Afrofuturism is an artistic style, way of thinking about science, and study of history that looks at how African diaspora culture connects with science and technology. It uses stories and ideas from science fiction, as well as other creative forms, to explore the experiences and hopes of people from the African diaspora. While it is often linked to science fiction, it also includes other types of imaginative storytelling, such as fantasy, alternate history, and magic realism. It can also be found in music.
The term "Afrofuturism" was first used by American writer Mark Dery in 1993. Discussions about it in the late 1990s were led by Alondra Nelson. Ytasha L. Womack, the author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, describes it as "a mix of imagination, technology, the future, and freedom." Ingrid LaFleur, a museum curator, says it is "a way of imagining future possibilities through the perspective of Black culture." Kathy Brown explains that Afrofuturism involves "thinking about the past and present while still looking forward to a better future." Others note that the movement is "flexible," combining technology, African traditions, and other influences.
Important examples of Afrofuturist works include the books by Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler; the artwork of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Angelbert Metoyer; the photography of Renée Cox; the music of Sun Ra and his group Arkestra; the creative stories of Parliament-Funkadelic; the music and performances of Earth, Wind and Fire; and the collaborations of Herbie Hancock with visual artists. Other examples include the music of the Jonzun Crew, Warp 9, Deltron 3030, Kool Keith, and the Marvel Comics character Black Panther.
History
Afrofuturism in music is a type of music that is not traditional. It focuses on themes like blackness, space, and technology. This style often uses sounds from synthesizers and drum machines. The lyrics often talk about black history, cultural pride, progress, spirituality, and science fiction.
One of the earliest examples of this style can be found in the film Space Is the Place. This movie shows a free jazz band called Sun Ra involved in a science fiction story. In the story, the musician helps a group of young black people prepare to colonize another planet. This creates a new, black-centered civilization on another world.
Studies of Afrofuturistic music show how the genre mixes sounds from different types of music, such as Hip-Hop, Jazz, R&B, Funk, and Electronic music. Combining these sounds and cultures highlights the unusual and imaginative qualities of Afrofuturist works. When performed live, the genre brings together different musical traditions from the African Diaspora.
DJ Kool Herc, a Jamaican-American DJ in the 1970s, was known for mixing Jamaica’s powerful music with R&B and Rap. This mix helped create a more immersive and storytelling experience for audiences. Today, musicians like the Hip-Hop duo Outkast and Jazz composer Nicole Mitchell use similar techniques in their music.
Afrofuturism was also applied to George Clinton and his bands Parliament and Funkadelic. Their work, like the album Mothership Connection (1975), included futuristic clothing, science fiction themes, and lyrics about black history. The album cover shows a Black person in chrome spacewear outside a UFO. The album also introduced characters like the Lollipop Man and Star Child. These characters helped create a unique world in their music.
This style also appears in the work of Jimi Hendrix, such as the album Electric Ladyland and the song "Third Stone from the Sun."
Herbie Hancock, influenced by Miles Davis, used electric and synthesized sounds in his music during the 1970s and 1980s. He also used tribal names for his group and focused on creating a techno-primitive style. His album covers, designed by artists like Robert Springett and Nobuyuki Nakanishi, were important parts of this look.
In 1975, Japanese artist Tadanori Yokoo created the cover art for Miles Davis’s live album Agharta. His design mixed science fiction with Eastern myths to show an advanced civilization.
Other musicians connected to Afrofuturism include reggae producers Lee "Scratch" Perry and Scientist, hip-hop artists Afrika Bambaataa and Tricky, and electronic musicians like Larry Heard and Juan Atkins. Writers like those behind "Light Years Away" also influenced the genre.
During the 1980s, the Detroit techno scene developed a futuristic vision tied to the city’s Black community.
Today, artists like Janelle Monáe, Outkast, Missy Elliott, Solange, and Nicole Mitchell create mainstream Afrofuturist music.
In 1993, Mark Dery wrote about Afrofuturism in his essay "Black to the Future." Scholars like Alondra Nelson, Greg Tate, and Kodwo Eshun have also studied the topic. Nelson describes Afrofuturism as a way to explore how Black people see themselves, including themes of being different and hoping for a better future.
Modern Afrofuturism often explores ideas like the origins of the universe and speculative philosophy. Artists like Solange Knowles, Rihanna, and Beyoncé use Afrofuturist themes in their music and fashion. Others, like Erykah Badu and Janelle Monáe, use cyborg and metallic visuals in their style.
Other 21st-century musicians linked to Afrofuturism include FKA Twigs, Ibeyi, Spoek Mathambo, Ras G, and Flying Lotus.
Janelle Monáe’s work includes Afrofuturist themes in urban music. Her videos, like "Prime Time" and "Many Moons," use cyborgs and the fashion industry to explore slavery and freedom. She created a character named Cindi Mayweather, who fights against a secret society called the Great Divide. This character is inspired by earlier Afrofuturist figures like Sun Ra and George Clinton. Her 2022 book The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer expands on these ideas.
In The Memory Librarian, technology is used to erase memories, showing how it can control people’s past and future. This highlights social and political issues, which is a key part of Afrofuturism.
Literature and comics
The term Afrofuturism was first used in the 1990s to describe a type of speculative fiction that explores African-American themes and issues within the context of 20th-century technology and culture. Over time, the term expanded to include artistic, scientific, and spiritual practices across the African diaspora. Today, Afrofuturism also looks back at historical examples of similar ideas and includes them in its history. For example, the Dark Matter anthologies, edited by Sheree Thomas, include modern black science fiction stories, discuss Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in an introduction titled "Looking for the Invisible," and also feature older works by writers like W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, and George S. Schuyler.
Lisa Yazsek believes that Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man should be seen as an early example of Afrofuturist literature. She argues that Ellison does not provide future possibilities for later writers to build upon.
Many modern science fiction and speculative fiction writers are described as Afrofuturist or as using Afrofuturist themes. Nancy Farmer won a Newbery Honor for her Afrofuturist young adult novel The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm. Steven Barnes is called an Afrofuturist for his alternate-history novels Lion’s Blood and Zulu Heart. N.K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, and Colson Whitehead are also described as Afrofuturist authors. Octavia Butler inspired a movement among black speculative fiction writers. Her stories challenge ideas that come from systemic oppression, such as how her stories show communities that work together instead of competing. In Samuel R. Delany’s essay "The Mirror of Afrofuturism," he says Afrofuturism is not a genre, but he notes that Butler’s 2003 short story Amnesty contains powerful ideas about race. The fourth book in the science fiction Patternist series, Wild Seed, fits Afrofuturist themes because it tells the story of two immortal Africans, Doro and Anyanwu, who live in an alternate history of 17th-century America with science fiction technology.
Simple science fiction stories (called Sci-Fi or SF) focus on parts of the future, imagined technologies, and life on other planets. These stories explore ideas about the future, including how people might live or interact with others. Good fiction should not be judged based on a person’s race or color.
Outside the United States and North America, Afrofuturism themes have developed in other parts of the African diaspora. For example, in the French Caribbean, author Michael Roch has created stories that reflect cultural and geographic differences but still connect to Afrofuturism.
Tim Fielder’s 2021 graphic novel Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale tells a partly historical story about an immortal African king.
In February 2021, the New York Times reported that fans would see more graphic novels and comics with Afrofuturist themes in the coming year. These include stories about fictional genes, reissues of Afrofuturist comics from companies like DC and Dark Horse, and new works such as After the Rain, Hardears, Black Star, and Infinitum by Tim Fielder. Other projects include new installments of N.K. Jemisin’s Far Sector, The Black Panther by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and reissued comics like E.X.O.. An animated series named Iwájú is also planned. Around the same time, Kenyan artist Kevo Abbra, inspired by Afrofuturism from the 1990s, explained how artistic styles have changed over time. The first issue of the new Black Panther series was released on February 16.
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Art
In 2014, King Britt organized an event called Moondance: A Night in the Afro Future as part of the MOMA's PS1 festival. From noon to 6 p.m. on April 13, people could attend Moondance and listen to lectures, enjoy live music, or watch dance performances that celebrated Afrofuturism in modern culture. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture hosted an important group show titled Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination, which focused on art inspired by science fiction and fantasy. This exhibition ran from October 1, 2015, to January 16, 2016. Its closing night took place on the same day as the Schomburg Black Comic Book Day. Unveiling Visions was curated by artist John Jennings (co-founder of the artist duo Black Kirby with Professor Stacey Robinson) and Afrofuturist scholar Reynaldo Anderson (founder of The Black Speculative Arts Movement). The show included works by artists such as Tony Puryear, Sheeba Maya, Mshindo Kuumba, Eric Wilkerson, Manzel Bowman, Grey Williamson, Tim Fielder, Stacey Robinson, and Shawn Alleyne. The exhibition included items from the Schomburg Center’s collection, such as film posters, comics, T-shirts, magazines, CD covers, playbills, and religious literature. These items highlighted Afrofuturism, black speculative imagination, and cultural creations from the African diaspora.
In April 2016, Niama Safia Sandy organized an art exhibit called Black Magic: AfroPasts / Afrofutures at the Corridor Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. This multidisciplinary show explored the connection between magical realism and Afrofuturism through the experiences of the Black diaspora. Sandy described the exhibit as showing both a look back and a look forward, celebrating the journeys people take, whether by choice or necessity.
The exhibition Afro-Tech and the Future of Re-Invention took place from October 21, 2017, to April 22, 2018, at Dortmunder U in Dortmund, Germany. It examined "speculative visions of the future and current developments in digital technology" created by artists and inventors from Africa and the African diaspora.
Afrofuturist artists used their work to inspire Black people to imagine new possibilities and futures.
Black Metropolis: 30 Years of Afrofuturism, Comics, Music, Animation, Decapitated Chickens, Heroes, Villains and Negroes was a one-person show that highlighted the career of cartoonist and visual Afrofuturist Tim Fielder. The exhibit, which traveled to multiple galleries, opened at New York Gallatin Galleries from May 23 to 30, 2016. It was curated by Boston Fielder and included both published and unpublished work, such as comics for independent magazines and mainstream publications like Marvel Comics. The exhibit was later shown at The Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, for the museum’s 30th anniversary, from October 12 to November 25, 2018.
Afrofuturism in art sometimes overlaps with Afrofuturism in literature, such as in science fiction comic books. For example, the Black Panther movie and comic book are examples of Afrofuturism literature.
In 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, an art exhibition that used a "period room" format to explore Afrofuturism themes. The exhibit imagined the past, present, and future home of someone who lived in Seneca Village, an African American community destroyed to build Central Park in the 1800s.
In 2022, the Hayward Gallery in London organized an exhibition featuring 11 contemporary artists from the African diaspora. These artists used science fiction, myths, and Afrofuturism to question how people understand the world. The exhibition was curated by Ekow Eshun and included artists such as Nick Cave, Rashad Newsome, Kara Walker, Hew Locke, Wangechi Mutu, Lina Iris Viktor, and Ellen Gallagher.
Starting on March 24, 2023, and lasting for one year, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened an exhibit titled Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures on the Concourse Level in the Bank of America Special Exhibitions Gallery. The exhibit had a spacecraft-themed entrance, and visitors received a guidebook called The Cosmic Companion: Your Guide to the Exhibition, which encouraged them to imagine being space-time travelers as they explored the show. The museum also published a book with the same name, which included 21 essays grouped into sections such as Space is the Place, Speculative Worlds, Visualizing Afrofuturism, and Musical Features.
Themes
Jared Richardson's Attack of the Boogeywoman: Visualizing Black Women's Grotesquerie in Afrofuturism examines how Afrofuturism serves as a space for Black women to explore topics like race, gender, and sexuality. The way Black women's bodies are shown in art is analyzed by Afrofuturist artists and made more strange and shocking by creators like Wangechi Mutu and Shoshanna Weinberger.
Beyoncé's 2016 short film Lemonade included feminist Afrofuturism in its themes. The film featured artists such as Ibeyi, Laolu Senbanjo, and Amandla Stenberg, as well as actors like Zendaya and Serena Williams. It also included poetry by Warsan Shire and honored the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner by showing them holding photos of their sons.
In D. Scot Miller's Afro-Surreal Manifesto, Afro-Surrealism is compared to European surrealism, which is described as more focused on facts. This idea is similar to Trey Ellis' essay The New Black Aesthetic, which says Afrofuturist art aims to challenge viewers. Afrofuturist art uses old images and updates them with modern ones, helping people today connect with the past. Afrofuturist artists create new ideas about beauty that mix the strange with the familiar. They imagine the future, while Afro-Surrealism focuses on the present.
Afrofuturism looks at the real experiences of Black people in the past and present and tries to create new truths outside of the usual stories told by dominant cultures. It connects the African diaspora to its history and knowledge of how Black bodies have been treated. In Afrofuturist art, space and aliens are important elements. Black people are imagined as the first aliens because of the Middle Passage, a time when enslaved Africans were taken from their homes. This alien status means being in a foreign place without a history, but also being separated from the past through the traditions of slavery.
Kodwo Eshun writes that the first alienation of Black people happened during the Middle Passage. He says Afrofuturist works use the idea of being outside of a place to explore the effects of forced movement and the lives of Black people in the Atlantic world. This connects science fiction and stories about dystopian societies to Black experiences.
In many Afrofuturist works, water and Black women are linked as symbols of both the loss and growth of Black life. These ideas seem opposite but actually support each other. Examples include the 2009 Kenyan film Pumzi, songs in Beyoncé's Lemonade, the work of the Detroit Techno group Drexciya, and Kara Walker's 2019 sculpture Fons Americanus.
Afrofuturism is about reclaiming lost identities and perspectives. When Mark Dery created the term, he asked if a community whose history was erased could imagine new futures. Afrofuturism is not limited to one type of art; it appears in books, music, and other forms. It involves taking back control of one's story, which was often told by others in the past. Dery said, "African-American culture is Afrofuturist at its heart."
In her article Race and Sexuality in Nalo Hopkinson's Oeuvre; or, Queer Afrofuturism, Amandine H. Faucheux introduces the term "queer Afrofuturism" to describe a type of Afrofuturist work that includes themes of queerness, sexuality, and the meaning of the body. She defines queer Afrofuturism as an approach that studies the connections between race and sexuality. Her article explores the history of Afrofuturism and Black queer theory, as well as the works of author Nalo Hopkinson. Faucheux says that queerness in Afrofuturism helps explain how race and sexuality are used in stories about the future.
In film
In film, Afrofuturism is the use of Black people's history and culture in science fiction movies and similar genres. According to Ashley Clark from The Guardian, the term Afrofuturism is "not clearly defined," but Afrofuturist films often share one main idea: they focus on the international Black experience in different types of stories, whether fictional or real, set in the past, present, or imagined future. Glenn Kenny from The New York Times noted that Afrofuturism is more common in music and art than in movies, but some films still show its ideas in unique ways.
The release of Marvel's Black Panther in 2018 brought Afrofuturism into the global spotlight. In North America, it became the third highest-grossing film ever, sparking new interest in Afrofuturism. The movie challenged negative ideas about Africa, such as it being filled with disease and war, and helped viewers feel proud of their Black identity.
In series
In 2023, Disney+'s sci-fi animation series Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire focused on stories that mix African culture with futuristic ideas. The series included tales from Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and Uganda. Peter Ramsey, an executive producer for Spider-Man, supported the release of the series. He said to CNN, "I really want people to come away with the idea that Africa really is as much part of pop culture as America or Europe or anywhere else."
Difference from Africanfuturism
In 2019, Nnedi Okorafor, a Nigerian-American writer known for fantasy and science fiction stories, stopped using the term "afrofuturism" to describe her work. She created new terms, "Africanfuturism" and "Africanjujuism," to better explain her writing and similar works. In October 2019, she wrote an essay titled "Defining Africanfuturism" that explained these terms. She described Africanfuturism as a type of science fiction rooted in African culture, history, and mythology. It focuses on hopeful future ideas and centers on people of African descent, often set in Africa or involving the Black diaspora. It includes stories with mystical elements and is different from Afrofuturism, which focuses more on African American themes. She also explained that Africanjujuism is a type of fantasy that blends real African spiritual beliefs with imagination.
In August 2020, Hope Wabuke, a writer and professor, noted that Afrofuturism was first used by Mark Dery, a white critic, in 1993. He connected African American themes to technology and culture. Later, Alondra Nelson expanded this idea, but Wabuke criticized it for focusing too much on the history of African Americans and how they were affected by white people. She argued that Africanfuturism is more specific because it avoids the influence of Western perspectives and focuses on Africa and its people. She said Africanfuturism has a different view than Afrofuturism and Western science fiction. She also discussed examples of Africanfuturist and Africanjujuist themes in books like Who Fears Death and Zahrah the Windseeker by Nnedi Okorafor, Pet by Akwaeke Emezi, and The Rape of Shavi by Buchi Emecheta.
In February 2021, Aigner Loren Wilson of Tor.com explained that it is hard to find books in the Africanfuturism subgenre because many people treat it as the same as Afrofuturism. She said Africanfuturism focuses on Africa and its people, while Afrofuturism often includes stories about Black people in the diaspora, such as those living in Western countries. Wilson listed books in the Africanfuturism genre, including Africanfuturism: An Anthology edited by Wole Talabi, The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, and Lagoon by Nnedi Okorafor. She noted that Lagoon requires readers to actively imagine the future it describes, making them part of the story’s creative process.
Gary K. Wolfe reviewed Africanfuturism: An Anthology in February 2021. He credited Nnedi Okorafor with creating the term "Africanfuturism" to describe science fiction centered on Africa. He mentioned that "Africanjujuism" might not become widely used but said the anthology is valuable because it shows the diversity of African science fiction. The anthology includes stories like "Egoli" by T. L. Huchu and "Lekki Lekki" by Mame Bougouma Diene.
In 2022, Alan Muller wrote that using "Afrofuturism" for African speculative fiction is limited because the term comes from African-American culture. He argued that terms like "South African futurism" or "Zimbabwean futurism" would better reflect African-specific stories. Financial Times writer David Pilling said "Africancentrism" focuses on African history and culture to imagine a free future. He also mentioned that some people criticize Black Panther for not showing a true African perspective and noted that Nnedi Okorafor’s book Binti is being adapted for television, showing the growing influence of Africanfuturism.