify with it. Or, rather, you may, but you must forget your real memories and your real past – exchange them for “our” memories and “our” past.
So, like Jane 57821, you may only participate if you erase your memories.
The African-American community is trapped. They are only allowed to participate if they deny their background. This, of course, is impossible, which means that they are not only not part of the collective past, but also not part of the collective future. For the imagination of the future is always an extension of the imagination of the past. Or, as George Orwell put it in the scifi classic 1984: ‘Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.‘
When we exclude people from our shared past we also exclude them from our shared future. The African-American community, and of course other communities descended from enslaved people, are thus trapped in time. Afrofuturism is a reaction to this. It wants to break free from time.
Afrofuturism is, in our words, an intellectual and cultural movement in the African-American community in particular that wants to free itself from a historical and futuristic discourse in which it is not allowed to participate. It therefore explores and creates alternative and fictional histories and future scenarios that do justice to their memories and experiences.
It results in speculative explorations in which the mystical, the transcendental and the phantasmagoric are not shunned. Because if both the past and the future work like a straitjacket, then ‘time’ is not on your side, and rejecting or letting go of (linear) time may be the only way forward.
In her book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, Ytasha Womack writes:
‘Afrofuturism stretches the imagination far beyond the conventions of our time and the horizons of expectation, and kicks the box of normalcy and preconceived ideas of blackness out of the solar system.’
Afrofuturism strips away the constraints of time (and thus causality and normality) and mixes lucid dreamscapes with African aesthetics with psychedelic transcendence with high-tech futures with cosmic time machines with mystical transformations. It connects all this in a strange but inspiring way to the emancipation of the African-American community.
It all started with a vision (or maybe a dream, or maybe a myth): Namely, in 01937, Herman Poole Blount, better known as the jazz composer Sun Ra, the creative progenitor of Afrofuturism, was abducted to Saturn.
Born in 01914 in segregated Alabama, Sun Ra is a studious child. He spends much of his time in the library of the black Masonic lodge in Birmingham, where he revels in symbolism. Although he was one of the few African-Americans at the time to receive a scholarship to study, he left the university in 01937 after being told to do so by extraterrestrials, according to his own account:
‘My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up… I wasn’t in human form… I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn. they teleported me and I was down on a stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools… the world was going into complete chaos… I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That’s what they told me.’
In the 1950s Sun Ra began to weave science fiction, ‘cosmic’ mysticism and the aesthetics of ancient African cultures into the everyday out of place experience of the African-American community. The timing, of course, was no accident. It was the beginning of both the Space Age, the psychedelic counterculture, and the American civil rights movement. Although the term Afrofuturism was not coined until the 1990s, Sun Ra inspired many generations of African-American artists from the 1950s onward, from George Clinton to Missy Elliott.
The mythical abduction of Sun Ra to Saturn and the continued fascination with science fiction within the African-American community become understandable when you consider that the major themes in science fiction -alienation, displacement, dehumanization, time travel and, of course, abduction by aliens – are very recognizable to people whose ancestors were enslaved.
In the interview article Black into the Future from 01994, which incidentally also uses the word Afrofuturism for the first time, writer Greg Tate says
‘…transporting someone from the past into the future, thrusting someone into an alien culture, on another planet, where he has to confront alien ways of being. All these devices reiterate the condition of being black in American culture.’
If you look at the story of an enslaved African person, it is not much different from the random story of alien abduction. That African was also plucked from his familiar surroundings and taken on a futuristic ship to a new world full of strange white creatures, where he or she was separated from his family and forced to procreate with total strangers and experimented on. So the step from slaveships to spaceships, when considered this way, is actually not that big.
Also, the contemporary condition of being trapped in a society that denies your history and thus also denies you the future, translates into a certain alienation from the Modern Western society of which you are nevertheless a part – whether you want it or not. (Writer Toni Morrison, by the way, considered African-Americans to be the first Modern people because they experienced very early on the displacement, alienation and dehumanization that thinkers such as Nietzsche and Marx would later associate with capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and Modernity.)
In the context of this displacement, Afrofuturism is perhaps best understood as the art of coming home. Coming home to the past and present as well as the future. And nothing symbolises this promise of a cosmic homecoming better than Sun Ra’s film Space is the Place. In it, Sun Ra convinces the African-American community, through music, to join him in a new destiny deep in the cosmos.
In the film, Sun Ra says:
‘We set up a colony for black people here. See what they can do on a planet all on their own, without any white people there. They can drink in the beauty of this planet. It will affect their vibrations, for the better of course. The first thing to do, equation wise, is to consider time as officially ended. We work on the other side of time. (…) We’ll teleport the whole planet here through music.’
Sun Ra is thus like a modern Noah who takes his people to the promised land, leaving his ship behind like a space-ark and an exploding globe. His band is also not called the Arkestra for nothing – which, by the way, still performs occasionally now, almost thirty years after his death.
Afrofuturism, then, is the art of coming home, practiced primarily by letting go. Letting go of the mainstream way in which the past and present are depicted.
But why do we have such a hard time incorporating the history of slavery into our own history books anyway? Surely it is just part of (Early) Modern history? The answer is simple: because we as a community still identify with Modern history.
Historians speak of the Early Modern Era (1450-1800) and the Modern Era (1800-1950), and these two historical periods together form the New Era. During this long historical period (1450-1950), the social institutions we know today were formed. Think, among other things, of the democratic rule of law and the corporate and civil service bureaucracies that provide our society with structure. So it is not surprising that we identify with them. And that in turn explains why we don’t want to face the negative aspects of this history.
It is actually a form of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the unpleasant tension that a person experiences when confronted with observations or ideas that contradict internal beliefs or perceptions. For example, when one’s self-image clashes with facts that do not support, or even contradict, this self-image, a person experiences cognitive dissonance – a dissonant or non-harmonious feeling that needs to be removed as soon as possible. Getting rid of the unpleasant feeling is done by either adjusting your self-image or denying the facts. Of course, the latter is easier than the former.
Slavery and colonialism are incompatible with our current values, yet they are part of Early Modern and Modern history. So is the development of democracy and the formulation of human rights. Yet our self-image is built more on that second aspect of our history than on the first. When we lecture China on the international rule of law, we obviously never start talking about the Opium Wars or, a little further afield, the war the Dutch East India Company waged with Ming China to force the Middle Kingdom to trade on terms favourable with “us.
We don’t want to include slave trade and other colonial abuses in school textbooks because it makes us, as a community, feel uncomfortably dissonant. It forces self-reflection, an adjustment of our self-image, and most people are simply not good at that. It is then easier to deny – or downplay – the facts. For many people and communities, facts are secondary to identity. In short, we prefer to bury our heads in the sand.
The price of our social identification with the Early Modern and Modern Times is high. Not only for those descended from enslaved people. Society as a whole also pays a high price. Our cultural identification with the last six hundred years and the institutions that were formed during that time cause us to lose sight of a rapidly changing society
Although our social institutions date back to the Early Modern and Modern Era, we no longer live in that era. As Jan Rotmans said: we are not living in an era of change but in a change of era. Only when we can let go of our cultural identification with the Early Modern and Modern Era can we be open to the cultural challenges and institutional changes that fundamental drivers such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, digitalisation and the rise of the Homo Romanticus bring.
So we must learn to let go of our cultural identification with the Early Modern and Modern Times. So that we can look at it objectively, without all kinds of cultural hangups. Like we can now look at the Middle Ages, for example. No one will give a damn now if it is said that some Dutch count did this or that to him or her. How different it is with Early Modern types like Piet Hein or Michiel de Ruyter. If someone says something unkind about these people, that they were also pirates or slave traders, for example, a large part of the Netherlands goes into a cognitive dissonance. That indicates that we, the Dutch, still identify with it.
But in times of fundamental change we must learn to let go. So that we can build the institutions of tomorrow with an open mind. Institutions that can lead us to a digital, nature-inclusive, economically secure and socially inclusive future. So that we too can come home in this times.
For a long time we thought that historical periodisation was somewhat trivial. After all, historical change is gradual. Not overnight. But what Afrofuturism teaches us is that this kind of periodisation does matter. For it teaches us what we identify ourselves with. Only when we have a new name for the time to which we are moving will we have arrived.
Hopefully we will find the Afrofuturists there.
Much love and nice weekend,
Ed and Chris 🖖