African Space Programs: Spaces and Times of the Black Fantastic

Abstract

This article traces the resonances and responses to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination and the Apollo space missions in the late 1960s in poetry and song, arguing that performances of the black extraterrestrial—donning the perspective and guise of the alien—articulate partially secularized prophesy and non-national planetary perspective. The black extraterrestrial blurs the different senses of historical and narrative possibility to stake out new historical possibilities. The article concludes with a brief consideration of contemporary popular instances of black anti-humanism, emphasizing the black android as the development of the black extraterrestrial in the post–Cold War era.

Keywords:

• Afro-alienation
• Afrofuturism
• black fantastic
• diaspora
• Martin Luther King

Notes

James Baldwin, “No Name in the Street,” in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America 1998), 432.

Nina Simone in Concert (PHS 600-135 1964).

Afrofuturism is a very capacious critical term that enables us to see commonalities among texts that might not otherwise speak to one another. Its definition depends on which texts and questions one emphasizes. I adapt my definition here from Alondra Nelson's gloss: “‘African American voices’ with ‘other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come.’” “Introduction: Future Texts,” Social Text 71, 20.1 (Summer 2002), 9.

I'm drawing on an argument Sybille Fischer made in an unpublished lecture, “When Things Don't Add Up: The Consequences of Enslaved Enlightenment” (March 27 2010, Cornell University) regarding the status of the Native American and African for Enlightenment, especially John Locke, where through a logic of double negation each becomes neither human nor beast.

Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (London: Oxford University Press, 2010), 196.

Ibid., 289–290.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 142. I draw the distinction between politics and the political from Jacques Rancière, among others.

Iton, “Still Life,” Small Axe 40 (March 2013), 35.

Henry Dumas, “Outer Space Blues,” in Knees of a Natural Man, ed. Eugene B. Redmond (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989), 67.

Iton, Black Fantastic, 139. The “underground” of which Curtis Mayfield sang and Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison wrote is another such space, but it lacks the capacity to rewrite history or achieve a planetary perspective, which, I will argue, is a key component of the extraterrestrial. Iton uses the notion of denaturalization in particular to refer to felons who, even upon release, forfeit many of their civil rights. Vesla M. Weaver makes a case for a causal relationship between mid-1960s Civil Rights legislation and the reinstatement of the death penalty, the revival of felon disenfranchisement, mandatory minimum sentencing, and other “tough on crime” legislation in her article “Frontlash: Race and the Development of Punitive Crime Policy,” Studies in American Political Development 21 (2007): 230–265.

Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks (Chicago: Third World Press, 2001), 471, my emphases.

Ibid.

One could oppose this poem to Gil Scott-Heron's “Enough” on Small Talk at 125th and Lennox, which addresses a presumably white audience and ends with a warning “until we have been nerve gassed, shot down and murdered, or done some of the same ourselves, look over your shoulder motherfucker, I am coming.”.

I draw this idea from Phillip Brian Harper's “Nationalism and Social Division in Black Arts Poetry of the 1960s.” Harper specifically comments on moments of second-person address.

Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 44–51.

Nikki Giovanni, Black Judgement (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1968), 7.

Giovanni, “Adulthood,” 18.

June Jordan, “Thinking about my Poetry,” Civil Wars (Boston: Beacon Press, 1977), 126.

Mark Anthony Neal, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1998), 114.

Sonia Sanchez, “Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King” in Homegirls and Handgrenades (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 1984), 69.

Ibid., 70.

Ibid., 194.

Mark Ribowsky calls it a “metaphoric cousin of ‘I Wish’,” which is also on Songs in the Key of Life. Signed, Sealed Delivered: The Soulful Journey of Stevie Wonder (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2010), 263.

Cited in ibid., 263.

Quoted in John F. Szwed, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 165.

Ajay Heble, Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance and Critical Practice (London: Routledge, 2000), 124.

Szwed, Space is the Place, 29–31, 365. Szwed notes that “if this experience took place in 1936,” as Ra claimed, “it came far before the date of what some say was the first alien contact” in 1952.

Qtd. in Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 26. The former citation comes from his liner notes to Out Beyond the Kingdom of (1974); the latter from Interstellar Low Ways (1967).

“When I say ‘killing,’ I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.” Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), 256.

Saidiya V. Hartman and Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle, 13, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2003), 185.

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 52.

Badu, “On and On,” Baduism (Kedar/Universal U-53027, 1997). Badu's continued fealty to the Five Percent Nation and Louis Farrakhan points to another foreclosed horizon insofar as the latter's Million Man March retrospectively looks like the end rather than the beginning of an era of black politics.

Walter Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch,” Selected Writings 1927–1930, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4.

Anthony Joseph, in his recent African Origins of UFOs (Cambridge: Salt Publishers, 2006) broadly rewrites the basic P-Funk template into an experimental “liquid text” that superimposes ancient Ïerè (the Amerindian name for Trinidad), the future world Kunu Supia where melanin is central to survival and is traded on the black market, and the “floating island” of the present. Past, present, and future co-occur and mutually transform over the course of the text, which pits the “anti-essentialists” who, like P-Funk's Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk are “impervious to funk” against the survival of those “lost in space, drifting from place to place, still trying to find where they came from,” informed by what Joseph terms “genetic memory,” a notion that splits the difference between Lamarkian evolution and contemporary genetics: “The ONE would hit them in the chest like this <!>and they wouldn't understand it. Prone to pork they'd lick pigfat off the floor when no one was looking but they wouldn't understand it. Their ears would ring with trans-genetic texts and they wouldn't understand it. Drums would tumble with insecret textures and they wouldn't understand it” (38, 137).

Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baba, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black White and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 207.

Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Oxford University Press, 1997), 120.

Joy James, “Concerning Violence: Frantz Fanon's Rebel Intellectual in Search of a Black Cyborg,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 1 (Winter 2013), 61–62.

Gil Scott-Heron, “Enough,” Small Talk at 125th and Lenox (Flying Dutchman 66611, 1970); Janelle Monáe, “Cold War,” The ArchAndroid (Bad Boy Records 512256-2, 2010).

Liner notes to Metropolis: The Chase Suite (Bad Boy Records 511234-2, 2008).

Ibid.

Iton, “Still Life,” 26.

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 8.

“Many Moons,” Metropolis.

“Dance or Die,” The ArchAndroid.

Shana Redmond, “This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe's ‘Cold War,’” Journal of Popular Music Studies 23.4 (December 2011): 396.

Liner notes to The ArchAndroid.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that supposed black social dysfunction “mark[s] such a change in the human condition that biologists would talk of a ‘speciation’—the creation of a new species,” which in addition to suggesting a qualitative change of being the emerging population would be unable to interbreed with humans of the older kind (quoted in “The Fight over Orphanages” Newsweek (January 16, 1995):22. Nicolas Wade's Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (New York: Penguin Books 2014) is the most recent attempt to link social outcomes to genetically derived race.

Paul Gilroy, “After the Love Has Gone: Bio-Politics and Etho-Poetics in the Black Public Sphere,” Public Culture 7 (1994): 49–76.

“Primetime,” The Electric Lady (Bad Boy 536210-2, 2013).

Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic, 15.

Iton, “Still Life,” 39.