Afrofuturism: The Second Race for Theory

The term “200 year present,” coined by sociologist Elise Boulding, is particularly salient because right now, at this moment, there are people that were born 100 years ago, and there is a child being born right now in the hospital that will be alive 100 years from now. Additionally, sociologists typically explain that nations, or sometimes societies, usually have about a 200-year kind of lifespan before they go through some type of massive change. If you go back 200 years here in this country around 1820, you will find enslaved Africans revolting. About ten years from now around 2030 I speculate my digital humanities people will go and collect the data and these archives that exist now. That’s the beginning of where you start having yearly meetings of what they would have called Black meetings of scholarship. Since 1830, there has never not been a year where Black people in the US did not have some type of religious or political meeting to talk about what was going on in the country. The last 100-plus years of transnational struggle, during which time Black intellectuals have been dealing with archiving (i.e., reassembling institutional knowledge), there have been roughly three phases. The first phase, the concept of the encyclopedia Africana, starts around 1901 when W.E.B. DuBois was in conversation with Edward Blyden, who was thought to be a multifaceted genius in the 19th century and influenced a lot of DuBois’s thinking. During the period, what Rayford Logan called the Nadir or the Age of Imperialism around 1880 to 1921 or so, other cultures at this time were putting together encyclopedias during the Industrial Revolution as a way of archiving and reassembling knowledge to make sense of what was going on.

Forty years or so after that period was the anti-colonial Black Power era when modern Black studies emerged primarily driven by people who were either activists or scholars that came of age between 1955 and 1975. Then the term “Africology” emerged in the late 20th century toward the end of the Cold War during a period where a lot of people were beginning to be influenced by the arrival of the postmodern scholars and influential thinkers that came to America after World War II and were exposed to people like Jacque Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others in the late 20th century. This eventually led to a certain type of intellectual conflict in terms of nomenclature and how people thought about theory. There was an article written by Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian entitled “The Race for Theory” (1987) wherein she observed that in the area of literary criticism a lot of theoretical writing was becoming incomprehensible in terms of the ability for people to understand it. During this postmodern era between 1987 and 1993, Jean-François Lyotard and Derrida were collapsing the idea of grand narratives. Lyotard’s writings on the postmodern condition, Molefi Asante’s theorization of Afrocentricity, Michele Wallace’s manifesto on Black feminism, and others published works kind of set a trend for a generation from around 1977 to through the late 1980s. During this period there was also a rise of public intellectuals like bell hooks, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, and others who knew that they were at the end of a certain kind of knowledge production that had really solidified from 1945 to about 1988. 

At this point, intellectuals began shifting from the anti-colonial Black Power era in terms of knowledge production on the eve of Web 1.0, which would go online by the mid-1990s. This is evident in Asante’s The Afrocentric Idea (1987), Gates’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988), and Cornel West’s Prophesy Deliverance! (1987), and Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) and some of the other Black British intellectuals at that time. Despite flaws in The Black Atlantic that leave out Afro-Latinos, people still reference Gilroy’s work, as well as his work There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and the Nation (1987). This period was also the beginning of what would be called the “culture wars,” a term first publicly introduced by paleoconservative US politician Pat Buchanan. He explained at the 1992 Republican National Convention, “My fellow Americans, this campaign is about philosophy… It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.” 

The Africological response to this period and discussions of Black futures was explored through a few works during this time. Mark Dery (1994) coined the term “Afrofuturism” in dialogue with author and literary critic Samuel R. Delaney, writer, musician, and producer Greg Tate, and hip hop scholar Tricia Rose. Additionally, C. Tsehloane Keto’s The Africa Centered Perspective of History and Social Sciences in the Twenty-first Century (1993) was one of those thin 100-page books that you could only find in Black bookstores. Keto explains, “As a futurologist she or he can speculate, engage beyond the next century… to create in sharp contrast a time map on which to trace the events of the past, create history through action in the present, and plot the path of possible future action” (1993, 120-122). Asante also published Malcolm X as Cultural Hero and Other Afrocentric Essays (1993) in which he deals with space and time. Then also, the first scholar using Afrocentricity in relation to the world wide web was Anna Everett in her essay The revolution will be digitized: Afrocentricity and the digital public sphere (2002), in which she establishes an Africological perspective in relation to the Web 1.0 era.