Unit 1 - Futurities
Week 2: Afrofuturism
MDSB14
Human, Animal, Machine
Wednesdays, 9 - 11AM
Humanities Wing, Room 214
Instructor: Kanika Lawton (they/them)
kanika.lawton@mail.utoronto.ca
2Lecture slides will now be available a few minutes before class for you to follow along with during class
These slides are now under Modules on Quercus
(You are still expected to come to class each week)
Note on lecture slides
3Your first reading reflection is due next Friday, September 20th at 11:59PM EST
• Submit on Quercus; emailed reading reflections will not be graded
Write on one text and one media object from the “Futurities” unit
2-3 double-spaced pages, 12pt font (Times New Roman preferred), properly cited (Chicago Style
preferred)
Visit me after class, during office hours, book an appointment, or email me if you have any questions
First reading reflection
What can science fiction offer to marginalized communities?
5Cultural aesthetic, form of history, and art, film, literature,
and music movement that explores the intersection of
Afrodiasporic cultural production with science and
technology
Associated with science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy,
and magical realism
Coined by Mark Dery in his 1993 essay “Black to the
Future,” which explored common tropes in African
American science fiction
Expanded in the late 1990s by writers like Alondra Nelson
Afrofuturism
Kaylan F. Michael
6For Nelson, “Afrofuturism can be broadly defined as
‘African American voices’ with ‘other stories to tell about
culture, technology, and things to come’ that are
concerned with ‘sci-fi imagery, futurist themes, and
technological innovation in the African diaspora”
(“Introduction: Future Texts,” 9)
A form of forward and backward thinking; Afrofuturism
pulls from the painful past and present to imagine better
futures through a Black cultural lens
Afrofuturism
David Alabo
One of the most influential pieces of media on Afrofuturism is
The Last Angel of History (dir. John Akomfrah, 1996), a docu-fiction
film about its origins, influences, and trajectories
8Distinct from Afrofuturism
Africanfuturism is a cultural aesthetic and science fiction
subgenre rooted in African culture, history, mythology, and
perspectives rather than focusing solely on the African
diaspora
Centered on those of African descent and located in Africa
Coined in 2019 by Nnedi Okorafor
Africanfuturism
David Alabo
9Traces some of the historical and conceptual trajectories of Afrofuturist thought, especially at the
intersection of race and technology after the late-1990s “digital boom”
• The “digital boom” promised a “placeless, raceless, bodiless near future enabled by
technological progress,” (1) but this isn’t the case for everyone
The “digital divide” is a code word for technological inequality between white people and people of
colour, especially Black people, who are assumed to be unable to “keep up” with high-tech society
• This obscures the fact that uneven access to technology is a symptom of economic inequalities
that predate the Internet
“Forecasts of a utopian (to some) race-free future and pronouncements of the dystopian digital divide
are the predominant discourses of blackness and technology in the public sphere” (1)
• For both narratives, race is a liability
Nelson, “Introduction: Future Texts”
For Nelson, one of the founding myths of the digital age is
that racial (and gendered) differences would be eliminated
Even if technology could emancipate humans from their
physical bodies and past experiences, this ”radical
humanism” would only free some humans
“Bodies carry different social weights that unevenly
mediate access to freely constructed identity” (Nelson,
“Introduction: Future Texts,” 3)
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The myth of a “placeless,
raceless, bodiless” future
Kaylan F. Michael
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Combines speculative fiction on a team of future African archaeologists with meditations on
Afrofuturism, from its “founding trauma” to its future
Eshun speculates that the United States of Africa (USAF) archaeologists would be surprised to discovery
that so much Afrodiasporic subjectivity is produced through “the cultural project of recovery” (458)
“In our time, the USAF archaeologists surmise, imperial racism has denied Black subjects the right to
belong to the enlightenment project, thus creating an urgent need to demonstrate a substantive
historical presence. This desire has overdetermine Black Atlantic intellectual culture for several
centuries. To establish the historical character of black culture, to bring Africa and its subjects into
history denied by Hegel et al., it has been necessary to assemble countermemories that contest the
colonial archive, thereby situating the collective trauma of slavery as the founding moment of
modernity” (458)
Eshun, “Further considerations on Afrofuturism”
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Countermemories “counter,” or move against, “official” histories (i.e., Western, colonial histories) that
displace marginalized communities
• Countermemories place these communities “back into” more robust histories
Speaking with Paul Gilroy, Toni Morrison argues that African slaves during the Atlantic Slave Trade were
the first modern subjects
• The modern world, or modernity, is built on slavery
For Eshun, critique of modernity must also extend to the future
Countermemories and the origins of modernity
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If countermemories are “an ethical commitment to history,
the dead, and the forgotten,” (459), counterfutures (futures
that “counter” Western, colonial ideas of the future that
also displace marginalized communities) become suspect
since many African artists are disenchanted with futurism
In the mid-20th century struggle against colonialism in
Africa, colonial revenge and violence made African utopias
seem impossible
This changed by the early-21st century with the rise of
digital technologies
Counterfutures
David Alabo
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For Eshun, “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” (459)
• Or, creating better futures also relies on understanding the past
Power nowadays is both predictive and retrospective; certain futures get endorsed, while others—and
those within them—get discarded
• E.g., Africa is always seen as a site of dystopia, or a place with no future
Afrofuturism works to fix this dystopia into other, better futures
“Afrofuturism studies the appeals that Black artists, musicians, critics, and writers have made to the
future, in moments where any future was made difficult for them to imagine” (463)
The proleptic and retrospective
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Afrofuturism isn’t just about correcting “the history of the future” or adding more Black voices to
science fiction; rather, “Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science fiction writers
envision. Black existence and science fiction are one in the same” (Eshun, “Further considerations on
Afrofuturism,” 466)
Science fiction can serve as allegories for the experiences of post-slavery Black subjects
“Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counterfutures 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” (468)
What can Afrofuturism do?
Part of a series of essays on the Black radical tradition, political
thought, and social critique under capitalism, in the neoliberal
university, within public policy, and in the “undercommons” (general
antagonism to the conditions of contemporary life)
In this essay, Harvey and Moten talk about logistics to actually talk
about displacement, shipping/being shipped, and
the Atlantic Slave Trade

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Harvey and Moten, “Fantasy
in the Hold”
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“To work today is to be asked, more and more, to do without thinking, to feel without emotion, to
move without friction, to adapt without question, to translate without pause, to desire without
purpose, to connect without interruption” (Moten and Harvey, “Fantasy in the Hold,” 87)
Logistics wants to get rid of the subject altogether
• Marx calls this the automatic subject (capital that exists without human labour); it is also known
as human capital
• But this is a fantasy; every time logistics tries to move away from the human, it buttresses
against it
Where did logistics get the idea it can move bodies without dealing with humans? With its origin in the
Atlantic Slave Trade
The logics of logistics
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From slavery to prisoners shipped to settler colonies to mass migrations to indentured servitude and
migrant workers nowadays, “logistics was always the transport of slavery, not ‘free’ labour. Logistics
remains, as ever, the transport of objects that is held in the movement of things. And the transport of
things remains, as ever, logistics’ unrealizable ambition” (Harvey and Moten, 92)
Modernity itself is in logistics’ hold, but logistics can’t hold everything it puts there
• “There are flights of fantasy in the hold of the ship” (94)
• Or, there has always been forms of resistance and ways to resist
Modernity in logistics’ hold
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Moving across the Atlantic is unsettling
• “The hold’s terrible gift was to gather dispossessed feelings in common, to create a new feel in
the undercommons” (Harvey and Moten, 97)
This feeling is hapticality, or “the touch of the undercommons” (98)
• It is “the feel that what is to come is here” and “the capacity to feel through others, for others
to feel through you, for you to feel them feeling you” (98)
“Thrown together touching each other we were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were
supposed to produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home. Though forced to
touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed in that space of no space, though refused sentiment,
history, and home, we feel (for) each other” (98)
Hapticality
Hapticality is a form of love for the shipped/as the shipped
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Science fiction short film by Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu
Title is Swahili for “Breath”
Set in East Africa 35 years after the WWIII, or “The
Water War”
• Harsh conditions, lack of water, and radiation
confines citizens inside their enclosed community
Follows a museum curator who receives a soil sample from
an anonymous sender. Believing that life is possible outside
of the community again, she attempts to leave

Pumzi (2009)
Some questions to consider:
1. How does race impact technology? For example, what are your
thoughts on the “digital divide”?
2. Why are countermemories, counterfutures, and other/alternate
ways of thinking about history and the future so important?
3. What are the dangers of ignoring the past by only thinking
about the future?
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For next week, please watch In the Future They Ate From the Finest Porcelain
(dir. Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, 2015) and complete the assigned readings
by Parikka and Rifkin
Thank you!