![Why Afrofuturism Is a Black Feminist Praxis Why Afrofuturism Is a Black Feminist Praxis](http://m5.paperblog.com/i/137/1375379/why-afrofuturism-is-a-black-feminist-praxis-L-ckIigl.jpeg)
Janelle Monae frequently uses Aphrofuturism in her work.
The most suffocating thing about being a black girl in a white supremacist, patriarchal world is the constant reminder that I’m not allowed to define myself. The media constantly reinforces this by failing to imagine black people as anything other than historical slave bodies in the white imagination. I’ve always wanted to imagine and create new social worlds where I could be my own agent, where every second of my life wasn’t a quest to fight white supremacist representations of my body. It turns out I’m not the only one: An entire movement is devoted to this very concept, and it’s called “Afrofuturism.”
Coined in a 1993 essay titled “Black to the Future” by Mark Derry, Afrofuturism centers on the black experience as one anchored on both a re-discovery of the black past and focus on the black future. Despite it’s pretty unique name, the movement isn’t merely science fiction + black bodies, but an aesthetic, practice, movement, philosophy, and theoretical framework grounded in black imagination and creativity. Filmmaker and author Ytasha Womack more specifically defines Afrofuturism as “the intersection between black culture, technology, liberation and the imagination, with some mysticism thrown in, too,” that can be expressed through film, art, literature or music and essentially helps “reimagine the experience of people of colour,” according to the Guardian.
Many people have been exposed to Afrofuturism without realizing it. For example, Janelle Monae’s music videos fall in line with an Afrofuturist aesthetic, as they often feature futuristic scenarios that offer different types of citizenship for Black people. I, like many others, wasn’t familiar that this term could be applied to this type of work until earlier this year when I encountered the movement. Soon after, though, I realized I’ve always maintained these sensibilities in that my activism has always centered on creating revolutionary, progressive spaces and rejecting oppressive spaces that attempt to define individuals based on factors like their race or gender.
Afrofuturism is particularly profound because especially in the context of the constant erasure, co-optation and appropriation of black folks’ past and imagine, it is a movement incapable of being co-opted by the white mainstream. It’s a perpetually moving framework for reimagining the black experience and is constantly re-inventing itself. It’s not about black folks escaping their contemporary situations, but imagining beyond the systems of oppression in which they are currently bound. This movement recognizes that all black folks have is the future and, as such, frames black people as conceptual architects capable of designing new blueprints for our activism based upon the world we want to create.