What does the Future hold?
The live action debut of Cowboy Bebop on Netflix has me thinking about the possible Afrofuturist roots in the classic show. The anime is a classic, it clearly fueled a jump in anime’s popularity in the 1990s, the Afrofuturist roots in the original series were not as clear to me until this live action adaptation. In hindsight, I should have thought of the Afrofuturist elements long ago. The original series debuted in 1998, the same year of Afrofuturism Listserv created by Alondra Nelson.
Afrofuturism Listserv from Internet Wayback Machine.
The historical moment is important. Nelson along with DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller), novelist Nalo Hopkinson, and cultural critic Alexander Weheliye as early guest moderators created a space to explore the implications of black speculative practice. Nelson went on to guest edit a special issue of the journal Social Text On Afrofuturism and she is widely regarded as one of the earliest theorists to broaden the definition of Afrofuturism from the original premise offered by Mark Dery. Her emphasis that Afrofuturism is a black take on modernity is especially meaningful to me.
What does the future hold? Nelson’s work has always been skeptical of the idea that futurity would lead to decentering of race. Instead, I think she calls our attention to the ways that racialization persists through systems. Technology does not offer a utopian solution because the vision behind the technology is racialized. It may be difficult to see Cowboy Bebop as Afrofuturist if you insist on black people being at the center of Afrofuturist vision. I often stress to the students that Afrofuturism ideologically framework is drawn from African Diaspora experience, but does not require you to be black. Instead, the concern rooted in the black experience with modernity and its implication on the application of power is crucial to understanding Afrofuturism.
If you consider form and themes, I do think you can make an argument that Cowboy Bebop has deep Afrofuturist roots.
The sound of Cowboy Bebop is Jazz. Right from the opening sequence, “Tank” the iconic theme composed by Yoko Kanno remains a signature sound for the anime. Indeed, Jazz provides a tonal reference point throughout the anime and the live-action series. Jet Black, one of the central characters of the series is a Jazz fan, hence the ship in the series is called “Bebop” after the jazz style he loves. While the original series did not necessarily confirm that Jet was African American, the voice acting on the American dub and the character design does suggest it. In the live-action version, they embrace this idea.
There are other elements, queerness, speculation of liberation, and consideration of hierarchy that also signal Afrofuturism in the live-action show. These ideas work together to decenter the Eurocentric vision of the future so common in American popular culture. Cowboy Bebop does have elements of the cyberpunk narrative of the 1990s, especially its fixation on corporatism and corruption, which lies at the heart of many of the trauma each character is facing. Indeed, the space between legal and illegal is blurry in the Cowboy Bebop and the questions about systemic exploitation that such comparison create are an important way that Afrofuturism calls attention to the need to think beyond the boundary of the system you know.
The implication of what might be achieved through a future narrative can never be denied. We have decades of cultural narrative created by utopian visions of the future. Star Trek is the most obvious of these narratives. What Star Trek fails to do and what Cowboy Bebop calls our attention to, is the process necessary to achieve liberation is complex. What shifts in actions, structure, and power can do we need to normalize to live in a liberate future?
Cowboy Bebop is not that future, but it hints at the changes that would bring that future to reality.
