#"Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture"

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Today I listened in on Ytasha Womack's speech at the Spring Convocation. Womack is the author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Through-out her speech she talked about how creative and bright-minded people of color are because of how we transform anything that we are encountered with. During her speech she tied what she does for a living back to what our ancestors did for a living which made her speech a lot more heartfelt. One quote that stuck with me was "In this moment I said I am going to find a beauty in this period, because there are people before me who have been in tougher times and I am not going to take that for granted. Im going to build upon the lessons and find the joy" -Ytasha Womack.

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Y2K Futurism in Hiphop and RnB

This optimism for the future had a massive effect on Black art, Black music specifically, and we saw a boom in futuristic aesthetics in music videos from the era, with directors like Hype Williams creating dazzling music videos dipped in metallics, leather, sterilized, and icy interiors, and trippy CGI, like we can see in the music video for Busta Rhymes and Janet Jackson's What's it Gonna Be?!

In "Afrofuturism, The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture", Ytasha L. Womack writes, “Afrofuturists sought to unearth the missing history of people of African descent and their roles in science, technology, and science fiction. They also aimed to reintegrate people of color into the discussion of cyberculture, modern science, technology, and sci-fi pop culture. With the Internet in its infancy, they hoped to facilitate equal access to progressive technologies, knowing that a widespread embrace would diminish the race-based power imbalance and hopefully color-based limitations- for good.”

Like the Black artists and creatives who embraced Afrofuturism in the 60s and 70s, the 2000s gave way to a new generation of Black people who saw their future up in the stars. 

The Black futurists of the 60s and 70s dreamed of a return to the motherland/mothership of Africa, a liberation of their people as a collective community by mixing Afro-centrism with space imagery, pyramids up against the stars, traveling to distant planets for a new beginning, taking the global African diaspora and spreading out in the galaxy. These were star children on a path to alternate worlds away from the racialized oppression and violence Black people faced globally on earth. A quote that best captures this space-age futurism is from Octavia E. Butler, "There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns."

There was a strong sense of community in this era, of collective liberation and unity

In contrast to this, the future of the 2000s was one plagued by a deep feeling of loneliness.

Yes, we see the recurring theme of Black people escaping Earth on spaceships to the stars, but in this era, they aren't escaping to a community; they're escaping alone to fancy space mansions, to advanced technology like the camera we see Lisa controlling in the video.

In his Video Essay, "Remembering Y2K Afrofuturism in Music Videos, GoldFro. Dives deeper into this idea of isolation in this era of Black art.

When the clock struck 12 on the first of January 23 years ago, the world had been collectively holding its breath. No one knew where the new millennium would take them, yet even in this era of uncertainty, people were able to predict that technology would be both a blessing and a curse. Techno-transcendence meant giving up physical connection for digital freedom, and Y2K Afrofuturists in their shiny metallic cages, alone in cyberspace, while they sang songs of longing to be loved and held, captured this feeling in a way I think is really beautiful.

[goodblacknews]

Black Lexicon: What "Afrofuturism" Means (LISTEN)

Black Lexicon: What “Afrofuturism” Means (LISTEN)

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson) In today’s Daily Drop, we explore the term “Afrofuturism” and its origin. To read about it and see links to sources, read on. To hear about it, press PLAY: https://goodblacknews.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/GBNPADpod050322.mp3 [You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts,…