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Afrofuturism

Installation by Alisha B. Wormsley, Detroit, Michigan, 2019

 

Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future-might, for want of a better term, be called "Afrofuturism." The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antimony: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? 

-- Mark Dery on "Afrofuturism"
in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994), pg. 180
View the full-text essay: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822396765-010

Mothership Mixtape
A curated Spotify playlist of Afrofuturistic songs from past and present to transport you to another realm 
Or, click here check out the YouTube version. 

Selected Authors

Find a book in the UF Libraries or the Alachua Co. Public Library systems! 

Tomi Adeyemi
Nigerian-American, b. 1993
Octavia Butler
American, b. 1947
Toni Cade Bambara
American, b. 1939
Ta-Nehisi Coates
American, b. 1975
Martin Delany
American, b. 1812 
Samuel R. Delany
American, b. 1942
W.E.B. DuBois
American, b. 1868
Tananarive Due
American, b. 1966
Kodwo Eshun
Ghanian, b. 1967 

Pauline Hopkins
American, b. 1859

Nalo Hopkinson
Jamaican, b. 1960 
Kelvin Christopher James
Trinidadian-American, b. 1972
N.K. Jemisin
America, b. 1972 
Walter Mosley
American, b. 1952
 Nnedi Okorafor
Nigerian-American, b. 1974

Ben Okri
Nigerian, b. 1959

Ishmael Reed
American, 1938
Nisi Shawl
American 
Rivers Solomon
American, b. 1989
Colson Whitehead
American, b. 1969
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