Institute For The Future

About Afrofuturism and the Black Speculative Arts Movement

In September 2018, the Institute for The Future (IFTF) held its first panel on Afrofuturism at its Ten Year Forecast at the Museum of Computer History in Mountain View, where I was able to deliver a keynote address explaining Afrofuturism in more detail. As a graduate student I arrived at IFTF in 1998 as an intern eager to understand the practice of forecasting and how it was articulated by IFTF. I learned much and wanted this approach to become even more accessible to my students by the time I became a professor at in 2003. I wanted to celebrate the Black imagination and at the invitation of Reynaldo Anderson, the co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM), we began to hold BSAM conferences in 2017. In March 2019, with the collaboration of IFTF, BSAM the Museum of the African Diaspora (MOAD), and the curator Ashara Ekundayo, we held an Afrofutures Festival at IFTF.

To provide a sense of Afrofuturism and kick off a series of posts on Afrofuturism, the Black Speculative Arts Movement and one of its media collaborators, The Afrofuturist Podcast, here’s an overview of the TYF 2018 keynote “Year of the Panther: Afrofuturism in Forecasting”: 

I share a dream: to ensure that long oppressed racial minority and diverse voices can articulate themselves in the futures imagined in the practices of long-term thinking and in the professional areas of foresight. It’s not the color of our skin that matters as much as the articulation and content of the varieties of cultural imaginations, along with the rainbow hues of our queer allies included. I share a dream.

When the film Black Panther hit theaters in early 2018 and became one of the largest grossing  movies of all time, Afrofuturism became more of a known genre. The Black Panther film depicts an uncolonized and secretive ancient, technologically superior central African civilization known as Wakanda that the modern world does not yet know about. As a result of the fictional meteorite called Vibranium that hit this region thousands of years ago, its super and powerful properties were used by the Wakandans to amplify their culture and develop their advanced technology.

In the film, they are faced with an existential dilemma caught between their desire to help solve the rest of humanity’s challenges and to maintain and safeguard their own society as a priority. It has a parallel story of a Wakandan boy abandoned in Oakland in the 1980s and how he seeks to reclaim his birthright lineage to the Wakandan kingdom.

This film and story within a story provides a useful metaphor for our festival as we acknowledge and harvest future visions already part of the African tradition and the Black Diaspora as it survived and innovated through the horrors of slavery and still, ongoing rampant discrimination today. Each generation has reimagined and envisioned what freedom(s) it is struggling to gain and its triumphs have shaped the societies of the Americas from Canada to the United States to Mexico and Latin American culture in religion, music, technology, sports, literature, social and physical sciences as vibrant expressions of its own metaphorical Vibranium. The Black Panther party in the 1960s was a vision of a Black utopian society being realized for a short while as it provided its own sense of autonomous Black power, providing health, food and security services for local black communities.

These visions of past futures and futures imagined are being more fully acknowledged as invaluable to expanding the voices in forecasting. Forecasting with an Afro-centric perspective can contribute to accelerating the cycle of foresight to insight to action as the future visions of Black communities allow for a wider and radically inclusive set of implementable forecasts to augment community well-being, collective wealth and individual economic mobility and freedom. Exploring the signals for equitable futures and real liberation of black people and people of color will help ensure healthier communities that guide policies understanding socioeconomic and social justice as the basis of health.

If you’re a straight white male, you see yourself reflected in almost every hero of every big super hero movie ever made. But imagine, you’d never seen someone who looks like you as the hero in a big fantasy epic. Imagine never seeing yourself in most visions of the future

The Afrocentric view shifts this emphasis from opposing binaries to juxtaposing dimensions where a range of truths can be held, that is the foundational theory to understand quantum computing and Black people have been there for centuries!

Black people have always been futurists; you see, we had to be. Afrofuturism aims to reclaim and transform the trauma of past atrocities against the Black and Afro-Queer Diaspora. Think of the Middle Passage as a science fiction horror story where Black people were transported from western Africa, the home planet of the Black Diaspora, and where previously unseen technologies of transportation and bondage were used to dislocate, kidnap large numbers of people to a new world. Arriving in this new world, they were killed if they spoke their own languages or practiced their own rituals. They had to adopt a new religion and infuse it under the radar with their own rituals. In this world, they had to innovate, adapt, capitulate, succumb and rebuild their former lives and traditions.

Spirituals became a form of what scholars call sonic utopias. Songs articulated Black visions of a future imagining freedom and yearning for an un-colonized mind and body. This is a form of futurism.

The Spiritual, the song, the dance, the art is our cultural vehicle, our spaceship that transports the Black Imagination as metaphorical images from one point in time to our future selves, to our future generations.

This is our truth.  This is our currency.  This, is our power.

And we are vibranium.

—Amos White, President of Bay Area Generations

So when we watch in the Black Panther film as King T’Challa is flying into Wakanda with a sleek African design inspired flying saucer like aircraft and we see the major Wakandan city for the first time, we feel pride in imagining an African technologically sophisticated metropolis. And further, when we see the city of Oakland’s name on the big screen, flashing back in time, the audience gasped with a simultaneous memory of the past and wonder for a new future.

I don’t know about you but the crowd I was with in Oakland for the community screening of the Black Panthers at the historic Oakland Grand Lake Theater were exhilarated because the collective yearning and memory of an alternative future the Zion of freedom, passed down in spirituals, resonated for us so deeply at that moment.

Forecasting is stronger not weaker when it includes the fullness of the forecaster, and stronger as advocate than agnostic. 

 

 

Watch Lonny Avi Brooks, PhD's talk at IFTF's 2018 Ten Year Forecast below.

 

You can read the full report from Equitable Futures: Community Speaks.

Institute for the Futures’s Equitable Futures Lab is committed to engaging diverse communities from around the world in imagining more equitable and sustainable futures. With support from the Blue Shield of California Foundation, IFTF hosted three community-based events in 2018 to re-imagine the future in collaboration with Afrofuturist artists, gender-focused thought leaders, and seven global nodes in a week-long network of distributed social reimagining. here are the studies from the sponsored events at IFTF.