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Afrofuturism Can Help the World Mend
- filleduchaos 6y agoIf by "the world" the author means the US, then sure. But nearly every time I engage with Afrofuturist work, it's as though there's a constant tiny disclaimer running through my head: "No actual Africans were consulted in the creation of this work". I'm not really sold on the global relevance of such locally minded narratives. To be clear, I don't mean that individual Africans or recent African emigrants don't work on these projects (although they're often missing that way too). It's the way the genre tends to completely ignore the very present, very vibrant, very alive contemporary continent, treating it as though it was some dead bygone thing to excavate for scraps of inspiration. The narratives tend to not think of the implications for those of us who, you know, live here at all. Black Panther and its Wakanda are particularly egregious in this regard. Nnedi Okorafor describes her work as (and is rather militant about it being called) Africanfuturist rather than Afrofuturist for this reason - in her words, as an author she is concerned with what is and can/will be, not what "could have been".