Retrofuturist Speculations: Race as Technology in Olaudah Equiano’s Vision of a Future

Abstract

Since the 1789 publication of his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself, Olaudah Equiano’s identity has confounded critics. While competing accounts of his origins certainly raise questions, his autobiography is best read, not as a reflection on transatlantic slavery, but as a retrofuturistic speculation of a future that never was. Within the vein of Africana science fiction and futurism, we can elucidate the ways Equiano self-styled his identity, using Beth Coleman’s notion of race as technology to hypothesize an innovative heuristic of global blackness that situated his identity in concurrent systems of Black being. Through this lens, we can also better understand how critics’ historicization of Equiano’s account reify current notions of Black identity.