The Challenge of the Past

One of the benefits and challenges linked to Afrofuturism is the question of futurity. Afrofuturism is, for the most part, defined in the popular imagination by a future-oriented narrative. For example, Wakanda is an advanced civilization with technology beyond our imagination. Yet, as a future, Foresight or Future studies is almost always defined as white or, more directly, defined in a racially neutral way that assumes whiteness as a baseline. This erasure is so complete, it is hard for anyone, especially someone from the United States to fully understand the systemic message represented by this essentially white future.

The implication that the future will be free of the struggle around race and equity that define the present or the past explains, in some small ways the ease we might have in signing into law a Juneteenth Holiday, while at the same time passing laws to make it harder to vote. The Civil War and its aftermath is something that most white people can almost agree about with black people. We can run down a list:

  1. There was a Civil War.

  2. The Union militarily subjugated the South.

  3. Slavery Ended

Those words are chosen very carefully, but most white people would say yes to them. We all know there was a Civil War, not the War of North Aggression, but the Civil War was one part of the country that made war on the other part. We agree (kind of) on the North using its military to subjugate, which means to bring under control, the South during the war. We can agree that because of that control, chattel slavery came to an end. The devil sadly is in the details. Yet, because it is in the past, and we don’t particularly teach history all that well, most white Americans accept this story. This is helped in no small part by the white people thinking about this story with themselves as prime actors. White people are fighting, white people freed the slave, and white people abolished slavery making the United States live up to its freedom ideology.

For most black people, the simplistic nature of that version of the story ignores the powerful work that African Americans have done, from the founding of the country to advocate and help define freedom in the United States. Even these basic ideas about agency in the context of The Civil War. Why does this matter in the context of Afrofuturism?

The reality is that Afrofuturism describes black speculative practice. The nature of this practice, especially in the context of Black Americans, is a consideration of freedom. Black people have, since coming to the western hemisphere have been thinking about the definition and acquisition of freedom. Even in the context of the Civil War, a figure such as Martin Robison Delany highlights how black speculative practice challenges the assumptions of white society across both real and imagined spaces. Delany was an abolitionist, the first African American Field Officer in the U.S Army, and one of the earliest African Americans to encourage a return to Africa. Yet, he also wrote Blake; or the Huts of America, a serialized novel between 1859 and 1861. Blake tells the story of Henry Blake, an escaped slave who travels throughout the southern United States and to Cuba to plan a large-scale slave insurrection.

Delaney serialized the story in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859 and the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861 and 1862. While fantastic in the context of the era, it was not out of character for African American speculative work. As is the case with contemporary Afrofuturist writers, Delany used the fictive landscape to explore how nineteenth-century slave society operates and the inhumane nature of that system. Yet, while works by white writers made black people into background characters in white sociopolitical concern. In the aftermath of working as a journalist and writing critical nonfiction, Delany wrote this fictive story examining the black experience. Thus, the link between speculative practice and critical inquiry for black activism represents parallel transformative action modes. The reality of this link is affirmed by Kodwo Eshun's description of Afrofuturism as a set of tools created by people of African origin in a century hostile to blackness.

The challenge for us in our current moment is to understand that past work is not backward-looking nostalgia, it is part of the process of creating a better future. We cannot ignore the past, there is in the work of Afrofuturism, a concern for history and how the past shapes current events. There is more work to understand this past speculative action even as we continue to embrace the possibilities of future worlds.

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Black Futurity + Comics