Nelson

Relevant Work
 Pages
(NATC, 3ed.)

## Biography

* Alondra Nelson was born into a middle-class family in Bethesda, Maryland in 1968.
* In 1994, she received a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of California at San Diego.
* In 2003, she received a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University.
* After college, she studied philosophies of evolution and theology for a year in Paris. In 1972, she completed her Ph.D. in biology at Yale University

* Nelson is currently the President of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
* Nelson is the Harold F. Linder Chair in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study.

## "Afro-Futurism: Past-Future Visions"

### **Background and Historical Context**

Nelson's "AfroFuturism: Past-Future Visions" (2000), articulates Afrofuturism's narrative, sonic and visual components while name checking its practitioners and innovators. Innovation and improvisation, she argues, are at the heart of black techno culture and of African diaspora peoples' histories and futures. For Nelson, history may inform the future of the African diaspora, but it does not wholly define it. Here Afrofuturists are visual as they envision those alternative tomorrows, sometimes utopic and at other times dystopic" (2632).

### **Key Words and Terms**

**AfroFuturism:**

* "a term of convenience to describe the analysis, criticism, and cultural production that addresses the intersections between race and technology";
* "a critical perspective that opens up inquiry into the many overlaps between technoculture and black diasporic histories";
* "looks across popular culture--jazz, hip-hop, and techno music; experimental film; graffiti art; new photography--to find models of expression that transform spaces of alienation into novel forms of creative potential";
* "reclaims theorizing about the future" (*NATC* 2633);
* "an antidote to unbridled, raceless future-lust" (2634);
* “Mark Dery coined the word ‘AfroFuturism” in a 1993 essay, first published in *South Atlantic Quarterly, c*alled 'Black to the Future.' Dery argued that ‘African American voices have other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come.’ He continued, ‘If there is an AfroFuturism, it must be sought in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points'" (2635).

**"Breakbeat science"**: "describes the application of scientific technique to the production of music" (2637).

**"soft power"**: A term coined by the digital artist Fatimah Tuggar, which means "the flow of electronics and information that enables neo-colonial power, despite the absence of physical proximity." Like the *pharmakon*, another contranym, which can mean either the poison or the cure, Tuggar views "soft power" as "both a tool of domination and a tool of possibility" (2635).

### **Key Quotations**

“The central focus of AfroFuturist thought is in defining the relationships between race and technology through the many places where they intersect, including fiction and digital art. But there is no consensus among critics about the absolute significance of these associations. Like the cultural productions they write about, the strength of what we might cautiously call AfroFuturist criticism lies in the speculative and fragmented nature of the ideas” (*NATC* 2635).

"[Tuggar's] representations are not blanket indictments of technological advance, but rather an opportunity for the viewer to consider the incongruities and contradictions of uneven development" (2635).

"Eshun is also interested in the philosophical possibilities of the 'break.' Musical innovations always begin as breaks with tradition, as stark discontinuities with how music had been made prior to the point of innovation. For Eshun, such breaks are irrevocable, they mark an unbridgeable distance between the past and the future. What is produced stands alone in the sphere of novelty" (2637).

“Yet future vision is a necessary complement to realism, for the reality of oppression without utopianism will surely lead to nihilism. And we should not think of speculative cultural production as only ‘escapist,’ but rather as holding important insights about people’s lived conditions” (2637-2638).

“The future is neither an uncritical embrace of the past nor

a singular conception of what lies ahead. It’s ours for the imagining” (2638).

### **Discussion**

In her essay, Nelson applies the term AfroFuturism, which has been defined as: (1) "a term of convenience to describe the analysis, criticism, and cultural production that addresses the intersections between race and technology", and "a critical perspective that opens up inquiry into the many overlaps between technoculture and black diasporic histories" (2633) to describe this "digital divide" between African Americans and the evolution of technology. She argues while this divide has cause some technophobia, she claims popular culture models (music, art, film, and photography) have created new spaces for reimagining black life. She claims: "These artists are self-styled mavericks whose creations reflect the long and impressive history of African diasporic culture" (2634).

She calls upon digital artist Fatimah Tuggar's photography of Nigerian communities to describe the deceptive nature of "cyborg realism". Referring to Donna Haraway's work "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" in which she creates the cyborg as a metaphor for a fluid identity with a focus on science and technology rather than focusing on nature and sex themselves, Tuggar's work responds to the "soft power" in which "the flow of electronics and information enables Neo-colonial power, despite the absence of physical proximity" (2635). Here her work is different from Haraway because her images express revisit the past, redefine the probable, and forecast the possible. In which case, it is both a tool for domination and possibility.

Nelson moves through the various forms of music in which she references Kodwo Eshun, British Ghanaian writer and filmmakers work to extend music's relation to the sciences, and offer critique on AfroFuturism. He forthright rejects Black Music because his goal is to "negate the constitutive role of racial histories in shaping representations of the future and uses of technology. Race disappears into technology and the "Afro" in AfroFuturism is deconstructed until its effects are negligible" (2637). Nelson recognizes Eshun's claim but argues that future vision is a necessary component to realism and that we are in control of the future through our imaginations.

## Bibliography

* *Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life* (2001)
* *Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text* (2002)
* *Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination* (2011)
* *Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History* (2012)
* *The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome* (2016)

## Related Works

* "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985) by Donna Haraway
* "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose" (1993) by Mark Dery

## Examples in Literature, Film, and Music

* Franny Choi's *Soft Science* (2019)
* *Black Panther* (2018)
* Janelle Monae's *Dirty Computer* (2018)
* Tomi Adeyem's *Children of Blood and Bone* (2018)
* NK Jemisin's *Broken Earth* trilogy (2016, 2017, 2018)
* Colson Whitehead's *The Underground Railroad* (2016)
* Tracy K Smith's *Life on Mars* (2011)
* Octavia Butler's *Kindred* (1979)
* *The Wiz* (1978)
* *Space is the Place* (1972)

## See Also

African Speculative Fiction Society

BBC Radio 4: "Journeys in Afrofuturism"

Oxford Bibliography on Afrofuturism

*This American Life*, episode 623: "We Are in the Future"

## References

* Leitch, Vincent B., editor. *The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism*. 3rd ed., W.W. Norton & Co., 2018.