Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2023.2177974
Whitney Frazier Peterson
Afrofuturism is a movement that takes in the spiritual and the political. In this paper, I am interested in the way the political and the spiritual coexist in the works of Jean Toomer and Sun Ra. I argue—along with Paul Youngquist, whose book A Pure Solar World examines the spiritual philosophy of Sun Ra and argues that there is a definite political element to his spiritual philosophy— that the two cannot be separated from one another. Youngquist calls Ra’s spiritual philosophy “Political Theosophy.” I argue that this “Political Theosophy” has its origins in the concept of the cosmic consciousness; indeed, it is through a realization of this cosmic consciousness and through an awareness of the rich Black esoteric tradition that Black artists can engage in what Mark Foster Gage calls “aesthetic activism.” Furthermore, I will argue that a through-line can be traced from a racialized re-conceptualization of the concept of the cosmic consciousness in the poetry of Jean Toomer, through the poetry of Sun Ra, up until contemporary movements like Afrofuturism—a through-line that has its origins in the Black esoteric tradition and is made manifest in the spiritualized poetry of both these poets. As William Sites writes, Afrofuturism “draws on mythical African pasts in order to envision new black-centered worlds of the future.” In this paper, I will show how Toomer and Ra do this through their esoteric poetry.
非洲主义是一场涉及精神和政治的运动。在本文中，我感兴趣的是让·图默和孙拉作品中政治与精神的共存方式。我和保罗·扬奎斯特（Paul Youngquist）一起认为，这两者不能相互分离。扬奎斯特的《纯粹的太阳世界》（A Pure Solar World）一书探讨了孙拉的精神哲学，并认为他的精神哲学中有明确的政治因素。扬奎斯特将拉的精神哲学称为“政治神智学”。我认为这种“政治神智学”起源于宇宙意识的概念；事实上，正是通过对这种宇宙意识的认识和对丰富的黑人神秘传统的认识，黑人艺术家才能参与马克·福斯特·盖奇所说的“美学激进主义”。此外，我认为，可以从让·图默诗歌中对宇宙意识概念的种族化重新概念化中找到一条主线，通过孙拉的诗歌，直到当代运动，如非洲主义——这条主线起源于黑人的深奥传统，并在这两位诗人的精神化诗歌中得到了体现。正如William Sites所写，非洲主义“借鉴了非洲神话般的过去，以设想未来新的以黑人为中心的世界。”在这篇论文中，我将展示Toomer和Ra是如何通过他们深奥的诗歌做到这一点的。
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2023.2177948
E. McLarney, Solayman Idris
One of these scientists, Yakub, bred the white race through experiments on the original people, a teaching that allegorically represents crimes of racial and sexual violence as a eugenics campaign of genocide against Black life. It also invokes an a priori Black past that existed before the poisoning effects of white racism—an origins teaching framed as myth science, if not considered science fiction. Just before his death, Malcolm X appeared as one of these “wise blackmenwho can tune in and tell what’s going to happen in the future.” In an interview, he is repeatedly asked: “Where do you think your future lies?” He responds: “I’ll never get old.” Startled, the interviewer asks, “What does that mean?” Malcolm answers: “A black man should give his life to be free and when you really think like that, you don’t live long. And if freedom doesn’t come to your lifetime, it’ll come to your children.” Though he clearly saw his life cut short, he perhaps could not have foreseen the extent of the impact of his life, voice, and vision, possibilities he opened for Black liberation through Islam, and outpouring of cultural and intellectual production he inspired. Malcolm X—as others before him—helped raise consciousness about the centrality of Blackness in Islam, decolonize Islam as an Arab religion (as with the shu’ubiyya movement previously), and revive possibilities for social justice, possibilities not yet fulfilled, but re-envisioned by new generations of Black Muslims in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Oakland, and in the diaspora. The Black Arts Movement (BAM), that partly grew out of Malcolm X’s life and death, converted teachings from African American Islamic movements—like the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA), Ahmadiyya, and Nation of Islam (NOI)—into early Afrofuturist cultural production. In the process, BAM artists translated
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2023.2177950
Daniel Coleman
Upon my first encounters with Afropessimism, I was, at once, enthralled, and unsettled. I spent a few years unsure about how to hold the simultaneity of these feelings and the root of what was causing the latter. Trained in elements of the white supremacy of the US academy, I struggled through learning to read and regurgitate the canonical DWEMS (Dead White European Males) so that I could learn to justify my decisions to center scholarship by peoples of the Global Majority. By “justify” here, I mean to fulfill the graduate student requirements of my coursework demonstrating enough mastery of the canonical theoretical imperatives of the DWEMS so that I could spend my time moving in a direction more suited to my goals and areas of inquiry. Given these reservations and my struggles, I asked myself if I should then be equally, if notmore generous, with scholarly interlocutors of what we might call the Afropessimist canon?How could I, on the one hand, enjoy the dense theoretical mapping and revel in understanding it, while concomitantly feel tremendous disease at what I call its ontological suicidal ideation and ultimate entrapment in a Euro-colonial white supremacist metaphysical perception of a singular world? In this article, I endeavor to embark on a generous relationshipwith the scholarship of Afropessimism to offer an exit from its ontological nihilism and move instead towards a pluriversal spiritual understandings of the universe from Afro-diasporic cosmology. I write from the positionality of a Black non-binary transman and ordained/initiated Lukumí priest of Obatala practicing in a Yoruba-centric spiritual ile or lineage. I write as a spiritual practitioner whose cosmological understandings come from practice, primarily, and the literature, secondarily. I use Africana Esoteric Studies (AES-more on this shortly) to bring together Afrofuturist thought and Afro-diasporic spiritual/cosmological epistemologies to add to the voices of scholars that give us, as Black people, something beyond Afropessimism’s totalizing claims. The basis of afropessimism’s absolute ontological nihilism signals a major gap in spiritual and cosmological scholarly perception, engaging in a disciplinary decadence. It is this gap that the present article attends to. In making this contention and commitment, I wish to forward a pluriversal perspective. While I do not wish to over-simplify the Afropessimist project, within the limited scope of this article I remain specific by attending to the project’s totalizing and nihilistic ontological position (exemplified in the work of Frank Wilderson III and Calvin Warren) because of how this position ultimately surrenders to the metaphysical location European continental philosophy as if it can name all that is, even while acknowledging the anti-blackness that this Western metaphysical universe relies on. In this instance, I ask how those of us who do not live our lives from a Euro-centered
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2023.2177946
Kimani S. K. Nehusi
The term Afrofuturism was first used by Mark Dery in 1994 to refer to an unfolding phenomenon among Afrikan people across the world, but especially in Afrikan American society where it was centered. The concept existed before it was named, for a tradition of Afrikan speculative writing, a significant part of Afrofuturism, had been extant for at least a century-and-a-half in both the continent and its Diaspora. Further, as is mentioned below in the example of Sun Ra, other aspects of the movement were vigorously alive long before 1994. Dery was part of a conversation among creators and critics of an emerging phenomenon which, among other developments, uncovered and (re)incorporated this tradition into a movement that did not possess a name until then. Speaking its name was an important step in calling Afrofuturism into full existence. The next significant step in its development was the founding of the listserv Afrofuturism.net, Figure 1: MAat, Ma’at. Female. Divinity of Universal Truth, Order, Justice, Righteousness, Reciprocity, Balance and Harmony.
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2023.2177947
P. Butler
I think the idea of the end of the world is over stigmatized. Meaning, the end of the world does not have to be the end of the earth—in a planetary sense. However, the malleable and seemingly perpetual nature of planet earth suggests/implies/infers the world is something different. The concept and practice of Worldbuilding places natural environment(s) (in this case earth or whatever it might be called in this new world) and places it in conversation with the mentality, sociality, geopolitical desires, agricultural imagination, and technological advancements of a collection of people. This suggests that a world is a materializing figment of an imagined landscape embodied by enough people who not only bring said world into material reality, but maintain its illusory existence as well. One might consider this as a combined will of sorts. So, the end of the world should be something less than anxiety inducing. Because in this sense it is not the end of earth and life itself, but the end of one particular mode of existence/way of life over others. The end of the world in this case would be the end of an anti-Black world, leading into as many Black worlds that could possibly ever exist/be. This essay will attempt to take a few disparate concepts (spacetime, demons, and the US popular culture concept of demon time) and weave together elements within each in an effort to postulate a necessary cocktail for the end of the world. Here, a cocktail is a potent combination of factors/ingredients converging on a particular coordinate, or set of coordinates, in spacetime. This cocktail relies on the concept of demon time to add both a local and complex ingredient; illegible to previously recognizable attempts at bringing a conclusion to white supremacist and anti-Black world(s). Here, demon time is meant to provide an initial language and framework intended to normalize Black embodiment and way(s) of life. It also acknowledges the ways Black bodies and modes of embodiment/being exist in diametric opposition to normative western conceptions of embodiment/being. I draw from quantum physics, neurobiology, and spacetime to conceptualize demon time as a portal leading to upending anti-Black world (s), while simultaneously building Black world(s)—as a multidimensional intervention/interruption and irruption of anti-Black time. An end of the world and not necessarily the earth suggests a difference in naming, referencing/indexing, epistemology, and sociality. One could go so far as to infer that the end of the world might suggest the end of present sociopolitical super powers or systems of power altogether. Even more so, it could mean the end of all known points of reference. Calling into question all points of reference might leave too many possibilities unspecified. So, for the purpose of our discussion I want to focus on the perceptual and existential foci of the world—humanity. I will do so through a Black Posthumanist lens. This kind of conceptualizing is akin to
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2023.2177980
L. Brooks, Ahmed Best, Jade Fabello
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
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Pub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2023.2178209
Hugo ka Canham
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2145595
Spandita Das
Love has recently attracted a good deal of attention from scholars in different fields of social sciences. Successfully bringing love into dialogue with spatial studies in Love and Space in Contemporary African Diasporic Women’s Writing: Making Love, Making Space, Jennifer Leetsch relates Black love to space with a focus on diaspora, migration, identity, memory, affect, and intimacy studies. This book explores how the female characters in contemporary African diasporic women writers’ works “opened up possible and still unexplored new pathways... [for] imagining be/longing-together, being-withanother” (262) by adopting what Leetsch calls the “strategies of ‘we-forming’ and ‘wesustaining’” (265). African diasporic women’s literature, as the book thus highlights, indicates “new possibilities of living in an ever-more mobile, globalised twentyfirst-century world” (1). The four chapters, excluding the introduction and the conclusion, analyze five contemporary women writers of the African diaspora, highlighting the potential of their works to imagine an alternative way of world-making through envisioning a radical affective and relational possibility. The argument in each chapter is shaped in a tripartite structure that gives the author enough scope to analyze individual works in detail: the first part focuses on the space with which the Black female protagonists develop affective attachment, and which also becomes central to imagining a transformative love; the second part elaborates on the textual strategies, which by directing attention at themselves, foreground the affective and relational possibilities eventually unfolding in the narrative; the third one—and this is the most gripping, powerful, and complex part of each chapter— develops the romantic potential of the texts by linking affect and longing with the spatial dimension related earlier. Focusing on four different spaces, these chapters collectively “bear witness to the different geographical and affective border crossings” (204). While primarily engaging with postcolonial theories, Black love, and affect studies, based on the context of the attachment it deals with, Leetsch additionally draws upon a different set of theories specific to its purpose in each chapter. Only the second chapter depicts a conventional, heteronormative love story with a happy ending: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Leetsch brings out the connection between longing and belonging by underlining how the protagonists’ “transnational travels were supplemented by other emotional travels” (57): the emotional bond between the protagonists maturates over time and space as they migrate to the West and subsequently return home to Nigeria. However, Leetsch
爱情最近引起了社会科学不同领域学者的广泛关注。詹妮弗·利奇（Jennifer Leetsch）在《当代非洲散居女性写作：做爱，创造空间》（love and Space in Contemporary African Diaspoic Women’s Writing:Making love，Making Space）中成功地将爱与空间研究对话，她将黑人的爱与空间联系起来，重点关注散居、移民、身份、记忆、情感和亲密关系研究。这本书探讨了当代非洲散居女性作家作品中的女性角色如何通过采用李所说的“我们形成”和“我们持续”的策略（265），“开辟了可能但尚未探索的新途径……[为]想象在一起/渴望与他人在一起”（262）。正如本书所强调的那样，非洲散居妇女文学表明了“生活在一个更加流动、全球化的21世纪世界中的新可能性”（1）。除引言和结论外，这四章分析了五位散居非洲的当代女作家，强调了她们的作品通过设想一种激进的情感和关系可能性来想象另一种世界创造方式的潜力。每一章的论点都是由三部分组成的，这给了作者足够的空间来详细分析个别作品：第一部分关注黑人女性主人公发展情感依恋的空间，这也成为想象变革性爱情的核心；第二部分阐述了文本策略，通过将注意力指向自身，展望情感和关系的可能性最终在叙事中展开；第三部分——这是每一章中最扣人心弦、最有力、最复杂的部分——通过将情感和渴望与先前相关的空间维度联系起来，开发了文本的浪漫潜力。这些章节聚焦于四个不同的空间，共同“见证了不同的地理和情感边界”（204）。在主要从事后殖民理论、黑人之爱和情感研究的同时，基于其所处理的依恋的背景，Leetsch在每一章中还借鉴了一套针对其目的的不同理论。只有第二章描绘了一个传统的、非规范的、结局幸福的爱情故事：奇玛曼达·恩戈齐·阿迪奇的《美国人》。Leetsch通过强调主人公的“跨国旅行是如何被其他情感旅行所补充的”（57），揭示了渴望和归属之间的联系：主人公之间的情感纽带随着时间和空间的推移而成熟，因为他们迁移到西方，随后返回尼日利亚。然而，Leetsch
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2145554
Bénédicte Boisseron
“I am an anachronism, a sport, like the bee that was never meant to fly. Science said so. I am not supposed to exist. I carry death in my body like a condemnation,” writes African American poet Audre Lorde in her journal. Those are the words of a breast cancer survivor’s brush with death following a double mastectomy, but her words also voice the moribund condition of Black Diasporic subjects attuned to the miracle of their existence as descendants of slaves. “Science said so” hints not only at Lorde’s diagnosis as a cancer survivor but also at her condition as a subject from the Black diaspora. “For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive,” she writes. Since Blacks were never meant to survive, they are often destined to be treated as always already dead. To that effect, the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” conducted by the US Public Health Service and spanning 40 years (1932–1972), recruited six hundred Black male human subjects who had been told they were being treated for “bad blood,” vaguely referring to syphilis and some other ailments, when the true nature of the project was to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis on the human body. Scientists had singled out those who were not supposed to exist, to take notes on their anachronistic death. Today, one talks of “bad blood” between the Black community and medical science. The COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy among African Americans attests indeed to a community that would rather hold on to their “bad blood” than trust science again, at the risk of their own lives. But even though the Tuskegee experiment is one example commonly used in the COVID-19 era to bring awareness to racial bias in science, medical mistrust within the Black Diasporic community far exceeds the contours of the American South.
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