Nick Wiltsher works at Uppsala University in Sweden. He keeps saying he's writing a book on imagination, and maybe one day he will.
A post by Nick Wiltsher
I’ve long been fascinated by Afrofuturism, without ever being quite sure what it actually is. Wikipedia rather unhelpfully says that it’s “a cultural aesthetic … an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation … a way of imagining … [a] genre”.[i] That’s a confused tangle of categories, and I’m not bothered about unravelling it. I’m just going to pull out a couple of threads and loosely weave them with some thoughts stolen from Michel-Antoine Xhignesse, with the aim of saying something about collective imaginaries.
All the same, I’ll need to tell you something minimal about the subject matter. So, let’s just say that Afrofuturism is a term applied to works of art that explore Afro-American experience and identity through engagement with a fantastical future. The term was coined in 1993 (by Mark Dery, a white critic), and has been applied retrospectively to work in various forms: the music of Funkadelic, the fiction of Octavia Butler, the visual art of Jean-Michel Basquiat.[ii] It’s also applied to contemporary work (Janelle Monáe, N.K. Jemisin, Ellen Gallagher). I’m mostly engaged with the music, which no doubt affects my analysis.
What analysis? Well, I don’t have really one, but here are four salient characteristics of Afrofuturism:
Characteristic one: Afrofuturism is engaged with the future.[iii] Works invoke a vision of time to come, directly or indirectly, often via reference to speculative technologies.
Characteristic two: Afrofuturism is imaginative. More precisely, the future that it invokes is imaginary. This is because the future hasn’t happened yet, and the sort of futuristic visions invoked by Afrofuturist works are sufficiently distant from the present that their invocation is an act of creation.
Characteristic three: Afrofuturism is Afro-American. I don’t mean that Afrofuturist works are necessarily created by Afro-American artists—though in fact they pretty much all are. I mean that the future invoked by such works is populated by and centred on Afro-American people, and part of the point of invoking it is to explore the experiences of such people.[iv]
Characteristic four: Afrofuturism is fragmentary. This characteristic has three aspects. First, Afrofuturist works appear in all sorts of media, so the ways in which the future is represented by them differ enormously. Second, some of the works most often identified as paradigms of Afrofuturism appear in media, genres and styles in which representation is often elliptical and gestural. A science fiction novel, say, might well invoke a future in some detail, and might explicitly aim at cogency among its details, the sort of thing sometimes called “world-building”. But however music represents the future, it’s distinctive of the medium that it does not lend itself easily (if at all) to such replete envisioning of what it invokes. Third, the various Afrofuturist works are made by many different authors, and so naturally they invoke many different futures; there is no one future that such works collectively invoke.
Or is there?
Now I’m really going to get loose, starting with a speculative art critical claim. Afrofuturism, I say, is highly fragmentary because of its Afro-American focus. When, say, David Bowie or Joe Meek started invoking science fiction tropes in their music, they were drawing on a relatively cohesive, substantial, established canon of science fiction rooted in stories, comic books, and film. For all that their work was fragmentary in the senses just described, it had a degree of cross-work coherence and detail, because of its roots in and reference to a shared canon. That canon was very, very white. There was no equivalent Black canon; so, when Black musicians started invoking a future populated with people who looked like them, whatever they were invoking could not borrow the cogency of the canon. The work was, for that reason, more fragmentary than its white counterpart.
So far, no grounds for doubt that the Afro-future is multiple; in fact, more grounds for saying it is. And yet. There is a sense in which all this work is about the same thing: a future centred on Afro-American people. And I want to claim that this is, in fact, a single, public, collaboratively authored artefact, which I want to term an imaginary.[v]
I suspect (fear? hope?) that the claim seems extraordinary to several readers, and I suspect that this is because of the way in which we’re often conditioned to think of things like fictional futures as fictional worlds. Of course, the contemporary father of fictional worlds, Kendall Walton, explicitly distinguishes them from possible worlds. His grounds for doing so are that fictional worlds need not be consistent or complete. All the same, thinking of futures in terms of fictional worlds does prime us to think that consistency ought to be a normative constraint on their constitution. And this primes us to think that Afrofuturist works must each be invoking a different future.
I think Michel’s excellent post on this very blog goes some way towards loosening the grip of this way of thinking. Michel suggests that “storyworlds are, first and foremost, public property”, and denies that “only the original author has the ability to tell stories set in her world”. If this is right, it seems that we are going to have to be very relaxed about whether the sum of the stories set in that world is consistent; the storyworld will become less and less cogent as more stories are told and authorship becomes more distributed.
A successful storyworld will also become larger and larger, to the point where nobody can realistically claim to have complete grasp of its contents, and (perhaps) nobody can realistically claim to be its controlling author. It’s this thing that I want to call an imaginary: the single thing that is the referent, or perhaps the containing framework, of a huge variety of stories, references, gestures and invocations. It is of necessity collectively authored, and each author provides just a sliver or glimpse of the whole.
Now, I think this is the kind of thing towards which Afrofuturist work refers: a single, collectively authored, partially grasped future-vision-framework. The framework is what anchors and orientates the movement, genre, or whatever you want to call it; there has to be a single referent of this kind for the critical label to do the critical work. This is precisely because the commonalities of actual reference and subject matter are so thin, fragile, and fragmentary. You might think of this as an exercise in active construction of a canon in the face of its absence.
Or you might not. I’m trying out suggestions here, and I’m not sure how I’ll land. I’ll close with one more, perhaps sententiously: if I’m going to make these claims at all, I want to make them seriously. I want to claim that there really is such a thing as the single Afro-future, and I want to claim that this thing really is an object and product of collective imagining, however difficult it might be to work out the metaphysics and the mental structures. Here is a case (like Michel’s) where our thinking about ontology and about imagination should follow the practice of artists and art criticism, no matter how surprising we find the routes or the destinations.
Notes
[i] The second characterisation is quoted from Ytasha L. Womack; the third is quoted from Womack quoting Ingrid LaFleur. Thus does scholarship advance.
[ii] One might of course have questions about whether the label has always been appropriately applied.
[iii] I said I don’t have an analysis. A fortiori, I don’t have an incisive or surprising analysis.
[iv] Afrofuturism is sometimes criticised for eliding “Afro-American” and “Black”. It’s a nice question whether this is a criticism of the works or of the critical notion.
[v] I’m aware that the term already has currency in the work of various authors (Taylor, Ricoeur, Medina ...). It’s usually used to refer to collective objects or acts of imagining, much as I’m doing here. Sorting out the relations among various uses is emphatically not a job to be done in a blog post.