Afrofuturism and Afrofantasy: the best genre you've never heard of

Black Panther has been a hot topic ever since it came out February, breaking box office records and inviting endless discussions and debates about the tone and texture of this otherwise conventional superhero flick.  But this sudden spur of interest has also drummed up musings on it particular genre - one relatively little known to many Westerners: Afrofuturism.  Very loosely defined, Afrofuturism - and its cousin, Afrofantasy - is an umbrella term encompassing speculative fiction, futuristic music and/or pop culture either made by people of African descent, featuring main characters of African descent, or using Africa as a setting.  But it’s much more than that; it twists expectations about who is or is not part of the speculative fiction bubble.  Afrofantasy and Afrofuturism - whether high or low, dystopian or utopian - promises an expanded role for people of African descent in arenas traditionally viewed as beyond their reach: the ballooning technological democracy of the Space Age, or the narrative freedom and adventure of ideas endemic to the fantasy paradigm.  But it also issues a challenge to the dominant worldview, usually by tempering the often out-of-bounds optimism of science fiction with real-world racism and perspectives from a people who have all-too-often felt the boot of history’s zealous, future-oriented “winners.”

It is a fascinating and diverse genre that spans the full multimedia range, but despite being filled to the brim with talented authors and artists, it is sadly ignored or underestimated by many mainstream fantasy and science fiction fans.  The reasons are manifold: general unfamiliarity with and condescending dismissal of Africa and the African diaspora on the part of the Global North is a prime culprit, but other factors, like access and exposure, play keys roles as well.  It’s no surprise that the Afrofuturist/fantasy creators most familiar to the mainstream reside in the United States. 

So if you’re hankering to immerse yourself in the same vibe delivered by Coogler and co. this past February, check out the authors, performers, and other luminaries down below.  They’re just the tip of a very deep iceberg, but their works shine a light into this fascinating and ever-changing field.

Authors

Nnedi Okorafor: This Nigerian-American writer is well known for her evocative sociocultural imagery of West Africa, as well as her thoughtful explorations of gender, class, and the social Other in fantastic or post-apocalyptic settings.  Her most notable works include Akata Witch, the first in a fantasy series starring an albino Nigerian-American who discovers her knack for magic on a trip to her parents’ homeland; and Who Fears Death, a grim, post-apocalyptic tale of a child of rape who discovers it’s her magical destiny to end the genocide of her people.

Octavia Butler: The late, great grandmother of the genre, she was one of the first

African-Americans to achieve success in the traditionally exclusive arenas of science fiction and fantasy.  She was a diverse and imaginative writer, refusing to be bound to a particular convention, and her plots sampled everything from astronomy and cybernetics, to time travel and biology, though always with the core theme of the misuse of humanity’s gifts to repeat cycles of domination and abuse - both at home, and across the galaxy.  Kindred is her most famous and bestselling work, starring a reluctant time traveler from the 1970s who’s repeatedly whisked away to the antebellum South in order to ensure that her slave-owning ancestor lives to father her family line.  Aficionados should also check out her Xenogenesis  and Patternists series, though the woman’s entire body of work is a treasury of Afrofuturism and Afrofantasy.

Samuel R. Delany: Another pioneering author of the Afrofuturism genre, Delany entered science fiction as a black homosexual, already far out of the norm for the field’s usual craftsmen, and never hid his aspirations for literary gravitas in a genre often mired by shallow technophilia and plots hung together by the barest of scaffolding.  His stories are complex, existential, yet often quirky, using the freedom of sci-fi to explore the bending boundaries of sexuality, race and class.  Dhalgren is widely considered his masterpiece, a 1975 mammoth of a book featuring a nameless protagonist known only as “the Kid” in his trek through the post-apocalyptic ruins of a fictional central US city in search of “signs.”  This is science fiction in the bare minimalist sense, more likely to appeal to fans of Cormac McCarthy's The Road than to the hardcore sci-fi enthusiast, though his bizarre early space opera, Nova, and seminal military sci-fi series Fall of the Towers are on more familiar, if no less deconstructivist, grounds.  Through it all, though, he remains arguably Afrofuturism’s most brilliant theorist.

Nancy Farmer: This Arizona native spent much of her early years in Africa, where most of her earliest works take place, and though she’s drifted from the continent in her later stories, she is recognized for pioneering the placement of Africa as a speculative fiction setting for young adult fiction.  Her most famous work of Afrofuturism is The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm, the story of three children in 2194 Zimbabwe who are kidnapped and put to work in a “plastic mine,” while three mutant detectives - the titular characters - search for them on order of the kids’ powerful father, in the process revealing a land both absurd and painfully familiar.

Leslie Esdaile Banks - AKA L.A.Banks:  Though cancer had tragically cut her life short, Banks left the world a sprawling corpus across a diversity of genres.  But she is best remembered for her intricately-plotted webs of urban fantasy and paranormal romance starring young African-American female protagonists.  Her Vampire Huntress Legends Series is perhaps her most popular, with Damali Richards as the eponymous huntress: a no-nonsense spoken word artist who leads a guerrilla team of deadly musical vampire slayers (no, really) in a never-ending battle of good against evil.  Described, perhaps superficially, as “Blade meets Buffy,” Banks infuses the series with free-flowing metaphors linking her underworld nosferatu with the clandestine dealings of drug lords and kingpins, and stresses the power of love in all its myriad forms to light even the darkest recesses of the world.  These themes carry over in her other works, like the Crimson Moon Series centered on a secret government consortium of Special Ops werewolves, as well as the number of young adult graphic novels based on her stories.

Musicians   

Herman “Sonny” Blount - AKA Sun Ra: The self-declared member of an angelic race from Saturn, he was a visionary composer and jazz band leader who pioneered the melding of free group improvisation and electric instruments that greatly influenced the jazz styles of the 1960s.  Incredibly inventive and wildly eccentric, he styled himself a philosopher/mystic, preferred his musicians to live communally, and often gave live performances in a mixed-media fog of outlandish costumes, sounds, and poetry that left his audiences both energized and bewildered.  His music often themed around the Space Age and cosmic sounds, and set much of the tone for the futuristic vibe that has become such a staple of Afrofuturism.  Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra is perhaps his most accessible work, while Atlantis is the perfect example of the free “space” jazz that ties him so firmly to the Afrofuturism category.  The Space Age is Here is a compilation that samples a number of his songs through the years, so it’s a nice way to wet your feet with this admittedly difficult avant-garde artist, if you can find it.

George Clinton: The father of funk, this barber from North Carolina blended soul and psychedelic rock into a bright, colorful package, producing dazzling performances and espousing revolutionary politics.  Through his two bands, Parliament and Funkadelic, Clinton created a “musical cosmology,” and much like Sun Ra, rooted his sound and his eccentricities in a place beyond the divisions and hierarchies of Earth.  The fluid, bass-heavy melodies of P-funk and their otherworldly rhythms were elevated by Clinton’s often space-based performances and costumes.  Mothership Connection, released in 1976, was a fictional concept album with a heavy space theme, and features such classics as "Mothership Connection (Star Child)" and "Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)."

Other Media and Resources

• Pumzi, a twenty-one-minute short by Kenyan native Wanuri Kahiu, set in a technologically advanced underground city in East Africa.
• Experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist Cauleen Smith, who blends her sci-fi sensibilities with French structuralism to make challenging and often confrontational works.
• Many figures in the creation of Afrofuturistic comic books and graphic anthologies, like John Jennings and Turtel Onli.
• Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, a documentary from 1980 about the musician himself and his thoughts on life, death, and music, punctuated by performances from the “Arkestra.”

Sources:

    "Samuel R. Delany." Authors and Artists for Young Adults, vol. 24, Gale, 1998. Biography In Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/K1603000116/BIC?u=dkpl&sid=BIC&xid=07078480. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.

    "Sun Ra." Contemporary Black Biography, vol. 60, Gale, 2007. Biography In Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/K1606003655/BIC?u=dkpl&sid=BIC&xid=898d3cb6. Accessed 30 Mar. 2018.

    White, Jerry. "The Many Layers of Cauleen Smith." Black Film Review, vol. 8, no. 2, June 1994, p. 6. EBSCOhost, proxygsu-dep1.galileo.usg.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=9503312058&site=eds-live&scope=site.

    Womack, Ytasha. Afrofuturism : The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. vol. First edition, Independent Publishers Group, 2013.

"The Last Jedi" hits a few wrong turns, but delivers a fair movie experience

Movie: Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Director: Rian Johnson

Starring: Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley

Verdict:

Director Rian Johnson ushers in Round 2 of the new Star Wars trilogy, and while the returning cast - both old and new - give it their all in an admirable showing, the strange pacing, weak side-plots, and generally off characterizations of some beloved franchise staples dull the enthusiasm a bit, with only its intelligent deconstruction of the Star Wars legacy to lift it above mediocrity.

In depth:

The Star Wars brand has seen a lot of ups and downs since The Force Awakens was released two years ago.  The loss of Carrie Fisher was a tremendous blow, which will obviously leave lasting reverberations for the films to come.  Meanwhile, though the new trilogy’s first film was largely a success - or at least, silenced fears that Disney would completely wreck the franchise - there was still heard the faint sounds of fan grumbling over the supposed stark changes it brought to the beloved series.  A female lead, a black male protagonist, and the surprise death of arguably the franchise’s most popular character all left die-hard saber-swingers floundering in the dark side on to what to expect in the future.  And now, The Last Jedi brings everything full circle, for while the first movie teased at changes to come, this one nearly deconstructs, or at least questions, some of the standard tropes that have been endemic to the enterprise since Luke first stepped out into the Tatooine sunset.  Everything from heroic machismo, to the pedestal treatment of “legends,” to even the notion of a “chosen one” all get a pretty bad spanking throughout the film.  Fine, fine, you might be saying.  But is it any good?  Well, yes and no.  But mostly, yes.

Unlike previous films, The Last Jedi seems to pick up almost immediately where we left off - an odd pacing choice, admittedly, though it doesn't rattle the cage too much.  The Resistance, lead by iron lady General Leia Organa (the late, great Carrie Fisher) is forced to evacuate their base before a First Order fleet lead by General and all-around slimeball, Hux (Domhnall Gleeson).  Ace pilot Poe Dameron, played by Oscar Isaac, leads a successful but horribly costly counter assault on a First Order Dreadnought before jumping to hyperspace.  Meanwhile, Rey (Ridley) has finally caught up to the elusive Jedi Master and living legend Luke Skywalker - played, as always, by the incomparable Mark Hamill - only to discover, to her horror as well as ours, that the former hero has become a burned-out cynic, closed off to the Force and unwilling to resurrect anything resembling the Jedi.  As Rey struggles to overcome his walls and learn more about her gift, first film favorite Finn (John Boyega) wakes from his coma to discover that the Resistance escape ship was being tracked, ushering a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the First Order.  With Leia out of commission during a surprise attack and the Resistance leadership in confusion, Finn joins forces with his old friend Poe and new ally Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) to find a way to break free of the Order’s grip.  And all the while, the ever-conflicted Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) wrestles with murdering his father and his tenuous place beside Supreme Leader Snoke, and in the process, forms a link with Rey as they work through their common concerns of belonging and destiny.  Where all of these ambitions collide will witness both the rise of a new power, and an altered course for the destiny of the Jedi.

Compared to most other movies in the franchise, the Last Jedi really plays fast and loose with its many inherited tropes.  No doubt a huge part of Star Wars’s monumental popular appeal lies in how it modernized ancient mythic archetypes and braised them in a cool, sci-fi coating.  The traditional hero - his (and it’s almost always “his”) call to adventure, the escape from the belly of the beast, the final apotheosis as the hero realizes he’s the Chosen One and redeems the world - have all been staples of the traditional Star Wars order, and indeed, remain the source of its undeniable power.  The Last Jedi pushed open the cracks in this formula left by the Force Awakens: Poe’s hot-headed heroism causes more harm than good; the last-ditch Indy ploy dripping with macho adventuring fails spectacularly; and the “Chosen One” seems, at this point, anything but.  Even the idea of the conflicted young villain is mercilessly deconstructed, and provides the film with its most effective sense of suspense in its entire run.  This is a controversial element for some fans, but for me, at least, it shows a great deal of creativity, and enhanced my experience quite a bit.

Even if you're not a fan of Disney taking a swipe at a few Campbellian sacred cows, the A-list cast goes a long way to sweetening the pill a bit.  With this being their second go around, the actors by now have all settled into a comfortable groove with their characters, and it shows.  Ridley and Boyaga are the real stand outs, with Rey and Finn stealing the show in this new leg of the franchise.  Rey has bloomed into a more nuanced character, with a smaller chip on her shoulder and a more appealing vulnerability born of recognizing her link to the Force and her desire to learn more of her past and her place in the grand scheme of things.  Finn’s delightful oscillation between practical cowardice and flashes of the utmost heroism marches on, and he even forges a distinctive edge over the course of the film, culminating in an epic battle against his own personal nemesis.  Finn’s everyman quality had been my high point in the preceding movie, and while much of his screen time was spent floundering in a bloated arc, he was still a delight through every moment of it.  Though Kylo Ren has been a divisive character since his introduction, I’ve always liked his take on how a young man can slip into evil through a muddled mixture of fear, ambition, and insecurity.  And of course, we must all bow to the great Carrie Fisher in her final performance - even if she spent about half of it in a virtual coma.

Still, even with all this praise, some bizarre narrative choices result in a somewhat lopsided showing for the story as a whole.  One drawback to taking a deconstructive turn in a popular series is that everything comes together in a more intentional - and hence, calculating - fashion.  The humor felt too pressed upon and unnatural at times; the “twists” were beaten to death by foreshadowing; and all the many plot points came across as blatantly calculating, and not as organic as the original series or even its decidedly mixed-bag predecessor.  This is the underlying rot under every shaky foundation of the movie, and explains quite a bit of its other follies.  The need to intentionally break open the hero archetype laid down by Han Solo has warped Poe into an intensely unlikable figure - hot-headed for no good reason, secretive, and resorting even to mutiny to enforce what he wrongheadedly believes to be the “right thing to do.”  More frustrating is that despite this, and the fact that he is directly or indirectly responsible for about half of the deaths for the Resistance (no, really), his actions are waved away in an oddly enforced status quo.

But perhaps the most devastating change for many fans is where they left the Skywalker legacy.  Now, granted, I can’t fully jump on board with the usual fan critiques; the central aspect of the Force, after all, is that it should belong to everyone, and wrapping everything around one bloodline makes a mockery of that lesson.  But reducing Luke Skywalker to a shell of who he was off screen can seem a lot like character derailment, and it doesn’t help that the film grants relatively few positive depictions of masculinity.  While I was ultimately satisfied with Luke’s character arc and understood (and appreciated) the lessons he imparted to Rey concerning a balanced view of the Jedi legacy, seeing him morph into a bitter cynic and viciously dismiss Jedi history as one of “failure, hypocrisy, and hubris ” with very little in canon to back it up can feel quite jarring without deeper reflection.

There are a couple of other things to pick at, if you’re really looking for it.  Finn’s side plot to find a hacker for a harebrained scheme to break the First Order’s tracker was a bloated and unpleasant affair, and not even Finn’s charm could surmount its plodding pace.  A major part of that objectionable little detour was new character Rose, who was a bit of a mixed bag in general.  While her initial scenes and sad loss of her sister at the very beginning lend her some potential and pathos, she quickly loses my interest as the subplot drags on and she fades increasingly to the background - relegated, it seems, to the slum of last-minute love interests and potential romantic plot tumors which come out of freaking nowhere.  Even beyond the sideplot, though, the film seemed to drag on longer than it needed to; there were several points before the finale where the film could have ended but didn't. Instead, it just ambles on, diffusing the tension and making me check my watch every five minutes.

And yet, despite these flaws and their seeming gross weight on the scales versus the Last Jedi's more positive attributes, this was still a worthwhile film.  While I understand that flirting with genre deconstruction can be quite unnerving in such a beloved series, I believe it was handled tastefully as a whole.  We don’t know what the next film will hold; Fisher’s demise put the ultimate monkey wrench in any plans Disney had for her and the film.  But Star Wars now stands at the crux of a cinematic crossroads: will it continue down the arduous road to deconstruction, or will it rebuild itself into something more akin to the original series?  Either path can be fraught with difficulty, but as long as it keeps its balance, it may be worth the effort.

Grade: B-