{"id":270,"date":"2019-10-25T15:34:58","date_gmt":"2019-10-25T14:34:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/?p=270"},"modified":"2019-10-25T15:50:04","modified_gmt":"2019-10-25T14:50:04","slug":"contemporary-theory-reading-group-afrofuturism-22-10-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/2019\/10\/25\/contemporary-theory-reading-group-afrofuturism-22-10-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Contemporary Theory Reading Group \u2013 AfroFuturism (22\/10\/2019)"},"content":{"rendered":"

We began our discussion of Alondra Nelson\u2019s \u2018AfroFuturism: Past-Future Visions\u2019 by considering a quote from Ishmael Reed:<\/p>\n

\u2018Necromancers used to lie in the guts of the dead or in tombs to receive visions of the future. That is prophecy. The black writer lies in the guts of old America, making readings about the future.\u2019<\/p>\n

Reed\u2019s words provided a productive springboard for the questions Nelson\u2019s text raises \u2013 particularly her discussion on the pressures of black culture being confined to a social realism, with the objective of \u2018keeping it real\u2019. Nelson notes how a long tradition of social realism in black creative life has fostered a \u2018cultural environment often hostile to speculation, experimentation, and abstraction\u2019. The spectre of Reed\u2019s necromancer and the idea of a prophetic literature, re-reading both the past and future, redressed the fixed realist forms that Nelson critiques.<\/p>\n

To expand upon these forms of realism, Nelson espouses AfroFuturism, a term that was coined by\u00a0Mark Dery\u00a0in his essay\u00a0\u2018Black to the Future\u2019,\u00a0as an attempt to explore the intersections between race and technology. The emphasis on intersectionality is reflected in Nelson\u2019s insistence on the fluidity of AfroFuturism. Rather than defining it as a fixed ideology, Nelson argues that it is \u2018neither a mantra nor a movement, AfroFuturism is a critical perspective that opens up inquiry into the many overlaps between techno culture and black diasporic histories\u2019.<\/p>\n

We discussed the \u2018possibility of becoming\u2019 that AfroFuturism promises, in terms of its capacities for reconfiguring and creating identities. Nelson writes that, \u2018alternative AfroFuturist narratives insist that who we\u2019ve been and where we\u2019ve travelled is always an integral component of who we can become\u2019, opening up the speculative spaces for \u2018new icons, new heroes, new futures.\u2019 From these forms of self-reinvention we discussed personas and masks, and the music of MF Doom.<\/p>\n

From the self-styled supervillain persona of Doom, we considered crossovers between AfroFuturist aesthetics with mainstream culture, such as the Marvel film Black Panther<\/em>, which in turn raises the question of assimilation versus radicalism. Following the thread of Black Panther<\/em>\u2019s American-centric worldview, we also considered how AfroFuturism might similarly be restricted to an American configuration of black experience, echoing some of the aspects of the Ta-Nehisi Coates\/Cornel West debate.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"(c)<\/p>\n

Nelson expands beyond an American conception of AfroFuturism by exploring the works of Nigerian-born photographer Fatimah Tuggar and her \u2018cyborg realism\u2019. Tuggar photographs quotidian scenes before digitally imposing additional, often technological images over the top. The result, Nelson argues, \u2018is a body of utopian, and sometimes dystopian, reflections on Africa and modernity\u2019. Afrofuturism as a concept similarly seeks new ways of expressing utopic and sometimes dystopic tomorrows, which act as necessary alternatives to neocolonial developments in the modern world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We began our discussion of Alondra Nelson\u2019s \u2018AfroFuturism: Past-Future Visions\u2019 by considering a quote from Ishmael Reed: \u2018Necromancers used to lie in the guts of the dead or in tombs to receive visions of the future. That is prophecy. The black writer lies in the guts of old America, making readings about the future.\u2019 Reed\u2019s … Continue reading “Contemporary Theory Reading Group \u2013 AfroFuturism (22\/10\/2019)”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":417,"featured_media":271,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"image","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,12,15,5,14,11],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-image","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-afrofuturism","tag-alondra-nelson","tag-black-panther","tag-contemporary-theory","tag-fatimah-tuggar","tag-post-colonialism","post_format-post-format-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/417"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions\/277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.bham.ac.uk\/cclc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}