Introduction to Afrofuturism delivers a fresh and contemporary introduction to Afrofuturism, discussing key themes, understandings, and interdisciplinary topics across multiple genres in Black literature, film, and music. From Afrofuturism’s origins to the present, this critical volume features scholarly works, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction which illuminates on the contributions of notable Afrofuturists such as Octavia Bulter, Sun Ra, N.K. Jemisin, Janelle Monáe, Nnedi Okorafor, Saul Williams, Prince, and more. The volume highlights the impact of films such as Black Panther (2018, 2022), The Woman King (2022), and They Cloned Tyrone (2023) and covers a variety of essential topics giving students a comprehensive view of the legacy of storytelling and the tradition of “remixing” in Black literature and arts. This volume makes connections across academic subject areas and is an engaging reader for pop culture and media film studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, Black and Africana studies, hip-hop studies, creative writing, and composition and rhetoric.
Author(s): DuEwa M. Frazier
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2024
Language: English
Pages: 300
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I Black Poetics, Creative Nonfiction, Drama, and Prose
Curtis L. Crisler
Last Stop to Dine
Looking for Hurston in a Triptych
The Automatism of Reflection on Creation and Space—a Triptych (featuring Alice Coltrane’s symphonic aura)
Zorina Exie Frey
I Heart Music: Hip-Hop is Dead. Long Live Hip-Hop
I’m a Black man wearing the stars and stripes, what don’t I understand?
Ran Walker
Mason Dixon
The Multiverse of a Heart
A Soulful Meditation
Alan King
Cornbread Othello
Raina J. León
poet: on imagining Planet X as the only safe space
Whispers and rockets
Arthur Rickydoc Flowers
Afroprophetica: A Hoodoo Future
Part II Black Music and Film
Paul Youngquist
Satellites Are Spinning: Notes on a Sun Ra Poem
DuEwa M. Frazier
Juice from the Mind: Afrofuturism in Hip-Hop and Black Visual Culture
Hip-Hop’s Visual Afrofuturists
Hip-Hop’s Womanist Afrofuturists
Conclusion
Christian M. Hines
Young, Gifted, and Black: Exploring the Community Building of Science and Sisterhood in Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Black Women in Superhero Comics and Transmedia
Afrofuturism
The Dark Fantastic
Wakanda Forever and the Dark Fantastic Cycle
Seeing Ourselves
Conclusion
Juliette Goutierre
Hacking Boundaries and Subverting Systems of Oppression in Neptune Frost (2021)
Douglas Rasmussen
“Heaven somewhere in the future”: The Digital Imagination of Prince’s Art Official Age
Art Official Cage
Clouds
Breakdown
The Gold Standard
U Know
Affirmation I & II
Way Back Home
Affirmations III
Conclusion
Jeffery Renard Allen
My Life in the New Wave: On My Origins as a Black Fabulist
Jeremy Laughery
“It’s Not What I See, But What I See Through”: Queer Afrofuturism and AfroSurrealism in Neptune Frost (2021)
Olayombo Raji-Oyelade
Altering Normative Epistemologies in African Speculative Fiction: A Reading of The Woman King
Analysis: Altering Normative Epistemologies
Conclusion
Olivia Uzodima Ekeh
I’m a Witness: Surviving Dystopia through the Sonic Memory of Black Women in When I Get Home
“Things I Imagined”/“I’m a Witness”: M Archive, Anticipation, and the Function of Limbo Time
A Black Women’s Chorus at the End (or beginning) of the World: The Features of When I Get Home
Conclusion
Shernā Ann Phillips
In The Afro-Future, Even Jezebels Like ‘Yo-Yo’ Deserve to Be Saved: An Exploration of Black Female Characters in They Cloned Tyrone (2023)
Part III Black Feminisms and Luminaries in Speculative Prose
Anindita Ghosal and Aritra Ghosal
Imag(in)ing Afrofuturistic Assemblages: Nurturing Multispecies Entanglement in Nnedi Okorafor’s Graphic narrative LaGuardia
Introduction: Environmentalism and Afrofuturism
Tracing the History of Afrofuturistic Narratives
Afrofuturistic Graphic Narratives
Confronting Racism, Alienation and Immigration in Nnedi Okorafor’s LaGuardia
Mapping the Relationality Between Afrofuturism, Graphical Representation and Environment Imagination in Nnedi Okorafor’s LaGuardia
Conclusion: Towards an Afrotopia
Flourice W. Richardson
Exploring Afrofuturism as a Tool to Dismantle Hegemony in Octavia Butler’s The Evening and the Morning and the Night
The Rhetorical Construction of Disease and Dis-ease
Therapeutic Discourse and the Policing Agency/Reclaiming
Conclusion and Futures
Heather Thaxter
Seeing is believing: An Afrofuturist reading of the visual medium of Duffy and Jennings’ graphic novel adaptation of Parable of the Sower
Introduction
Medium Specificity
Neuroesthetic processes
Visual illusions of reality
Conclusion
Ayana T. Hardaway
Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Exploring Endarkened Afrofuturist Feminism & Shapeshifting in Octavia E. Butler’s “Wild Seed”
The “Mother of Afrofuturism” & Wild Seed
Afrofuturism and Afrocentric Futurism
Towards an Endarkened Afrofuturist Feminism
Freedom Technologies in Afrofuturism
Shapeshifting as Freedom Technology in Endarkened Afrofuturist Feminism
Conclusion
Jada Similton
Demystifying the Speculative: An Ifa reading of Stigmata.
Jasmine H. Wade
“Live and Let Live” Black Feminism and Difference
Black feminist theories of difference
Summary of “Live and Let Live”
Alternative Approaches to Difference in “Live and Let Live”
Keisha Allan
Verbal Marronage as Linguistic Resistance in Midnight Robber
Marronage and Notions of Freedom
Verbal Marronage
Michael Ra-shon Hall
How did I (We) Get Here?: Speculative Time Travel and the Contested Place of Technology in Afrofuturistic Fictions
Victoria Moten
Mother(ship) Intuition: Black Women Protagonists in Afrofuturism
AK Wright
F.A.M: Trans-Afrofuturism in Janelle Monae’s and Danny Lore’s “Nevermind”
Black Feminist Worldbuilding in the Pynk and The Cracks in Our Praxis
New Futures: Trans Afrofuturism
Reading, Writing, and Discussion Guide
Bibliography
Index
