Afro-Futurism Aff/Neg
1AC
Surveillance is the means through which the expendable objects of anti-black violence
are tracked- able to be disposed of at any time. To understand how this racist practice
is foundational to America and its supremacy, we first look back in time.
History takes us to colonial New York and Black luminosity- the panoptic gaze which
keeps black bodies illuminated for not only surveillance but also consumption. It was
through the consumption of free Black labor that America’s national identity was
built. Black luminosity is not a bill to be repealed or made unconstitutional because to
do so would be to make illegal the cultural practices that are America not merely in
law but in spirit.
Simone Browne (Assistant Professor, African and African Diaspora Studies Department and the
Department of Sociology) January 2012 “EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN” Cultural
Studies, 07/2012, Volume 26, Issue 4
In the three sections below, I offer a discussion of the racial body in colonial New York City done by a
tracing of the archive of the technologies of surveillance and slavery. The first section focuses on the
technology of printed text, namely runaway notices and identity documents, in the production of The
Book of Negroes during the British evacuation of the city. This section draws on archival documents to
provide textual links that evidence the accounting of black bodies as intimately tied with the history of
surveillance, in particular surveillance of black skin by way of identity documents. In so doing my analysis
then raises the problem of my own surveillance practices in reading the archive: by accounting for
violence do my reading practices act to re-inscribe violence and a remaking of blackness, and black skin,
as objectified? Thus, I am mindful of both Katherine McKittrick’s cautioning that there is a danger of
reproducing ‘racial hierarchies that are anchored by our ‘‘watching over’’ and corroborating practices of
violent enumeration’ (2010) and Nicole Fleetwood’s urging for the ‘productive possibilities of black
subjects to trouble the field of vision’ by virtue of ‘the discourses of captivity and capitalism that frame’
the black body as always already problematic (2011, p. 18). To question acts of watching over and
looking back, in the second section I turn to lantern laws in colonial New York City that sought to keep
the black body in a state of permanent illumination. I use the term ‘black luminosity’ to refer to a form
of boundary maintenance occurring at the site of the racial body, whether by candlelight, flaming torch
or the camera flashbulb that documents the ritualized terror of a lynch mob. Black luminosity, then, is
an exercise of panoptic power that belongs to ‘the realm of the sun, of never ending light; it is the nonmaterial illumination that falls equally on all those on whom it is exercised’ (Foucault 2003, p. 77). Here
boundary maintenance is intricately tied to knowing the black body, subjecting some to a high visibility
by way of technologies of seeing that sought to render the subject outside of the category of the
human, unvisible. My focus in the second section is the candle lantern and laws regarding its usage that
allowed for a scrutinizing surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to, and that produced
them as black subject. Following David Marriott in his reading of the spectacle of death that is lynching
and its photographic archive, such laws, I suggest, operated ‘through visual terror’ in the management
of black mobilities, warning of the potential to reduce one to ‘something that don’t look human’ (2000,
p. 9). Or perhaps too human. Rather than looking solely to those moments when blackness is violently
illuminated, I highlight certain practices, rituals and acts of freedom and situate these moments as
interactions with surveillance systems that are both strategies of coping and of critique. This is to say
that ‘ritual heals’ and ‘constitutes the social form in which human beings seek to deal with denial as
active agents, rather than as passive victims’ (Sennett 1994, p. 80). With the third section, I consider
varied notions of repossession by examining the Board of Inquiry arbitration that began in May 1783 at
Fraunces Tavern in New York City between fugitive slaves who sought to be included in The Book of
Negroes by exercising mobility rights claims as autonomous subjects and those who sought to reclaim
these fugitives as their property. In her discussion of ‘narrative acts’ and the moments of narration
through which racialized subjects ‘are brought into being’, (2009, p. 625) Hazel Carby suggests that we
must ‘be alert to the occasions when racialized subjects not only step into the recognitions given to
them by others but provide intuitions of a future in which relations of subjugation will (could) be
transformed’ (p. 627). I am suggesting that The Book of Negroes is one of those occasions that Carby
alerts us to. At Fraunces Tavern, the pub turned courtroom, mobility rights were sought through decommodificatory narrative acts, disputing the claims made on the self as goods to be returned. I
conclude this article by turning to a different narrative act, Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes: A Novel
(2007), as it extends the racial surveillance practices discussed in this article through its creative
remembering of the brutalities of slavery. I begin and end this article with representations of black
escape to argue that, in different ways, they allow for a rethinking of the archive of the technologies of
slavery and surveillance, in that they disclose how this archive continues to inform our historically
present tenets of emancipation. The Book of Negroes lists passengers on board 219 ships that set sail
from New York between 23 April 1783 and 30 November 1783. Ships, as Paul Gilroy tells us, ‘were the
livings means by which the points within the Atlantic world were joined’ (1993, p. 16). Following this,
The Book of Negroes is not only a record of escape on board 219 ships, but it can also be thought of as a
record of how the surveillance of black Atlantic mobilities was integral to the formation of the CanadaUS
border. If we are to take transatlantic slavery as the antecedent of contemporary surveillance
technologies and practices as they concern inventories of ships’ cargo and the making of ‘scaled
inequalities’ in the Brookes slave ship schematic (Spillers 1987, p. 72), biometric identification by
branding the body with hot irons (Browne 2010), slave markets and auction blocks as exercises of
synoptic power where the many watched the few, slave passes and patrols, black codes and fugitive
slave notices, it is to the archives, slave narratives and often to black expressive practices and creative
texts that we can look to for moments of refusal and critique. What I am arguing here is that with
certain acts of cultural production we can find performances of freedom and suggestions of alternatives
to ways of living under a routinized surveillance that was terrifying in its effects.
Black luminosity becomes a spectre of colonial America’s cultural practices, haunting
black women through entitled access to our bodies. Present day surveillance is an
abusive dynamic that forces black women to participate in our down destruction,
stripped of consent and subjecthood.
Harry 14 (Sydette Harry is a cultural critic, troublemaker and writer from NYC. Her next project is a
decidedly low/high tech response to media, age and race, also grad school. She has been published in
dissent, Salon and the blogs as @blackamazon. “Everyone Watches, Nobody Sees: How Black Women
Disrupt Surveillance Theory” , https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/everyone-watches-nobody-seeshow-black-women-disrupt-surveillance-theory, October 6th, 2014 TAM)
What the hell is you looking for? Can’t a young man get money anymore? It kind of pains me to call
Mason Betha prophetic, but 17 years ago when “Looking at Me” hit the Billboard charts, the Harlem
native pretty much described the current state of surveillance and tech in America. Especially for black
people and doubly so for black women. Surveillance is based on a presumption of entitlement to access,
by right or by force. More importantly, it hinges on the belief that those surveilled will not be able to
reject surveillance — either due to the consequences of resisting, or the stealth of the observance. They
either won’t say no, or they can’t. Discussions of stolen celebrity selfies often miss the “by force” aspect
of the breeches, instead focusing on salacious details. Surveillance is part of the information age, but it
has always been part of abusive dynamics. As opting into surveillance becomes increasingly mandatory
to participate in societies and platforms, surveillance has been woven into the fabric of our lives in ways
we can not readily reject. Being watched is not just an activity of Big Brother-style surveillance, but also
fannish adulation and social enmeshment. As Black women have been historically denied the ability to
consent to surveillance, modern discussion of watching and observing black women needs better
historical context. When I’nasah Crockett points out how black women online have constantly been
portrayed as “raving amazons,” one of the unspoken through lines is how easily media, even on the left,
believes dissecting black women, tracking their online habits, consuming illegally obtained images of
them, and demanding education is a “right”. Black women cannot say no, and do not need to be in any
way respected or fully informed about how they will be studied or used. Media collects the data of black
activity and media production as a weapon, without black participation. The lack of black participation
can be unintentional or intentional, but usually ends in gross appropriation, clumsy “admiration”, willful
erasure or a troublesome combo of all three. Combined with historical blindness, racist condescension
and content desperation, the modern surveillance of black women too often results in the same
historical abuse and erasure of black women. When Patricia Garcia says the that the big booty era has
finally arrived as a “high fashion” moment, but credits Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azaelea, it erases the very
real abuse that black bodies have suffered for those exact body types, that were surveilled to produce
the standard that Garcia hands over to Lopez et. al. She writes: “Rihanna shows up to the CFDA Awards
practically naked with her crack fully on display and walks off with a Fashion Icon Award. Perhaps we
have Jennifer Lopez to thank (or blame?) for sparking the booty movement.” Suggesting the way to
Rihanna’s 2014 moment was paved by Lopez shows a dangerous laziness towards the stated goal of
body positivity. Rihanna’s moment was a direct tribute to Josephine Baker, another black woman often
sexualized and placed under surveillance, not just for celebration of her uniquely black body but for her
participation in World War II and the civil rights movement. Garcia’s “cultural surveillance” ends up
being a contextless mess that insults both Rihanna and Baker. Writing for Salon, I pointed out that
Media has no idea how to talk about race, and more recently I am convinced they do not actually care to
learn. Unfortunately when covering Black women, this inability or unwillingness to learn defaults to
common stereotypes at best and complete cultural propaganda at worst. That unwillingness create a
vacuum of knowledge, as history repeats itself over and over. Take Alessandra Stanley’s profile of
Shonda Rhimes in the New York Times: a cringe-worthy attempt at “complimenting” Rhimes’
stereotype-breaking television output that instead relies on empty surveillance of black characters while
Stanley offers no evidence of having actually watched the shows she cites. Stanley’s descriptions of
Rhimes and her work are filled with words like “angry, terrorizing and sassy,” recalling Crockett’s angry
amazons perfectly while perpetuating and prolonging logic that for decades kept Viola Davis from being
the leading lady Stanley describes. Her piece ignores multi-year plot developments as well as a
wonderful opportunity to discuss Rhimes’ accomplishments as possibly the only non-white-male with
multiple, simultaneous network TV hits. Her surveillance provides little in the way of edification and a lot
in codifying uncomfortable catch 22’s for black women and privacy: visibility is part of achievement in
media, but is it worth it when even at the pinnacle of your success the only thing made visible is the
racism of those observing you?Even more difficult, how do you fight back?Under Surveillance, Over
Exposed Steven Mann’s concept of sousveillance centers on wearing portable cameras and technology
to record activity, but I would like to expand it to include all forms of using tech to jam surveillance.
Mann, a pioneer in the field of wearable computing and computation photography, framed the concept
of wearable cameras functioning as recording data for theuser, not an outside network. Hashtags, street
recordings, phone taps can all be looked at as ways of using tech to push back against surveillance.
#Yourslipisshowing in particular was used to fight #4chan surveillance of black women. Crockett, user
@sassycrass, and a community of black women (myself included) used the hashtag to expose 4chan
board members who declared “war” on black feminists by tracking and attempting to infiltrate their
“ranks.” The attempt was foiled mostly by how their racist caricatures of black women (much like
Stanley’s) were so jarringly incongruent with reality. However, sousveillance often requires large
amounts of disclosure to be effective and ultimately negates privacy even more. Hasan M. Elahi
responded to being incorrectly surveilled by making a project of displaying his personal information.
Similarly, Black women’s responses to abusive surveillance has often been heart-rending accounts of
personal trauma and exposure of personal networks. What goes unmentioned is that social capital and
safety are often key to being able to go public with sousveillance as a strategy. Mann and Elahi –
credentialed, well-known professors – have a much easier time of saying they agree to be watched than
those on the margins. Stacia L. Brown offers a beautiful examination of the ramifications of ahistorical
surveillance, discussing representation as well as more diverse media sources as counter-tactics. As
Brown points out in response to Garcia’s flippant mess: “It isn’t about who gets credit for popularizing
the ‘big booty.’ It’s about who is erased and minimized in the process.” Her recommendations are solid
but also bring up a very real question: for populations whose fundamental problem under surveillance is
the inability to declare privacy and boundaries, what kind of solution is being made to expose one’s self
“voluntarily,” to invite more observation into one’s life? The response to these articles and continued
moments of ahistorical abuse and sometimes outright violence are a version of cultural sousveillance.
Black women must lay themselves bare, exposing trauma and constantly excavating painful historical
memory to gain sympathy and respect. Surveillance must be used as sousveillance, with the records
generated by the intrusive observation of blackness, used to bolster black testimony. Buzzfeed has an
article that is a triggering reminder of the murkiness of this dilemma. While being one of the few places
to acknowledge how Daniel Holtzclaw, a predatory policemen targeted black women, it also notes how
he used surveillance, and even the more stringent sousveillance to track black women to abuse. To
emphasize the gravity of his offense, once again black women’s trauma is made public with overly
specific details on the abuse of his victims.More disturbingly have been the deaths of three black men:
Eric Garner, Michael Brown and John Crawford III, all murdered by police. In all three cases there was
video /photo evidence of the deaths that circulated the internet, and in Brown’s case, even AFTER the
mother requested it stop. Crawford’s death is a disturbing illustration of the interplay of surveillance and
sousveillance with historical discrimination. The police who ultimately ended his life were responding to
a report, via citizen surveillance, that he had been observed with a gun. The surveillance video which
showed him being shot? Still not enough for indictment. Why must black death be broadcast and
consumed to be believe, and what is it beyond spectacle if it cannot be used to obtain justice? History
Repeating
When Janay Rice was assaulted by her husband, it became a rallying cry for domestic violence and
resulted in job creation for white feminists. What stuck out immediately was the ease at which the
surveillance aspects were skipped over. Echoing a similar leak of a private moment that targeted the
Knowles-Carter family, little discussion was made of how a culture of intrusion seemed to focus on the
abuse of black women as breaking news without asking about breaches of boundaries.That the same
online communities that continually prodded and mocked black women are incubators for sex criminals
who expose private pictures of celebrities isn’t shocking, it’s inevitable. They watched the world not
care, why should they anticipate consequences now? Predators are often wrongly pictured as targeting
the defenseless, when they also target the undefended. Black people, women particularly have
historically been able to defend themselves, but have also been shown to be undefended. The problem
is not that they can’t fight back, but that their fight and the record of what they were fighting is erased
and sanitized for easier consumption.When Laurie Penny and Lola Okolosie claim a victory over racist
and sexists online, they willfully erase the original problem of targeted women not wanting to be
surveilled, and shut down conversations about how that issue can be addressed. If they have won
already, what does the trauma of the women used in that success matter?Just recently, threats to
“expose” Emma Watson’s nudes turned out to be a prank to “draw attention” to attacks on feminists.
The ver
y real trauma of women — who even after they were transgressed were asked to answer for it like they
had committed the crime — becomes a “gotcha” moment. A time to ask what factors lead to the abuse
of women and where it starts — usually with black women expressing feminist or anti-racist ideals —
becomes covered in really uncomfortable racist/classist overtones, namely: “What happens if this
happens to a white woman we actually care about?!” Even as women of all colors have been fighting for
years to make legislation against revenge porn.When Janay Rice was assaulted by her husband, it
became a rallying cry for domestic violence and resulted in job creation for white feminists. It’s a cry
that does not truly encompass the necessary complexity of the problem in the NFL, or give anything at
all to the attacked woman. This major step to “address issues” still hinges on making a black woman’s
personal affairs heartbreakingly public and assuring that no one who represents her voice — which has
asked for very different things than advocacy — will be heard.What We Call Surveillance
What we have decided to call surveillance is actually a constant interplay of various forms of monitoring
that have existed and focused on black people, and specifically black women, long before cameras were
around, let alone ubiquitous. Surveillance technology is a dissemination of cultural standards of
monitoring. Our picture of surveillance needs to factor in not just tech developments, but the cultural
standards that have bred surveillance, especially towards black culture, as part and parcel in our world.
Elahi can use the intrusion into his privacy to further his work. But if all you want to do is have space to
mind your own business, handle your family issues in private, or exist without interference,
sousveillance isn’t an answer… it’s a reminder of defeat. If what you want is representation as you
are, what do you do when the reality is ignored for the easy win, even when it leaves you worse than
before? What is the solution for being constantly watched, if no one sees you at all?
As the future encroaches on us, technology expands the reach of Black luminosity.
Drones become the manufactured disciplinarians of the black female body and a
constant reminder of our construction as expendable non-persons. The affirmative
first operates in the present, destroying conceptions of the benign sovereign and
exposing the omnipresence black luminosity.
James, 13(Robin Associate Professor of Philosophy @ UNC Charlotte, “Afrofuturism and Drones”,
http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2013/11/01/afrofuturism-and-drones/, November 1, 2013
TAM)
This post is basically speculative. It’s a question, or rather, a hypothesis. I’m not citing empirical evidence
so much as suggesting a line of inquiry, which then needs some grounding in empirical evidence. The
question is this: If Afrofuturism uses UFO/alien spaceship imagery to describe slavery and middle
passage,* can, and if so where, do drones fit in Afrofuturist mythology? In a Cyborgology group-email, PJ
hypothesized that “that the prevalence of drones has made the UFOs unremarkable in many parts of the
world.” Around the same time, Tavia Nyong’o’s questions and concerns about the contemporary politics
of Afrofuturism appeared in my twitter timeline. Afrofuturism is a set of theories and practices that
critique and imagine alternatives to Western modernity. Specifically, Afrofuturism targets the linear,
progressive temporality which posits European/Western civilization as “present reality,” as the
culmination of historical development, and the “future” vis-a-vis which non-Western cultures are the
supposedly primitive “past.” One way Afrofuturists do this is by scrambling linear progressive
temporality. For example, musician Sun Ra treated Ancient Egypt as bothdistant past and alien,
intergalactic future. Theorist Kodwo Eshun calls this notion of time the “futurepast.”But, as Nyong’o’s
tweets suggest, that sort of critique might not pack much punch anymore. Now that we neoliberals have
reached what Francis Fukuyama famously called “the end of history,” when mainstream society seems
to exist in the “futurepast” imagined by Afrofuturists (as Steven Shaviro has argued), is Afrofuturism
obsolete? Has it become co-opted? (Think, for example, of the mainstream industry success of
Afrofuturist musicians like Janelle Monae, Lil Wayne, Kanye West, & Beyonce.) This is where PJ’s
comment is helpful. Maybe the myth of the UFO speaks to a historically and ideologically specific racial
formation (to use Omi & Winant’s term)? African slavery is absolutely essential to modernity, and the
UFO myth helps unpack and resist this. What if Afrofuturism needs a new mythology, one tied not so
much to UFOs and modernity, but to, say, drones and capitalist realism? How might Afrofuturism adapt
itself to respond to, for example, accelerationism? Could the myth of the drone, instead of the myth of
the UFO, help thematize contemporary forms of racism and anti-blackness? If neoliberalism has
upgraded racial formations, how might Afrofuturist mythologies be made compatible with these
upgrades? Here’s one potential way critical drone mythology might work (again, this is just a hypothesis,
so I’m happy to be pushed and challenged here). Last week, I argued that “droning” was a specifically
neoliberal form of surveillance. I said “drones drone by creating a consistent psychological pitch or
timbre–terror.” Consider the resonance between that idea and Kodwo Eshun’s claim that neoliberal
capitalism…mobilizes speculative affect” such that “the affective register of our relation to the future
has been shifted from euphoria to fear, a state of fear without forseeable end” (emphasis mine). Eshun’s
concept of futurity sounds a lot like my notion of droning–they’re both attunements to constant,
pervasive fear. If alien abduction captured something about modernist racial formations based in
slavery, how might droning capture something about racial formations based in the war on terror?
Drone mythos might help us conceptualize and critique the role of anti-blackness in contemporary
imperialism. When we Americans think of drones, we usually think of them as something that happens
in Pakistan, Yemen, or other Middle Eastern locations. However, droning practices certainly exist over
here–you could think of Stop & Frisk and Stand Your Ground as a method of striking a constant pitch of
fear among targeted populations. How might this idea that droning only happens “over there” obscure
racist droning “over here”? In other words, how does droning re-enforce anti-black racism? On the
other hand, how does anti-black racism facilitate droning, especially insofar as droning seems to target
non-black people of color? Drones, as increasingly autonomous machines, also speak to one of classical
Afrofuturism’s other main myths: the robot as slave/slave as robot. The English word “robot” comes
from “robota,” which is Czech slang for “slave.” Afrofuturism views enslaved black people as wetware
robots avant la lettre. Or, before capitalism had mechanical robots to do its slave labor, it had black
people. Drones are robots; the surveillance state and neoliberal capitalism outsources their crap jobs to
them. In what way are people of color the “drones,” the autonomous, “un-manned” (that is, lacking
moral personhood and/or citizenship) devices that keep neoliberal capitalism chugging along? Think
about it: drones are often framed as expendable. How does the expendability of drones relate to the
expendability of populations of color? If neoliberal capitalism is fundamentally a “shock doctrine,” a
practice of creative destruction, does the idea of the expendable drone help us understand the way
specific populations are framed as good candidates for destruction? Or, if drones themselves, as
expendable instruments, are used to destroy other, even more vulnerable populations, how does the
myth of the drone help us understand how select groups of non-whites are used as instruments to
further marginalize even more vulnerable non-white populations?**
Thus, my partner and I affirm that domestic surveillance against black women should
be substantially curtailed.
The paradox of the present is a black hole- it presents the black female body for
continual surveillance while simultaneously consuming her. Voting aff is a fissure that
breaks from the present and exists in a black future where our survival is possible.
Cherie Ann Turpin (Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of the District of
Columbia) August 2014 “Strategic Disruptions: Black Feminism and Afrofuturism”
http://afrofuturismscholar.com/2014/08/24/work-in-progress-strategic-disruptions-black-feminismand-afrofuturism-by-cherie-ann-turpin/
The beginning of the 21st century marked a shift towards a shaping and attempts at cultivating an
aesthetic and critical apparatus to respond to an emerging artistic movement within literature, music,
and visual art called Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism opens possibilities of developing responses to ideas
about where and how people of African descent could position themselves as intricate parts of human
collectives and unknown futures, especially as we move towards realizing virtual and digitalized forms of
cultural expression. Further, subjectivity and taking personal agency to create imagined worlds where
Black people are leaders is a strong challenge to the weakened but still existing stereotypes of Black
women and men as non-intellectual or limited in technological knowledge. Development of
Afrofuturism as an aesthetic, theory, or as a process is fraught with the many of same critical debates
and discursive tensions that continue to permeate through Black Feminism with regard to essentialism,
identity politics, performativity, and aesthetic concerns. Parallel commentary regarding bodies, gender,
and race have continued to impact critical responses to speculative and science fiction coming from
Afro-Diasporic writers in the 20th and 21st century. “Ironically, African-American critical theory provides
very sophisticated tools for the analysis of cyberculture, since African-American critics have been
discussing the problem of multiple identities, fragmented personae, and liminality for more than 100
years” Tal (1996). Making connections between two flourishing movements is not so much the issue as
it is negotiating the discursive tensions with regard to political and aesthetic concerns. In order to
understand these discursive tensions permeating critical reception of gender and race in Afrofuturist
culture, this essay will discuss the role of critical debates and critical tensions in Black Feminist theory, as
well as its role in the development of Afrofuturism as critical theory. Stereotypes regarding Black women
and intellectual abilities continue to be extremely difficult to unravel in the 21st century by Black
feminists who seek to build a counter-text to them. However, as noted earlier, some Black feminist
theorists have attempted to take on this difficult task in order to recover Black womanhood from
degradation. “Women develop theories, characters, art, and beauty free of the pressures of meeting
male approval, societal standards, color-based taxonomies, or run-of-the-mill female expectations. The
results are works that some critics call uncategorizable” Womack (2013). Black feminists have persisted
in creating fissures in these “bodies” of “knowledge” in order to question and unravel these stereotypes,
while opening possibilities for critical inquiry that would traverse new terrain in Africana women’s
speculative/science fiction. Black Feminist Theory Early Approaches Over the course of well over forty
years, Black women intellectuals have engaged in theoretical debate and discussion as a means towards
building a critical apparatus that would address both aesthetic and political concerns regarding the
“place” and “position” of Black women writers, artists, in addition to our presence as academics in
higher education. Barbara Smith’s “call to action” for a Black feminist theory during the 1970s, argued
for a breaking of racial and gendered silence in understanding Black women writers’ work: “Black
women’s existence, experience, and culture and the brutally complex systems of oppression which
shape these in the in `real world’ of white and/or male consciousness beneath consideration, invisible,
unknown” Smith (1978). For Smith, Black women struggled to be heard and acknowledged as
contributors to literary traditions, and as “outsiders,” were subject to marginalization in academic
discourse. During the 70s, 80s and 90s, Black Feminism as a form of literary inquiry, or what became
known as “Black Feminist Theory,” came into the academic community through the work of Barbara
Smith, the Combahee River Collective, Mary Helen Washington, Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde,
Michelle Wallace, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Evelynn Hammond,
Barbara Christian, Deborah McDowell, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, Valerie Smith, Patricia Hill Collins,
June Jordan, and Hortense Spillers. Approaches to Black feminist theory during the 1980s were fraught
with debates regarding politics of language, which in turn unfolded tensions between what some Black
feminists saw as essentialism and what other Black feminists saw as articulation of what had been
deemed by the hegemony as unspeakable and unacceptable in an overwhelming White, male,
heteronormative academy: the Black female body. Barbara Christian warned of the dangers of becoming
entangled in “academic language” that that could not only alienate and exclude, but miss engaging in
crucial inquiries: “Academic language has become the new metaphysic through which we turn leaden
idiom into golden discourse. But by writing more important thinking exclusively in this language, we not
only speak but to ourselves, we also are in danger of not asking those critical questions which our native
tongues insist we ask” Christian (1989). Christian’s concerns were in part a response to Hazel Carby, who
debated and disagreed with Christian and McDowell’s critique regarding the direction of Black feminism
towards a discursive body infused with dense, Eurocentric language designed to exclude: “For I feel that
the new emphasis on literary critical theory is as hegemonic as the world which it attacks” (Christian,
1987). Hazel Carby, paraphrasing Elaine Showalter in her introduction to Reconstructing Womanhood,
suggested a model of black feminist theory, which would occur in three phases: “(1) the concentration
on the misogyny (and racism) of literary practice; (2) the discovery that (black) women writers had a
literature of their own (previously hidden by patriarchal [and racist] values) and the development of a
(black) female aesthetic; and (3) a challenge to and rethinking of the conceptual grounds of literary
study and an increased concern with theory” Carby (1987). Carby rejected the notion of shared
experience between black women critics and black women writers as ahistorical and essentialist. She did
“not assume the existence of a tradition or traditions of black women writings and, indeed, is critical of
traditions of Afro-American intellectual thought that have been constructed as paradigmatic of AfroAmerican history” (Carby, 1987). Carby saw “black feminist” and ‘black woman” as being signs; black
feminist theory, in her view, must interrogate the sign as “an arena of struggle and a construct between
socially organized persons in the process of their interaction [and] as conditioned by the social
organization of the participants involved and also by the immediate conditions of their interactions”
(Carby, 1987). Language in black women’s literature, in Carby’s view, was not some universal code of
communication or an essentialist vision of communion between black women (Carby, 1987). Carby
intersected critical and political aspects of reading which serve to modify poststructuralist models of
criticism with the intention of moving black feminist criticism directly in the midst of “the race for
theory.” Deborah McDowell noted the importance of the work completed and progress made by critics
coming out of Black Arts Movement and the Black Feminist Movement to bring Black female writers into
the larger academic discourse McDowell (1990). “ In isolating and affirming the particulars of black
female experience they inspired and authorized writers from those cultures to sing in their different
voices and to imagine an audience that could hear the song” (McDowell, 1990). Elizabeth Alexander
views the 80-90s struggle for theoretical ground as counterproductive to transformation of academic
inquiry and academic space: “As “race” became a “category,” and much intellectual energy was put into
critiquing “essentialism,” the focus was lost on actual people of color, their voices and contributions, as
well as, more practically, the importance of increasing their—out—empowered presence on campuses
and in other workplaces. The extreme reaches are not unimaginable: a gender studies without women,
“race” studies without black people and other people of color” (McDowell, 1990). Black Feminism and
Marginality Politics Other Black feminists furthered the call for theory through series of reshaping and
reimagining European theoretical apparatuses, borrowing discursive strategies introduced by Bahktin,
Derrida, Freud/Lacan in order to do what Audre Lorde warned could not be done: use the Master’s Tools
to dismantle the Master’s “House,” which could be considered as signified through imposition of
“theoretical discourse.” For example, Wallace borrowed Houston Baker’s trope of the black hole, in
which “black holes may give access to other dimensions…and object …enters the black hole and is
infinitely compressed to zero volume…it passes through to another dimension, whereupon the
object…reassumes…all of the properties of visibility and concreteness, but in another dimension”
Wallace (1990). The dialectic of black women’s art is forced into the position of “other” by white women
and black men, who are themselves other to white men (Wallace, 1990). The trope of the black hole
described the dimensions of negation, and described the repressed accumulation of black feminist
creativity as compressed mass, negated from existence in the race and production of theory (Wallace,
1990). “The outsider sees black feminist creativity as a hole from which nothing worthwhile can emerge
and in which everything is forced to assume the zero volume of nothingness, the invisibility, that results
from the intense pressure of race, class and sex” (Wallace, 1990). Here, Wallace attempted to address
what Mary O’Connor considered to be “nothingness….as a place of origin for …much of black feminist
writing…imposed from without, entity defined by the patriarchal and white world of power and wealth.”
Mary Helen Washington declared that black women “have been hidden artists–creative
geniuses…whose creative impulses have been denied and thwarted in a society in which they have been
valued only as a source of cheap labor” Washington (1974). Through the margin of resistance black
women writers encourage others to write, to create works of art, and to break through the “black hole”.
During the early 1990s bell hooks theorized that art created in the margin as radical, saying that “[i]n
this space of collective despair resistance to colonization becomes a vital component to the creativity at
risk. Space is interrupted, appropriated and transformed through artistic and literary intervention”
hooks (1990). Black women’s creative works reached back into the broken and silenced past and recover and re-claim the repressed words of their ancestors, while speaking of their experiences and
beauty. bell hooks saw aesthetics as a means of inhabiting space or location, a way of looking and
becoming (hooks, 1990). “African American discourse on aesthetics is not prescriptive…the location of
white western culture is only one location of discourse on aesthetics.” (hooks, 1990). Aesthetics were
also formed through encouragement of other black women to write and to express themselves
artistically. “The realities of choice and location are confronted in the gesture of “re-vision,” shaping and
determining the response to existing cultural practices and in the capacity to envision new alternative,
oppositional aesthetic acts” (hooks, 1990). hooks also saw subjectivity in black women as a process
towards political radicalness, and that black women writers should resist Western notions of
subjectivity, which limit the ability to commit to political upheaval the structures which oppress black
women (hooks, 1990). For hooks, although black women’s writing contained radical resistance to racist
oppression, many black female writers limited black women characters’ progress after breaking away
from oppression instead of becoming radical subjects of resistance (hooks, 1990). Contemporary black
women writers linked subjectivity with emotional and spiritual health, ignoring the possibility of
commitment to radical politics and the possibility of resisting unity concepts and accepting difference in
female experience and in subjectivity itself, reinforcing dominant feminist thought and essentialist
notions of black identity (hooks, 1990). Further, hooks viewed marginality as being more than a site of
deprivation; for her the margin was a position of political possibility and a space of resistance, and a
location of counter-hegemonic discourse which also came from lived experience (hooks, 1990). Black
women writers have possibilities of multiple locations of expression. When black women as “other”
speaks and writes in resistance, she is no longer a silent object of derision or object of degradation; she
is a radical subject of resistance. As a speaking “other” she is not the muted other, but a subject of
power, power which is used to deconstruct the structures of oppression. However, like Barbara
Christian, hooks warned black feminists regarding slippage between the voice of the oppressed and the
voice of oppressor, especially with regard to power relations and domination of the oppressed. (hooks,
1990). Language was “a politicization of memory” which explained the present while articulating the
past (hooks, 1990). Mae Gwendolyn Henderson referred to this articulation as a sort of “speaking in
tongues, ” an ability of black women through their location as marginalized to see and speak more than
one language as reader Henderson (1989). Henderson proposed a discursive strategy that “seeks to
account for racial difference within gender identity and gender difference within racial identity. This
approach represents [her] effort to avoid ….the presumed `absolute and self-sufficient’ otherness of the
critical stance in order to allow the complex representations of black women writers to steer use away
from `a simple and reductive paradigm of otherness.’” (Henderson, 1989). To Henderson, critical theory
in the dominant hegemony negated the multiplicity of voices of subjectivity within black women’s
writing, which was in “dialogue with the plural aspects of self that constitute the matrix of black female
subjectivity”, and was in “dialogue with the aspects of “otherness” within the self” (Henderson, 1989).
Henderson’s critical model proposed the existence of heteroglossia in black women’s writing, borrowing
from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “notion of dialogism”, in which “voices of the other(s) `encounter one another
and coexist in the consciousness of real people”…that speaks to the situation of black women writers in
particular, `privileged’ by a social positionality that enables them to speak in dialogically racial and
gendered voices to the other(s) both within and without” (Henderson, 1989). Henderson saw black
female creative writers as “enter[ing] simultaneously into familial, or testimonial and public or
competitive discourses….that….enter into testimonial discourse with black men as blacks, with white
women as women and with black women as black women…..[and]…enter into a competitive discourse
with black men as women, with white women as blacks, and with white men as black women”
(Henderson, 1989). Henderson suggested the development of “an enabling critical fiction–that it is black
women writers who are the modern-day apostles, empowered by experience to speak as poets and
prophets in many tongues….signify[ing] a deliberate intervention by black women writers into the
canonic tradition of sacred/literary texts” (Henderson, 1989). She argued that Black women were in a
unique position of possibilities as prophets, as with the Hebrew prophets of old, who were in a unique
position of being the mouthpiece of God. Conversely, Michelle Wallace offered the caveat that
romanticizing or privileging marginality as a primary theoretical/political strategy would lead to a
reaffirmation of the white hegemony through reinforcement of the image of the silent “strong
matriarch” who is “already liberated” from her oppression (Wallace, 1990). These and other images
could be used by the hegemony to silence the process of resistance (Wallace, 1990). “It seemed to me
the evidence was everywhere in American culture that precisely because of their political and economic
disadvantages, black women were considered to have a peculiar advantage” (Wallace, 1990). For hooks,
a strategy of building a critical apparatus that would resist a fixed position or singularity of identity that
could be co-opted; rather, it would open possibilities of opening inquiry on multiple experiences and
voices. “A radical aesthetic acknowledges that because of changing positions and locations, there can
never be one critical paradigm for evaluating African American art” (hooks, 1990). Still, other critics like
Deborah Chay, whose essay “Rereading Barbara Christian: Black Feminist Criticism and the Category of
Experience” constructed a strong theoretical rebuttal of the notion of “experience” or “representation”
as theorized by Barbara Smith, Barbara Christian, and other early Black feminists, offered a blunt
observation that the dilemma faced by Black feminist critics was one that was brought on their
dependency on a paradigm that was itself self-evident of a need for them to transcend its limits and
traps: “I would like to suggest that it is precisely to the extent that the grounds for their differentiation
cannot be maintained that black feminists may make their strongest case for both the continuity and the
importance of their critical project. That is, the conditions which continue to make an appeal to
experience as a logical, appealing, and invisible foundation themselves constitute the most powerful
argument for the continued need for “black feminist critics” to organize and inventively challenge the
apparatus and terms of their representation Chay (1993).” In other words, the strategy of relying on
“experience” or “representation” as a theoretical foundation exposed a theoretical flaw that would and
did, in time, prove to become intellectual traps for Black feminists. In addition to critiques on the limits
of identity-based theory that focused on race and gender, significant contributions were published by
Black feminists who felt the need to address what Hortense J. Spillers and Evelynn Hammonds referred
to as “silences” in mainstream feminism with regard to Black female bodies and sexualities. For instance,
Spillers argued that mainstream feminism’s silence towards Black female tended to perpetuate
dominant ideological paradigms that continued to perpetuate oppressive impressions of Black female
sexuality. “I wish to suggest that the lexical gaps I am describing here are manifest along a range of
symbolic behavior in reference to black women and that the absence of sexuality as a structure of
distinguishing terms is solidly grounded in the negative aspects of symbol-making. The latter, in turn are
wed to the abuses and uses of history, and how it is perceived.” Spillers (2003). Spillers asserted a need
for Black feminists to pursue a discursive strategy to correct “official” histories of Black female sexuality
that would reposition us as a disruptive force to counter hegemonic influence: The aim, though obvious,
might be restated: to restore to women’s historical movement its complexity of issues and supply the
right verb to the subject searching for it, feminists are called upon to initiate a corrected and revised
view of women of color on the frontiers of symbolic action” (Spillers, 2003). In addition to Spillers’ call to
Black feminists, Hammonds also proposed a much more decisive and unequivocal discursive strategy for
Black feminists. She saw Black feminists’ reluctance to pursue a theoretical direction that included
discussions on lesbian eros as an exclusionary tactic that exposed a privileging of heterosexual desire, as
well as the presence of the excluded lesbian text: “Since silence about sexuality is being produced by
black women and black feminist theorists, that silence itself suggests that black women do have some
degree of agency. A focus on black lesbian sexualities, I suggest, implies that another discourse—other
than silence—can be produced Hammonds (1994).” Hammonds believed such discourse to be crucial to
the development of Black feminist criticism that would contend with Black women artists and writers
articulating from a previously missed context that needed to be explored in order to address sexual
difference and multiplicity. For Hammonds, breaking this silence was a decisive move that could not be
ignored by Black feminists. “Disavowing the designation of black female sexualities as inherently
abnormal, while acknowledging the material and symbolic effects of the appellation, we could begin the
project of understanding how differently located black women engage in reclaiming the body and
expressing desire (Hammonds, 1994). Black Feminism and Intersectionality In the 21st century Black
feminism has continued to engage in a series of complex struggles to engage a rapidly changing
academic and theoretical landscape challenged by instabilities and uncertainties with regard to political
and cultural alliances. For some Black women, disengaging themselves from the limits of a feminism
aligned with a singularity of racial identity while remaining committed to dismantling oppressive
ideological frameworks entailed developing and encouraging a critical strategy that promised a much
more complex engagement: intersectionality. Jennifer C. Nash defined intersectionality as “the notion
that subjectivity is constituted by mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality, has
emerged as the primary theoretical tool designed to combat feminist hierarchy, hegemony, and
exclusivity” Nash (2011). Nash’s essay “rethinking intersectionality” criticized intersectionality’s
tendency to persist in Black feminism’s theoretical problem of “continuously and strategically jamming
the workings of binary thinking” by “continu[ing] in the tradition of black feminism with the addition of a
new name for conceptualizing the workings of identity” (Nash, 2011). For Nash, intersectionality as a
truly useful and progressive theoretical apparatus needed to undergo a critical overhaul that would
correct its ambiguity as to how it distinguishes itself from previous versions of Black feminism, whether
it remained a part of Black feminist theory as a revised or emergent version, or whether it served as a
critical strategy that completely “departs” from it (Nash, 2011). Nash asserted that “[i]n conceiving of
privilege and oppression as complex, multi-valent, and simultaneous, intersectionality could offer a
more robust conception of both identity and oppression” (Nash, 2011). She suggested an
intersectionality strategy that would study “race and gender as co-constitutive processes and as
distinctive and historically specific technologies of categorization,” which would in turn allow a much
more robust intellectual engagement that would result in “insights that far exceed imagining race and
gender as inextricably bound up” (Nash, 2011). By 2011, Nash takes her call to reconsider intersectional
analysis in a critical and political direction that seems to anticipate and invite what I would refer to as a
theoretical “bridge” for those who would seek to engage in Black feminism beyond identity traps,
especially for those who seek to connect Black feminism with Afrofuturism. Her essay “Practicing Love:
‘Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality’” takes on Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic in
her (1983) essay “Uses of the Erotic” and remixes it with affective theory, proposing a Black feminist
love politics that would expose “the existence—indeed, vibrancy—of multiple black feminist political
traditions” through “a radical conception of the public sphere” and through “a new relationship to
temporality generally, and to futurity” (Nash, 2011). Nash asserts what I would consider a theoretical
bridge that invites an Afrofuturist vision of Black feminism when she theorizes that “love-politics
practitioners dream of a yet unwritten future; they imagine a world ordered by love, by a radical
embrace of difference, by a set of subjects who work on/against themselves to work for each other”
(Nash, 2011). Bridge Towards Afrofuturism The rise of Afrofuturism in the 21st century, a name first
articulated by Greg Tate in the mid 1990s, can be considered as an aesthetic and critical process existing
at the side of and through the development of Black feminism and its critical companion
intersectionality. It is inclusive of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction, as well as visual art,
music, and technological infusion into Afro-Diasporic cultures. Jewelle Gomez refers to “speculative
fiction,” as new landscapes and life experience are imagined beyond the limits of the so-called real:
“[s]peculative fiction is a way of expanding our ideas of what human nature really is, allowing us to
consider all aspects of ourselves; it is important that a diverse range of writers, Black lesbian writers
included, participate in this expansion” Gomez (1991). D. Denenge Akpem, discussing the 2011
Afrofuturism Conference in Chicago Art Magazine, describes Afrofuturism as “an exploration and
methodology of liberation, simultaneously both a location and a journey…[w]e are alchemists in this city
of steel, akin to the Yoruba god Ogun, fusing metal to metal.” As “alchemists,” Afrofuturists invoke the
past as a means towards imagining a future that is not only inclusive of us as participants but as shapers
of worlds that embrace new permutations of existence, as well as new permutations of expression,
artistically. “Afrofuturism as a movement itself may be the first in which black women creators are
credited for the power of their imaginations and are equally represented as the face of the future and
the shapers of the future” (Womack, 2012). Like Black Feminists, Afrofuturists engage in a recovery and
retelling of the presence of people of African descent as contributors to cultural production and
articulation. “Afrofuturism has evolved into a coherent mode not only aesthetically but also in terms of
its political mission. In its broadest dimensions Afrofuturism is an extension of the historical recovery
projects that black Atlantic intellectuals have engaged in for well over two hundred years” (Sdonline).
Rather than following dominant cultural assumptions of Africana culture as being in opposition to a
digitalized future or present, Akpem invokes an Orisha who symbolizes humanity’s changing relationship
with those elements that provide us with the tools for innovation, invention, and advancement. Ogun,
the God of iron, shapes not just spears and guns, but railroads, locomotives, cars, and ships. His
“children” are not just warriors, but also inventors and drivers. Afrofuturism is also a reclaiming of space
previously assumed to be alien to us; it is not so much about being included in someone else’s cultural
and technological conversation, as it is a reclaiming of authority to speak as creators and inventors. For
Black feminists, such a process surpasses socio-cultural codes demanding containment. “While
Afrofuturist women are obviously shaped by modern gender issues, their creations and theories
themselves emerge from a space that renders such limitations moot” (Womack, 2012). This process
intervenes and interrupts what Alondra Nelson refers to as “the racialized digital divide narrative” in a
collection of essays on Afrofuturism called “Future Texts,” a special edition of Social Text (2002): The
racialized digital divide narrative that circulates in the public sphere and the bodiless, color-blind
mythotopias of cybertheory and commercial advertising have become the unacknowledged frames of
reference for understanding race in the digital age. In these frameworks, the technologically enabled
future is by its very nature unmoored from the past and from people of color. Neocritical narratives
suggest that it is primitiveness or outmodedness, the obsolescence of something or someone else, that
confirms the novel status of the virtual self, the cutting-edge product, or the high-tech society Nelson
(2002). Racialized tropes that dominate the “public sphere” have been flooded with the notion that a
digitalized or highly technological space cannot exist or flourish in a future populated with people of
color because they/we are outdated, or of a past existence. Cultural expressions coming from such
ideological paradigms assume a future free of those populations that signify a racialized limitation, as
well as a past with a very limited or dim view of racial others. Nelson sees writers like Ishmael Reed as
an example of a futurist vision that counters the hegemony’s script: “Like [Ishmael Reed’s] critique of
the dominant mythos of “Western civ,” his anachronistic use of technology in Mumbo Jumbo begs the
question of what tools are valued by whom, and to what ends. With his innovative novel as an exemplar,
Ishmael Reed has supplied a paradigm for an African diasporic technoculture (Nelson, 2002).” Reed’s
depiction of “technology” serves as a subversion of the dominant tropes by revising and reimagining
stories of both our past and our future from a vantage point of one who is able to see our presence as
both inventors and users of technology. As Nalo Hopkinson notes with a certain joy, speculation in
fiction offers Afrofuturist writers a means towards “shaking up” the hegemony: “Science fiction and
fantasy are already about subverting paradigms. It’s something I love about them” Hopkinson (2010).
Teresa Goddu asserts that African American writers who have ventured into speculative fiction featuring
horror or the fantastic engage in a counter-text or counter-theoretical mode of writing about the past,
where the “horror” of the slave institution, Jim Crow, and the aftermath provide rich, fertile ground
upon which to imagine supernatural or preternatural figures who exist in a world already rife with evils
of racism, subjugation, and dehumanization. She asserts that “[f]rom Morrison’s vampiric Beloved, who
sucks the past out of Sethe, to Eddie Murphy’s Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), which replays Dracula’s
landing in England as the entrance into New York harbor of a crumbling Caribbean slave ship populated
with corpses, the African-American vampire reminds us that the American gothic travels from elsewhere
and is burdened by the horror of racial history” Goddu (1999). Kodwo Eshun’s theorization moves in a
direction similar to that of Nelson’s trajectory, in that he also sees Afrofuturism as interrupting the old
version of the story of the future Eshun (2003). Further, Eshun views Afrofuturism as an emergence of
“temporal complications and episodes that disturb the linear time of progress” which “adjust the
temporal logics that condemned the black subjects to prehistory” (Eshun, 2003). Put another way,
Afrofuturism is a process or performative that disrupts and erupts commonly understood sequential
order of things, or what we have understood to be history, or even fact. For novelist Nalo Hopkinson,
the speculative possesses a political vehicle that allows writers to explore racial and social class
performativity: “So one might say that, at a very deep level, one of the things that fantasy and science
fiction do is to use myth-making to examine and explore socioeconomically configured ethnoracial
power imbalances” (Hopkinson, 2010). According to Herman Gray, Afrofuturist writers like Octavia
Butler, Samuel Delaney, and others inspire this movement in such a way that encourages an imagined
existence in the African Diaspora beyond colonized borders and the legacy and terror of slavery and its
aftermath. Gray asserts that “Afrofuturists claim that blacks scattered across the Atlantic world are
aliens in an alien land, ever on the lookout for clues and resources that point the way out of alien
nations and conditions of bondage” (Gray, 2005). Linking Afrofuturist fiction to Afrofuturist music as
similar movements away from these limits, Gray contends this movement as a significant step towards
liberation, where the liminal could produce innovative modes of fashioning the African diasporic self: “It
is possible to rebuild old and make anew different diasporic connections, as well as to imagine
possibilities for inhabiting the spaces and identities about which Sun Ra wrote” Gray (2005).
Afrofuturism positions the master narrative about the past, present, and future into one of instability
and uncertainty, which is, without a doubt, a critical and political strategy that can align and inform with
that of a Black feminist process that seeks to develop a discursive strategy that complicates and disrupts
those narratives and myths that depend on a singularity of timelines or more importantly, identity
politics. Afrofuturism and Black feminism are both vital critical apparatus vehicles for Afro-Diasporic
women and men who seek to enter and disrupt an otherwise homogenous ideological framework.
Affirmation of our historical counter-future is a gesture of defiance that heals and
creates new growth and new life via transgressive epistemologies
Susana Morris (Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Auburn University) Fall/Winter
2012 “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler's "Fledgling"”
Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 3/4, ENCHANTMENT (FALL/WINTER 2012), pp. 146-166
Speculative fiction, that is, science fiction, fantasy, horror, and futurist fiction, has largely been
(mis)understood as a genre written only by whites (mostly men) about whites (again, mostly men).
However, by the end of the twentieth century black writers such as Samuel Delaney, Octavia E. Butler,
Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, and Nalo Hopkinson, among others, reflected a tradition of black
speculative fiction known as Afrofu turism.6 My use of the term "Afrofuturism" is particularly informed
by Afrofuturist scholars Mark Dery, Alondra Nelson, Lisa Yaszek, and Kodwo Eshun. Dery coined the term
"Afrofuturism" in 1994 to "describe African American cultures appropriation of technology and SF
imagery" (2008, 6). He further notes that "speculative fiction that treats African-American concerns in
the context of twentieth-century technoculture and, more generally, African-American signification that
appropriates images of tech nology and a prosthetically enhanced future ... might, for want of a bet ter
term, be called Afro-Futurism" (8). Dery s portmanteau of "afro" and "futurism" denotes the important
connection between race and futurist fiction, a circumstance that tends to go unacknowledged in
mainstream speculative fiction.7 In addition to Dery's definition, Alondra Nelson's groundbreaking
work—including editing the special issue of Social Text devoted to Afrofuturism and founding the
Afrofuturism Listserv and website—has been vital to the development of Afrofuturism criticism and
scholarship. Nelson contends that Afrofuturism forwards "takes on digital culture that do not fall into
the trap of the neocritics or the futurists of one hundred years past. These works represent new
directions in the study of African diaspora culture that are grounded in the histories of black com
munities, rather than seeking to sever all connections to them" (2002, 9). Likewise, Afrofuturist scholar
Lisa Yaszek suggests, "While early Afrofuturists are concerned primarily with the question of whether or
not there will be any future whatsoever for people of color, contemporary Afrofuturists assume that in
the future race will continue to matter to individuals and entire civilizations alike. In doing so, they
expand our sense of the possible and contribute to the ongoing development of science fiction itself"
(2006). My use of Afrofuturism is also informed by Kodwo Eshun's asser tion that Afrofuturism is
"concerned with the possibilities for interven tion within the dimension of the predictive, the projected,
the proleptic, the envisioned, the virtual, the anticipatory and the future conditional" (2003, 293).
Furthermore, it is important to note, as Eshun contends, that "Afrofuturism may be characterized as a
program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic
projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention
within the current political dispensation may be undertaken" (301). Thus, Afrofuturism is an
epistemology that both examines the current problems faced by blacks and people of color more
generally and critiques interpretations of the past and the future. Ulti mately, Dery, Nelson, Yaszek, and
Eshun illuminate that one of Afrofuturism's foremost guiding tenets is the centrality of African diasporic
histories and practices in sustaining progressive visions of the future. Put another way, not only does
Afrofuturism posit that blacks will exist in the future, as opposed to being harbingers of social chaos and
collapse, but in "recovering the histories of counter-futures" Afrofuturism insists that blacks
fundamentally are the future and that Afrodiasporic cultural practices are vital to imagining the
continuance of human society. Because much of Afrofuturism's transgressive politics align with the
fundamental tenets of black feminist thought, I argue that it is critical to understand these
epistemologies not only as related but as, in fact, in conversation with one another and potentially even
symbiotic. Just as Afrofuturism underscores the centrality of blacks to futurist knowledge and cultural
production and resistance to tyranny, so does black feminist thought contend that black peoples
experience, knowledge, and culture are vitally important. Black feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins
claims, "Black feminist thought affirms, rearticulates, and provides a vehicle for expressing in public a
consciousness that quite often already exists" (2000, 32). Moreover, just as Afrofuturism seeks to
liberate the possibilities that open up when blackness is linked to futurity, so does black feminist
thought seek to uncouple dominance from power as blacks assert their agency, for as bell hooks
declares, "Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those
who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new
growth possible. It is that act of speech, of 'talking back,' that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is
the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice" (1989, 9). This movement
toward a liberated voice, as hooks suggests, is not about simply replacing the dom inant voice with the
voice of the marginalized; rather, liberation is cast in terms of coalition and power sharing,
methodologies that would incite a future quite different from the hegemony of present structures. I
want to consider the synthesis of Afrofuturism and black feminist thought as Afrofuturist feminism.
Afrofuturist feminism is a reflection of the shared central tenets of Afrofuturism and black feminist
thought and reflects a literary tradition in which people of African descent and transgressive, feminist
practices born of or from across the Afrodiaspora are key to a pro gressive future. Ultimately, I argue
that recognizing Afrofuturist feminism offers a critical epistemology that illuminates the working of black
speculative fiction in vital ways. Octavia Butler is certainly among the authors whose works exemplify
Afrofuturist feminism. In her essay "Positive Obsession," Butler asserts that speculative fiction has the
potential to catalyze progressive political change and that, for black people, this is a particularly
significant project. She writes: What good is any form of literature to Black people? What good is sci
ence fictions thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or
to consider alternative ways of think ing and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects
of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction
stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow,
narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing, thinking—whoever "everyone" happens to be this
year. And what good is all this to Black people? (2005b, 135). Butlers rhetorical questions and
subsequent answers reject the notion that speculative fiction is a "whites only" enterprise, arguing
instead that the genre can incite d for a variety of people. Also, Butlers emphasis on the transformative
potential of speculative fiction underscores her Afrofuturist work as being defined by a feminist
sensibility. That is, her works of speculative fiction not only adhere to the tenets of Afrofuturism but also
are self-consciously interested in the con nections between race, gender, sexuality, and ability that are
at the core of black feminist thought. Indeed, as Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise Keating note, "Octavia
Butler s work is thematically preoccupied with the potentiality of genetically altered bodies—hybrid
multispecies and multi ethnic subjectivities—for revising contemporary nationalist, racist, sexist, and
homophobic attitudes" (2001,45). Thus, Butler s work is Afrofuturist feminism in several ways. Her texts
are committed to portraying compli cated (and sometimes vexed) histories of people of color and
visions of the future with people of color at the center, with a particular emphasis on women of color.
Butlers fiction is also fundamentally interested in critiquing conventional systems of power and
dominance and offering futurist solutions based on cooperation and egalitarian ethics. Thus, Butlers
writing consistently advocates transgressing repressive social norms and rejecting heteropatriarchy,
while centering (or creating) a variety of experiences from across the Afrodiaspora. Nonetheless, while
Butler's Afrofuturist work underscores a commitment to an equitable vision of society, it does not resort
to simply offering up Utopias. Butler s visions of the future are often ambivalent ones that reveal an
ongoing struggle for peace and justice. To that end, while contemporary vampires (and other principle
figures and tropes of speculative fiction) are often illustrated as a way to crystallize and affirm whiteness
and Western values, Butlers Afrofuturist feminism radically challenges these tenets. She (re)configures
vampires as power ful beings not outside of the history of racism, but as powerful, enchant ing beings
that are both vulnerable to the constraints of racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism (and their
attendant violence) and committed to creating futures for them and those they love that reject these
ways of knowing. Nevertheless, I am not arguing that Fledgling is (simply) a reac tionary text. As
Kimberly Nichelle Brown argues, "Contemporary African American female writing is a product of choice,
of agency, rather than solely a reaction to victimization" (2010, 64). In other words, I see the novel
participating in a tradition of feminist resistance in literature that also taps into the potential (albeit
sometimes unrealized) that speculative fiction has to interrogate and challenge normative ideologies
and practice. That is not to say that Butler s Afrofuturistic vampires are not enchanted or enchanting;
however, they break from many of the traditional or con ventionally popular tropes. These vampires are
a biological species, not a supernatural force. Some of them are "daywalkers " or, in other words, can
move about in the sun. They have preternatural strength but they are not invincible. They have
seductive powers of persuasion that they largely use for good, not evil. They live in nonnormative
groups with or among human beings and are (generally) not antagonistic to humans. Although not
magical creatures, Butlers vampires are, nevertheless, enchanted because of the power that they wield,
despite their various flaws and vul nerabilities and their ability to radically alter their surroundings and
chal lenge normative notions of how to be.
Black feminist performances rebuke technologies of silencing and create the
conditions for political mobilization through not only a challenging of contemporary
surveillance practices that enable black fugitivity
Shana Redmond (Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, Ph.D in American
Studies from Yale) 2011 “This Safer Space: Janelle Monáe's “Cold War”” Journal of Popular Music
Studies, Volume 23, Issue 4 December 2011 Pages 393–411, WileyOnline
Black women's resistance efforts are a treasure trove of contemporary historical inquiry. The
interdisciplinary methods that must be used to shed light on their acts can only begin a discussion, as we
follow the (non)disciplin(ed/ary) women themselves who devised fantastic responses to what Stuart Hall
has named the “fatal coupling of power and difference” (17), more commonly referred to as racism.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore documents the responses of women environmental activists to this coupling,
arguing that they “join forces not only as petitioners to the state in the name of injuries sustained but
also—and more provocatively—as petitioners to communities of similar people in the name of
reconstructing space so that concepts of ‘safety’ and ‘health’ cannot be realized by razor-wire fences
and magic bullet cures” (15). The themes of free speech, access to community or public space, and
safety from physical and psychic assault, especially white supremacist violence, scaffolds much of the
efforts of black women to construct alternative worldviews during the twentieth century. The Cold War,
which roughly spanned the period between the frayed ends of World War II in 1945 and the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989, saw the rise of a second Red Scare under McCarthyism (1947–1957) as well as an
intense moment of (inter)national suppression of dissent in tandem with the consolidation of an
organized black political public through a broad civil rights movement. Post-Berlin Wall, this moment has
been imagined by black artists as a fruitful signifying site through which to investigate and rebuke the
technologies of silencing that were developed and expanded by formal political and cultural actors
during the long Cold War period.1 The lived experiences of and narratives by the African-descended are
often replayed and reimagined in and through performance, and black women in particular have a
tradition of representing and resisting the conditions of their lives through creative uses of the black
body; black women's performance traditions have centralized the body as evidence and epistemology.
Daphne Brooks argues that black women “might put their own figures to work for their own aesthetic
and political uses and ‘imagine their own bodies’,” thereby “invent[ing] ways to maintain the integrity of
black female bodies as sites of intellectual knowledge, philosophical vision, and aesthetic worth” (8).2
Wondaland/Bad Boy recording artist Janelle Monáe offers a twenty-first century version of this practice
as she uses her body to critique and to resituate history, including the identities produced from and
within it. The video for her single, “Cold War,” generates a unique alchemy of (re)presentation,
positionality, and performance, and in so doing, puts under stress the dichotomies of black/white,
inside/outside, past/present. In this way, Monáe adds a postmodern edge to the modern performance
traditions described by Jayna Brown, in which black women performers and artists of the early
twentieth century “combined intense intimacy and unbrookable distance [with]… the ability to record
what one saw or felt from above, below, inside or outside” (228). Self-described as a visual artist,
Monáe's most prominent canvas is her body. She has garnered significant attention for her black and
white wardrobe, which often takes the form of a tuxedo, presenting an androgynous aesthetic even
while the high contrast color-blocking represents her belief that “there's no gray area with me” (Nylon
Magazine TV).3 The stark simplicity of Monáe's wardrobe serves as a foil for a complicated gender
performance, yet it clearly reflects the demarcations of her own sociopolitical investments. This is her
“uniform,” as she describes it, one that she proudly wears in solidarity with the working classes she was
born into in Kansas City, Kansas, and alongside whom she now labors from her base in Atlanta, Georgia.
This uniform refuses periodization as it incorporates the high collars and puffed shoulders of Victorian
women's wear with the saddle shoes and mod, slim-cut slacks of the 1950s, thereby demonstrating
Monáe's Afro-materialist ability to blur the aesthetic conventions of history and dismiss the
transhistorical expectations of the female body by commenting on multiple past moments through one
ensemble. Although she eschews color in her performance wardrobe, Monáe describes her music as
colorful, making an explicit connection between sight and sound within her work. She constructs what
she calls an “emotion picture for the mind,” and attempts to develop a more comprehensive experience
for the viewer/listener, one that engages on multiple sensory levels and that connects the mind to the
body (NPR). Her explicit and rapt attention to the mind of her audience is one of her grand interventions
within the pop music realm; this focus compels her to contend with historical forces within her layered
productions, in the process allowing those who watch that battle to struggle alongside her, inducing a
sense of identification that is based in social movement techniques as well as in the “freedom dreams”
discussed by historian Robin Kelley—those maneuvers within the black radical tradition that recover
historical methods to generate and mobilize futures of alternative possibilities.4 Surrealism is one such
maneuver Monáe employs in her aesthetic choices and in her insistence on the mind as a site of struggle
and elevation. Through this process, which fuses social and cultural movements, Monáe enters into the
genealogy of what black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick delineates as “the place of black
women in relation to various scales: in their minds, in their bodies, in their homes, in urban/rural
centers [sic], and in the nation” (2000a: 126). Monáe's invention and use of scale is highlighted in the
second video release from her album The ArchAndroid, entitled “Cold War,” which she describes as
“one of my most intimate releases to date” (Neon Limelight). At stake within this song—as a sound and
sight production—is the reconfiguration and substantiation of the emotional and bodily planes of
existence for marginalized and alienated groups. Monáe's employment of the Cold War as both
metaphor and subject disrupts the time, geography, and ideology that undergirds it as a hermetically
sealed period defined by the contest among state actors over capitalism versus communism. This history
is further disrupted by examinations of the contemporaneous struggles waged by the African-descended
over the meaning, formation, and practice of the Cold War; the “Double V” campaign of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the high profile performances by artist-activist
Paul Robeson after his 1950 passport revocation for suspicion of communist activity continue to
demonstrate the exclusions within the Cold War narrative and the ways in which the national fears that
characterized it make peripheral or dismiss other contests waged on a nonnational scale.5 These
omissions occlude the varying levels of national (dis)identification that made the protracted
engagement of the Cold War what it was: a multiply situated contest of wills and political maneuvering
that was not brought to one final conclusion, but that led to numerous projects and ends, including
foreclosures of international diplomacy, the manufacture of the “Third World” through the
consolidation of world economic and cultural divisions, and the increased local surveillance and
incarceration of activists on the Left. Monáe's use of the Cold War as a framework for contemporary
conditions of existence acknowledges the ways in which state powers continue to employ scale to enact
competing world visions; in the process, she highlights the tenuous relationship between national
discourses of freedom and their everyday practice. Within “Cold War,” Monáe uses her own
hypervisibility to complicate that period and its aims by situating it as an ongoing phenomenon. This
repositioning of history is not a dismissal, however. Monáe is respectful of and inspired by the past, and
she demonstrates this in her borrowing from James Brown's footwork, in her screening of civil rights
iconography during her live shows, and in her use of Jimi Hendrix's “Purple Haze” to introduce her
entrance onto the stage. However, she articulates a distinct distance from this past by invoking it and
then deftly outmaneuvering it by constantly challenging the narratives that fossilize that past. In “Cold
War,” Monáe is able to perform time travel through the unique aesthetics and positioning of her body;
for the first time in her “emotion picture” archive she completely abandons her retro uniform, stripping
her body of the historical fixity that she also debunks within her lyrics. Her “Cold War” evocations are
offered primarily in present-tense statements and questions that reshape historical inquiry by
demanding a collective engagement with the Cold War as a frame for the quotidian brutalities of
difference. Her refrain, which asks, “It's a cold war, do you know what you’re fighting for?” disrupts the
historical narrative of the Cold War by announcing its multiplication across time and space (“a cold
war”). She additionally dismisses the sectarianism of the Cold War (Do you know who you’re fighting
for?) and replaces it with a call to a cause (“[D]o you know what you’re fighting for?”). The perpetual
battle of belonging and accountability that she references here remaps the Cold War terrain and its
victims through the insertion of her body as palimpsest. The scene for her “Cold War” is a black box,
which represents both a creative play on the fallout shelters that pervaded civil defense culture during
the Cold War, and an abstracted “‘nowhere’ setting.” Like the dance music videos of the 1990s, this
black box offers a “lack of perspective [that] is playfully futuristic,” yet, unlike these videos, Monáe's
picture is not “outside of and beyond mundane social relations”—in fact, she uses this unarticulated
space to expose the myth of the mundane through evocations of her reality (Bradby). She begins with
the visual; in this black box, the only color contrast is Monáe's skin, offering an incisive critique of
binaries and uncritical identity consolidation through the introduction of not one, but multiple,
blacknesses. Here she uses our gaze to establish both the relation and the difference between her
environment and her body. We look at Monáe head on and seem to catch her off guard as she speaks
with another off-camera entity when we arrive at her scene. She looks back and forth and begins to
remove her robe as the screen goes pitch black, announcing the reason that we are all here: “Janelle
Monáe, ‘Cold War,’ Take 1.” She returns from the title screen bare and unaccessorized, setting the tone
for a video that uses both visual and musical cues to heighten the crises that it draws upon. Monáe takes
advantage of the tight framing of the camera by employing striking affective gestures. As she begins her
voiceover her eyes widen, and she turns to profile where she squints, letting us know that she has vision
too—a vision described by critic Eric Harvey as “not remotely sexual, as much as it is knowing.” She
returns to face us and inhales, offering her opening line: “So you think I’m alone?” This question is
haunted by the histories it considers.6 As Geoffrey Smith argues, the “political demonology” of the Cold
War was reliant on two phases of US political displacement: the first based on race and the second on
ethnicity and vocation. Both phases, according to Smith, “tended towards segregation,” including “social
isolation, medical testing for exclusion, and even politically generated deportation.” These sociopolitical
prohibitions set the stage for an early Cold War period that emphasized differentiation and
containment. In his work on James Baldwin's 1956 novel, Giovanni's Room, Douglas Field argues that the
Federal Bureau of Investigation's scrutiny of Baldwin “is indicative of the ways in which government
organizations during the Cold War scrutinized American citizens (both home and abroad) for evidence of
subversive political activity to maintain rigid distinctions between an identifiable Self and Other.” The
federal government's rabid maintenance of Jim Crow in the American South, constant surveillance of
civil rights organizations, and collusion with European colonial powers made clear which camp the
African-descended belonged to. While these exclusions shaped the formal political opportunities for
people of color, they also fostered alternative political acts and solidarities that challenged, and
ultimately overturned, de jure practices of segregation. Monáe signifies on this practice of collectivity
through her reconstruction of a Cold War history that “brings wings to the weak,” and that forecasts
that “the mighty will crumble.” Her contemporary artistic forum—the music video—also relies on a
shared community as she performs for, to, and alongside a diverse public. Her black box setting may
lead us to believe that she is in fact alone until we remember that she is in dialogue with us—another
character in her production. Monáe's questions to us throughout the song are met with definitive
statements as she narrates a story of dispossession and alienation. Her second verse, which argues, “If
you want to be free / below the ground's the only place to be /’cause in this life / you spend time
running from depravity,” details a space not of death (“below the ground”) but of safety that is shared
by a self-selected group who choose freedom over flight (“running from depravity”). It is an
underground, a shelter, where political consciousness might best be fostered and utilized safe from the
culture wars fought outside. Monáe's spatial realignments signal a powerful departure from
conventional narratives of black suffering; unlike much of the disaster and tourist photography of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which purports to display black reality without allowing the subject
to speak, we are forced, through viewing her moving image, to brace ourselves for her next utterance as
she looks us in the eye and uses her emotional intensity to displace our intentions for her body. Through
this effort she becomes the subject through which the forces under consideration are elucidated. Raw
emotion punctuates this possession; at the moment of revealing, “I was made to believe there's
something wrong with me / And it hurts my heart,” Monáe's eyes well up with tears. She breaks
character as the emotions escalate, missing the lines of her playback, and shaking her head and hands in
acknowledgement of the emotions that originally inspired the song's composition and that are now
replayed in the act of performance. This rupture dismisses the standard ventriloquism of music video lip
synchronization in favor of vulnerability before a knowing audience, signaling her investment in using
her own “Cold War” for new ends: it is no longer a contained project (war) or a historical object (music
video) but it is, through her, an entire field of play and performative engagement that traverses period,
ideology, and method. This radical act of self-exposure spurns the longstanding surveillance practices of
the United States and offers an alternative to the subterfuge used by oppressed peoples. Monáe's
performance refuses the acts of dissemblance that have long characterized black women's participation
in the public sphere. Darlene Clark Hine argues that black women employed dissemblance throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a way to respond to rape, violence, and the threats thereof,
thus “creat[ing] the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shield[ing] the truth of their
inner lives” (912). These refusals produced a “self-imposed invisibility” that allowed them to “accrue the
psychic space and harness the resources needed to hold their own in the often one-sided and
mismatched resistance struggle” (Hine 915). Monáe relies on invisibility in “Cold War,” insisting that
“Being alone's the only way to be / When you step outside / you spend life fighting for your sanity.”7
Her words echo the sentiments of Mary Church Terrell, who early in the twentieth century announced
to her constituency in the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs that “our peculiar status [as
black women] in this country … seems to demand that we stand by ourselves” (Hine 917). Monáe's
staging of interiority, however, is already undercut by her choice of forum: it is not a platform from
which she speaks only to other black women, but a music video that comprised both a sonic
announcement to be replayed again and again, and a moving image that catalogs and exposes her for all
time to anyone who would watch/listen. There is a dramatic tension here; while Monáe acknowledges
dissemblance as a strategy, she also forestalls its efficacy through that revelation, effectively lifting the
veil of secrecy that allowed for black women's sociopolitical subterfuge.
The imagination of a world without surveillance against black women’s bodies is a
utopian possibility
REDMOND,11 ( Shana L. is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She received
her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University. Her
research and teaching interests include the African Diaspora, Black political cultures, music and popular
culture. "Marking the Margins: Janelle Monáe's 'Cold War' Landscape":“This Safer Space: Janelle
Monae’s´ "Cold War"”, Post45 Conference, Roundtable/Panel, Refereed Paper, Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame, Cleveland, OH, Post45, Spring 2011 )
Monae´ s questions to us throughout the song are met with definitive statements as she narrates a story
of dispossession and alienation. Her second verse, which argues, "If you want to be free / below the
ground's the only place to be / 'cause in this life / you spend time running from depravity," details a space
not of death ("below the ground") but of safety that is shared by a self-selected group who choose
freedom over flight ("running from depravity"). It is an underground, a shelter, where political
consciousness might best be fostered and utilized safe from the culture wars fought outside. Monae’ s
spatial realignments signal a powerful departure from conventional narratives of black suffering; unlike
much of the disaster and tourist photography of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which purports
to display black reality without allowing the subject to speak, we are forced, through viewing her moving
image, to brace ourselves for her next utterance as she looks us in the eye and uses her emotional intensity
to displace our intentions for her body. Through this effort she becomes the subject through which the
forces under consideration are elucidated. Raw emotion punctuates this possession; at the moment of
revealing, "I was made to believe there's something wrong with me / And it hurts my heart," Monae´ s
eyes well up with tears. She breaks character as the emotions escalate, missing the lines of her playback,
and shaking her head and hands in acknowledgement of the emotions that originally inspired the song's
composition and that are now replayed in the act of performance. This rupture dismisses the standard
ventriloquism of music video lip synchronization in favor of vulnerability before a knowing audience,
signaling her investment in using her own "Cold War" for new ends: it is no longer a contained project
(war) or a historical object (music video) but it is, through her, an entire field of play and performative
engagement that traverses period, ideology, and method. This radical act of self-exposure spurns the
longstanding surveillance practices of the United States and offers an alternative to the subterfuge used
by oppressed peoples.
Our affirmation of the topic represents an afrofuturist speculative fiction that
imagines a radical re-centering of black women in conversations at the intersection of
race, gender, technology, surveillance, and the future of criminalization in an antiblack America
Carruthers 2/3 (Carruthers, Charlene A. Political organizer and writer; National Director BYP100
"Black Future Month: End the Anti-Black Police State." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 03
Feb. 2015. Web. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charlene-carruthers/end-the-antiblack-police_b_6604488.html>.)
A future for Black people in America must include full decriminalization of acts not considered to be
criminal when performed in non-Black bodies. Where we go from here requires approaches to public
safety that don't hinge on the control of Black people, empowerment of police and reliance on punitive
measures. Our call to action must support restorative justice practices, quality public school systems and
good living-wage jobs. The call for an end to mass criminalization must include a call to the end of
the Anti-Black Police State. BYP100 Agenda to Keep Us Safe defines criminalization as a process in which behaviors and
people are presumed criminal. Criminalization has less to do with what is actually done, and more to do
with society's ideas about who is "other," whose behavior is wrongful and who should be punished. The
law, media and public perception drive criminalization. Black people who fall outside of the protected
norms of whiteness, gender conformity, heterosexuality, middle-class and otherwise so-called
respectable appearances are routinely harassed, arrested, sexually assaulted, incarcerated and killed. No
person should have to live under the threat, fear or reality of criminalization from a neighbor, police
officer or teacher. However, this threat is a reality for many young Black people in the United States.
Whether it is Trayvon Martin walking down the street or Renisha McBride knocking on a door for help, Black
people are systemically criminalized and killed for acts generally recognized as harmless when non-Black
bodies perform them. Criminalization impacts all Black people. Last year Monica Jones, a Black Trans
woman and activist, was arrested for "walking while trans." Jones explains that "it's a known experience in our
community of being routinely and regularly harassed and facing the threat of violence or arrest because
we are Trans and therefore often assumed to be sex workers." All people should be able to walk down
the street without fear of being profiled. From the local beat cop to the police chief, law enforcement
agencies, have too much power over our lives. I want to live in a world where police department
budgets don't take up over 20% of overall budgets while community services are allocated 6% or less, as
they do in cities like Chicago and Oakland. I want to live in the world where society prioritizes quality public
education, well-rounded social and mental health services and sustainable infrastructure. The officers
who killed Aura Rosser in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Tanisha Anderson in Cleveland, Ohio and Mike Brown in
Ferguson, Missouri are reflections of a broad and powerful Anti-Black Police State. Individual police
officers are just one party in the breathing-while-Black-pipeline to jail, prison, sexual assault or death. I
am less invested in focusing on the character of an individual police officer than the character of the
entire system. The Anti-Black Police State protects elected officials who advocate for more police
officers while public schools in Black communities are closed and underfunded en masse. Communities
must organize against candidates who call for more police and support candidates who have
commitments and records of protecting teachers, parents and the public school system.Where we go
from here requires us to see that the systems that fund tear gas in Ferguson, MO, the police officers gun
in Cleveland, OH, the tanks in occupied Palestine and the detention centers in Arizona are all connected.
If enslaved Africans in the Americas could imagine a future where their grandchildren would not be
slaves, we can imagine a future without mass criminalization, incarceration and the Anti-Black Police
State. Our freedom dreams must be radical. Our way forward must be radically inclusive or it will repeat
the same strategies, tactics, policies and ideas that have failed our people before.We'll know Black lives
matter when the anti-black police state no longer exists and all people can live with dignity. For me,
becoming an AFROFuturist was reminiscent of joining a populist organization like the original Black
Panther Party (if I had been old enough, I might have enrolled). You take the pledge. Don the black
leather jacket. Hide behind ultra-dark sunglasses and step into the glare of a turbulent urban scene. We
all have seen images of the 1970s Panther Party -- the clinched fists and newspaper headlines. For the
most part, AFROFuturism is similar to the revolutionary Black Panther Party except in several very
important aspects. Like the "Occupy Movement", AFROFuturism has no centralized leadership. There is
no head committee to imprison or torture. There are no mantras nor mission statements that we have
to memorize and repeat upon demand. There is not even a secret handshake. We will not see
AFROFuturists parading down Independence Avenue in Washington, DC, to pay homage to the Martin
Luther King, Jr., Memorial. AFROFuturists will not be meeting in North Carolina barns at midnight,
plotting to storm the local police kiosk and hack their computers. AFROFuturism is a spontaneous
crusade involving a variety of individuals and activities. It is more of a "happening" occurring in big cities
and small towns and around the world. There are AFROFuturistic fashion shows with champagne as well
as structured academic study for PhD candidates.
Afrofuturism Solvency
The affirmative’s criticism, and re-articulation of, contemporary government
surveillance practices functions as an Afrofuturist, feminist epistemology – voting aff
is the basis for a pragmatic model for cooperation and change
Susana Morris (Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Auburn University) Fall/Winter
2012 “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler's "Fledgling"”
Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 3/4, ENCHANTMENT (FALL/WINTER 2012), pp. 146-166
Black Girls Are from the Future In an early study of Butler s works, Ruth Salvaggio contends, "Though
Butler s heroines are dangerous and powerful women, their goal is not power. They are heroines not
because they conquer the world, but because they conquer the very notion of tyranny" (1984, 8l).10
This sentiment also describes the dynamics at the heart of Fledgling, Butler s final novel. Fledgling strips
vampires of both their omnipotence and their universal izing whiteness. Instead, Butler insists that
vampires' potential strength is not in their brawn, or speed, or seductiveness; rather, their strength can
be found in symbiosis and hybridity, a transgressive Afrofuturist feminist stance dangerous to
conservative notions of identity and community often found in vampire lore. De Witt Douglas Kilgore
has suggested, "Black women who contribute to [science fiction/fantasy/horror] have reached the point
where the history they recover can potentially become future history. It is now possible to identify a
new pattern of expectation, one that emerges from long-suppressed voices" (2008, 127). Thus, the
organizing principles of Ina life have the potential to stand as a sort of Afrofuturist feminist epistemology
and become a pragmatic model of cooperation that, while a work in progress, does not simply reinforce
racism, sexism, and compulsory heterosexuality and other hegemonic social ideals. Fur thermore, Butler
s emphasis on symbiosis, enchantment, and the ways in which the novel's humans and Ina struggle to
make sense of the evolu tion of their cultures and species reflects the challenges found in our own
diverse, unenchanted world as we try to make feminist futures out of tren chant patriarchal realities.
Octavia Butler is one member of a thriving cohort of Afrofuturist femi nist writers whose work is actively
reconfiguring the contours of specula tive fiction. Her work stands alongside of and is in conversation
with the work of writers such as Jewelle Gomez, whose pioneering work in queer speculative fiction has
inspired more nuanced renderings of black sexuali ties; Tananarive Due, whose recent work in horror
has revolutionized the genre by focusing on complex black heroines; L. A. Banks, whose dark fan
tasy/horror novels rival Buffy s girl power but without the racist dynamics; Nalo Hopkinson, whose
Afrodiasporic tales of fantasy and folklore skill fully blend tradition with a futurist vision; and Nnendi
Okorafo-Mbachu, whose stories of precolonial Africa incite us to reenvision the continent s past and
future. Their works stand as, in the words of Kimberly Nichelle Brown (2010), decolonizing texts that
destabilize normative notions of what is possible by creating worlds in which black women not only have
the power to transform their lives, communities, and even species but do so routinely and, often,
unapologetically. Ultimately, while mainstream speculative fiction might depict women, and women of
color, especially, as accessories or minor characters, these authors insist that black women and girls are
in the present and can and do signify (on) the future.
Afrofuturism is a critical tool for cultural analysis – counters dehumanization
Womack 2012 (L. Ytasha, Afrofuturism: An Aesthetic and Exploration of Identity)
The world of science fiction is known for its absence of cultural diversity. While history texts are still
recovering from the conspicuous absence of the contributions of non-European cultures across the
world and in America, there’s an equal need to claim the future as well. Hijacking the imagination and
perpetuating limiting views on culture and humanity in the imaginative future just won’t do. Enter
Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is a term that emerged in the mid 90s, coined by cultural critic Mark Dery
who affixed the term to the growing artistic movement and critiques that followed narratives of people
of African descent in a sci-fi, futuristic treaties. Afrofuturists seek to inspire and forge a stronger selfidentity and respect for humanity by encouraging enthusiasts to reexamine their environments and
reimagine the future in a cross cultural context. For example, one digital Afrofuturist painting of a young
African American girl in the future depicted her in metallic space boots and pants; her hair was styled in
an Afro and she wore an ankh, an ancient Kemetic symbol on her green-friendly T-shirt. The image
bound the future with the past, celebrated culture and universality, and positioned the teen smack dab
in the latter part of the 21st century. For many, simply placing a young African American girl in a
futuristic context challenges the absence of such images and rearticulates the relevance of such cultures
and world views in art depicting the future. The aesthetic includes the music, visual art, literature, film,
critical essays and other mediums dedicated to futuristic explorations primarily through the arts. Works
range in theme and story lines but they are typically characterized by compelling insights, both cosmetic
and analytical into black identity in the Americas, Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa and beyond.
From soul singer Erykah Badu’s “Next Lifetime” video which highlights West African traditions in a
futuristic society to Nnedi Okorofor’s book “Who Fears Death” chronicling a mystical young girl in postapocalyptic Africa, the depictions are culturally rich takes on the future through fiction that explore
identity, too. Artists like jazz composer Sun Ra, 70s funk pioneer George Clinton, science fiction writer
Octavia Butler, or DJ/multimedia artist DJ Spooky are among the more popular purveyors of the genre
(although Sun Ra, Clinton and Butler did work long before the term came into vogue). There are a bevy
of new wave artists, musicians and filmmakers creating new works as well as a cadre of established
professors now chronicling and teaching it. In fact, Afrofuturism is now taught in several universities as
an artistic aesthetic, a tool for critical cultural analysis, a platform for rethinking the impact of
modernization on cultural creations as well as an exploration of identity. Pioneers created works largely
to challenge color-based social structures, caste systems and the realities of second-class citizenship,
which plagued the experience of black people, particularly in America and across the world for much of
the modern era. In many cases, particularly in music, they re-imagined technologies to create new
artistic works or reinvented processes that created new sounds. The creations of avant-garde jazz, funk,
dub, house, hip-hop and other genres are as innovative for their musicality as for their experimentations
with electronic sounds and machinery. The use of a turntable needle in hip-hop to create music or the
multi-layering of prerecorded noises in dub are as Afrofuturist as Motown Record’s Berry Gordy looking
to Detroit’s car assembly lines as a basis for creating a new system in artist development. Each explores
the impact of modernization and environment on the creation of artistic movements, identity and
perspectives by people of color.An extensive body of critical analysis using Afrofuturism as the prism
currently exists. DJ Spooky, for one, is most known for reediting the film Birth of a Nation, a film which
was technically advanced at the time but also reinforced horrific stereotypes of blacks during the
Reconstruction period in the US and established ethnic stereotypes in films for years to come. DJ Spooky
linked the images on the screen to his turntable and mixed and scratched along with the revisioning of
the film. Many Afrofuturist works are characterized by a synchronicity between the past and the future.
While many science fiction works heavily disavow the past, Afrofuturism has a great deal of reverence
for ancestors and ancient societies as well as an active celebration of movements in history that
countered the active dehumanization of people of color through power systems. This reverence is
rearticulated in a futuristic context. References to Egyptian deities and other African Traditional
Religions (Yoruba, etc), African Derived Religions (Santeria, Candomble, Hoodoo) and Native American
folklore and spirituality are common as are references to Asian fighting arts and the civil rights
movement in the US. Spirituality and mysticism are frequent threads. Humanity, freedom and selfdetermination are common themes.While all works dubbed Afrofuturist aren’t created by people of
African descent or don’t deal with black identity on the surface (the pop culture favorite “The Matrix” or
the original “Night of the Living Dead” film for example) they share themes, symbolism or imagery that
evokes cultural markers.In essence, many Afrofuturists aim to challenge society’s limits to the
imagination and this limitation includes a very narrow reflection on race, culture and ethnicity in
fictional and artistic works on the future. Afrofuturism celebrates new takes on modernization and the
histories that have facilitated social change. Although some might argue that the term itself is as freeing
as it is constricting, the growing body of work categorized in this genre is fascinating and enriching.
Imagination allow for us to create a space and language to address issues in the past,
present, and future
Stone, 14 (Chardine Taylor-Stone is the founder of black speculative fiction book club Mothership
Connections (@MCBookClub on Twitter). She is a member of Writers of Colour, plays drums in black
feminist punk band Big Joanie and is currently in her final year studying for a BA (Hons) Arts and
Humanities at Birkbeck. “Afrofuturism: Where Space, Pyramids and Politics Collide”
http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2014/jan/07/afrofuturism-where-spacepyramids-and-politics-collide ,Tuesday 7 January 2014, TAM)
Afrofuturism creates a space for those from the Black Diaspora to explore issues in the present and how
they will manifest in the future. As Michah Yongo points out, just as the language used in Orwell’s 1984
has been used to frame the debate around increasing government surveillance, black science fiction can
provide a new language to address the increasingly complicated frameworks of discrimination. If we are
able to name these frameworks in the same way we recognise Big Brother when we see him, it is the
first step in being able to dismantle them. In this sense, Afrofuturism provides a lot more to the black
experience than simple escapism, silver Dashikis and pyramid-shaped spaceships, although I will always
have time for that too.
Afro-futurism also creates a viable process of dis-alienation
Eshun ‘13(Eshun, Kowdo. writer, theorist and filmmaker. studied English Literature at University
College, Oxford University, and Romanticism and Modernism MA Hons at Southampton University.
"Project MUSE - Further Considerations of Afrofuturism." Project MUSE - Further Considerations of
Afrofuturism. Michigan State University Press, summer 2013. Web.
<https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v003/3.2eshun.html. Page 289>.)
Afrofuturism does not stop at correcting the history of the future. Nor is it a simple matter of inserting
more black actors into science-fiction narratives. These methods are only baby steps towards the more totalizing
realization that, in Greg Tate’s formulation, Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision. Black
existence and science fiction are one and the same. In The Last Angel of History, Tate argued that “The form itself,
the conventions of the narrative in terms of the way it deals with subjectivity, focuses on someone who
is at odds with the apparatus of power in society and whose profound experience is one of cultural
dislocation, alienation and estrangement. Most science fiction tales dramatically deal with how the individual is going to
contend with these alienating, dislocating societies and circumstances and that pretty much sums up the mass experiences
of black people in the postslavery twentieth century.” At the century’s start, Dubois termed the condition of structural and
psychological alienation as double consciousness. The condition of alienation, understood in its most general sense, is
a psychosocial inevitability that all Afrodiasporic art uses to its own advantage by creating contexts that
a process of disalienation. Afrofuturism’s specificity lies in assembling conceptual approaches and countermemorial mediated
practices in order to access triple consciousness, quadruple consciousness, previously inaccessible alienations.
Slavery is analogous to alien abduction – thus blacks have been living in an alien
nation for centuries – thus the black body does not represent the ideal of humanity –
Afrofuturist discourse demonstrates a move by black bodies from the subhuman to
the posthuman
Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, 2002 (Alondra, holds an appointment
in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWaG). Her areas of specialization include race
and ethnicity in the U.S.; gender and kinship; socio-historical studies of medicine, science and
technology; and social and cultural theory. Nelson studies the production of knowledge about human
difference in biomedicine and technoscience and the circulation of these ideas in the public sphere: Her
research focuses on how science and its applications shape the social world, including aspects of
personal identification, racial formation and collective action. In turn, she also explores the ways in
which social groups challenge, engage and, in some instances, adopt and mobilize conceptualizations of
race, ethnicity and gender derived from scientific and technical domains. Afrofuturism, Duke University
Press, 2002) page 27
Taking the negative ontological placement of black subjects in Western modernity as his
point of departure, Kodwo Eshun constructs an argument that posits a specifically black
constellation of the posthuman in which New World black subjects have privileged access to
the posthuman because they were denied the status of human for so long.20 Eshun belongs to a
growing number of critics exploring the intersections of black cultural production, technology, and science fiction collected under the rubric
Afrofuturism, including Greg Tate, Sheree Thomas, Mark Dery, Carol Cooper, Nalo Hopkinson, Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), and the many
contributors to the AfroFuturism Web site and listserv.21 Eshun’s 1998 volume More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction
represents the most extensive manifesto of this movement, tracing different forms of
alienness and posthumanity through various genres of post– World War II black popular
music, including jazz, funk, hip hop, techno, and jungle, as well as providing a dazzling
account of the technicity of black music. Eshun claims that the sign of the human harbors a negative
significance, if any, in Afrofuturist musical configurations. In these genres, he argues, shifting
forms of nonhuman otherworldliness replace the human as the central characteristic of black
subjectivity: The idea of slavery as an alien abduction means that we’ve all been living in an aliennation since the eighteenth century. The mutation of African male and female slaves in the
eighteenth century into what became negro, and into an entire series of humans that were designed
in America. That whole process, the key behind it all is that in America none of these humans were
designated human. It’s in the music that you get this sense that most African- Americans owe
nothing to the status of the human. There is this sense of the human as being a really pointless and
treacherous category. (192 – 93; emphasis mine) As a result of the dehumanizing forces of slavery,
in Eshun’s frame of reference, certain kinds of black popular music stage black subjectivity, bypassing the
modality of the human in the process of moving from the subhuman to the posthuman. According to
Eshun, black posthumanism stands in stark contrast to the strong humanist strand found in a host of black cultural styles, ranging from the
majority of African American literature to the history of soul and the blues. Eshun describes these two modes of thinking as Afro-diasporic
futurism and the humanist futureshock absorbers of mainstream black culture. Eshun’s important work unearths some of the radical strands of
black music that refuse to uncritically embrace the Western conception of “the human,” are largely instrumental, and therefore do not rely on
the black voice as a figure of value.
Afrofuturism Solvency – Janelle Monae
Our imagination creates an alternative reality different than the norm and
performance of the black body that stands out to be seen and known, without
without consent
REDMOND,11 ( Shana L. is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She
received her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale
University. Her research and teaching interests include the African Diaspora, Black political
cultures, music and popular culture. "Marking the Margins: Janelle Monáe's 'Cold War'
Landscape":“This Safer Space: Janelle Monae’s´ "Cold War"”, Post45 Conference,
Roundtable/Panel, Refereed Paper, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, Post45, Spring
2011 )
Monae´s performative unveiling sensitizes us to questions of truth as the layers of history, identity, and
resistance collapse on one another. Yet her engagement with and demand for the rights of access and
voice are consistent throughout. Her performance makes the space to critique how dissemblance may
have "contributed to the development of an atmosphere inimical to realizing equal opportunity or a place
of respect"; yet the method of exposure—performance—signals another intervention (Hine 915). The
music video, which has offered a platform for display and critique since the 1970s, is used by Monae´ in
"Cold War" as a confessional site, a shelter ae where the struggles of the ordinary black women described
by Hine, and embodied by Monae´ might be discussed and responded to. Too often safe spaces are limited
in their availability for the disenfranchised, yet Mon´ae is able, through various creative and organizing
techniques, to construct a "Cold War" free speech zone—a task and location little known during the
historical moment that the song references. Her "Cold War" imagination therefore creates an alternative
reality that is recognizably different from those of her contemporaries within the shared "superpublic"
described by Richard Iton, in which black bodies and performances are conspicuous in the visual cultures
grown from hip hop and the Internet. Mon´ae s willingness to challenge history situates her as a spectral
figure representing the unfinished work of the past, even as she leads a cohort in the present and
envisions a future beyond her own critique.
Like Janelle Monae, the affirmatives performance seeks to refuse acts of dissemblance
and self-imposed invisibility – creating speculative futures that recenter black women
on their own terms, as subjects rather than objects
REDMOND,11 ( Shana L. is Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at USC. She
received her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale
University. Her research and teaching interests include the African Diaspora, Black political
cultures, music and popular culture. "Marking the Margins: Janelle Monáe's 'Cold War'
Landscape":“This Safer Space: Janelle Monae’s´ "Cold War"”, Post45 Conference,
Roundtable/Panel, Refereed Paper, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, Post45, Spring
2011 TAM)
Monae´s performance refuses the acts of dissemblance that have long characterized black women's
participation in the public sphere. Darlene Clark Hine argues that black women employed dissemblance
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a way to respond to rape, violence, and the threats
thereof, thus "creat[ing] the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shield[ing] the truth of
their inner lives" (912). These refusals produced a "self-imposed invisibility" that allowed them to "accrue
the psychic space and harness the resources needed to hold their own in the often one-sided and
mismatched resistance struggle" (Hine 915). Mon´ae relies on invisibility in "Cold War," insisting that
"Being alone's the only way to be / When you step outside / you spend life fighting for your sanity."7 Her
words echo the sentiments of Mary Church Terrell, who early in the twentieth century announced to her
constituency in the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs that "our peculiar status [as black
women] in this country . . . seems to demand that we stand by ourselves" (Hine 917).Monae´s staging of
interiority, however, is already undercut by her choice of ae' forum: it is not a platform from which she
speaks only to other black women, but a music video that comprised both a sonic announcement to be
replayed again and again, and a moving image that catalogs and exposes her for all time to anyone who
wFATCA and the broader tax crackdownould watch/listen. There is a dramatic tension here; while Mon´
acknowledges dissemblance as a strategy, she also forestalls its efficacy through that revelation,
effectively lifting the veil of secrecy that allowed for black women's sociopolitical subterfuge.
Afrofuturism Solvency - Sequencing
Afrofuturism is a prerequisite productive frameworks and vocabularies for analyzing
government surveillance policies – it’s a crucial first step
Taylor-Stone ’14 (Taylor-Stone, Chardine. Founder of fiction book clubMothership Connections.
Member of Writers of Colour, plays drums in black feminist punk band Big Joanie and has BA (Hons) Arts
and Humanities. "Afrofuturism: Where Space, Pyramids and Politics Collide." The Guardian. The
Guardian, 7 Jan. 2014. Web. <http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fscience%2Fpoliticalscience%2F2014%2Fjan%2F07%2Fafrofuturism-where-space-pyramids-and-politics-collide>.)
Afrofuturism creates a space for those from the Black Diaspora to explore issues in the present and how they will
manifest in the future. As Michah Yongo points out, just as the language used in Orwell’s 1984 has been used to
frame the debate around increasing government surveillance, black science fiction can provide a new
language to address the increasingly complicated frameworks of discrimination. If we are able to name
these frameworks in the same way we recognise Big Brother when we see him, it is the first step in
being able to dismantle them. In this sense, Afrofuturism provides a lot more to the black experience than simple escapism, silver
Dashikis and pyramid-shaped spaceships, although I will always have time for that too.
Afrofuturism Solvency - Surveillance
Afrofuturism is rooted in resistance against surveillance studies – foundational texts
challenge the futuristic means of identification and control through speculative fiction
Nabeel Zuberi (Senior Lecturer in Film, Television, and Media Studies at the University of Auckland)
2004 “‘The transmolecularization of [Black] folk: Space is the Place, Sun Ra and Afrofuturism’”
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8Q
FjAAahUKEwiFnf2msODGAhWq83IKHU3vB_U&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amherst.edu%2Fmedia%2Fvi
ew%2F362786%2Foriginal%2FZuberi%2BThe%2BTransmolecularization%2Bof%2B%25255BBlack%25255D%2BFolk%2BSpace%2Bis%2Bthe%2BPlace%25252C%2BSun%2BRa%2Band%2BAfrofuturism%2B--%2Bcorrected.pdf&ei=6ASoVYWJCarnywPN3poDw&usg=AFQjCNEhJCN0v8hraCITziBYP0E_XEvh5A&sig2=f3JfnNmO38KAOXsMO0NZuQ
In the longer version of this paper, I examine how the film Space is the Place has been remediated
(along with its star Sun Ra) in emergent techno-centric or media-centric writing on popular music as well
as science fiction film. I also examine and critique notions of the ‘post-human’ in debates about
Afrofuturism in the African diaspora as they appropriate the figure of Sun Ra in Space is the Place1. But
given the limited time here I’ll focus on the unstable generic status of the film, as well as its music—in
particular, the use of the Moog synthesizer as an agent of transformation. The musical science fiction
film Space is the Place was directed by John Coney in Oakland, California in 1972, and produced by Jim
Newman for release by North American Star Systems in 1974. The film stars Sun Ra, jazz keyboardist,
composer, arranger and bandleader of the Intergalactic Myth-Science Solar Arkestra. Though US state
documentation registers his birth as Herman Blount in Birmingham, Alabama, for much of his life Sun Ra
claimed to be an alien from the planet Saturn. In SITP, Ra visits Earth in a spaceship, time travelling
between Chicago 1943 and Oakland, California 1972 where he communicates with local African
Americans and tries to convince them to leave with him for a space colony. Ra engages in no less than a
struggle for the souls of black folk against an archetypal pimp/mack/ player/business figure called the
Overseer. The medium of combat is a magic card game and Ra’s most potent weapon is his music. In the
film, the Arkestra performs many pieces of diegetic and non-diegetic music in its effort to uplift the race
to outer space. Ra also encounters the largely corrupt media network system, using it to spread his
message despite the fact that black radio in the form of announcer Jimmy Fey is compromised by the
evil Overseer’s influence. Ra also contends with the surveillance and violence of the United States
government. The FBI kidnaps and sonically tortures him with a recording of the Confederate anthem
‘Dixie’. Three young black men rescue Ra just in time for the Arkestra to perform a concert for the
community. During this show the FBI men try to assassinate Ra at his Minimoog keyboard, but are again
foiled by the three youths. Ra teleports these youths into his spaceship and the Arkestra departs for
outer space. Like the alien prophet Klaatu played by Michael Rennie in the 1951 liberal Cold War sci-fi
classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, Sun Ra lands on earth to inform the human race that it needs
redemption, but leaves after relatively little success. In his excellent biography of Sun Ra, John Szwed
describes SITP as ‘part documentary, part science fiction, part blaxploitation, part revisionist biblical
epic’2. Initially envisaged by producer Jim Newman as a documentary, Szwed suggests that the film
became a mishmash of genres due to the different, often conflicting inputs of Newman, screenwriter
Joshua Smith, director John Coney, and Sun Ra himself. Many changes and scene cuts were made during
the film’s production and post-production, some at Ra’s behest. Like Szwed, many other brief
descriptions or reviews of the film on the Web represent it as an early 70s curiosity, a bizarre or camp
oddity with a disorganized and almost nonsensical plot. In fact, the film’s mix of signifyin(g) humour,
space-age prophecy and various generic elements are hardly beyond comprehension. In the style of
much African diasporic vernacular expression and media practice3, the film ‘signifies’ across and
between a number of recognizable film genres and modes such as science fiction, the musical, the urban
youth film and the documentary. We can view it as the kind of ‘imperfect cinema’ lauded by Third
Cinema theorists and filmmakers or a generic/genetic mutation in the margins of the early 70s New
Hollywood system4. This molecular milestone in the history of African American film plays a small role in
the process of what Arthur Knight calls ‘disintegrating the musical’, further exposing the contradiction
that the utopian Hollywood musical in its form integrated the community while maintaining racial-social
segregation and division. Though Knight’s study focuses on an earlier period of film history (1929-59), he
contends that aspects of the disintegrated musical appear in a number of later forms such as
blaxploitation, pop musicals and music videos5. Recent film genre theory also confirms a view of genres
as unstable, mutable, fleeting and mobile formations. Against the long durée of film cycles and linear
historical sedimentation, a more horizontal and hypertextual sense of genre formation has emerged in
the genre theory of Nick Browne and Rick Altman6. In the digital era, the science fiction film theory of
Scott Bukatman and Brooks Landon also concentrates on cinematic moments, intensities, spectacle and
special effects at the expense of linear narrative7. In this low budget sci-fi film, music is the special
effect. Like much of Sun Ra’s oeuvre, SITP is concerned with how music can transport black people to
other states of being in both material and spiritual terms. At the beginning of the film in a forest on
another planet Ra says to the camera: ‘The Music is different here. The vibrations are different. Not like
Planet Earth. Planet Earth sounds of guns, anger, frustration. We’ll set up a colony for black people here.
See what they can do on a planet all their own, without any white people there. We’ll bring them here
through either isotope teleportation, transmolecularization or better 993 still, teleport the whole planet
here through music’. According to Ra, redemption of black people comes through music. Musical form is
a template for society and the body. Ra’s statement expresses ideas akin to those in the discourse
around the music of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor and others.
As Lawrence Kart puts it, the avant-garde conceived of ‘new techniques as a means of more than
technical transformation, the work as a transcendental laboratory or proving ground’8. Attention to
aural texture meant stretching the sonic possibilities of existing instruments, often producing
dissonance and atonality. Rock music in the 1960s distorted tones and chords through electrical means
such as amplification and feedback. New electronic instruments such as the Moog synthesizer produced
peculiar tones outside the parameters of previous listening. Though the eerie otherworldly sound of the
theremin had weaved through thrillers, science-fiction film soundtracks, and the ‘exotica’ recordings of
Les Baxter and others since the 1940s, the line between noise/sound effects and music in rock, jazz and
other popular music styles becomes increasingly blurred in the 1960s. This is why Sun Ra’s music has
become something of a point of origin for today’s advocates of electronica and cited as an example of
the power of noise to disrupt the social and musical status quo or system. For example, in his
Afrofuturist sermon More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, black British cultural critic
Kodwo Eshun argues: that Sun Ra uses the Moog to produce a new sonic people9. The sounds of the
Moog are semiotically charged with rematerialization (or transmolecularization, if you will). In their
history of the Moog, Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco state that it became an ‘apparatus for transgression,
transcendence, and transformation’10. Gershon Kingsley, a musician-engineer who worked with Robert
Moog, programmed Sun Ra’s Minimoog for him11 . But Jon Weiss, who worked on the overall design of
the Moog, comments that Ra ‘had taken this synthesizer and I don’t know what he had done to it, but
he made sounds like you had never heard in your life, I mean just total inharmonic distortion all over the
place, oscillators weren’t oscillating anymore, nothing was working but it was fabulous’12. Sun Ra’s
soundtrack for the film, recorded in 1972, exploits the Minimoog’s capabilities for a range of alien
textures, ‘dark’ as well as warm tones, rapid keyboard runs and less ‘musical’ beeps and burps, as well as
drones produced through stable sine wave generation. Ra uses the Minimoog for discrete sci-fi effects
that primarily signal a disruptive presence. The minimoog joins the piano, Farfisa organ, Hohner Clavinet
and Rocksichord in Sun Ra’s electrical keyboard armoury. The Arkestra’s horns feature strongly in the
sound of SITP. Brass usually evokes 994 the military and warfare in science fiction films, but in the urban
action film, blaxploitation and road movie, trumpets and saxophones complement the screeching tones
of tyres in car chases and the high-pitched whooping of police sirens. In SITP, the Arkestra’s horns lead
the marches of many pro-space anthems such as ‘We travel the spaceways’ and ‘Watusa’, but also
propel the film’s one car chase sequence. Another strong element in the soundtrack is the polyrhythmic
‘Africanist’ drumming and percussion of congas, koras, bongos and bells, common to other African
American genres of this period. Though Ra’s soft voice offers pedagogical monologues, engages in
dialogues and ‘declamations’ (such as ‘I am the Brother the Wind’), June Tyson’s voice dominates with
her repeated long phrases, chants, slogans and quasi-jingles for outer space travel. The Arkestra’s music
accompanies almost all the action in the film but the musicans are rarely in the space of the film
narrative. They have clearly been filmed in a recording studio. Close ups of June Tyson other medium
shots of the Arkestra feature a dark anonymous background. Though SITP shows the musicians in
‘authentic’ live performance--common in many post-1950s jazz films and entrenched by the early 1970s
after the rock concert films Monterey Pop (1967) and Woodstock (1969)—here shots of the Arkestra cut
back and forth to the story world of Oakland. We are never clear where the Arkestra is—if it’s in the
space ship or is the sonic motor of the spaceship itself. Only in the rehearsal and final concert at the end
of the film do we briefly see the group in Oakland, a generic nod to the backstage musical and youth film
in which the culmination of the narrative is the ‘kids putting on a show’ for the community. SITP also
riffs on the language (and some of the clichés) of black nationalism in the urban African American film of
the period. The film’s dialogue pastiches and parodies the babble of radio and television. And like many
films of the American Vietnam War and Watergate period, Space is the Place foregrounds the
government’s audiovisual surveillance of citizens and resident aliens. These themes make the film and
Sun Ra’s body of work still relevant today. They are so much exemplars of a post-human that supercedes
the human, but illustrations of how limited and provincial the notion of ‘humanity’ remains in the USA.
Sci-Fi Utopianism Good
Science fiction the best form of utopian thinking – allows the criticism of traditional
dominant structures and the emergence of hope
Freedman 2000 -- Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University (Carl, “Critical Theory
and Science Fiction” Wesleyan University Press, University Press of London, 67-70)
As a version of critical theory, then, the utopian hermeneutic of Bloch not only ranks in importance with Bakhtinian stylistics and Lukacsian genre analysis but
illustrates more emphatically than they do a crucial dialectical doubleness at the heart of the whole critical-theoretical project. On the one hand, utopia,
the
supreme positive value, nonetheless implies a ruthless negation and demystification of actuality: "The
essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present. If we had not already gone beyond the
barriers, we could not even perceive them as barriers." 31 The perspective of utopia alone makes
completely clear how banal and corrupt are the barriers of the status quo that utopia works to
transcend. Indeed, the fact that utopian plenitude can only be apprehended in the most elusive and
fragmentary anticipations-that utopia emerges only in the teeth, as it were, of the mundane – is the most devastating
commentary upon the latter. On the other hand, the specifically negative dimension of the utopian dialectic-the dimension of critique in the familiar sense of
astringent demystification -can never, as we have seen, remain wholly self-identical: in
every concrete instance it points to a
corresponding positivity and plenitude, that is, to authentic utopian fulfillment. Of course, a substantially similar
dialectic does operate in the theories of Bakhtin and Lukacs. For the former, the critical heteroglossia or multiaccentuality of novelistic style – as opposed to the
closed monologism of the poetic- possesses a potentially revolutionary charge in its grasp of the diverse and contradictory interconnectedness of the social field.
Indeed, one might even argue that, for Bakhtin, the
open, polyvalent style of the novel actually functions, in Blochian terms, as a
utopian figure of a multicultural liberated humanity. For Lukacs, authentic critical realism, through its concrete historical-materialist
ontology and epistemology that negate (and sublate) the abstractions of naturalism and psychologism, directly serves the revolutionary project; as we have already
seen, a purely realistic text could only be composed from the standpoint of utopia- the standpoint, that is, of the transparency that only a postrevolutionary
classless society could enable. Indeed,
we can go so far as to say that the telos of critical theory in general can only be
the transformation (in thought, language, and action) of reality into utopia. The elaborate demystifying apparatuses of Marxist (and, though
to a lesser degree, Freudian and even some poststructuralist) thought exist, ultimately, in order to clear space upon which positive
alternatives to the existent can be constructed. Of all versions of critical theory, however, it is perhaps Bloch's that provides the amplest,
most explicit demonstration of the reciprocity and indispensability of the negative and positive moments of the critical dialectic; not accidentally, it may well be
Bloch's utopian hermeneutic that bears the deepest affinity with science fiction. For Bloch all
genuine art- virtually by definition- finds its true
significance in utopian construing. Nevertheless, there are discriminations to be made, not only among individual artworks but, perhaps more
pertinently, among whole genres, some of which participate more fully in the utopian dialectic than others. Though Bloch (like Bakhtin and Lukacs) exhibits little or
no personal acquaintance with science fiction as such, he indirectly provides a guide to the utopian dimension of science fiction in his two great companion essays in
genre criticism, "A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel," and "A Philosophical View of the Novel of the Artist."33 Bloch sees the two genres as comparable,
frequently "popular" forms (but such a juxtaposition might more likely pair detective fiction with science fiction), which are, however, philosophically antithetical.
Detective fiction is a deeply conservative form in which utopia is at a minimum. The essentially Oedipal
structure of the detective novel is oriented decisively toward the past, when the crime that constitutes the chief datum of
the text was committed. The plot of the novel is thus devoted to the strictly reactionary project of solving the crime and identifying the culprit in order that the
status quo ante – the as-if-unproblematic condition of the detective's society prior to the (singular) crime-may be restored. Now, although Bloch himself does not
pursue this line of thought, there is no doubt that a comprehensively Blochian reading would be capable of constructing anticipatory pre-illuminations of utopian
collectivity even from such regressive Tory loci as a rural English village in Agatha Christie or an Oxford college in Dorothy Sayers. What Bloch actually stresses,
however, is the much greater utopian energy at work in the novel of the artist. Here the chief structuring datum is a real Novum, namely, the imaginary works of art
that give the protagonist his generic identity as an artist, but that can be located only on the Front, as works that may be coming into being but possess no
established empirical validation yet. "Whereas
the detective novel," as Bloch summarizes, "requires a process of collecting
evidence, penetrating backward to a past crime, the novel of the artist requires recognition of an
interest in the creative person who brings out something new instead of something past" (Utopian Function 267).
For the German-speaking Bloch, Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947) is the principal exemplar of the novel of the artist, but Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(1916), which probably occurs more readily to the Englishspeaking reader, provides an even more pertinent illustration of the Blochian point. Stephen Dedalus, after
all, is not, precisely, an artist (for that title cannot be earned by a single haunting villanelle ), but a future artist, an artist as a young man. The great artworks that
constitute Stephen as the hero of a Bildungsroman about an artist are not only imaginary but, even within the world of the text, exist only on the level of the NotYet, as pure though concrete potentiality. In strictly utopian manner, it is the future – the fractional anticipations of that which is coming into existence – that
structures Stephen: and not only him individually but, as he himself suggests in his determination to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my
race," 34 our entire view of the society that his artistic achievements will retroactively redefine. Bloch's
fundamental generic point about
the novel of the artist is even more relevant to science fiction. The estranging novelties that characterize
the genre correspond precisely to the Blochian Novum-which, as we have seen, is never a single new element
inserted into an essentially unchanged mundane environment, but is instead such a radical novelty as to
reconstitute the entire surrounding world and thus, in a sense, to create (though certainly not ex nihilo) a new
world. Likewise, the science-fictional text is, as we have also seen, defined by its creation of a new world whose
radical novelty estranges the empirical world of the status quo. And this is equally true whether the Novum of science fiction is
expressed by the wholesale production of new worlds (as in Last and First Men or its even more wide-ranging sequel, Star Maker [1937]), or whether (as in
Frankenstein) the Novum manifests itself as one novelty of such radical and profound newness that (as was discussed in the preceding section) the superficially
mundane context is dynamically reconstituted as a potential future, new and strange. Furthermore, the
utopian aspect of such sciencefictional futures is heightened by the cognitive and critical nature of science-fictional estrangement.
Although (as Bloch himself makes clear) the longings expressed in fantasies and fairy tales may well possess authentic utopian value, utopia cannot
finally be understood as simply cut off from the empirical world of actuality. It is the transformation of
actuality into - utopia that constitutes the practical end of utopian critique and the ultimate object of
utopian hope. In other words, such shards of utopia as may be found in fantastic representations of Cockaigne or Never-Never Land involve the recasting of
utopia into irrationalist form. By contrast, the cognitive rationality (at least in literary effect) of science fiction allows utopia to
emerge as more fully itself, genuinely critical and transformative. In this way, the dynamic of science fiction
can on one level be identified with the hope principle itself. The reading of science fiction drives us into
lands where we have never set foot and yet which-because they are cognitively linked to the world we
do know and are invested with our actual longings-do indeed amount to a kind of homeland. Even more than in
the novel of the artist, the defining features of science fiction are located on the In-Front-of-Us, at the level of the Not-Yet Being, and in the dimension of utopian
futurity.
Science fictional utopias solve alienation and exclusion
Freedman 2000 -- Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University (Carl, “Critical Theory and Science Fiction” Wesleyan University Press,
University Press of London, 199-200)
It is, then, the general circumstances of postmodernity that necessarily define the status and importance of science fiction today. As I have already discussed,
science fiction is, at least in our time, the privileged generic tendency for utopia; that is, for those anticipatory
figurations of an unalienated future that constitute the deepest critical truth of which art is capable.
More difficult to attain even than critique in its negative, demystifying dimension, utopia has never been
so desperately needed as it is now, in our postmodern environment that ruthlessly tends toward total
reification. Indeed, not since before the October Revolution itself (whose ultimate overthrow in 1991 constituted only the sickening
final chapter of a downward narrative begun with bureaucratization and Stalinist betrayal almost six decades earlier) has it been harder and
lonelier to imagine a social organization beyond alienation and exploitation, or to imagine sociopolitical forces more
decisive than the regime of exchange-value (of "the market," in currently fashionable jargon). Such imagining, however close to impossible
it may be, must now be the principal vocation of science fiction. To what degree science fiction will
prove adequate to the task cannot be predicted. Yet there is at least one sense in which science fiction is particularly well suited to the
postmodern situation (however hostile, in most other respects, postmodernity may be to the critical and utopian power of science fiction at its most radical).
Science fiction has, as we have seen, its general orientation primarily toward the future. Indeed, it should be remembered that
the advent of science fiction during the moment of Mary Shelley is inseparable from the very invention of history and the future as these terms are now meaningful.
Though this does not, as we have also seen, imply any sort of futurism in the positivistic sense, it does mean that
of all literary modes science
fiction ought to be the least tempted by the kind of premodern regressivity whose strength still largely
defines the moment of modernism itself. Accordingly, even more than the modernist fictionality-still very far from formally exhausted-of
Joyce or Proust, science fiction must scorn the concept of regression to the premodern, even while
encountering substantial difficulty with the kind of progression that postmodernity has in fact entailed. In
other words, it is in the generic nature of science fiction to confront the future, no matter how unpromising a
critical and utopian activity that may seem (as now) to be. “No one,” as Nieztsche writes, “is free to be a crab. … One must go
forward – step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of mondern ‘progress’).”
Fantasy allows for us to take part in defamiliarisation and see surveillance what it
really is, something that targets a specific people in the name of “crime prevention”
Flanagan, 11 (Victoria Flanagan is a lecturer in children's literature at Macquarie University in Sydney,
Australia and is currently working on a project that examines the representation of technology in
children's literature, television and film. “Skin Colour, Surveillance and Subjectivity: Deconstructing Race
in Jan Mark's Useful Idiots”, 2011)
A technique closely associated with fantasy literature is defamiliarisation, the art of representing familiar
phenomena in new or strange ways in order to disrupt the reader's usual manner of perceiving the world.
Holman and Harmon suggest that 'because our senses are forever falling into rigid habits and empty
routines, we need art periodically to wake us up by making the familiar suddenly seem strange - and the
process of estrangement is defamiliarization . . . ' (130). Although realist texts can also employ modes of
representation that defamiliarise what is usually recognisable, the genre of fantasy tends to use this
strategy as a primary means of communicating both story and significance. Fantasy thus defamiliarises
the world as we know it, using fantastic events, characters and settings to comment upon, or stand in for,
social reality. Mark makes good use of this strategy, especially in her examination of the relationship
between racial identity and technology. Technology plays an important role in the novel - both in terms
of how it is used to evoke human progress and how it affects individual subjectivity. The future world of
Useful Idiots is distinctive from the present on two fronts: the changing geography of the Earth's surface,
and advancements in technology that have eradicated much of the disease and sickness which
characterise human life in our quotidian world. These technological advancements have resulted in an
environment that is under constant surveillance, yet the novel resists the familiar association of the racialised
body with heightened electronic monitoring. Instead of demonising surveillance technology as a form of
excessive and unjust social control, Mark offers a more nuanced representation of the effects of technology
on individual subjectivity. Through Merrick's focalisation, the impact of surveillance on subjectivity is
explored - and this is achieved by contrasting Merrick's own experience of surveillance with the absence
of surveillance that he encounters while on the Inglish Reserve. The novel thus defamiliarises the reader's
expectations regarding what would be considered (in relation to our everyday world) excessive 170 VICTORIA
FLANAGAN surveillance, as Merrick is so accustomed to being surveilled that the Oysters' lack of such technology
produces in him feelings of anxiety and destabilisation. The subject of surveillance is intimately connected
to race. Critical discussions of surveillance (which gained momentum in the early 1990s) are, according to
John McGrath, 'almost always framed in terms of crime prevention (now very much extended to terrorism
prevention) and privacy rights' (2). The 'crime prevention' aspect of surveillance involves monitoring
'suspicious' subjects - and as McGrath asserts, 'suspicion is often dependent on skin colour' (22). That
surveillance operates by targeting specific groups is crucial to the work of David Lyon, widely recognised as
a pioneer of surveillance studies, who contends that a primary goal of surveillance is 'social sorting' (Surveillance
Society; Surveillance as Social Sorting; Surveillance Studies), a process which involves the specific targeting of racial
groups (Surveillance Studies 63). In this context, Mark's decision not to make the Oysters the target of
governmental surveillance is an interesting and enlightened one, because it enables her to explore the
effects of surveillance on individuals in terms of their compliance with it. When Merrick first enters the
Briease Moss (the Inglish Reserve) with Frida, an aboriginal dancer he has befriended, it is the lack of
surveillance (amongst a range of things that he perceives as different) that causes most consternation.
'There seemed to be no code, no key, no scanner. He could not get into his own apartment, even into his
own height, ['height' refers to the level of the building] without pausing for the doors to recognise him. He
looked round for an eye but if one existed it was very well concealed' (156). Merrick's initial experience of
Frida's home is thus represented as one that is characterised by lack, through the repeated use of 'no' and
emphasis on what is missing ('no code, no key, no scanner') in his focalisation. A discussion with Frida ensues,
in which Merrick's point of view is countered by Frida's.
Sci-Fi Solvency – A2 Cede the Political
Science fiction is a lens to analyze politics of the present
Weldes 2003 – Senior Lecturer, Bristol University; PhD (Minn) (Jutta, “Popular culture, science fiction, and world politics: exploring inter textual relations” in
“To seek out new worlds: science fiction and world politics” ed. Weldes, Palgrave Macmillan 2003, 10-11)
SF offers an exceptionally useful focus for analysis because it concerns itself quite self-consciously with
political issues; it directly addresses issues like technological and social change, confronting contemporary
verities with possible alternatives. For instance, SF often extrapolates into the future. 11 As a strategy, extrapolation is
“based on the metonymical extension of the ends of reality” (Stockwell, 1996: 5). That is, it starts with the known and projects or
expands some part of it into the unknown. SF texts, in this sense, “reflect where this present is heading, both in terms of how they envisage
the future but also as cognitive spaces that help to shape and direct how people conceive and make the future” (Kitchin and Kneale, 2001: 32). Utopias, for instance,
tell us something about what we hope the future will be, dystopias something about what we fear it might be. Dystopias, of course, extrapolate negatively from
contemporary trends. As a result, they often provide themes directly critical of contemporary world politics. William Gibson’s “Sprawl” series 12 is a good example.
Rooted in a 1980s perception that the state was declining at the expense of multinational corporations (MNCs), it portrays a genuinely globalized future in which
states have been eclipsed by cyberspace, global corporations, and global organized crime. The global market is dominated by the Yakuza and MNCs: “Power...
meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had
attained a kind of immortality” (1984: 242). Both Yakuza and MNCs are “hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon” (242).
Technology has run rampant. This is a world of body and mind “invasion” (Sterling, 1986: xii); a world of prosthetic limbs (Gibson, 1984: 9); eyes—“sea-green Nikon
transplants”—that are “vatgrown” (33); and a cyborg dolphin, “surplus from the last war” and a heroin addict (Gibson, 1981: 23). Through such dystopias, we can
criticize the trends of contemporary politics. In Mike Davis’s words: “William Gibson... has provided stunning examples of how realist, ‘extrapolative’ science fiction
can operate as prefigurative social theory, as well as an anticipatory opposition politics to the cyber-fascism lurking over the horizon” (1992: 3).
More important, of course, SF
tells us about the present. As Ronnie Lipschutz notes later in this volume, SF never
really is about the future: “It is about us and the world in which we live.” William Gibson agrees: “What’s most important to
me,” he has explained, “is that it’s about the present.... It’s a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and
terror inspired in me by the world in which we live” (in Kitchin and Kneale, 2001: 31). This is because SF “presents
syntagmatically developed possible worlds, as models (more precisely as thought-experiments) or as
totalizing and thematic metaphors” (Suvin, 1988: 198). These possible worlds allow us to explore elements of contemporary society in more or
less estranged settings. SF of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, used myriad future scenarios to explore the
consequences and possible ramifications of nuclear war. With its focus on alternative worlds, SF can
“accommodate radical doubt and questioning” (Davies, 1990: 4), thus providing space to interrogate
contemporary politics.
Science fiction scenarios solve all the advantages of public policy better than their framework does—
sci fi provides a corrective on short-term politics and improves predictions and risk analysis
MILLER AND BENNETT 2008 - Associate Director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, Associate Director and CoPI
of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society, and Chair of the PhD Program in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology at
Arizona State University. He is also a Senior Fellow in the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy at the University of WisconsinMadison. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Cornell University AND PhD in biochemistry from Arizona State University in 2003 and
today is an Assistant Research Professor in the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes and the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at
Arizona State University (October, Clark A. and Ira, “ Thinking longer term about technology: is there value in science fiction-inspired
approaches to constructing futures? ” Science and Public Policy, 35(8), Ebsco)
Over time, the most
important project may be to try to identify mechanisms through which science fiction
could be meaningfully integrated into society’s practices and institutions for public engagement and
technology assessment. This will not be easy. American political culture is deeply oriented toward the present,
especially with regard to the framing of its regulatory gaze. As highlighted by the dissenting opinions to the recent Supreme Court ruling forcing
the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, US
regulatory culture is founded on
the axiom that only harms that are actual or imminent are generally subject to regulation and redress.
Thinking prospectively about the kinds of technological risks we may face in the future is, at best, not
central to the framing of US risk assessment or technology assessment enterprises. And yet, it would seem that
finding ways to be more future-oriented would add substantial value to our assessment processes. In
some cases, growing attention is being given within assessments to the practice of scenario-building — which
in many ways is a form of science fiction writing. Judicious mixing of science fiction writing sensibilities
into scenario writing practices could substantially enhance the public engagement possibilities
associated with scenarios. This fact was recognized by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a major international scientific
assessment, which used drama to communicate scenarios to a range of publics in Africa. We should learn from this experience. But science
fiction can be more than just a communication tool. Citizens could be given new opportunities to
contribute creatively to assessments through science fiction writing exercises, perhaps working with
scenarios, perhaps in other ways. Experiments with citizens writing scenarios in an ecological
assessment conducted by the University of Wisconsin showed that these methods have considerable
power in facilitating citizen buy-in to the assessment process, results, and policy recommendations. They
also shaped the scenarios in directions unexpected by the expert participants. Likewise, as a forerunner to a formal assessment process — such
as the UK GM Nation exercise, where citizens were asked to meet and dialogue about their preferences with regard to genetically modified
organisms — writers might be asked to develop multiple stories and dialogues that could be shared with the public alongside more technical
reports.
Politics is influenced by SF – academics ought to analyze political representations of
scientific futures
Weldes 2003 – Senior Lecturer, Bristol University; PhD (Minn) (Jutta, “Popular culture, science fiction, and world politics: exploring inter textual relations” in
“To seek out new worlds: science fiction and world politics” ed. Weldes, Palgrave Macmillan 2003, 1-5)
Why examine science fiction if we are interested in world politics? On the face of it, there seems to be little relation between
the two. World politics, common sense tells us, is first and foremost about life-and-death issues: war and peace, ethnic cleansing and genocide, the global spread of
AIDS, refugees, natural disasters, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and counter-terrorism, global trafficking in arms, drugs, and human beings, famines, free trade,
rapacious corporations, globalization. World
politics is serious business; it is difficult policy choices and intractable
differences of opinion in “a domain of hard truths, material realities, and irrepressible natural facts” (Ó Tuathail and Agnew, 1992: 192). Science fiction,
in contrast, is precisely fictional. It is make-believe, and we read it, watch it, argue about it, and poach on it for fun. 1 As everyone knows, science fiction (or SF)
deals with imagined futures, alien landscapes, bizarre cityscapes, sleek ships for traveling through space, improbable machines for escaping time, encounters with
fantastic creatures from other worlds or our own future, and radical transformations of societies and their inhabitants. Its hallmark, writes Darko Suvin, is “an
imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (1979: 9) that, through strategies like extrapolation and estrangement, helps us to
transcend our mundane environment. So what is the connection to world politics? The
apparent great divide between the “hard
truths” of world politics and the imagined worlds of SF is deceiving, however. The dividing line between
world politics’ material realities and natural facts and the fictional worlds and imaginative possibilities of
SF is far from clear. For instance: • NASA/Star Trek: As Constance Penley has shown, a pervasive connection exists between the discourse of the
U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and that of Star Trek (1997: 4; see also Nichols, 1994). It is perhaps best illustrated in the naming of the
first U.S. space shuttle. Initially to be called The Constitution, it was in fact christened The Enterprise— in honor of Star Trek’s flagship— after U.S. President Gerald
Ford, in the wake of a letter-writing campaign by Star Trek fans, directed NASA to change the name (18– 19). This same U.S. space shuttle Enterprise then found its
way back to Star Trek: it appears in the succession of ships called Enterprise shown in the montage that opens each episode of the fifth Star Trek series, Enterprise.
2 SDI/Star
Wars: On March 23, 1983, U.S. President Ronald Reagan delivered a nationwide television address calling for research into defenses that could
“intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies,” thus rendering “nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete”
(Reagan, 1983). The next day, SDI critics in the U.S. Congress lampooned Reagan’s vision of a defensive military umbrella, successfully relabeling it “Star Wars” after
George Lucas’s block-buster SF movie (1977) (Smith, nd.). Hiroshima/Locksley
Hall: U.S. President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the newly
developed atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was apparently influenced by his belief that demonstrating the power of an “ultimate superweapon” could end
the war. Truman had copied 10 lines from Tennyson’s poem Locksley Hall— lines that depict “ultimate aerial superweapons for the future, waging a terrible
climactic war in the skies” (Franklin, 1990a: 157)—and carried them in his wallet for 35 years. In July 1945, realizing that he was about to gain control over just such
a superweapon, Truman “pulled that now faded slip of paper from his wallet, and recited those lines... to a reporter” (ibid.). 3 Globalization/Spaceship
Earth: The Economist depicts liberal globalization using many SF references. In particular, the magazine is awash in images of “spaceship Earth.” This ubiquitous
trope constructs the increasingly globalized world as, on the one hand, “a sin gle totality, ‘the global village,’ making it appear easily accessible” while, on the other
hand, positioning it “out there” on “the final frontier” of space (Hooper, 2000: 68). For The Economist, liberal globalization is made sensible “through imagery which
integrates science, technology, business, and images of globalisation into a kind of entrepreneurial frontier masculinity, in which capitalism meets science fiction”
(65). The
Revolution in Military Affairs/future war fiction: The so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) might better be called
“military science fiction.” This ideology of the technological fix, championed in both official military futurology (e.g., U.S. Army’s Army Vision 2010 or U.S. Space
Command’s Vision for 2020) and in a broader corpus of think tank projections (e.g., Shukman, 1996; O’Hanlon, 2000; Metz, 2000), aims to transform threat
perceptions and the technological, doctrinal, and organizational basis of warfare. The RMA, however, tells us less about the future of warfare than about
“contemporary cultural obsessions and the continuing influence of powerful historical concerns, pre-occupations, fixations, and desires” (Latham, 2001: 9). In fact,
the RMA is better understood not as a rational response to objective changes in military technology or
the geo-strategic environment but as a cultural artifact powerfully shaped by enduring SF fantasies of
future war, such that official military futurology mirrors SF’s characteristic “anxieties, desires, fears, fetishes, insecurities, and cognitive and affective
predispositions” (10). Neo-liberal globalization/Foundation: The neo-liberal discourse of globalization dominating public discussion is a selffulfilling prophecy (Hay and Marsh, 2000: 9) that rests on a well-rehearsed set of narratives and tropes, including an Enlightenment commitment to progress, the
wholesome role of global markets, a rampant technophilia, the trope of the “global village,” and the interrelated narratives of an increasingly global culture and an
expanding pacific liberal politics. As I’ve argued elsewhere (Weldes, 2001), this
discourse displays striking homologies to American
techno-utopian SF (exemplified in Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation novels [1951, 1952, 1953, 1982, 1986, 1988, 1993]). These homologies
help to render neo-liberal globalization both sensible and seemingly “inexorable” (Gray, 1998: 206). Moreover,
underlying Asimov’s Foundation universe lies a barely concealed authoritarian politics that alerts us to
the covertly, but nonetheless demonstrably, un-democratic character of globalization and contemporary
global governance. While some of the connections between world politics and SF illustrated here are superficial, others are more deeply rooted. For
example, explicit references might be made from one domain to the other. NASA poaches from Star Trek, while SDI’s critics attempt to dismiss it as Star Wars (but
even these relations turn out to be more complex). In other cases, deeper
relations exist. Globalization and claims to a “global
village” are made commonsensical through space-based images of “Spaceship Earth” that, although they
became practically possible only in 1966, when the first photographs taken in outer space showed
“planet Earth as one location” (Scholte, 1997: 16– 17), have long been a staple of SF. Similarly, in hoping that his new
“superweapon” would bring an end to World War II, Truman was no different from many of his compatriots, “who had grown up in a cultural matrix bubbling with
fantasies of ultimate weapons.” Such fantasies, Franklin explains, profoundly shaped
“the nation’s conceptions of nuclear
weapons and responses to them, decades before they materialized” (1990a: 157; 1988). A long history of
fantastic enemies and sophisticated high-tech wars— from H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), through Robert Heinlein’s
Starship Troopers (1959), to Roland Emmerich’s film Independence Day (1996)—renders desirable a future of militarized security
seemingly attainable through advanced weapons and information warfare. Conversely, SF is rife with references to wars,
empires, diplomatic intrigue, and so forth— the very stuff of world politics. The first chapter of the 1954 edition of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, 4 for instance,
makes direct reference to contemporary politics. The context is explicitly the cold war, “the cleavage between East and West” (2). The U.S. carrier James Forrestal
searches for Russian submarines off the Pacific island launch site of the Columbus, soon to be headed for Mars; the U.S. space program is spurred on by new
intelligence that “the Russians are nearly level with us” (2); a Russian gloats that “In another month we will be on our way, and the Yankees will be choking
themselves with rage” (3). Many works of SF begin with, make explicit reference to, and poach on politics, including historical and contemporary events, situations,
and characters from world politics. The relations between SF and world politics, then, are more numerous and more complex than is generally assumed. Curiously,
although
we live in a time when “the political and the cultural can no longer be decoupled” (Dean, 2000: 2), this
intimate relationship has rarely been examined. This is especially true of scholars of world politics or “International Relations,” who have generally devoted their
attention to “high politics,” eschewing both the depths of low politics and the shallows of a frivolous popular culture. As Cynthia Weber put it: “Whether by neglect,
by design, or by displacement, the
politics of the popular is among the most under-valued and therefore underanalyzed aspects of international politics” (2001: 134). If it is unusual for popular culture in general to be studied in connection with world
politics, it is even more so for world politics and SF to be studied together.
Politics and SF are coproductive – impossible to analyze politics without its SF
undercurrents
Weldes 2003 – Senior Lecturer, Bristol University; PhD (Minn) (Jutta, “Popular culture, science fiction, and world politics: exploring inter textual relations” in
“To seek out new worlds: science fiction and world politics” ed. Weldes, Palgrave Macmillan 2003, 15-16)
Crucial here is not only the reproduction, across the SF/world politics intertext, of similar images— whether
of cyberspace, the post-modern city, or spaceship Earth. 18 These are the easiest relations to illustrate but, although central to the
production of common sense, they are not ultimately the most significant aspect of the SF/world politics intertext. Instead, what renders this
intertext so crucial to our understanding of world politics is the deep metaphysical— epistemological
and ontological— overlap across its constituent texts. Their structural homologies, in other words,
extend to their most basic assumptions: the nature of Self and Other, the character of knowledge, the
possibilities of knowing the Self, or the Other, the nature of and relations between good and evil, the
possibilities for community. The language of “inter-text” subtly implies that different texts are produced in different spaces/times/cultures.
These different texts then have an interface: they meet and relate to one another. But if these texts already overlap
at such fundamental metaphysical levels, then the notion of an “intertext” relies too heavily on an ontology of difference. Quite different texts— the
constituent elements of the SF/world politics intertext— do get produced, but they share deeply rooted
assumptions. Both SF texts and the texts of world politics are grounded in the same reservoir of cultural
meanings. The SF/world politics intertext— as the RMA or cyberspace shows— has no clear beginning or end. Instead, there is an endless
circulation of meanings from world politics to SF, from SF to world politics, and back again. The analyses in this
volume, then, highlight aspects of a world that is already fully present, never really new.
Sci-Fi Solvency - Process > Product
Science fiction overall is good—the mode of storytelling is more important than the
narrative details of our story
Whitehall 2003 – Associate Professor, Political Science, Acadia University (Geoffrey, “The problem of the ‘world and beyond,’ in “To seek out new
worlds: science fiction and world politics” ed. Weldes, Senior Lecturer, Bristol University. Palgrave Macmillan 2003, 173)
Science fiction can help us think about how the beyond can be used to reimagine the performances of
world politics and the limits of the political. This genre has appeal because the modern political imaginary is so deeply
committed to a singular reified world political performance. This performance endlessly secures and
manages change, movement, and the beyond within the problematic of sovereignty. It is fair to say that science
fiction does not necessarily deal substantively with the complexities of world politics; in fact, its themes
are often restricted to sterile liberal constructions (i.e., democracy vs. dictatorship, freedom vs. equality, and exploitation vs. selfdetermination) that this chapter seeks to displace. This may be a blessing in disguise. Although provocative, we cannot rely on science fiction only as a meditation
on contemporary political problems. For the purposes of this chapter, science fiction
will be treated as a genre of the beyond. On this
the political appears in the different usages of the beyond and not in the specific details of a story’s
narrative dilemmas. What is said is less interesting than how the beyond is used.
view,
Framework – Fiat = Sci-Fi
Fiat is science fiction – the process of imagining “what if” is a subset of the SF genre
LAZ 1996 – Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Southern Maine (Cheryl, “Science Fiction and Introductory Sociology: The "Handmaid" in the
Classroom.” Teaching Sociology, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jan., 1996), pp. 54-63, JSTOR)
Sociology often has an eye to the future, in terms of either social change, preserving the status quo, or (in less an obviously ideologi- cal way) simple prediction. SF,
aside from the future setting of its stories, likewise looks
ahead. But science fiction, Ursula Le Guin contends, is not about the future
or about prediction. Rather, it is descriptive and speculative. Le Guin describes science fic- tion as "a thought
experiment. Let's say (says Mary Shelley) that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory; let's say (says
Philip K. Dick) that the Allies lost the sec-ond world war; let's say this or that is such and so, and see what
happens..." (Le Guin 1976). Much science fiction can be read in such "thought experiment" terms. What if
(Margaret Atwood asks in The Handmaid's Tale) some group wanted to take over the United States? How could they
accomplish it? What if (Marge Piercy asks in He, She, andIt) cyborgs were programmed to acquire emotions and desires and
to be self-correct- ing? What then would differentiate people from machines? Le Guin, however, believes that science fiction is not about the future. Despite the
apparent futuristic quality of The Left Hand of Darkness (set in Ekumenical Year 1490-97 and peopled by androgynes), Le Guin argues, I'm merely observing in the
peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are
[androgy- nous]. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psy- chological reality in the novelist's way, which is by
inventing elaborately circumstantial lies (1976). SF
authors thus create striking and un- usual thought experiments; they
invent lies-fictions-to represent "reality" and to present "truth." As sociology teachers using SF, we create a
classroom situation in which we ask students to apply sociological skepti- cism and sociological
principles derived from "real" life to the world of what is, on the surface, fiction.
Framework - Education
SF solves their education claims – research indicates it has pedagogical benefits
Reynolds 77 – Associate Professor of Education in the Profes- sional Laboratory Experiences Department
of the University of Georgia. (John C., “Science Fiction in the 7-12 Curriculum” The Clearing House, Vol.
51, No. 3, Nov., 1977, JSTOR)
Some techniques utilized by these teachers in- cluded building models of cities of the future, see- ing
earth through alien eyes, and inventing a planet or spaceship for human use. It appears that there are as
many basic purposes for utilizing sci- ence fiction in the classroom as there are teachers with innovative
ideas. Many of the teachers sur- veyed mentioned the application of science fiction to the study of the
social foundations of educa- tion, history, economics, and the social sciences. They found that the
science fiction short story or novel is particularly adaptable to pedagogical ob- jectives. An analysis of
the science fiction short story or novel reveals usually that the theme is developed in the context of an
action-filled back- ground, meaningful situations, and characters which the classroom teacher can utilize
in discus- sions and written assignments. What are some of these basic themes?
Reading science fiction is not enough—students must be able to manipulate the
stories and apply them to new purposes
Woodcock et al. 1979 – professor at Connecticut State University (November, John,
Gregory Benford, Samuel Delany, Robert Scholes,
Alan J. Friedman, “ Teaching Science Fiction: Unique Challenges (Proceedings of the MLA Special Session, New York, December 1978) ” Science
Fiction Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3, JSTOR)
I do have a theoretical overlay which explains, to me at least, why SF can indeed be such a successful tool for teaching both literature to science
majors and science to literature majors. This theoretical overlay is based on the work of Jean Piaget. To brutally reduce the idea I have
borrowed from him, it is that, whatever you
are trying to teach, people will learn it much faster and better if
they can manipulate it – preferably physically, but cerebral manipulation works, too. If we want students to appreciate
something about a concept in physics or in the design fiction, we need to let them design some fiction,
we need to let them manipulate some physics. The best thing about SF as an educational tool is that it
can be manipulated. It invites you to manipulate it, to manipulate science, to manipulate literature. If you
listen to science students telling each other about literature, they're telling each other plots. But if those plots are SF plots, the students begin
almost immediately to manipulate them. It goes something like: "I read a neat story somewhere about people who changed their sex every
month. I wonder what it would be like if they only changed it once a year. Or if someone else could change your sex without your consent once
a year. " You see, you have manipulation of an idea. That's
something we don't permit students to do enough of in
introductory science courses or, as far as I can tell, in introductory literature courses, either. But SF almost
forces you to do this, to look back at the story and ask yourself "what if. . . " and to reinvent the story for
yourself - all this being the manipulation which Piaget says encourages people to learn something about
unfamiliar topics. And that's why I'm so hopeful that SF may help us in closing the two-cultures gap.
Framework - Race
Black people are not the ones who need to change – white people are the driving
force of racism, and must hold themselves accountable thus creating a shift from
white supremacy.
Chart 6/30 (Chart, Natasha. years of experience in online politics across the progressive blogosphere,
works to make politics user-friendly, responsive, and accessible. RH Reality Check’s Director of Online
Campaigns. "It's Not Black People Who Need to Change." RH Reality Check. N.p., 30 June 2015. Web.
<http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2015/06/30/black-people-need-change/>.)
The white terrorist who gunned down six Black women and three Black men, peaceful worshippers at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal
Church in Charleston, South Carolina, announced his murderous intentions by first declaring, “You rape our women.” We all know that he
meant white women, like me. “His” women, as a white man like him would think of us. But the thing is, white people are
the ones
who need to change in the United States. I read the grief-stricken request of a Black woman who asked that white women call
this out and repudiate it, so that’s why I’m writing. There is something terribly, disastrously wrong with how white
people tolerate racism among other whites, how we interact with people of color, how we interact with
the Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved by our ancestors. This is not something we can fix
by promising to renounce racial slurs, nor even by promising to correct each other’s racist speech in
private. The rot goes deeper. Firstly, because it’s important to emphasize: White men are the ones who are most likely to rape white
women. Especially those white men who think of us as their own, particular property. The majority of rapes, like the majority of all crimes, are
committed by people known to the victims. White men have built a parallel society in the United States to keep white women and children in a
society where a white person can often go for days, weeks, or longer, without meeting a single person of color who is presented to us as a peer.
Whom else do white women usually know? These segregated, insular, white communities so many of us live in, we are told, were set up so
white women and children could be “safe” in “good” neighborhoods, and many of us enthusiastically bought this story too. “Good”
neighborhoods protected by police forces who are enjoined to act like white people’s personal enforcers—sometimes as agents of terror
against Black children, women, and men, and against other people of color—rather than as public servants with a lawful duty to every citizen.
“Good” neighborhoods where the only men around who have the social standing to rape with impunity are white men. And they do. White
men tell white women to be afraid of Black men. They ask us to call the police in the event of a “suspicious” non-white man in the
neighborhood, especially a Black man, whatever he may be doing. We white women have often been eagerly complicit in this false, learned
fear that has unleashed such devastating white terrorism on Black communities. It’s so much simpler for us to believe anything besides the
truth, so we do. Too many of us have bought this slander of Black men, even as the men who usually rape us, and who so often get away with
raping non-white women, are white men. The tragic massacre
of peaceful Black women and men at the AME church
is exactly where these attitudes and behaviors were meant to lead. They are meant to produce a vicious,
hateful willingness to destroy whatever a white person can’t “protect” through ownership. There’s no
possible legacy for a society run with such brutality other than mass murder and wanton destruction. If
we would not be held responsible for these atrocities, we must rid ourselves of the attitudes that got us
there. That means much, much more than legislators agreeing to take down the idols of Confederate treason in the South. Every one of
us must reject these white supremacist attitudes, these claims to ownership over other people’s lives
and well-being for the gratification of our own egos. We need to reject the moral authority of anyone whose ethics begin
and end with their own rights to amass property. We have to look very hard at every part of our society where we perpetuate the idea that
people can own each other. And we must certainly look at the part of white women in all of this, since we’ve also been here, all along. Was it
not white women who came in like locusts to loot the homes and businesses after the white male rioters and the National Guard burned Black
Wall Street in Tulsa? Was it not white women who would have set out the family’s Sunday best and brought along the picnics for the lynchings
that can be seen in those old postcards? We were there. How long did it take after the fall of Jim Crow for white women to even begin to think
of mourning murdered Black children as if they were our own nieces and nephews, the children of our sisters? In slave-owning white
households, was it not also white women who made the lives of the enslaved Black women around them miserable and sometimes
unimaginably tragic out of jealousy, instead of seeing the rape of their sisters and finding a way to act from compassion? Indeed, in the
Jefferson household, as in countless others, Sally Hemings was in fact Martha Jefferson’s half-sister, because their father raped the women he
enslaved. When the freed descendants of these enslaved Black women first took up paid labor in white households doing similar work, they
were often still subject to the same threat of rape by white men and treated with scarcely more compassion by white women. White men have
spent hundreds of years raping Black women in the United States. White women have long refused to face this, helping hide the truth behind
victim-blaming stereotypes of hypersexual Black women. Just as we have refused to face that we often have more to fear from the white men
who live with us than dark-skinned strangers walking down the street. Before white men could own slaves, they could take wives. A wife is not
a slave, but in much of historical white culture, neither was she a free person. Under the doctrine of coverture in English law, she was not quite
a person at all, and the last of the laws that stemmed from coverture were stricken down in U.S. courts in the 1970s. Marital rape could not
even be conceived of as a crime in white culture until the middle of the 20th century. And from the start of Western literature, it was already
established that a wife and mother was not even supposed to speak in public, as an act of modesty and humility in honor of the family
patriarch, while a first rite of manhood was to claim the authority to shut her up. From the social fantasy of the model, upper-class, white wife
comes the ideal of the passivity of white women. She is quiet, meek, pale with hiding indoors, she reacts, she supports. She gives, and loves,
and simpers. Instead of acting, she asks, and so she acts under permission, under his authority as a good little girl ought to. The story she
remembers of her own life is a story of things done around or near or to her, things witnessed from a remove, except the blur of menial tasks
and social obeisance. She is helpless, unaccountable in the innocence of that helplessness, and in constant need of rescue by the white male
hero. She is necessarily insecure, because what can she do? Yet while white women can be trained into creating a convincing simulacrum of
such a person, that has never been anyone’s authentic self. It’s a box built for women’s personalities so that white men could believe that we
naturally exist as objects for their conquest and ownership, whereas no such thing is true. As Andrea Dworkin said, “Genocide begins, however
improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.” White women
have sat for too long as passive spectators to brutality and genocide committed by our own families, in our names, because we have been full
of such false convictions. Even if we did not start them, we can decide now to end them. It doesn’t deny the misogyny we’ve been subjected to
for us to acknowledge any of this. That isn’t how it works. Because this fantasy of our “natural” passivity, so convincing a lie told about white
women by white men that we often come to believe it ourselves, must go. We must give up being objects before we can seek a basic decency
greater than that of those who would own us. And where we cling to these myths from fear, which is often, it’s a lie that turning ourselves into
wish-fulfillment objects for white men will make us safe. Objects can’t love, nor can they be loved. Only love can make people truly safe with
each other. And we must all learn to be moved from love to act with terrible urgency. The deadly present crisis of white racist brutality toward
the Black community demands it. So we need to call each other to walk away from learned passivity and towards love, as many times as it
takes. We
must stop forgiving each other’s bad behavior, or asking for forgiveness, and insist on change,
following the example of the dearly beloved Black women and men our nation is in mourning for right
now. It’s not Black people in the United States who need to change. Every one of the AME worshippers died as a
model of the kind of person all white people should strive to be. I hope my son will want to grow up to be like them. I hope he will be like the
loved ones they left behind, people who showed incredible forbearance as cameras were shoved in their faces by white people who were
white people must
absolutely listen to the requests of the Black community that we stop asking them to act like the Rev. Martin
asking for forgiveness before the bodies were even cold. In the aftermath of white supremacist terrorism,
Luther King, another peaceful Black person murdered by a white supremacist. Black people, like the murdered Rev. Clementa Pinckney and Rev.
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, already knew how to act like that. The slain worshippers lived as a testament to the church’s 200-year-old legacy
of standing in fellowship against white supremacist terror. They easily extended their hospitality to a complete stranger, a hateful man who
would sit with them for an hour before gunning them down, just like his white supremacist idols who had murdered other Black people they
could not own or control. Have
Black people not been terrorized over the last few hundred years into a
meekness toward white people that runs so deep, African-American men have been seen to politely ask
their white attackers to stop hurting them even as they were taking their last breaths? White people
would do better to start listening to King’s request of us throughout his life and works, and throughout
the life and works of the other women and men in the Civil Rights Movement, that we learn to listen
to and love our Black sisters and brothers. That we make white society decent and humane at long last.
What is white fear of the “angry” Black person besides a worry that we will be held to account for the
merciless slander and persecution of Black people by whites that each and every white person bears
responsibility for tolerating as if it were not a deadly emergency? We must do everything we can to put
an end to white supremacist attitudes. It should be clear by now that this ideology won’t just fade away
in time with the old, it must be rejected and extinguished as a matter of deliberate intent. It helps no
one to wallow in shame or guilt. Act in honor of the beloved dead. Do your part to put an end to the evil
of white supremacy so that we can all live together in peace and dignity.
Instead of teaching to escape we should discuss why that escape is needed in the first
place
Smith, 15 (Clint Smith is a teacher, poet, and doctoral candidate in education at Harvard University
with a concentration in Culture, Institutions, and Society (CIS). “Teach black students they can change
communities they don't have to escape”, http://www.theguardian.com/teachernetwork/2015/jul/07/teach-black-students-change-communities-not-escape?CMP=share_btn_fb,
Tuesday July 7 2015 TAM)
When my students and I found out about the shooting of nine black people in Charleston, South
Carolina, our breath was pulled from our lungs, our minds spun with disillusionment, and our hearts
filled with rage and despair. We wanted to escape. My students are black and brown, living in
communities that have been subjected to generations of underinvestment and discrimination. As a
teaching artist in Boston public schools and a former high school English teacher just outside
Washington DC, I’ve seen how the violence against people of color in the past year has left many in fear
that their lives are in perpetual danger. As it happened, we did escape. The news came on the eve of a
long-planned school trip to France. Hours later, when we met at the airport, we hugged one another and
exchanged words – a reminder that we mattered, if not to the rest of the world, then at least to each
other. When we arrived in Paris, I was reminded of the American writer James Baldwin. His departure
from Harlem in 1948, aged 24, with only $40 (£25) in his pocket was an attempt to escape the pernicious
racism of the US. This decision, he claims, saved his life. “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France
– it was a matter of getting out of America,” he said in a 1984 interview with the Paris Review. “My luck
was running out. I was going to go to jail; I was going to kill somebody or be killed.” For my entire life, I
have watched the realities of racism slowly kill those around me. I have watched food insecurity and
unequal access to healthy meals saturate black communities with diabetes and heart disease at
disproportionate rates. I have watched the residue of federally-sanctioned redlining create small
apartheids in cities for decades, generating breeding grounds for crime and poverty. In Baltimore, for
example, local policies have existed since 1910 to isolate the city’s black population. To the present day
federal housing subsidy policies still result in low-income black families being segregated from richer
neighbourhoods. With all of that said, a part of me struggles to accept that Baldwin, a literary hero of
mine, felt the only thing he could do was leave. When I discuss Baldwin with my students, the questions
surrounding his departure inevitably arise. It is a difficult yet necessary conversation. I tell them it is a
choice he made, one he had the right to – one they have the right to as well. In the midst of these
conversations, however, I do not want to suggest to my students that the only way to be successful, or
to have value, is to escape. This is a message already deeply embedded in the social fabric of schools in
poor communities. Teachers, administrators and others propagate a “do well so you can leave this
place” narrative. I have witnessed this in the schools where I have taught and been on the receiving end
of it growing up. As someone not currently living in my own hometown of New Orleans, I even wonder
to what extent I internalised such a message as a child. Education, at its best, gives students the option
to make a life however and wherever they choose. That is different, however, to defining one’s ambition
or dreams by how far removed they are from the places of their childhood. A child in Chicago, Detroit,
New Orleans, or any other city across the country, should not have to dream of escaping their
neighborhood to make a meaningful life for him or herself. How will our communities ever grow into
their true potential if we continue to tell our most successful students to leave? And still, I am not sure
anyone can be faulted for desiring to escape a paradigm in which your humanity, and your body, are
both questioned and assaulted. It is not as simple as telling our students to stay. No. We, as educators,
must directly address the realities that cause them to want to leave in the first place. That, in part,
means we must discuss racism candidly – both the interpersonal and the systemic. This does not mean
adding a perfunctory Martin Luther King Jr speech to be skimmed over during Black History Month. It
does not mean reading the only writer of color in the curriculum and analyzing their work devoid of any
historical context. This means holistically broadening the range of texts we expose our students to and
having them interrogate why certain voices have been, and continue to be, left out of the literary and
historical canons. We cannot discuss what led Dylann Roof to take the lives of nine innocent black
people as they prayed inside their church with students unless we also discuss our country’s history of
racial violence. We cannot discuss what the confederate flag represents without also wrestling with
what it means that many of our founding fathers owned slaves. These are not loosely tied phenomena;
they are intrinsically linked realities and shape the country we live in. Americans often define racism
singularly as direct verbal or physical abuse. This, however, is only one way it manifests itself. As
teachers, we have a responsibility to our students to provide a more holistic and honest definition of
what racism is in this country, so that we might better push back against it as we move forward. While
systemic injustice is suffocating and can often seem immutable, things can change. But we must engage
our students honestly, and remind them that we are the architects of the world we live in. That is what I
would have wanted my teachers to tell me. That is what I try to tell my students. Perhaps then we can
collectively re-create our reality so that one day no one is forced to “escape”.
Surveillance Key
Surveillance and Visualities Roots being in the Plantation – This discussion is key
Mirzeoff ’11 (Mirzoeff, Nicholas. visual culture theorist and professor in the Department of Media,
Culture and Communication at New York University "The Right to Look." Critical Inquiry 37.3 (2011):
473-96. University of Chicago Press, Spring 2011. Web. <http://nicholasmirzoeff.com/RTL/wpcontent/uploads/2011/06/RTL-from-CI.pdf>.)
Here I want to advance my claim first by offering a conceptual framework to think with and against visuality and then by applying it to today’s
permanent crisis of visuality. Visuality’s
first domains were the slave plantations, monitored by the surveillance
of the overseer, the surrogate of the sovereign. This sovereign surveillance was reinforced by violent
punishment and sustained a modern division of labor. Then from the late eighteenth century onward,
visualizing was the hallmark of the modern general as the battlefield became too extensive and complex
for any one person physically to see. Working on information supplied by subalterns—the new lowest ranked officer class created
for this purpose—and his own ideas and images, the general in modern warfare as practiced and theorized by Karl von Clausewitz was
responsible for visualizing the battlefield. Soon after this moment, visuality was named as such in English by Thomas Carlyle in 1840 to refer to
what he called the tradition of heroic leadership, which visualizes history to sustain autocratic authority.7 In
this form, visualizing is
the production of visuality, meaning the making of the processes of history perceptible to authority. This
visualizing was the attribute of the Hero and him alone. Visuality was held to be masculine, in tension with the right to look that has been
variously depicted as feminine, lesbian, queer, or trans. Despite its oddities, the interface of Carlyle’s appropriation of the revolutionary hero
and his visualizing of history as permanent war with the military strategy of visualization has had a long legacy. While Carlyle’s idea of mystical
leadership was not a practical form of organization, British imperial visuality was organized by an army of missionaries bringing light to darkness
by means of the Word, actively imagining themselves to be heroic subjects.8 The fascist leaders of twentieth-century Europe claimed direct
inspiration from Carlyle, while today’s
remote visualization.
counterinsurgency doctrine indirectly relies on strategies of local and
Song/Lyrics
"Q.U.E.E.N."
(feat. Erykah Badu)
I can't believe all of the things they say about me
Walk in the room they throwing shade left to right
They be like, "Ooh, she's serving face."
And I just tell 'em, cut me up, and get down
They call us dirty 'cause we break all your rules down
And we just came to act a fool, is that all right (Girl, that's alright)
They be like, "Ooh, let them eat cake."
But we eat wings and throw them bones on the ground
Am I a freak for dancing around? (queen)
Am I a freak for getting down? (queen)
I'm cutting up, don't cut me down
Yeah I wanna be, wanna be (queen)
Is it peculiar that she twerk in the mirror?
And am I weird to dance alone late at night?
And is it true we're all insane?
And I just tell 'em, "No we ain't," and get down
I heard this life is just a play with no rehearsal
I wonder will this be my final act tonight
And tell me what's the price of fame?
Am I a sinner with my skirt on the ground?
Am I a freak for dancing around?
Am I a freak for getting down?
I'm cutting up, don't cut me down
Any yeah I wanna be, wanna be (queen)
Hey brother can you save my soul from the devil?
Say is it weird to like the way she wear her tights? (but I like it)
And is it rude to wear my shades?
Am I a freak because I love watching Mary? (maybe)
Hey sister am I good enough for your heaven?
Say will your God accept me in my black and white?
Will he approve the way I'm made?
Or should I reprogram the program and get down?
Am I a freak for dancing around?(queen)
Am I a freak for getting down?(queen)
I'm cutting up, don't cut me down
And yeah I wanna be wanna be (queen)
Even if it makes others uncomfortable
I wanna love who I am
Even if it makes others uncomfortable
I will love who I am
Shake 'til the break of dawn
Don't mean a thing, so duh
I can't take it no more
Baby, we in tuxedo groove
Pharaohs and E. Badu
Crazy in the black and white
We got the drums so tight
Baby, here comes the freedom song
Too strong we moving on
Baby this melody
Will show you another way
Been tryin' for far too long
Come home and sing your song
But you gotta testify
Because the booty don't lie
No, no, the booty don't lie
Oh no, the booty don't lie
Yeah
Yeah, Let's flip it
I don't think they understand what I'm trying to say
I asked a question like this
Are we a lost generation of our people?
Add us to equations but they'll never make us equal.
She who writes the movie owns the script and the sequel.
So why ain't the stealing of my rights made illegal?
They keep us underground working hard for the greedy,
But when it's time pay they turn around and call us needy.
My crown too heavy like the Queen Nefertiti
Gimme back my pyramid, I'm trying to free Kansas City.
Mixing masterminds like your name Bernie Grundman.
Well I'm gonna keep leading like a young Harriet Tubman
You can take my wings but I'm still goin' fly
And even when you edit me the booty don't lie
Yeah, keep singing and I'mma keep writing songs
I'm tired of Marvin asking me, "What's Going On?"
March to the streets 'cause I'm willing and I'm able
Categorize me, I defy every label
And while you're selling dope, we're gonna keep selling hope
We rising up now, you gotta deal you gotta cope
Will you be electric sheep?
Electric ladies, will you sleep?
Or will you preach?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEddixS-UoU
NEG
Afrofuturism Bad – US Focus
Afrofuturism’s unquestioning use of the United States as a central site and science
fiction as a genre reinscribes racial oppression.
McCutcheon 2011 (Mark A. McCutcheon, PhD. Associate Professor, English, Athabasca University.
Review: “Debating the Histories and Futures of Black SF” Published in Extrapolation Vol. 52, No. 2)
In other words, Afro-Futurism
produces a kind of cyborg, anti-realist identity politics that seeks not
to overcome alienation but to deepen it as a mode of resis-tance to hegemonic ontologies. Afro-Futurism's
alienating effects thus take aim equally at a technocratic modern society founded on white capitalist patriarchy and the
racialized terrors of slavery, and at the dominant forms of subjectivity such a society has engendered. So the consistent,
conspicuous absence here of any references to Eshun, Nelson, or Rose (among others), while presumably
unintended, nonetheless tends more to suppress than to enable a dialogue with AfroFuturism—an effect exacerbated by the editor's insistent self-positioning as a "pioneer" in this field (251; cf. ix, 245). Barr's editorial selfpositioning (with its problematically colonialist figuring) relates the collection's highly selective representation of AfroFuturist history to a similarly selective representation of its territorial ambit: that is, the collec-tion frequently arrogates
black Atlantic writers to black American contexts. The collection shares this kind of arrogation with Dery and Nelson,
who both simply assume the U.S. supplies the defining and exemplary national site of AfroFuturist production (Youngquist 183). In Afro-Future Females, this kind of presumptive, territorial
arrogation arises among several contributors, in descriptions of sf as an unproblematically American
literature, and in related assumptions about black American culture as tacit synecdoche for
Other black diasporic cultures around the Atlantic or around the world. Only Dubey connects the magicinfused speculative fiction of black women writers with Paul Gilroy as well as Toni Mor- rison (35). Henton invokes
"diaspora" only to describe the African-American imagination (110) and the diversities of sf form
(101). That Hopkinson and some contributors to Mojo are African-Canadian (or African-Caribbean-Canadian, in Hopkinson 's case) is only
mentioned in passing by Kilgore (120), who inscribes
them nevertheless in "African-American involvement in
fantastic fiction" (119). A salutary illustration of the collection's U.S.-centric assumptions occurs in
Rogan's essay on Due and Hopkinson. Rogan reads their representations of "the reproduction of mothering" according to
a provocative historical-materialist premise: that "the master/slave dialectic… reinscribe[s]
itself in the relation of the black woman to capitalist patriarchy… victimized by institutionalized
neglect rather than by the close scrutiny she bore as an object of property” (77). On this premise, Rogan
builds an insightful reading of mother figures in the subject authors' novels. However, notwithstanding the overall perspicacity of Rogan's
reading of Hopkinson according to the globalized continuities of postcolonial cultures and neoliberal hegemony, the critic is on unfamiliar
ground in discussing the Canadian setting of Brown Girl in the Ring (1999), whose antagonist Rogan describes as "Canada's Premier Uttley" (90).
This misreading of a provincial government leader as Canada's head of state costs Rogan's argument a relevant
point about globalization: the provincial political setting makes the novel legible as a satire on
Ontario's hard right turn in the mid-1990s under the neoconserva-tive regime of Premier Mike Harris, which so drastically
slashed social programs and attacked minoritized groups that Hopkinson's image of downtown
Toronto as a gutted inner city reads more like a shrewd urban-planning projection than a postapocalyptic dystopia.
Afrofuturism masks Eurocentrism and colonial oppression
Albiez, 05 (Sean Albiez is Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Southampton Solent University. He has
lectured in popular music studies, music technology and media and cultural studies since 1991, and has
been involved in electronic music making since the mid-1980s., Published in 2005 as 'Post Soul
Futurama: African American cultural politics and early Detroit Techno' in European Journal of American
Culture. Vol 24. No 2. 2005, TAM)
Cosgrove, in creating a thesis that emphasizes the innovatory futurism of techno, rides roughshod over
the sensitivities of the black American racial and personal subjectivity of Atkins. This controversial thesis
lingered in later writing on techno, with Sinker stating ‘Techno ... explicitly and contemptuously refused
community with Motown and motorcity gospel [in favour of] Gary “Me, I Disconnect From You”
Numan’.39 Though there is some evidence to suggest Numan was more important musically to Juan
Atkins than Motown, no disrespect was intended to the symbolic achievements of Gordy, and Atkins
very specifically acknowledges the key role of electronic and synthesizer experimentation by Bernie
Worrell (Funkadelic) and early 1970s Stevie Wonder in his music. Furthermore, to cast European
electronic music as an escape route for black musicians from the USA’s racially antagonistic environment
is to create a comforting story that perhaps helps European writers excise memories of the colonial
enslavement of Africans, recasting Europe as a post-industrial sanctuary.
Afrofuturism Bad - Solvency
AfroFuturism outdated and no longer works as a movement – it is open ended and
message is ambiguous depending on the person
Miller ’11 (Miller, Paul D. a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose
work is often called by critics or his fans as "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntablist, a producer, a
philosopher, and an author The Book of Ice. Brooklyn, NY: Mark Batty, 2011. Print.)
Every movement has its sell-by date. I think that there were a lot of flaws in the way that Afro-Futurism
unfolded, and I think it missed certain pressure points in the flow of how culture evolves in this day and
age. It wasn’t digital enough, it didn’t have a core group of people with any kind of coherent message. It
was conceptually open ended without any kind of narrative. People tend to like that kind of thing. I speak of AfroFuturism in the past tense because I think that the culture at large caught up to and bypassed many of
the issues it was dealing with. Forget the idea of the “permanent underclass” that people like Greg Tate (no disrespect) kept
pushing. Forget the idea that blacks are outside of any system—we are the system. I guess that many people outside of the arts have awakened
to the day and age and moved on. It
seemed like Afrofuturism just didn’t have a cohesive situation to have music,
art and literature evolve from. Sure, Afrofuturism can be used, as you put it to be a “descriptor of a body
of knowledge, which does not die and outlives its progenitors (like jazz, hip-hop, deconstruction, or philosophy itself)”—
but only by sleight of hand (which is sampling, anyway). It’s basically a hall of mirrors, a smoke and fog routine in
a middle brow cheap magic show. But hey... even that can be interesting sometimes.
Afrofuturism = Sexist
Even if their small selection of 1AC authors cite feminist principals, the Afro-Future is
overwhelmingly imagined as a male dominated space. Sexism and the alienation of
black woman inevitably dooms the movement.
AH 2011 (From a collection of short posts on the blog of Jakeya Caruthers, PhD Candidate in
Anthropology of Education at Stanford University where she teaches courses on Black Childhood, Queer
Afrofuturism and occasionally guest-lectures on representations of race, sex, and gender in popular
culture. Her courses have earned her a Middlebrook Prize for Graduate Teaching and a teaching
fellowship with Stanford’s Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity. June 2, 2011
http://queeringafrofuturism.tumblr.com/post/6126537901/female-presence-in-the-afro-future)
In J. Griffith Rollefson’s work “The Robot Voodoo Power Thesis: Afrofuturism and anti-anti-essentialism from Sun Ra to Kool
Keith” the author argues
that afrofuturism, though often viewed as a constructed fantasy and sort of post human,
futurist sensibility, has “real” productive potential towards the larger project of cultural theory. He argues specifically
that, “By stepping out side of the white liberal tradition and rewriting blackness in all its complexity, afrofuturism offers a novel
form of revolution that is rooted in a long history of black opposition”. In his work Rollefson sites artists that while productive in
their audacity to (re)envision and reproduce alter-destinies, still through practice and position reify notions of hetro-patriarchy
and sexism. In all of his
examples he presents male-bodied individuals as the leaders of this new
wave of cultural thought and progression into the future. The first is the highly noted Sun Ra, band leader
for the Arkestra. Rollefson highlights the leader’s ability to institute a new wave of futurist thought through an insistence that
he was not of this planet and neither is any black person. The author notes that Sun-Ra creates a new space through which
black people can begin to let go of desires towards equal citizenship through an indoctrination into an alternate world, that of
the uni-verse. Rollefson, notes that Sun Ra and
other noted leaders such as George Clinton and
Parliament-Funkadelic, as well as MC’s such as Kool Keith “established the core tenet of antianti-essentialist collapsed binaries”. He continues further: “ I would like to assert that they do have real political
efficacy because they problematize the rigid binary of blackness/whiteness and the matrix of binaries that are inscribed up this
central set.” Such
reimagining works to blur the lines of whiteness and blackness perhaps,
however, they do little to renegotiate the history of sexism and erasure that these same
histories present (as an opposition) to the project of feminist politics. Through Rollefson’s reading we
find that the female presence is non-existent in the theorized (and thus archived) afrofuture. It is
problematic to me that no space, imaginary or otherwise, has been offered with which to combat
the issues of patriarchy and sexism that override our present quests for “Freedom”. Until the
way we think about afro futurism is inclusive off all black bodies, the project towards
liberation will continue to be stunted. -AH
And, where women are imagined in the afro-future they remain fetishized subjects of
the male gaze.
AVM 2011
(From a collection of short posts on the blog of Jakeya Caruthers, PhD Candidate in Anthropology of Education
at Stanford University where she teaches courses on Black Childhood, Queer Afrofuturism and occasionally guest-lectures on
representations of race, sex, and gender in popular culture. Her courses have earned her a Middlebrook Prize for Graduate
Teaching and a teaching fellowship with Stanford’s Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity. 4/24/2011
http://queeringafrofuturism.tumblr.com/page/4)
To begin, these readings helped me better understand the role of music in complementing or expanding one’s own identity and vision of
the world. Weheliye effectively delineates the politics of the ‘vocoder’ effect and how it has different meanings for black and white people in
relation to their perceived humanity (37). Indeed, ze effectively shows how musical effects can be used not just to carry the musician and the
spectator to a new space (or an audotopia), but also to construct anew body for the musician. Foster takes on this notion in hir essay. Ze
delineates how cyberspace is used by people to experience trans identification with races, genders, and sexualities ‘different’ than their
prescribed ‘bodies.’ In hir reading of science fiction texts, Foster depicts cyberspace as a utopian space, where people
are able to experience strength and empowerment in their identities. James in hir essay on Robo-Diva perhaps best fleshes out this
phenomenon. Ze
reads the work of Beyonce and Rihanna to convey how “afro-futurist robo-diva
R&B can be understood as reverse-engineering the body, using music to rewire the way
whiteness and patriarchy are programmed into our bodies and structures of feeling ” (419). For James,
“to adopt the aesthetic of the robo-diva is to throw in white patriarchy’s face what it most fears – black women and black femininity not as
some ‘redeeming’ path to ‘whole-ness…’ that exists solely for the purpose of nursing white culture and maintaining patriarchal privilege” (417).
While I certainly appreciate James’s reading of these music videos, I almost feel as if ze is glamorizing the radical potential of the robo diva.
Indeed, for James, the robo diva is the embodiment of an empowered critique of a white patriarchal regime. While I agree that the robo diva
can be a feminist figure, I am circumspect at James’s universalizing claim. I posit that while the
robo diva can be read as a reactionary,
subversive feminist figure, she also can be read as a product if a patriarchal regime. From my understanding, one of
the core notions of feminist theory and history is that women’s bodies have been demonized by
the patriarchy. Indeed, considering the historical associations of women with witches, demons, and other ill-intentioned creatures it is pretty
easy to recognize that women’s bodies – especially women’s menstrual cycles – have been delegitimized by men. Part
of the project of second wave feminism was reclamation of women’s bodies. Indeed, with books like Our Bodies Ourselves, women began to
educate themselves about their bodies and, in the process, empower themselves. Even with the dawn of third wave feminism, women’s
bodies still continue to be held under the scrutiny of the patriarchal gaze. Depictions of women in media
and other public outlets still present a skinny, large-breasted figure – a paragon of beauty unattainable by women. Rates of eating disorders,
diets, and self-mutiliation are still issues for the women’s rights movement. This is why I
am circumspect of immediately labeling
the robo diva a feminist icon. Certainly, her cyborg status in many ways bolsters her body. The technology of herself can be said
to fortify her from the predatory, penetrative gaze of patriarchy. However, can we not also view this re-configuration and
performance of the body as yet another product of a patriarchal capitalist society? James’s analysis
features Beyonce and Rihanna without thinking about the type of women and the type of bodies these artists have sought to
construct. Both of these women still aspire toward dominant (white) notions of beauty – they are still
ridiculously toned, often perm their hair, and wear sensational, skimpy clothing to broadcast their bodies as
part of their image. Both of these women are known for their bodies. Male consumers and fans often comment on how ‘hot’ they are. I wonder
– could
the robot diva simply be a fetish of the patriarchal gaze? Have Beyonce and Rihanna
figured out that by playing dress up as a robot, they can further titillate the male gaze ? From the
discipline of ecofeminism we learn how the domination and degradation of our earth and natural
resources can be read with a comparable framework as the trauma inscribed on the woman’s
body and experiences by patriarchy. Men have historically used technology to rape the land of
its resources. Is the robo-diva just another one of these tools? Is her cyborg image really an
indication of her colonization? In Kanye’s “Love Lockdown” music video alien-inspired tall
women stand with their arms at their shoulders as Afrofuturist men dance behind them. The
camera takes a curious focus. It features the dancers dancing in-between the legs of the
woman. In this moment I began to recognize – could the reproductive capacity of women simply being
appropriated for by the afro-futiuristic impulse for a new world, for a new body? I think it’s important
that we approach issues of gender difference within the afro-futuristic project with a critical eye. We cannot simply exalt the
‘robo-diva; we must continue to complicate her politics and presence in order to better
understand the feminist implications of afro-futurism.
Sci-Fi Bad - Feminism
The Alt can’t solve- examining science from a feminist perspective reinforces
sterotypes of women- as incompetent
Fehr 04 (Carla is an Associate Professor in Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Iowa
State University. She works in the philosophy of biology, feminist philosophy and feminist science
studies. “Feminism and Science: Mechanism Without Reductionism” Spring
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa/summary/v016/16.1fehr.html
Although it has been said before by such leading philosophers as Sandra Harding (1987) and Helen Longino (1987), the point that feminist
theorists do not and should not endorse a single feminist method, or of a single way that women do (or ought to do) science bears repeating
for at least three reasons. First, Donna Haraway (1985) has pointed out that feminism and science need to be intertwined if we are to exercise
our responsibility for the practices and products of science and technology. By
drawing a line between women’s science and
science itself, we lose our ability to address current problems within scientific practice, and we don’t investigate
ways in which the traditional practice of science can be interrogated and improved. Second, presuppositions of a single feminist
science reinforce the cultural stereotype that women can’t do science as it is traditionally construed. This
further removes an already marginalized group from mainstream scientific discourse and fails to give credit to
women who have fought to succeed as researchers in what continues to be a man’s game. Finally, we need to guard against essentializing
women’s intellectual or cognitive characteristics. Advocating a single feminist science suggests that there is a single, feminine manner way in
which women think or relate to other people or organize their experiments and their laboratories. This is not the case. Because of the latter
two concerns, pluralism is an appropriate attitude to take toward feminism and science. Instead of endorsing a feminist method, I hope to
create space for a variety of approaches.
Sci-Fi Bad – Cedes Political
We should build plausible and specific scenarios—that’s key to improve policymaking
and avoid existential threats
HUNTLEY et al 2010 (Wade L. Huntley, US Naval Postgraduate School; Joseph G. Bock, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies; Miranda
Weingartner, Weingartner Consulting; “Planning the unplannable: Scenarios on the future of space,” Space Policy 26)
On 16 March 1966 Neil
Armstrong deftly piloted the Gemini VIII within 0.9 meters of the pre-launched Agena Target Vehicle, then slowly
accomplished the world’s first orbital docking. Armstrong and co-pilot David Scott were still in a celebratory mood, when Scott noticed the
Gemini beginning to roll. Armstrong used the Orbit Attitude and Maneuvering System thrusters, but the moment he throttled down, they started to roll again.
Turning off the Agena seemed to stop the problem for a few minutes. But when it began again, the roll was accelerating. They undocked and with a long burst of
translation thrusters moved away from the Agena. But the roll continued to accelerate. Tumbling now at one revolution per second, the astronauts were in danger
of impaired vision and loss of consciousness. But Armstrong
was able to bring the wild oscillations under control thanks in part
to preparation by a flight simulation training exercise that many pilots disliked, believing the simulation
was too unlikely to waste their scarce training time and energy on.26 Fortunately, NASA did not plan the astronauts’ training based on the most
likely scenarios. Instead, they planned on the basis of plausible and important scenarios. Developing plausible
scenarios helps us take the long view in a world of great uncertainty.27 Scenarios are narratives of the future defined around
a set of unpredictable drivers, intended to expand insight by identifying unexpected but important possible directions and outcomes. Scenarios
have a timeline over which meaningful change is possible. They are a useful tool for examining a number of different possible
futures. They provide a means to stimulate new thinking, challenge assumptions, and provide an
effective framework for dialogue among a diverse group of stakeholders. They can inspire new ideas and innovations by
helping identify common goals and interests that transcend current political divides. Scenarios thus help to develop the
means to work towards preferred futures.28 Scenarios are stories about the way the world might turn out tomorrow; they do not need to
be likely, but they ought to be plausible, internally consistent, and relevant. It is precisely by considering possible, even if not necessarily likely,
scenarios that we are best prepared for the unpredictability of the future. By encouraging creative
thinking beyond the future we anticipate, scenarios help us become more resilient to unexpected
events. With respect to their utility in guiding policy development, three features distinguish good scenarios from simple speculations, linear predictions or
fanciful musings of the future: Scenarios are decision focused. Successful scenarios begin and end by clarifying the decisions and actions the participants must make
if they are to deal successfully with an uncertain future. One
common misconception of scenarios is that they are prescient,
path dependent predictions of the future. On the contrary, scenarios are used to order our thoughts
amid uncertainty, build common ground among differing perspectives, and think rationally about our
options. The value of a set of scenarios accrues not from their accuracy or likelihood, but from their
plausibility and the insights they generate. Scenarios are imaginative. In examining a decision within the context of a number of different
futures, scenarios require us to look behind fixed assumptions. They encourage participants to challenge conventional wisdom, create new contexts for existing
decisions, and think creatively about options for surmounting obstacles. At their core, then, scenarios are about learning.29 Scenarios are logical. The scenario
process is formal and disciplined in its use of information and analysis. The creativity and imagination inspired by scenarios can only be as effective as it is based in
realistic assessments. In requiring participants to challenge each others’ thoughts, perceptions, and mind-sets, the process helps clarify that reality. Scenarios first
emerged following World War II as a method of military planning. This approach was reflected in Herman Kahn’s assertion of the need to ‘‘think the unthinkable’’
concerning the possibilities and implications of war in the atomic age. ‘‘In our times’’, Kahn wrote in 1966, ‘‘thermonuclear
war may seem
unlikely, but it is not impossible’’. 30 Kahn’s motivation was, in part, recognition of the
counter-intuitive notion that planning could be a necessary means of avoidance. Analyzing scenarios reached greater methodological
unthinkable, immoral, insane, hideous, or highly
sophistication with the work of Pierre Wack, a planner at the London offices of Royal Dutch/Shell. Wack and his colleagues refined the application of scenario
thinking to private enterprise. This work helped Shell anticipate the consequences of the emergence of a cartel among oil exporting countries, and to develop
various plans to cushion the blow that would (and did) result from formation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960. Shell was
also able to anticipate massive economic and political change in the then USSR in the late 1980s.31 Scenario analysis came to be used in the political arena when
associates of Wack assisted stakeholders in South Africa in the peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy. Many doubted the country’s prospects; in 1987,
the Guardian Weekly quoted Margaret Thatcher’s former spokesman Bernard Ingham as saying that anyone who believed the African National Congress (ANC)
would one day rule South Africa was ‘‘living in cloud cuckoo land.’’32 But with operations in South Africa and an interest in preventing anarchy following the
downfall of apartheid, Shell sent some of Wack’s prote´ge´s, including Adam Kahane, to convene meetings of top governmental, religious, civic and business leaders
at a conference site there called Mont Fleur. From February 1990, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison, to April 1994, when the first all-race elections
were held, participants identified relatively certain and uncertain but plausible factors, and then formed into teams to research various alternative futures. In the
midst of deep conflict and uncertainty, ‘‘Mont Fleur’’ brought people together from across ideological and political divides to think creatively about the future of
their country. The collaboratively drafted scenarios were not a panacea, but did contribute to establishing a common vocabulary and enough mutual understanding
for participants to find common ground on complex decisions. In particular, the consensus on the undesirability of three particular scenarios contributed to
developing the perception of shared interests that was an important element in the success of the governmental transition.33 Scenario-building
and
analysis has become a distinct tool of US government policy making, and has been applied directly to
future space security issues. For example, one major US Air Force scenario-based study evaluated 25 emerging technologies and 40 separate
potential weapons systems through the lens of six ‘‘alternative futures’’ in an effort to guide future Air Force policy choices.34 This exercise (and others like
it) exemplifies the potential for applying nonlinear future planning methodologies to large-scale public
policy topics, including the future of space. The principal deficiency of such government-sponsored efforts is simply the narrowness of their
focus e they are, by design, only concerned about a single government’s decision points and are shaped by the goals, dilemmas and uncertainties most relevant to
that single party. Lacking is a parallel process to achieve the same kind of expansive thinking while also incorporating a full range of stakeholders. Such exercises can
hardly be generated by governments.
Sci-fi empirically can’t understand or affect policy
Berger 1976 – award winning science fiction author (July, Albert I., “ The Triumph of Prophecy: Science Fiction and Nuclear Power in the
Post-Hiroshima Period” Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, JSTOR)
This naivete
about politics and preoccupation with technological solutions was the obverse of the
prevailing SF distaste for politics. Politics had always had a bad press in the science-fiction magazines, being
portrayed as the captive of technologically, if not socially reactionary special interests. The appalling
scientific ignorance and prejudice displayed by Congress after Hiroshima, and its general unwillingness
to be educated, merely compounded the problem in the eyes of science-fiction writers and readers. This
distaste for politics was testified to not only by letters-to-the-editor in Astounding and the fan magazines but also by an article by W.B. de
Graeff, "Congress is too Busy" (Sept 1946), detailing with a gleeful contempt the most mundane and ridiculous chores of a member of Congress.
By 1950
even an old stalwart like E.E. Smith could take up nearly a third of a novel-First Lensman (not
serialized; Fantasy Press 1950)-with a detailed account of an election in which military heroes act both as police
forces and as candidates arrayed against a corrupt political machine. The use of conspicuously armed poll
watchers and what amounts to a military coup are justified by the criminal tactics of the opposition.
Smith's villains are supposed to be the pawns of a sinister conspiracy of aliens, but their methods are
described as normal American practice.
SF alone isn’t enough – new socio-literary techniques are needed for public
engagement
Miller and Bennett 2008
- Associate Director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, Associate Director and CoPI of the
Center for Nanotechnology in Society, and Chair of the PhD Program in Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology at Arizona
State University. He is also a Senior Fellow in the Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He
holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Cornell University AND PhD in biochemistry from Arizona State University in 2003 and today is an
Assistant Research Professor in the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes and the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State
University (October, Clark A. and Ira, “ Thinking longer term about technology: is there value in science fiction-inspired approaches to
constructing futures? ” Science and Public Policy, 35(8), Ebsco)
Even if science fiction offers an alternative approach to fostering thinking about longer-term
developments in technology — one that focuses as much or more on the social dimensions of technological change than the
technological — new kinds of socio-literary techniques would still be needed in order to exploit this
approach in public engagement or technology assessment exercises. In the past two years, we have
undertaken or participated in several exercises that have explored how aspects of science fiction might
be used in interesting ways that we describe in brief here. We do not mean these to rise to the standard of proof of
concept, by any stretch of the imagination. Nevertheless, we offer them as illustrations of a couple of possible approaches we have taken, early
on in our explorations of how we might use science fiction-inspired techniques to advance the objectives of societal reflection on technological
futures.
Predictions about the future of space must be rigorous and realistic—their science
fiction stories don’t qualify
HUNTLEY et al 2010 (Wade L. Huntley, US Naval Postgraduate School; Joseph G. Bock, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies; Miranda
Weingartner, Weingartner Consulting; “Planning the unplannable: Scenarios on the future of space,” Space Policy 26)
Few space security analysts have focused on the possibilities for cooperation to function more organically as an element of the evolution of human space activities,
rather than simply as a structure applied to that evolution. The more organic possibility reflects the potential over time for cooperative agreements and institutions
to change state interests themselves. Processes facilitating such evolution include strategic interest convergence, information creation and sharing, ‘‘spillover’’ and
‘‘feedback’’ effects, issue scope expansion and integration, and the facilitation of transnational linkages. Interacting synergistically with the interests they are
influencing, such cooperation evolves dynamically as well. As such cooperation deepens its roots among all parties, it can begin to endure self-sustainably.21 The
potential for more organic principles and cooperative institutions to shape the nature of political relations themselves suggests a more expansive concept of the
underlying nature of interstate relations e one that need not always resemble the realist image of a Hobbesian ‘‘war of all against all’’. Hedley Bull’s ‘‘anarchical
society’’ and Daniel Deudney’s ‘‘negarchy,’’ for example, capture the past and present existence of international political orders that, despite the absence of
hierarchical government, have functioned as qualitatively distinct governance systems.22 Application of concepts of qualitatively distinct political ordering principles
to developing governance conditions of the future human presence in space is as yet largely unexplored.23 The fluidity of interests and capabilities with respect to
space activities suggests a relatively large potential for organized cooperation to influence their evolution. Such cooperative principles and institutions would then
become intrinsic to the dynamic political forces shaping the expanding human presence in space, growing and evolving with them, rather than acting as exogenous
static structures seeking to constrain those forces.24 The
rate and uncertainty of change in both the technological and
political dimensions of expanding human space activities complicates this task. Herein lies the value of
‘‘realistic visions’’. Rigorous articulations of the interplay of the wide variety of constraints, tradeoffs,
uncertainties, and values entailed in human expansion into space can facilitate evaluation of the
applicability of alternative governance concepts to human space activities in the context of dynamic
change. Among other things, such visions can explore how alternative futures in space are intimately linked to terrestrial conditions. As the human presence in
space develops into an integral aspect of global life, it will increasingly reflect the prevailing conditions of global life. Anticipation of space weaponization premises
continued earthly insecurity and conflict, while ambitions for growing commercial and exploratory development of space presume increasing international
integration and collaboration. A future in which space becomes a domain of conflict and arms race competition may be irreconcilable with visions for increasing
peaceful human presence embodied in today’s growing commercial and exploratory activities. Choices
among alternative futures for the
human presence in space may depend upon choices among alternative futures for life on Earth as well. The following section
reviews the potential for scenariobuilding techniques to inform these choices by providing rigorous detailed visions of future worlds that account for a wide range of
current realities and span the spectra of the most important uncertainties. The
resulting plausible, integrated visions can yield
feasible policy-relevant insights that demonstrably enable current policy making to be more farsighted.
Beyond the fruits of the exercises themselves, the longer time-frames entailed in scenario building also facilitate dialogue among diverse parties divided on nearerterm questions. The
collaboration enabled can inspire innovation and integrated analysis among diverse
experts, leading to the development of a productive ‘‘epistemic community’’25 addressing the full scope
of future human space activities. Vision development is only one aspect of long-term planning. Comprehensive knowledge generation and
strategies for policy making are also required. But vision development is currently the least well advanced. All global policy debate, including US
national security policy making, can benefit from having a fuller range of rigorous and credible
assessments of long-term prospects from which to draw.
Science fiction conflates fantasy with fact—this undermines civic engagement and
scientific literacy
Kluger 7/11/11 - senior writer for TIME (Jeffery, “ Scientific Illiteracy After the Shuttle: Are America's Smartest Days Behind Her?”
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2082213,00.html)
The problem is, the
land of the free and home of the brave is in danger of becoming — not to put too fine a point on it — the land of
the dunderhead, and my trip to Cape Canaveral, Fla., drove that point home. It's no secret that as a people, we're rapidly losing the
basic fund of knowledge we need if we're going to function well in a complex world. Just last week, another
dispiriting poll was released revealing how little some of us know about our national history. Only 58% of Americans can say with certainty what happened on July 4,
1776 — a figure that falls to a jaw-dropping 31% in the under-30 cohort. Fully 25% of Americans who do know that we seceded from some country or another to
become a nation don't know what that former parent country was. This follows on the heels of other polls showing similar numbers of folks believing that we fought
the Russians in World War II and beat them with the help of our stalwart German allies. Being historically illiterate is bad. Being scientifically illiterate, however, is
even worse — if only because having
a working knowledge of how the world operates is essential to understanding
critical areas of national policy. Type the words "global warming" and "hoax" into Google and you get an appalling 10.1 million hits. The polls are all
over the map on this one, but they show that rising numbers of Americans think climate science is fraudulent or exaggerated — up to 41% in one survey. It's not
merely opinion to say that those people are simply wrong. There may be raging debates among scientists about the precise severity, mechanisms and trajectory of
global warming, but the basic science is established and accepted, whether you want to admit it or not. Then of course there are the 18%
of Americans
who believe the sun revolves around Earth and the 28% who think the moon landings were faked. Google that last
one and you're taken to sites that profess to be forums for political debate. Political debate? About faking the moon landings? This isn't the Roman Senate, folks, it's
fantasyland. What got me thinking about all this was a stop I made after the launch at the Kennedy
Space Center Visitor Complex — a combination
museum and theme park on the Cape Canaveral grounds. The center's special feature this season is called Sci-Fi Summer 2011 — and it
delivers just what it promises. Adjacent to the rocket garden, with its full-size mock-ups of the U.S.'s most legendary boosters, is
a massive maplike display comparing the sizes of the Saturn 1B, the Saturn 5, the Mercury Redstone, the space shuttle and the
International Space Station to the Starship Enterprise. Which is fine, except that all the other spacecraft actually existed and the Enterprise, um,
didn't. The spacesuits worn by Neil Armstrong, Gordon Cooper and other astronauts are similarly commingled throughout the exhibit with uniforms worn by the
Klingons and Romulons. There is also an entire pavilion set aside for a Star Trek display. O.K., it's cranky to begrudge people a little fun and Star Trek is undeniably
cool. But do we really not get enough fun and cool elsewhere? Is
there anyone alive who thinks that what Americans need right
now are more ways to divert and amuse ourselves? Mix Cooper with the Klingons or the shuttle
Enterprise with the Starship Enterprise long enough and the kids who consume all this stuff will no
longer be able to tell them apart. Scientific literacy is part of good citizenship. And when it comes to
space science, you don't need a lick of fiction to make it fun. An engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who works in the
interplanetary program once explained why he loves his job by saying, " If you can't have a good time coming to work and building
robots to send to Mars, give it up, man." The same used to be true of merely learning about such things. It
must become true again if the U.S. is going to keep its edge.
Futurism Bad - General
Futurism is unproductive
Salam ’06(Salam, Reihan. American political commentator, columnist, and author. He is the executive
editor of "National Review" "The Future of Futurism." Slate. The Slate Group, 09 June 2006. Web.
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2006/06/the_future_of_futurism.html>.)
The problem is that we mean different things by “future.” The reality is that there are other ways of
imagining our relationship to time. Steffen outlines six 1. THE PAST. Character is history; character is
destiny. We have a way of rewriting history to suggest what the future will be. To wit: The Alamo. It has
been purposed and repurposed to be a lesson that substantiates Manifest Destiny, multi-cultural origins,
and even anti-tax rhetoric. It positions where we’re going in the past. Steffen suggests that it’s worth
knowing that there is often a huge gap between what professional historians think/believe and how
retellers of these stories reflect these stories. 2. SIMPLE PREDICTION. Most predictions are glaringly
wrong. It is important to know the difference between predictions grounded on data and articulated as
probabilities, and predictions that are simply personal opinion founded on a set of individual, qualitative
beliefs. The latter is not always wrong, but the inquirer needs to be careful about them. One huge
example: Climate Change. One side has assigned a set of probabilities, data, and created peer-reviewed
work to predict our trajectory. Based on this scientific effort, the globe is on a track toward 7 degrees
warming. There are very few predictions about what 7 degrees means because it represents such a
profound change; there is no meaningful prediction. So academics and media talk about is 4 degrees
and 2 degrees. “Business as usual” will land us at 4. But business as usual is not a fair way of dealing with
the future. The climate models accepted by the scientific community give us budgets, curves and
timelines; these are effectively predicting our future scientifically. If we want to have a more reasonable
task, we must start to lower our emissions on an individual and national level. In fact, what we do now
about carbon matters in a way that few moments have mattered. Impacts will be with us for thousands
of years. All of this is a direct read of the world’s largest peer reviewed process of prediction. This is very
real. We can look and feel despair, but Steffen believes that in fact there are many incentives aligning
for the private sector to re-think its relationship to carbon. One of the reasons why change will happen
is that the sheer size of the assets at risk from climate change, added to how much can be made from
switching to new platforms and technologies, far outweigh the fossil fuel business. Steffen maintains
that, fundamentally, there is only one question: how long will politics allow this delay to continue? 1.
PREDICTING THE PRESENT. Building on William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, this way of approaching
time suggests that we predict the future by looking at things that have already been built in the present.
(Gibson’s famous quote is some semblance of: “The Future is here; it’s not evenly distributed.”) We can
look for things in our current environs that suggest where change will take place. 1. ANTICIPATION OR
PROVOCATION. This relationship to time uses new products as provocation. Steffen put up a fakeproduct picture of “panda jerky” (lab-grown panda meat, made into jerky, and packaged like any other
FMCG). Concept cars brought to the auto shows are an example of anticipation or provocation. The TV
show “Black Mirror” is this sort of speculative science fiction; its construct is that it takes one
unintended consequence of a new technology and “blows it out,” trying to see how technology would
change the future if its taken to an extreme conclusion. Many other types of science fiction (e.g., Mad
Max) are themselves provocations, and not all of them are silly. (The Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars
Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson is one such example. Its premise: What if we tried settling Mars and the
people who settled decided to rethink society?). Provocation can become the grounds for more detailed
and thoughtful examination. 2. VISIONARY FUTURES. “Dune” is a detailed systems future using things
that aren’t possible, but an excellent vision of a different reality. These works are often about “world
building.” World building itself has become a popular cultural activity. It’s evident in role-playing games,
and the way people look at programs like “Lost”. Often these visionary futures are pure entertainment.
We can think of this as escapism being a future function of our society. We don’t necessarily believe in
what this outlines, but we are entertained.
Futurism Bad – Edelman
Embrace the death drive to allow a space for the queer
Edelman, 98 (Lee Edelman is a professor in the English Department at Tufts University, “The Future is
Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive”, Jan. 1998, date accessed 7/17/15, TAM)
Choosing to stand, as many of us do, outside the cycles of reproduction, choosing to stand, as we also
do, by the side of those living and dying each day with the complications of AIDS, we know the
deception of the societal lie that endlessly looks toward a future whose promise is always a day away.
We can tell ourselves that with patience, with work, with generous contributions to lobbying groups, or
generous participation in activist groups, or generous doses of political savvy and electoral
sophistication, the future will hold a place for us-a place at the political table that won't have to come,
as it were, at the cost of our place in the bed, or the bar, or the baths. But there are no queers in that
future as there can be no future for queers. The future itself is kid stuff, reborn each day to postpone
the encounter with the gap, the void, the emptiness, that gapes like a grave from within the lifeless
mechanism of the signifier that animates the subject by spinning the gossamer web of the social reality
within which that subject lives. If the fate of the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of
futurity, if the jouissance, the excess enjoyment, by which we are defined would destroy the other,
fetishistic, identity-confirming jouissance through which the social order congeals around the rituals of
its own reproduction, then the only oppositional status to which our queerness can properly lead us
depends on our taking seriously the place of the death drive as which we figure and insisting, against the
cult of the child and the political culture it supports, that we are not, to quote Guy Hocquenghem, " "the
signifier of what might become a new form of 'social organization' (138), that we do not intend a new
politics, a better society, a brighter future, since all of these fantasies reproduce the past, through
displacement, in the form of the future by construing futurity itself as merely a form of reproduction.
Instead we choose not to choose the child, as image of the imaginary past or as identificatory link to the
symbolic future; we would bury the subject in the tomb that waits in the hollow of the signifier and
pronounce at last the words we are condemned from the outset for having said anyway: that we are the
advocates of abortion; that the child as figure of futurity must die; that we have seen the future and it's
every bit as lethal as the past; and thus what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest
despite us, is our willingness to insist intransitively: to insist that the future stops here.
Utopianism = Passivism
Post-colonial futurism and utopianism are non-falsifiable and make it impossible to
create coalitions or enact political change – its built on a flawed foundation
Niezen, 07 (Ronald Niezen holds the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy in the
faculties of Law and of Arts, a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Law, and is a
Professor and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology., “Postcolonialism and the Utopian
Imagination”, 21 September 2007)
Postcolonial futurism has no answer to the problems and paradoxes of cultural claims and collective
strivings toward distinctiveness and selfdetermination other than to imagine a world in which they do
not exist. Recalling that postcolonialism also encourages nationalist essentialism, this means that there
are two antipathetic, mutually negating versions of postcolonial liberation: one looking toward a future
of borderless global cultural liberation, another toward a more immediate, intellectuallyinspired era of
cultural affirmation and autonomy. Postcolonial futurism commits the fundamental error, once widely
attributed to Marxism, of anticipating a global state of collective being that underestimates the
propensity toward national or minority identities based on affirmation of the rights of peoples, today
often expressed in terms of cultural distinctiveness coupled with claims of political self-determination.
But the national and universalist versions of postcolonial liberation are, at least in one sense,
complementary. The utopian imagination is able to make particular cultural allegiances seem more
palatable for global consumption, to mask the unpleasant flavours of indigenophilism and small-scale
identity politics with saccharine promises of unconditional liberation from the levelling powers of
nation-states. It is able to reconfigure particular cultural aspirations in a way that removes from view
their tensions, contradictions and proclivities to intolerance, while leaving intact their most compelling
promises of inclusion, spiritual awareness, intimacy and affirmation. This brings us to the most
important question that follows from the recent resurgence of utopian visions: what is wrong with
hope? Why should we deny dreamers the consolation of their fantasies? Is not the capacity to imagine a
different and better world the most important component of our ability to change the world for the
better? And does it POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE UTOPIAN IMAGINATION 727 Downloaded by [] at
07:10 18 July 2015 not follow that denying the possibility of imagining a radically different future might
result in a crippling of the capacities to criticize present institutional injustices and dysfunctions and to
create better institutions and forms of governance? There is a relatively simple answer to this: hope for
the future goes astray whenever it is built upon a mistaken understanding of present conditions; and
there is no definitive way to correct its errors. The utopian imagination is by its very nature free to
elaborate radically different-from-the-present visions of a yet-to-be-realized society, founded on
misleading, irrational understandings of the present circumstances or propensities of human social life.
There is a sense in which utopianism, when tolerated as a form of intellectual discourse, can wreak
havoc on recognized forms of critical etiquette. How might one, as a critic, point conclusively to a
misrepresentation of the collective future? One of the appeals of utopianism is its immunity from
falsification. Certain dreams are inherently adverse to the stimulants of facts, practicalities and
openness to revision. The postcolonial utopian imagination is especially fraught with dilemmas and
improbabilities. Although being largely premised on postmodernism’s rejection of ‘grand narratives’,
and although expressing its vision of the future as one of permissiveness and cultural freedom, it
indirectly possesses its own civilizing agenda to which all others are expected to conform. Insofar as it
does articulate a specific vision of future change, it anticipates the dismantling of existing structures of
nation-states and institutions of global governance, while maintaining a naı¨ve faith in the emergence,
out of conditions of revolutionary change and insecurity, of a free-flowing global cultural ecumene. Does
this mean that there is no form of utopian imagination applicable to conditions of planetary integration,
one that can offer realizable inspiration without engaging in obscurantism, cultural fundamentalism or
civilizing agendas? My perspective suggests that postcolonial idealism makes it almost impossible to
learn from the actual disorderly processes of negotiating and overcoming differences. But perhaps it is
yet possible to construct a vision of the future that acknowledges the untidiness and disarray of human
identities. Whatever other qualities it might have, such futurism would begin with the following
premise: we have more to learn from those who have struggled through conflict, compromise and
reconciliation to achieve a condition of peace than from those who are content to imagine away the
obstacles to an otherwise unachievable ideal.
Iconoclastic and Blueprint Utopianism Worthless.
Jacoby 5 (Jacoby, Russell. is a professor of history at the University of California Los Angeles an author,
and critic of academic culture. Preface. Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age.
New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Ix. Print. Preface xv)
I turn instead to the iconoclastic utopians, those who dreamt of a superior society but who declined to
give its precise measurements. In the original sense and for the original reasons, they were iconoclasts;
they were protesters and breakers of images. Explicitly or implicitly they observed the biblical
prohibition on graven images of the deity. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. . . . Thou
–
entailed no disrespect of God. On the contrary: it honored Him by refusing to circumscribe Him. In the
same way that God could not be depicted for the Jews, the future could not be described for the
iconoclastic utopians; it could only be approached through hints and parables. One could “hear” the
ffers no
concrete details about the future. He invokes a utopian spirit purely by his reflections on music, poetry,
and literature. I survey the roots and contours of such iconoclastic utopianism—iconoclastic inasmuch as
it eschews blueprints and utopian inasmuch as it evokes a future “bliss of the fully contented.”11 The
blueprint utopians have attracted the lion’s share of attention—both scholarly and popular. They
describe utopias in vivid colors; their proposals can be studied and embraced or rejected. From Thomas
More to Edward Bellamy, their utopias took the form of stories in which travelers report of their
adventures from an unknown future or land. They offered characters, events, and particulars. Bellamy’s
Looking Backward, a classic of blueprint utopianism, commences with a straightforward Preface xv
JACOBY FM 1/24/05 9:29 PM Page xv narrative. “I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year
the iconoclastic utopians offer little concrete to grab onto; they provide neither tales
nor pictures of the morrow. Next to the blueprinters they appear almost as ineffable as they actually
are. They vanish into the margins of utopianism. Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia opens mysteriously. “I am. We
are. That is enough. Now we have to begin.” In regard to the future the iconoclasts were ascetic, but
they were not ascetics. This point must be underlined inasmuch as iconoclasm sometimes suggests a
severe and puritanical temper. If anything, it is a longing for luxe and sensuousness that defines the
iconoclastic utopian, not a cold purity. In an image-obsessed society such as our own, I suggest that the
traditional blueprint utopianism may be exhausted and the iconoclastic utopianism indispensable. The
iconoclastic utopians resist the modern seduction of images. Pictures and graphics are not new, of
course, but their ubiquity is. A curtain of images surrounds us from morning till night and from
childhood to old age. The word—both written and oral—seems to retreat in the wake of these images.
“Everything,” writes the theologian Jacques Ellul in his defense of modern iconoclasm, The Humiliation
of the Word, “is subordinated to visualization, and nothing has meaning outside it.” We are living in an
“age of extreme visualization.”12
Utopianism papers over the most crucial aspects of creating a new future – fully
rendered political utopias are not useful roadmaps to change
Niezen, 07 (Ronald Niezen holds the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy in the
faculties of Law and of Arts, a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Law, and is a
Professor and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology., “Postcolonialism and the Utopian
Imagination”, 21 September 2007)
Attempting to define the concept of utopia introduces the multi-dimensional inconvenience of a rich
literature in which there are paradigmatic historical transformations leading up to a confusion of
meanings in the present. In the most general terms possible, utopianism is a literary form that describes
the essential features of an ideal future society. The modern utopian tradition therefore begins with the
rise of lay literacy and the development (or rediscovery) of a secular, humanistic, practical approach to
human perfectibility. The term utopian imagination does not necessarily mean the disposition toward
elaboration of fully formed visions of humanity’s future. It also refers to more subtly rendered dreams of
the future, based on assumptions of human perfectibility, usually accompanied by expectations of their
actualization. It describes a future world that has already gone through revolutionary transformation,
without the nature of that revolution (particularly its traumas) being fully elaborated. If there is a
common logic to the many different dreams of utopia, it can be found simply in the expectation of
better things tomorrow, projecting into the indeterminate future the amelioration of present
deficiencies, a kind of wish fulfilment for humanity. The utopian imagination does not just depict
alternative worlds, but worlds that somehow transcend the conflicts and dysfunctions of lived reality.
What are the particular forms of utopian imagination that might find root in the current intellectual
terrain? This question is complicated by the fact that until fairly recently there was a general consensus
among social theorists that utopian thinking had dramatically declined, having been suppressed in one
way or another by conditions of late modernity. Manuel and Manuel’s epic survey of Western utopian
thought, for example, concludes with the observation that, unlike previous ages in which there was a
rich imaginary of ingenious and often bizarre alternatives to the state, family, sexual mores, private
property, and so on, there was in the late twentieth century a ‘discrepancy between the piling up of
technological and scientific instrumentalities for making all things possible, and the pitiable poverty of
goals’.5 Only two decades ago Habermas argued that the West’s successful projects of social democracy
and the welfare state had taken much of the allure out of utopian projects, mainly by creating a politicoeconomic order that forbade any radically different alternative, placing limits on dissent and particularly
on radical designs for a better future.6 Views may have differed on the causes of the steep decline in
utopianism in late modernity—the dampening effect of the spectacular failure of several major forms of
political imperialism driven by ideological futurism, notably fascism and Soviet communism, has been
the most common and straightforward explanation—and they may have differed on the significance
that should be attached to the decline, ranging from 716 ISRAEL AFFAIRS Downloaded by [] at 07:10 18
July 2015 nostalgic regret to celebration of an end to a politically dangerous form of irrationalism, but
until very recently there was broad consensus surrounding the view that utopian projects came quietly
to an end some time during the post-World War II period of the twentieth century. Part of the reason
for this perception of decline has been an undue emphasis on fully rendered political utopias with less
consideration given to alternative, comparatively formless visions of the future. But just because the
modernist visions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are now largely discredited does not
mean that the propensity to envision an ideal future, particularly in times of accelerated global change,
has diminished. We must be alert to the possibility that it has simply taken new forms, not just those
familiar ideas that reject the dystopias of uncontrolled science and global tyranny, but more often
creative varieties of ambitious optimism. Today, universal ideals of liberation seem to be keeping pace
with new perspectives on globalization, and we should expect that out of the promise and insecurities of
a rapidly integrating world there would again emerge hopeful visions of the human future.
Utopianism = Violence
Utopianism paves the way to totalitarianism and endless
Jacoby 2005
(Jacoby, Russell. professor of history at the University of California Los Angeles an author, and critic of
academic culture Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age. New York: Columbia UP,
2005. Print. Page 12-13)
The common wisdom that utopias inexorably lead to dystopias not only derives from texts, it appeals to
history to make its case. New words help make the argument. Like “dystopia,” the term “genocide”
belongs to the twentieth century. Inevitably these new terms seem related; they seem to address
kindred experiences. Raphael Lemkin, a Polishold practice in its modern development”—the annihilation of a national or ethnic group. He believed the
Nazi practices occasioned a new word.43 While Lemkin worked tirelessly to spread the news about
genocide—with few rewards44—he did not associate it with either utopia or dystopia.45 Yet scholarly
and conventional opinion today consistently links genocide and utopia and bills the blood bath of the
twentieth century to “utopians” such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mao
—its last chapter is titled “The Perverse Logic of
Utopia”—scholars have thrown communism, Nazism, and utopia into one tub. Prestigious savants like
Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper have persuasively argued that utopia leads to totalitarianism and mass
murder. “We must beware of Utopia,” wrote Ralf Dahrendorf. “Whoever sets out to implement Utopian
plans will in the first instance have to wipe clean the canvas, on which the real world is painted. This is a
brutal process of destruction;” it leads to hell on earth.46 To question this approach requires asking
what utopias are actually about—and why, for instance, Nazism should not be deemed a utopian
enterprise. Even the vaguest description of utopia as a society inspired by notions of happiness,
fraternity, and plenty would apparently exclude Nazism with its notion of Ayrans dominating inferiors in
a Thousand Year Reic
Thomas More’s Utopia and Hitler’s Mein Kampf? Virtually nothing.47
Utopianism is Tyranny disguised as ideology.
Levin ’12 (Levin, Mark R. Lawyer, worked in the administration of President Ronald Reagan and was a
chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese. Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America. New York:
Threshold Editions, 2012. Print. Page 5.)
Tyranny, broadly define, is the use of power to dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political
utopianism is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even paradisiacal governing ideology. There are, of course,
unlimited utopian constructs, for the mind is capable of infinite fantasies. But there are common
themes. The fantasies take the form of grand social plans or experiments, the impracticability and impossibility of
which, in small ways and large, lead to the individuals subjugation. Karl Popper, a philosopher who eloquently deconstructed the
false assumption and scientific utopianism, arguing it is totalitarian in form and substance, observed that
"[a]ny social science which does not teach the impossibility of rational social construction is entirely
blind to the most important facts of social life, and must overlook the only social laws of real validity and
of real importance. Social sciences seeking to provide a background for social engineering cannot, therefore, be true descriptions of
social facts. They are impossible in themselves. Popper argued that unable to make detailed or precise sociological
predictions, long-term forecasts it considers worth pursuing. (Although Popper differentiated between "piecemeal social engineering" and
"utopian social engineering," it is an ahistorical, or at least a leap of faith, to suggest that one unleashed, the social engineers will not become
addicted to their power; and Popper never could enunciate a practical solution.)
Utopianism is pseudo-science and reasoning, stripping individuals of their personal
Identity and making them a subject of whomever is in charge.
Levin 12 (Levin, Mark R. Lawyer, worked in the administration of President Ronald Reagan and was a
chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese. Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America. New York:
Threshold Editions, 2012. Print. Page 5.)
Utopianism substitute’s glorious predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science, and
reason, while laying claim to them all. Yet there is nothing new in deception disguised as hope and
nothing original in abstraction framed as progress. A heavenly society is said to be within reach if only
the individual surrenders more of his liberty and being for the general good, meaning the good as prescribed by the
state. If he refuses, he will be tormented and ultimately coerced into compliance, for conformity is
essential. Indeed, nothing good can come of self-interest, which is condemned as morally indefensible and empty. Through
persuasion, deceit, and coercion, the individual must be stripped of his identity and subordinated to the
state. He must abandon his own ambitions of the state. His first duty must be to the state - not family, community, and
faith, all of which challenge the authority of the state. Once dispirited, the individual can be molded by
the state with endless social experiments and lifestyles calibrations.
Utopianism is a way to try to shape individuals and divide them creating more
violence and recreating the same oppressive society
Levin ’12 (Levin, Mark R. Lawyer, worked in the administration of President Ronald Reagan and was a
chief of staff for Attorney General Edwin Meese. Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America. New York:
Threshold Editions, 2012. Print. Page 7.)
Utopianism also attempts to shape and dominate the individual by doing two things at once: it strips the
individual of his uniqueness, making him indistinguishable from the multitudes that form what is
commonly referred to as "the masses," but it simultaneously assigns him a group identity based on race,
ethnicity, age, gender, income, etc., to highlight differences within the masses. It then exacerbates old
rivalries and disputes or it incites new ones. This way it can speak to the well-being of "the people" as a whole
while dividing them against themselves, thereby stampeding them in once direction or another as necessary
to collapse the existing society or rule over the new one.
‘Afro’ K
Their use of the pre-fix ‘afro’ to avoid a wider discussion of futurism begs the question
of why they called their args futurist in the first instance – it only creates racial
dissonance that causes their argument to become incoherent
Tshepo Mahasha, black philosopher and filmmaker, 13 – Phetogo, “Art Criticism: is the prefix
‘Afro-’ (as in "Afro-futurism") arresting our imagination and manifesto salesmanship?” July 14,
http://www.thisisafrica.me/visual-arts/detail/19943/art-criticism-is-the-prefix-afro-as-in-afro-futurismarresting-our-imagination-and-manifesto-salesmanship.
A prefix modifies a word/statement. The prefix ‘Afro-’ as used in art criticism modifies existing
manifestos. In my opinion, it does not promote the generation of wholly new ideas and manifestos, but
only the modification of the creativity of others. The prefix ‘afro-’ has acquired a parasitic character,
leeching off manifestos: Afro-Surrealism, Afro-Punk, Afro-Futurism and Afro-etc. I think it has the
capacity to arrest African imagination, so that the African imagination only follows other manifestos,
only to attach itself to them and never coming up with an original of its own. I wouldn’t have a problem
with it because creativity is about modifying elements that are already there to create something new,
but given what’s out there at this point I have an objection. Just a quick internet search reveals that the
movie The Matrix is listed as Afro-futurism on some websites. It can go to the point where Afro-futurism
can only be about a person of colour in a future space, when in fact for a project like ‘The Matrix’, the
faces and races are interchangeable, it would still be what it is without black people in it. I read an AfroSurrealist manifesto written by D. Scot Miller and it had me asking a few questions. In this manifesto,
Miller outlines what isn’t Afro-Surrealism. He writes, “Afro-Surrealism is not surrealism.” “…Leopold
Senghor, poet, first president of Senegal, and African Surrealist, made this distinction: ‘European
Surrealism is empirical. African Surrealism is mystical and metaphorical.’” And then he says of AfroSurrealism, “[it] presupposes that beyond this visible world, there is an invisible world striving to
manifest, and it is our job to uncover it.” And he goes on to say, “Afro-Surrealists restore the cult of the
past. We revisit old ways with new eyes. We appropriate 19th century slavery symbols, like Kara Walker,
and 18th century colonial ones, like Yinka Shonibare. We re-introduce ‘madness’ as visitations from the
gods, and acknowledge the possibility of magic. We take up the obsessions of the ancients and kindle
the dis-ease, clearing the murk of the collective unconsciousness as it manifests in these dreams called
culture” Miller claims that Afro-Surrealism is NOT Surrealism. And then he goes on to define something
that’s different from ‘Surrealism’ and calls it ‘Afro-Surreal’. My question when I read Miller’s Manifesto
was why call it Afro-Surrealism if it is not Surrealism? Why prefix the word Surrealism with ‘Afro-’? Most
importantly, since it is so different from surrealism, why not call it something entirely new? Miller
considers The Neptunes early music Afro-futurist. Would that same music if it was produced by a person
of a different race still be considered Afro-futurist? What made it fundamentally Afro-futurist except for
race?
Their use of ‘afro’ as a signifier to modify and distinguish their argument from other
forms of criticism must be rejected – it limits imaginative possibilities and
homogenizes experience
Tshepo Mahasha, black philosopher and filmmaker, 13 – Phetogo, “Art Criticism: is the prefix
‘Afro-’ (as in "Afro-futurism") arresting our imagination and manifesto salesmanship?” July 14,
http://www.thisisafrica.me/visual-arts/detail/19943/art-criticism-is-the-prefix-afro-as-in-afro-futurismarresting-our-imagination-and-manifesto-salesmanship.
As I have explored my views, I concluded: a) The use of the prefix ‘afro-’ needs to be minimized for the
sake of freeing African imagination. Since I can’t foresee and cover the entire use of the prefix, I am
referring to the points that I’ve covered in this essay in relation to art-criticism. I see it as a necessity for
the sake of encouraging imagination to grow, and not be restricted to – or attached to - other preexisting manifestos and make it harder for ourselves to come up with something unique. Minimizing the
‘afro’ prefix would promote fresh thinking. Afro-manifestos have a “leeching” tinge to them. They are
forms of reacting to things instead of all out attempt at ‘originality’ - Black people reacting to other
manifestos: Punk (Afro-Punk), Surrealism (Afro-Surrealism) etc. I haven’t even taken into account that
Afro-futurism may be a misnomer, when looked at with the “Futurism” manifesto. b) Art critics need to
be bold enough to give things stand-alone names. Everything is about encouraging invention. ‘High-life’
music is highlife. The implication being that any person of any descent can do Highlife music; can the
same be easily said for any of the ‘Afro-’ prefixed semi-manifestos? Or does it pivot on race? Can a
Japanese person do ‘Afro-punk’ and if so, would it require another prefix to be Japanese-Afro-Punk? I
have difficulty answering these questions. I don’t think I’m way off in imagining the South American
manifesto of ‘Magic Realism’ would be called ‘Afro-something’ if it was being done by people of African
descent. We need to encourage new names and manifestos. c) The African Renaissance is about
creating a floor in a much larger context, one that aims for African people to be free amongst other free
people. It’s about freeing the African from the “struggle for reason” by collecting and restoring artefacts,
and projecting these into the future so that this base will always be available to future generations. It is
either within the context of ultimate freedom (Free to explore and create new black African identities,
new Manifestos) and/or the offsetting of “the struggle for reason” that cultural production takes place
and should be evaluated in. It must be recognized that ‘some’ current African Art cannot be
contextualized without mention of the Renaissance and its excavations. Even as I write this I have
doubts that of course I may be biased. It took a long time to finish this essay and to publish it. I wouldn’t
like to speak only for myself, I’d like to believe that there must be others who feel the same as I do. I
don’t, for a second, doubt the force of my imagination. My mind may change in time about the contents
of this essay but at this point I am convinced.
Cap Links
Afro-futurism is a form of anti-historicism which abandons materialism in favor of
textual and rhetorical determinations of reality. Historical disengagement abdicates
power and guarantees the continuation of a white capital regime.
Foster ’97 (John Bellamy, Department of Sociology at Oregon, “In Defense of History, In Defense of
History, ed. Foster & Wood)
The weaknesses of postmodernism-from an emancipatory perspective- thus far overshadow its
strengths. Missing from Foucault's analysis, like that of postmodernism generally, is any conception of a counter-order
to the disciplinary orders described. In the more extreme case of "textual postmodernists"-those
postmodernist thinkers like Derrida, as distinct from Foucault, who deny any reality outside the text-the political and
historical weaknesses from a left perspective are even more glaring. By undermining the very
concept of history-in any meaningful sense beyond mere story-telling-such theorists have robbed
critical analysis of what has always been its most indispensable tool.'8 The denial within
postmodernist theory of the validity of historical cri- tique covers up what is really at issue: the denial
of the historical critique of capitalism, leading to a convergence between left thought infected by Nietzsche and the
dominant liberal "end of history" conception. The danger of such ahistorical or anti-historical views, as E.P. Thompson
observed, is that one loses sight not of "reason in history" in some abstract sense, but rather of "the
reasons of power and the reasons of money."9 Historical materialism at its best provides a way out of this dilemma. This is
not to ignore the fact that Marxism-which has sometimes given rise to its own crude interpretations and historical travesties, as in the case
of Stalinism-has frequently been identified with the kind of "totalizations" and "essentialisms" that postmodernist theorists have singled
out. As Thompson pointed out in a 1977 essay on Christopher Caudwell, Marxism has sometimes relied on " `essentialist' tricks of mind,"
the "tendency to intellectualize the social process"-"the rapid delineation of the deep proc- ess of a whole epoch." These are things that
to abandon theory and historical explanation
entirely in order to avoid "essentialism" and "foun- dationalism" is a bit like throwing out the baby in
order to keep the bathwater clean. Marx himself provided another model, actively opposing theory (even "Marxist" theory)
the historian (and social scientists in general) should guard against. But
that purported to be "suprahistorical." In his Theses on Feuerbach, he presented what still ranks as the most thorough- going critique of
what he called the "essentialist" conception of human beings and nature. Indeed, historical materialism has long engaged in its own selfcritique, precisely in order to expel the kinds of "essentialisms," "positivisms," and "structuralisms" that have intruded on the philosophy of
praxis itself-a self-critique that has produced the insights of theorists like Gramsci, Sartre, Thompson, and Raymond Williams.20 These
thinkers distanced themselves from the positivistic "official Marx- ism" that grew out of the Second International and later turned into a
caricature of itself in the form of Stalinism. Yet they held firm to the critique of capitalism and their commitment to the struggles of the
oppressed. Moreover, these
particular examples tell us that if what has sometimes been called "the
postmodern agenda"-consisting of issues like identity, culture, and language-is to be addressed at all,
this can only be accomplished within a historical context. And here one might openly wonder with Foucault "what
difference there could ultimately be between being a historian and being a Marxist." When placed within a more holistic historical
materialist context-ani- mated by the concept of praxis-the problems raised by postmodernism look entirely different. As David McNally
says, "Language is not a prison- house, but a site of struggle." What the contributions in this volume have in common is the insistence that
issues like language, culture, nationality, race, gender, the environment, revolution, and history itself are only effec- tively analyzed within
a context that is simultaneously historical in charac- ter, materialist (in the sense of focusing on concrete practices), and revolutionary.
Such analyses do not abandon the hope of transcending capitalism, nor of the notion of human progress as a possible outcome of historical
strug- gles. It is said that Nicholas I, Czar of Russia, issued an order banning the word "progress." Today we no longer believe, in a
nineteenth century sense, in automatic human progress, embodying some definite content-the idea that the Czar found so threatening.
But this does not mean, as the philoso- pher Michael Oakeshott contended with respect to political activity in the 1950s, that we "sail a
boundless and bottomless sea" that has "neither starting-point nor appointed direction" and that our only task is "to keep afloat on an
even keel." History-as centuries of struggle and indeed pro- gress suggest-is more meaningful than that. To
abandon altogether
the concept of progress, in the more general sense of the possibility of progres- sive human
emancipation, would only be to submit to the wishes of the powers that be. Such political
disengagement by intellectuals on the left in the present epoch could only mean one thing: the total
obeisance to capital.21 The irony of post-modernism is that while purporting to have transcended
modernity, it abandons from the start all hope of transcending capitalism itself and entering a post-capitalist
era. Postmodernist theory is therefore easily absorbed within the dominant cultural frame and has even
given rise recently to texts such as Postmodern Marketing, which attempts to utilize the insights of thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard,
and Baudillard to market goods within a capitalist economy. Perhaps this
will be the final destiny of postmodernist
theory-its absorption by the vast marketing apparatus of the capitalist economy, adding irony and
color to a commercial order that must constantly find new ways to insinuate itself into the every- day
lives of the population. Meanwhile, historical materialism will remain the necessary intellectual
ground for all those who seek, not to revel in the "carnival" of capitalist productive and market
relations, but to transcend them.22
Afrofuturism operates within the assumptions of capitalism, making liberation
impossible.
Greer 09 (Olivia J. Greer, MA in Performance Studies from NYU, author and contributor to HuffPo, Alternet, “Yes We Can: (President)
Barack Obama and Afrofuturism,” published in Anamesa
http://www.nyu.edu/pubs/anamesa/archive/fall_2009_intersections/yes_we_can_president_barack_obama_and_afrofuturism.pdf)
Multiculturalism: Yes You Can In the 1993 article in which Dery
coined the term Afrofuturism, he suggested to author Samuel
urban blacks responsible for vital art forms such as hip-hop live in what might be called ‘beeper
culture,’ where miniatured digital technology is everywhere at hand.”19 Dery posits that technology had become
omnipresent—in the United States at least—and was available now even to those members of the populace to
whom access to societal advances had generally been denied. Delany took issue with Dery’s assessment,
responding: I can detect the possibility of a naïve assumption that the redistribution of commodities is
somehow congruent with the redistribution of wealth—which it is not. Just as seriously, I can detect an
assumption that the distribution of commodities is at one with access to the formation of those
commodities and the commodity system… When one talks about “black youth culture as a technological culture,” one
has to specify that it’s a technological culture that’s almost entirely on the receiving end of a river of “stuff,” in which
the young consumers have nowhere near what we might call equitable input.20 (emphasis in original) Delany’s critique of
consumerism disguised as participation and power is at the root of Žižek’s assertion in 1997 that the “ideology of cyberspace
capitalism” obliterates individuality and the “particularity of social position.” For Žižek, “cyberspace
capitalism” obfuscates a crucial reality that the market— and, as he notes, the World Wide Web—relies on power
relations, political decisions, and institutional conditions that necessarily remove ordinary people from
proximity to power, but do so by perpetuating a fantasy of “equitable input,” to use Delany’s words. 21 “Yes We Can”
operates within the fantasy of equitable input. It perpetuates a vision of solidarity and togetherness, but it is created and
disseminated within a system in which will.i.am and his celebrity participants hold a rarified position. They are privileged
because they have access to Delany’s “equitable input;” they are participants in the production of technology, of the
Delany that “the young
market. As Ricardo Dominguez writes in Electronic Disturbance, “the celebrity acts as empirical proof positive that electronic appearance is but
a record of the natural world.”22 However, without proximity, “the many” can never verify the truth of the celebrity’s manifestation. It is for
this very reason that Bould
cautions against viewing Afrofuturism as a pure mode of resistance. Cultural
production operates increasingly within a capitalist frame that, despite best intentions, can be
precipitous to navigate. Žižek, like Delany and Bould, argues against the idea that subversion could exist within
the structures of the market. Against the image, all-present in cultural criticism, of a radical subversive discourse or practice
“censored” by the Power, one is even tempted to claim that today, more than ever, the mechanism of censorship
intervenes predominantly to enhance the efficiency of the power discourse itself…The gesture of selfcensorship is co-substantial with the exercise of power.23 For Žižek, the mechanism of censorship (which upholds
existing power structures) is multiculturalism, which he conceives as a destructive force born out of capitalism,
operating from figures of capital (“the multiculturalist”) outwards. The multiculturalist “respects” (in Žižek’s own scare
quotes) the identity of the Other, while maintaining the distance of a “privileged universal position,” and thus asserting
his own superiority. In other words, multiculturalism
is an invention of capitalism that encourages the separation
of cultural differences as a means to uphold the homogeneity of capitalist systems. Since, as we might put it,
everybody silently accepts that capitalism is here to stay—critical energy has found a substitute outlet in
fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world-system intact.
So we are fighting our pc battles for the rights of ethnic minorities, of gays and lesbians, of different lifestyles, and so on,
while capitalism pursues its triumphant march—and today’s cultural theory, in the guise of “cultural studies,” is doing the
ultimate service to the unrestrained development of capitalism by actively participating in the ideological effort to render its massive presence
invisible.24 will.i.am’s “Yes We Can”—with its development out of the most commercial arms of the entertainment industry, its dependence on
celebrity, and its strained reach toward multiraciality—raises important questions about the silent acceptance of systems of oppression. The
video’s vision of multicultural unity, while not presenting a clear power source, operates entirely within the capitalist homogeneity Žižek
outlines. Its beautiful representatives of diversity mask the capitalist ideology behind it, which goes unquestioned by anyone in the video, or by
Obama himself. Bould cites Žižek’s critique, stating that science
fiction’s “color-blind future is multiculturalist in this way.”25
For Bould, “Afrofuturism tends towards the typical cyberpunk acceptance of capitalism as an
unquestionable universe and working for the assimilation of certain currently marginalized peoples into
a global system that might, at best, tolerate some relatively minor (although not unimportant) reforms, but
within which the many will still have to poach, pilfer, and hide to survive.”26 The lack of attention to “the many”
who will continue to suffer under capitalism, even if a certain disrupted contemporary appearance of racism also characterizes will.i.am’s video.
“Yes We Can” uses the ghosting of the past, with traces of Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy—images
of liberation not
achieved, but deferred—to push for a nostalgic hope. But hope for what: the present, the future, or even the past? The sections of
Obama’s speech that will.i.am chooses to highlight are those that harken back to another time. “A king who took us to the mountaintop”
directly conjures up images of the civil rights movement, but also harkens back to the Bible. In other parts of his full speech, Obama spoke to
the challenges of the present; but these sections are not part of the video.27 The words are moving, especially when redeployed over a
soundtrack of many voices, but by the end when the word “hope” turns to “vote” what is left is a sense of what DeClue calls “survival
by
futurity.”28 This begs the question of whether mere survival is—or should be—the end goal, or whether a
more radical break for future freedom is needed. Survival, Žižek might argue, is multiculturalism. will.i.am probably
does not imagine “Yes We Can” adhering to Žižek’s model of multicultural censorship. Yet, “Yes We Can” is part of what Henry Jenkins describes
as “new participatory culture,” which is forming at the intersections of new tools and technologies that “enable consumers to archive,
annotate, appropriate and recirculate media content,” the promotion of “do-it-yourself (DIY) media production,” and the interaction of
multiple forms of media.29 Jenkins writes that these trends seem to encourage active modes of spectatorship, in which audiences gain power
and autonomy in a “new knowledge culture.” However, Jenkins notes—recalling Žižek—“it is wrong to assume that we are somehow being
liberated through improved media technologies.”30 We are more often being given the idea that we are being liberated, what Néstor García
Canclini calls the “illusion of participation.”31 As Žižek and Bould remind us,
the idea of liberation may very well be a trap.
Conclusion The
purpose of this study has not been to dislocate will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video and Obama’s presidential campaign and
caution, as Bould does from within the field, against the dangerous
assumption that Afrofuturism—or any artistic movement, for that matter—is synonymous with cultural or political
resistance. DeClue’s conceptualization of Obama as Afrofuturist has a relationship with Victor Turner’s concept of an intercultural
victory from the field of Afrofuturism. It is rather to
transmission of experience that consists of a “living through,” a “thinking back,” and a “willing or wishing forward.”32 While hypothetically this
transmission might move a society forward progressively, that it will do so is not a forgone conclusion. Particularly in electoral politics, a
symbolic system rife with shared rhetoric, poll numbers, familiar gestures, and inscribed public spaces (both offline and online) allow for the
equal possibility of either reenacting our political reality and stabilizing the status quo, or of finding ways to resist. Even since the election of
Barack Obama, the United States (and arguably the rest of the world) faces a discouraging political climate in which capitalism is an
unchallenged omnipresence, even as it collapses before our eyes. Under such circumstances, it is tempting to find signs of resistance and
change in our cultural and political production. Certainly these signs can be found readily, and are heartening and galvanizing. It is important
though that we “stay awake,” as Octavia Butler would have us do, and be wary of simple answers. 33 Artistic
production,
technological advance, and future visioning will not take us the whole way to political transformation. This is a
position that Žižek complicates: “Even when the change is not substantial but a mere semblance of a new beginning, the very fact that a
situation is perceived by the majority of the population as a ‘new beginning’ opens up the space for important ideological and political
rearticulations.”34 “Yes We Can” shows that the navigation between status quo and resistance is problematic; outcomes
can be
characterized not as good or bad, positive or negative, but more in terms of what they open up. Obama—
and the cultural production that has developed with him—has certainly opened up an enormous space for possibility. But if that space is
filled with a status quo that is called a new beginning, we may find ourselves in a multicultural morass of
pretty pictures that ask only for complacency.
Cap or Wilderson Link
If Wilderson:
Afrofuturism relies on a grammar of futurity which assumes a chronopolitical
landscape in which blackness has agency. This naïve simulation allows whiteness to
predetermine and maintain predictable market futures.
If Cap:
The future is pre-determined by Capitalism’s drive to create predictable markets.
Afrofuturism engages in product placement through a non-neutral science fiction
which creates self-fulfilling demand for new technologies.
Eshun 2003 (Kodwo Eshun, Writer/Filmaker, MA in English, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” pubished
in The New Centennial Review
http://muse.jhu.edu.go.libproxy.wakehealth.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v003/3.2eshun.html)
For African artists, there were good reasons for disenchantment with futurism . When Nkrumah was
deposed in Ghana in 1966, it signalled the collapse of the first attempt to build the USAF. The combination of colonial
revenge and popular discontent created sustained hostility towards the planned utopias of African
socialism. For the rest of the century, African intellectuals adopted variations of the position that Homi Bhabha (1992) [End Page 288] termed
"melancholia in revolt." This
fatigue with futurity carried through to Black Atlantic cultural activists,
who, little by little, ceased to participate in the process of building futures. Imagine the archaeologists as
they use their emulators to scroll through the fragile files. In their time, it is a commonplace that the future is a chronopolitical terrain, a terrain
as hostile and as treacherous as the past. As the archaeologists patiently sift the twenty-first-century archives, they are amazed by the impact
this realization had on these forgotten beings. They are touched by the seriousness of those founding mothers and fathers of Afrofuturism, by
the responsibility they showed towards the not-yet, towards becoming. Control through Prediction Fast forward to the early twenty-first
century. A cultural moment when digitopian futures are routinely invoked to hide the present
in all its unhappiness. In this context, inquiry into production of futures becomes fundamental, rather than trivial. The field of
Afrofuturism does not seek to deny the tradition of countermemory. Rather, it aims to extend that tradition
by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective. It is clear that
power now operates predictively as much as retrospectively. Capital continues to function
through the dissimulation of the imperial archive, as it has done throughout the last century. Today, however,
power also functions through the envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable futures. In
the colonial era of the early to middle twentieth century, avant-gardists from Walter Benjamin to Frantz Fanon revolted in the
name of the future against a power structure that relied on control and representation of the
historical archive. Today, the situation is reversed. The powerful employ futurists and draw
power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the
past. The present moment is stretching, slipping for some into yesterday, reaching for others
into tomorrow. [End Page 289] SF Capital Power now deploys a mode the critic Mark Fisher (2000) calls SF (science
fiction) capital. SF capital is the synergy, the positive feedback between future-oriented media and
capital. The alliance between cybernetic futurism and "New Economy" theories argues that
information is a direct generator of economic value. Information about the future therefore
circulates as an increasingly important commodity. It exists in mathematical formalizations such
as computer simulations, economic projections, weather reports, futures trading, think-tank
reports, consultancy papers—and through informal descriptions such as science-fiction cinema,
science-fiction novels, sonic fictions, religious prophecy, and venture capital. Bridging the two are formal-informal
hybrids, such as the global scenarios of the professional market futurist. Looking back at the media
generated by the computer boom of the 1990s, it is clear that the effect of the futures industry—defined here as the
intersecting industries of technoscience, fictional media, technological projection, and market prediction—has been to fuel the
desire for a technology boom. Given this context, it would be naïve to understand science fiction,
located within the expanded field of the futures industry, as merely prediction into the far future, or as a utopian
project for imagining alternative social realities. Science fiction might better be understood, in Samuel R. Delany's
statement, as offering "a significant distortion of the present" (Last Angel of History 1995). To be more precise, science fiction is neither
forward-looking nor utopian. Rather, in William Gibson's phrase, science fiction is a means through which to preprogram the present (cited in
Eshun 1998). Looking back at the genre, it becomes apparent that science
fiction was never concerned with the
future, but rather with engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming
present. Hollywood's 1990s love for sci-tech fictions, from The Truman Show to The Matrix, from Men in Black to Minority Report,
can therefore be seen as product-placed visions of the reality-producing power of computer networks, which in turn
contribute to an explosion in the technologies they hymn. As New Economy ideas take hold,
virtual futures generate capital. A subtle oscillation between prediction and control is being
engineered in [End Page 290] which successful or powerful descriptions of the future have an
increasing ability to draw us towards them, to command us to make them flesh. The Futures Industry
Science fiction is now a research and development department within a futures industry that
dreams of the prediction and control of tomorrow. Corporate business seeks to manage the
unknown through decisions based on scenarios, while civil society responds to future shock through habits
formatted by science fiction. Science fiction operates through the power of falsification, the
drive to rewrite reality, and the will to deny plausibility, while the scenario operates through
the control and prediction of plausible alternative tomorrows. Both the science-fiction movie and the scenario
are examples of cybernetic futurism that talks of things that haven't happened yet in the past tense. In this case, futurism has little to do with
the Italian and Russian avant-gardes; rather, these approaches seek to model variation over time by oscillating between anticipation and
determinism. Imagine the All-African Archaeological Program sweeping the site with their chronometers. Again and again, they sift the ashes.
Imagine the readouts on their portables, indicators pointing to the dangerously high levels of hostile projections. This area shows extreme
density of dystopic forecasting, levels that, if accurate, would have rendered the archaeologists' own existence impossible. The AAAP knows
better: such statistical delirium reveals the fervid wish dreams of the host market. Market Dystopia If global scenarios are descriptions that are
primarily concerned with making futures safe for the market, then Afrofuturism's
first priority is to recognize that
Africa increasingly exists as the object of futurist projection . African social reality is
overdetermined by intimidating global scenarios, doomsday economic projections, weather
predictions, medical reports on AIDS, and life-expectancy forecasts, all of which predict decades of immiserization.
These powerful descriptions of the future demoralize us; they command us to bury our heads in our hands, to groan with sadness.
Commissioned by multinationals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), these
developmental futurisms function as
the other side of the corporate utopias that make the future safe for industry. Here, we are seduced not
by smiling faces staring brightly into a screen; rather, we are menaced by predatory futures that insist the next 50 years will be hostile. Within
an economy that runs on SF capital and market futurism, Africa is always the zone of the absolute dystopia. There is always a reliable trade in
market projections for Africa's socioeconomic crises. Market
dystopias aim to warn against predatory futures, but
always do so in a discourse that aspires to unchallengeable certainty.