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Uniqua Jones                                    Afrofuturism

“Religion begins with the consciousness that there is something higher than man. But even Herodotus called the Negroes sorcerer’s:- now in sorcery we have not the idea of a god, of a moral faith..”-Hegel

Religion to many is to have faith and belief in a higher power. It is to be fully devoted to a way of life. History has shown that religion can bring together people but also destroy relationships from anything to family relationships or friendships. In this excerpt, Hegel has used religion to his advantage to create this image of Africans as savages with no structure in their lives or communities as a whole. Hegel’s ignorance about the different cultures in Africa lumps Africans all in one group. Hegel then goes on to say Africans don’t have religion and because of this, they are sorcerers.

   Many people who do not follow a particular religion or do not believe in a higher power at all are often looked down upon, this was particularly prevalent in the past. Hegel contributes to the western views and ideology that all people in Africa need help. That Africans are not civilized, have no structure because they have no religion. He then goes on to invoke fear into people by calling Africans sorcerer. “Sorcerers”, people who deal with magic or witchcraft are feared because it is a practice many people are ignorant about. As a result, people reading what Hegel is saying often start to believe what he is saying because they are ignorant. This contributes to the negative mindset associated with Africans.

As we discussed in class, Afrofuturism in music is an interesting avenue to explore, with artists like Erykah Badu or Janelle Monae. After some searching, I found an episode of This American Life that discusses Afrofuturism. It led me to a song called “The Deep” by a group called clppng which features Daveed Diggs from Hamilton. The podcast explains that, “The song is based on the underwater mythology of the 90s Detroit electro band Drexciya.” The song works with a mythology that imagines that pregnant women who were thrown off of slave ships birthed their children in the water and these children were able to create a thriving civilization under the sea. The intro to the song states, “We built our home on the sea floor, unaware of the two-legged surface dwellers until their world came to destroy ours. With cannons, they searched for oil beneath our cities. Their greed and recklessness forced our uprising.” The song goes on to talk about an uprising from these people after the people on the surface ruin the peace in the civilization down below. The song imagines great peace in this civilizatoin built from children who would have been slaves, and deals very openly with the questions, “what if we had never been colonized? What if we have been left alone?” This kind of imagined separate space makes me think of “the quarter of the negro” that Langston Hughes discusses. Although this space can sometimes be negative in Hughes’ work, both discuss a space purely for black people, without interruption from any kind of white colonizing power.

As we discussed, the concept of “double-consciousness” refers to the sense of “two-ness” that comes out of a complex identity that often has features that seemingly contradict or integrate in an intersectional manner. In “Space is the Place” Sun Ra and other Black individuals not only are victim to white racist power, but also to black-on-black violence and exploitation as well – seen through the exchanges with character of the Overseer. Continue reading “Double-Consciousness of the Overseer in “Space is the Place””

I was intrigued by all the wildly interesting, detailed, yet also mysterious/vague elements of this afrofuturistic film, however I also had some trouble with the confusing back and forth of some of these features, which made me try to analyze who/what Sun Ra represents. Continue reading “Space is the Place – Who is Sun Ra?”

As this episode progresses you can really see the way that the futurism of Black Mirror in general coupled with the episodes use of neurotechnology, works to represent the way our society enslave and dehumanize people of color.  The episode opens up with a girl named Nish, who we later find out is there to get vengeance for her father – a convicted murderer – who was tricked by the museum owner (Rolo Haynes) into giving up his digital consciousness post-execution in exchange for money for his family. Continue reading “Netflix’s Black Mirror: “Black Museum””

One thing I noticed when listening to the ” Writing Afrofuturism ” playlist is the beats and the sound of the songs. Each song has its own unique beat and sound to it, and for me that is a very crucial component to an afrofuturistic song. For example, the songs such as ” Zodiac Sh*t ” or ” Table Tennis ” by Flying Lotus don’t exactly have lyrics that stand out, or have no lyrics at all. However, that does not make the song ” less good.” It just allows the listener to focus more on the beat and make something out of that instead. Even for the songs that do have lyrics, for each song one can already feel the “mood” of the song when listening to its beat or sound. Whether the artist wants you to feel calm, angry or hopeful… one can be able to feel these things or know what the artist is feeling by simply listening to its beat, rhythm or tempo.

When first reading, Ralph Ellison’s, Invisible Man I didn’t think much of it as a afrofuturism novel. However, thinking back to it, I now realize that this novel goes into many interesting topics that touches on afrofuturism. I briefly want to talk about the title itself, Invisible Man, and the fact that the protagonist in this novel is nameless. As I was reading this book, in high school, I constantly wondered what the protagonists name was. I also found myself frustrated at the fact that the author does not give us any clue to what his name could be, even after he changes it. Then I realized, once you give someone a name, you have given them an identity and every issue or challenge that person goes through is specific towards them. That’s when I began to understand why Ellison decided to leave the protagonist as nameless, or at least came to an assumption. As the Invisible Man, the author was able to write about the issues and struggles African Americans go through as whole. In other words, the protagonist represented all African American men in America. Even by referring to the protagonist as the ” invisible man” says something, and emphasizes how black people in America are not taken serious, or even acknowledged. We even see the narrator being set up for failure since the very beginning, while trying to find a job, when it is revealed that the true purpose of his scholarship was to keep him running around and waste his time. To me this symbolized how our government system is, and how it was not made for African Americans, or any minority group, to succeed. I just found it very interesting and clever on how Ralph Ellison decided to tackle these issues during the time this novel was written. ( I’m not sure if im making sense, especially to those who have not read the novel yet)