Afrofuturism is an evolving field of study in Black cultural studies. Its theories and scholarship are heavily influenced with particularities in science fiction, speculative fiction, new media, digital technology, the arts, and Black aesthetics all situated and focused on the continent of Africa, the Diaspora, and its imaginaries. From its origins,
Afrofuturism can be broadly defined as “African American voices” with “other stories to tell about culture, technology and things to come.” The term was chosen as the best umbrella for the concerns of “the list” – as it has come to be known by its members – “sci-fi imagery, futurist themes, and technological innovation in the African diaspora. (p. 9)Footnote1
It pays close attention to the narratives, theories and methods that positions Black identity in the present and into some futurity of the imaginary.
Proponents of Afrofuturism are fascinated with the images, stories and theories pushing into and extrapolating Black life into a new era, time and aesthetic. Yet, Black religion has not been very prevalent in the theory building, or in the aesthetics of Black identity of futurity. Thus, we gathered several scholars, thinkers, academicians and community organizers to address this critical oversight. In October 2014, we created a one-day symposium focusing on Afrofuturism and Black theology. These innovative scholars and artists whose works and research interests include gender, sexuality, race, culture and the Black Church with a view to the arts addressed the intersectionalities of technology, digital media and science fiction. We were interested in creating a critical dialogue on the research topics of Black life in critical consideration of religiosity, race, gender and sex, which have often remained marginal within the broader discourses of Black religion, Black cultural studies, and in particular Afrofuturism.
The symposium explored methods and ideologies of Afrofuturism situated in mysticism, technology, new age spirituality, human and post-human identity, and the futurity of race, sexuality and gender roles in Black religion and the Black Church. As the Black Church continues to struggle to find its identity in the twenty-first century the symposium explored Black identity, sexuality, gender and the role of Black religion and the Black Church in the future. At the same time, technology has led to unprecedented cultural and scientific exchange between the current generations of the Diaspora and the conceptual future vis-à-vis human and post-human, race and post-race, and gender and post-gender theories.
To address these ideas and methodologies scholars engaged key questions to help frame their engagement and discourse: How does the study of religion in America look different, when one begins with race and, more specifically, Blackness? How does the study of futurity and African American religion shift if the conversation starts with sexuality? Where and how are Black preaching and the Black Church situated within these shifting paradigms? And how might leading with religion and race alter the very questions that are brought to analyses of gender and sexuality?
The task before us is not to address a single problem, but rather to unearth and engage with the often-unstated normative claims surrounding race, religion, sex, culture and socio-political life that continue to inform our work as scholars and our lives as people within the United States and the African Diaspora, more broadly. With this in mind, the symposium featured a panel discussion with featured guest speakers presenting papers that represent the latest Afrofuturistic research being done by scholars, thinkers, theologians and artists throughout the US. Thus, this special edition of the journal offers selected essays by the symposium's scholars, thinkers and theologians. They interrogate the Black Church, Black religion, gender, sex, sexuality, and the futurity of Black identity in some visions of Black aesthetics and some conceptions of a post-human and post-racial world, yet all seeking futurity centered and infused between “New World” and Africa.
With the first essay, “Your God is a Racist, Sexist, Homophobic, and a Misogynist …Our God is Change,” Michael Brandon McCormack examines the distinctive ways two Black literary artists, Ishmael Reed and Octavia Butler, whose dramatic writings can rightly be described as Afrofuturistic, use religion to critique contemporary Black life in issues of difference, domination and deliverance in the future. Reed points toward a Sankofa ancient-future, which reclaims and re-signifies African diasporic religious and cultural traditions, as a means of Black liberation and innovation within a pluralistic American context. Meanwhile, Butler presents a vision of a future socio-political context that demands an altogether new Black and feminist religious movement. McCormack argues that taken together, Reed's and Butler's Afrofuturistic critiques offer possibilities for imagining alternative, emancipatory forms of Black theological discourse and religious practice.
Next, Nettrice Gaskins employs and weighs the ideologies of an ancient African symbol commonly called a cosmogram. In “The African Cosmogram Matrix in Contemporary Art and Culture,” Gaskins considers ritualistic spaces that correspond dynamically with the Christian crucifix and Buddhist mandala. She works with a variety of iconography to explore these spaces and visual artistry. Her work here also involves a range of performance arts and music genres. Similarly, Gaskins finds that contemporary Black artists and Black creativity construct improvisational, cultural spaces and lenses to view the universe. This article further suggests that the re-mixing of these artistic matrices with Western and African belief systems offers creative expression into the liberation struggles and visions of freedom which are central to Black theology.
With a critically vital approach, community organizers for the Children's Defense Fund of Nashville, TN, Damien Durr and Eric Brown, take to the proverbial streets of Afrofuturism in their work with Black youth. They explore how Black youth might envision an alternative Afro-future in the face of disparaging forces pathologizing and criminalizing their Blackness even before they have had the chance to grasp what that future could be. How might youth contribute a sense of worth to the world for a Black future from these Afrodiasporic experiences? Herein, the Nashville Team of the Children's Defense Fund seeks to cultivate and explore the insights of young Black males, who find themselves caught in the surge of a prison pipeline that operates as a systemically oppressive institution, with the insurmountable forces of profit-making. The Children's Defense Fund Nashville Team share how they have designed several projects to work on identity (re)formation with Black youth to construct visions of a future filled with supportive structures, unhindered imaginations, and therefore unlimited possibilities.
In turn, Christophe Ringer also tackles Black public space in view of religion and the biopolitics of race. Ringer's eschatological vision here takes shape in his article, “Afrofuturism and the DNA of Biopolitics.” He examines the theological framework of posthuman myths to explore technoscience and the Human Genome Project within the biopolitics of race. He then explores issues of a Black public sphere in view of the science-fiction film District 9 and the involuntary science experiments with DNA seizures by the US government and its arrests with deleterious impact to reinforce racial order. Ultimately, Ringer turns to an eschatological framework drawn from the ironic use of DNA to exonerate wrongly convicted Black inmates on death row, as well as pointing out its use to explore African ancestry in the biopolitics of race within the Black public sphere. In particular, Ringer demonstrates the theological concepts of incarnation and eschatology and how they can illumine the way political economy, hope and race are tied to the transformation of human to alien flesh as a fundamental mark of difference.
In the final essay, “Fire This Time,” Terrance Dean delves into the art of Black preaching with the artistic visions of Black literature. Turning over James Baldwin's extraordinary visions in Fire Next Time, Dean explores the rhetorical structures of Black preaching's “call and response,” liberation, and transformation theology as seen through the prophetic eyes of Baldwin's message to his nephew. Positioning Baldwin as a preacher and prophet, Dean illustrates how Baldwin's prophetic visioning calls forth a historical acknowledgment of White America's indictment in slavery. The visions of Afrofuturism take shape at the intersections of theological language, spirituality, rhetorical frameworks, and styles of African and African-American cultural discourse through the African-American sermon and preacher.
This special issue of the journal offers these variously constructed lenses that peer into the many cultural critiques that pose creative possibilities in Afrofuturism. Critical creativity is the stake and the means of Afrofuturism. The tools may encompass the arts – such as the far reaching music of “funk” or the prophetic musings of Black literature – along with the science fiction of film or the nexus between the scientific horrors of our past and the scientific exploration of our futures. No less, this issue enters the foray as theological scholars, authors of Black art and cultural reflection, and community organizers enter a common universe of prophetic analysis and fantasized visions that contemplate heretofore unimagined, transformed Black life.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Terrance Dean
Terrance Dean is a PhD student in Homiletics and Liturgics in the Graduate Department of Religion at Vanderbilt University. His research interests include Afrofuturism, Black cultural production, gender and queer studies and the intersections of the philosophy of language in the Black religious experience. He is interested in exploring how religious discourse informs, shapes, aides and abets Black identity, particularly Black queer identity in the Black religious experience post Civil Rights era. Dean has written several publications on Black culture, sex and sexuality, including Hiding in Hip Hop (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2008), and Mogul: A Novel (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2010). Dean facilitated the 2014 Vanderbilt Symposium, Afrofuturism in Black Theology: Race, Gender, Sexuality and the State of Black Religion in the Black Metropolis.
Dale P. Andrews
Dale P. Andrews, PhD, is Distinguished Professor of Homiletics, Social Justice and Practical Theology at Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion. He also is an Affiliate Faculty in the American Studies Department in the College of Arts and Sciences. Previously, he served as the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Homiletics and Pastoral Theology at Boston University School of Theology.
Notes
1 Alondra Nelson, Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002).