Envisioning Africana Futures in 2045

Abstract

Much of the field of futures studies and foresight carries the heavy imprint of a Eurocentric perspective. This elite field of work attempts to map out how our future society will look like for major corporations, government agencies, non-profit industries, and for the rest of us—to create a form of science fiction capital that privileges whiteness, a form of white foresight. The mapping of the future still confronts the weighted language of colonial expansion, exclusion, conquest, and erasure for imagining the dilemmas of racial identity and intersecting identities as we race to the future. This insipid domination of whiteness of the future has such a pervasive reach into our souls that if you are a straight white male, you have seen yourself reflected in almost every hero of every big super hero and science fiction film or TV series ever made. But imagine, you have never or rarely seen someone who looks like you as the hero in a big fantasy epic. Imagine never seeing yourself in most visions of the future. In the current moment, we can only count a limited range of media exposure to Black visionaries that are pervasive throughout Africana history or to understand what an Afrocentric vision of the future conveys. Our goal with this essay is to de-center the Eurocentric domination over futures studies and allow for multiple cultural approaches to shape this field to create a framework for a politics of futures healing and hope to sustain liberatory futures for all. We aim via these case studies to multiply exponentially our knowledge of the undiscovered stories of our past, present, and anticipated visions of Black futures. Jason Lewis et al. inquire about our relationship to Artificial Intelligence and virtual reality from Indigenous perspectives. We expand upon their initial question by asking: how do we as Africana and Indigenous people