WeAreCity: Black Futurism
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Presentation for the WeAreCity symposium in Indianapolis, IN on August 21, 2014.
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WeAreCity: Black Futurism
- 1. ::BLACK FUTURISM NETTRICE R. GASKINS::
- 2. In some far off place Many light years in space I’ll wait for you. Where human feet have never trod, Where human eyes have never seen. I'll build a world of abstract dreams And wait for you. –Liner notes to Monorails and Satellites (1968)
- 3. “Afrofuturism is way of re-contextualizing and assessing history and imagining the future of the African Diaspora via science, science fiction, technology, sound, architecture, the visual and culinary arts and other more nimble and interpretive modes of research and understanding.”
- 4. Early examples of Afrofuturism include stories about a hidden society in Ethopia with advanced technology, an apocalyptic event in which civilization is destroyed, a real-life black scientist, and the first female black pilot.
- 5. Jazz musician Sun Ra presented a unified conception, incorporating music, myth, and performance into his multi-leveled equations. His view of space influenced later generations of artists.
- 6. “I was a big fan of Star Trek, so we did a thing with a pimp sitting in a spaceship shaped like a Cadillac, and we did all these James Brown-type grooves, but with street talk and ghetto slang.”
- 7. The events and specific technical artifacts built for World’s Fairs made a lasting impression on the urban dwellers that encountered them – i.e. the lasting image of the Unisphere.
- 8. We must create our own creation mythologies, alternate realities and identities.
- 9. We must consider new or different conceptions of race, gender and culture through twenty-first century technologies that may create major changes for human life.
- 12. Across the Diaspora, African artists and designers are following race, culture and art into their future possibilities, weaving together textured and fantastical enhancements.
- 14. “Sonic Afro-modernity” is the “interplay between sound technologies and black music and speech enabled the emergence of modern black culture.” –Alexander G. Weheliye
- 15. Shabazz Palaces’ Lese Majesty is a series of astral suites of recorded happenings and “a dope-hex thrown from the compartments that have artificially contained us all and hindered our sublime collusion.” –Pitchfork
- 16. Click HERE to download book and see chapter 2.7.
- 17. Click HERE to view Afrikadaa issue on Afrofuturism.
- 19. ::Image Credits Slide 1: Sun Ra (1965); Sun Ra in Space is the Place production still (1972); Shabazz Palaces. Inside cover for Lese Majesty (2014). Illustrated by Nep Sidhu. Slide 3: Sanford Biggers and Moon Medicine. Multimedia performance live at the Hammer Museum at UCLA. Photo at the Rubin Museum, New York, NY in conjunction with Grain of Emptiness, photography courtesy Michael Palma. Slide 4: Pauline Hopkins’ One Blood (1902); W.E.B. Dubois’ The Comet (1920); Bessie Coleman, first African American pilot, courtesy National Air and Space Museum. Slide 5: The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume Two - Sun Ra (1965); Sun Ra in Space is the Place production still (1972). Slide 6: Parliament. “The Mothership Connection,” (1975). Slide 7: The Unisphere, from the northwest. Photo: Donald G. Presa; Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force. Don't Stop... Planet Rock - The Remix EP (1992); Craig Mack. Flava in Ya Ear (1994).
- 20. ::Image Credits Slide 8: Wangechi Mutu. Non je ne regrette rien, 2007. Mixed media on mylar, 137 x 233 cm . Courtesy Victoria Miro, London . Photo: Allison Smith and Michelle Pemberton. Slide 9: Ellen Gallagher, Untitled, 2012. Oil, ink, and paper on canvas, 24 x 24 in (61 x 61 cm). Courtesy the artist. © Ellen Gallagher. Photo: Zarko Vijatovic Slide 10: Wanuri Kahiu. Pumzi, film still, 2009. Courtesy Focus Features Africa First Short Film Program. Slide 11: Sun Ra in rehearsal October, 1971 Oakland, CA. Photo from nuvoid.blogspot.com; Cyrus Kabiru’s C-Stunners; RAMMELLZEE (The “Equation”), 1984. Slide 12: William Cordova in collaboration with Nyeema Morgan and Otabenga Jones & Associates, yawar mallku (sculpting elsewhere in time / the arc of the moral universe is long… / the Lesson, pt. 2). Slide 13: Shabazz Palaces. Inside cover for Lese Majesty (2014). Illustrated by Nep Sidhu. Slide 16: Muchiri Njenga. Kichwateli production still, ().
Editor's Notes
- Sanford Biggers and Moon Medicin. Multimedia performance live at the Hammer Museum at UCLA. Photo at the Rubin Museum, New York, NY in conjunction with Grain of Emptiness, photography courtesy Michael Palma.
- Early examples of Afrofuturism Pauline Hopkins’ One Blood (1902) about a hidden society in Ethopia with advanced technology. W.E.B. Dubois’ The Comet (1920) that uses the apocalyptic event in which civilization is destroyed, to tell a tell about race in the aftermath. George Schuyler, a noted black writer, published a work about real-life black scientist EE Just and the first female black pilot, Bessie Coleman.
- In the early 1950s jazz musician Sun Ra, the father of Afrofuturism, abandoned his birth name, developed a complex persona using cosmic philosophies and lyrical poetry, and began preaching awareness and peace. Sun Ra presented a unified conception, incorporating music, myth, and performance into his multi-leveled equations. His view of space influenced later generations of artists.
- My research explored events and specific technical artifacts built for World’s Fairs made a lasting impression on the urban dwellers that encountered them – i.e. the lasting image of the Unisphere. Some of these objects would remain at the site beyond the conclusion of the Fair, becoming a stage for popular media forms in urban art and culture developed in inner cities, made popular through commercialization.
- The inner sleeve notes for Drexciya’s The Quest is a map divided into four stages: The Slave Trade, Migration Route of Rural Blacks to Northern Cities, Techno Leaves Detroit, Spreads Worldwide, and The Journey Home (Future). The image on the right visualizes the concept of a intercultural, transnational network by showing the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from their homeland, as well as the newly established bonds that transform identities and cultures.
- One of the little understood dimensions of American culture has been the material contribution of Africans to science, technology, etc. Note Beth Coleman’s notion of “race as technology”—denaturing race from historical references—and futuristic expressions of style, rhythm, dance, and the body in art, we can see the formation of a social imaginary that disrupts the syntax.
- Drawn to scientists’ description of this discovery, Gallagher recognized similarity between their account and how science fiction narratives unfold through the transformation and evolution of characters and physical matter.
- In Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi, the main character Asha escapes enslavement and ecological devastation by sacrificing her body to grow a germinating seed.
- William Cordova collaborated with Nyeema Morgan and Otabenga Jones & Associates to construct a new work inspired by his recent sculpture “lando, landu (yawar mallku),” (2011).
- Weheliye separates music and speech from their human sources, through technologies beginning with the phonograph that generate new modes of thinking, being, and becoming. He imagines the African diaspora as a “virtual sounding space,” one that is marked by the circulation of culture via technological reproductions—records and tapes, mixing, and the use of music production centers (MPCs or sampling machines).
- Shabazz Palaces. Inside cover for Lese Majesty (2014). Illustrated by Nep Sidhu.
- Shabazz Palaces. Inside cover for Lese Majesty (2014). Illustrated by Nep Sidhu.
- Shabazz Palaces. Inside cover for Lese Majesty (2014). Illustrated by Nep Sidhu.