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 Americas 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 Black luminosity is not a bill to be repealed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 McKittricks 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
Fleetwoods 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 non-material 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 dont 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 de-commodificatory 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 Hills 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 Americas

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-watchesnobody-sees-how-black-women-disrupt-surveillance-theory, October 6th, 2014 TAM)
What the hell is you looking for? Cant 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 wont say no, or they cant. 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 Inasah 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 Rihannas 2014 moment was paved by Lopez
shows a dangerous laziness towards the stated goal of body positivity. Rihannas
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.
Garcias 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 Stanleys 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.
Stanleys descriptions of Rhimes and her work are filled with words like angry,
terrorizing and sassy, recalling Crocketts 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
22s 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 Manns 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 Stanleys) 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 womens 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 Garcias flippant mess: It isnt about who gets credit for
popularizing the big booty. Its 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 ones
self voluntarily, to invite more observation into ones 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 womens 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 Browns case,
even AFTER the mother requested it stop. Crawfords 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 isnt shocking, its 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 cant 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 Watsons 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. Its 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 womans 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 isnt an
answer its 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. Its a question, or rather, a hypothesis. Im 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 Nyongos 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
Nyongos 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 PJs comment is helpful. Maybe the myth of
the UFO speaks to a historically and ideologically specific racial formation (to use
Omi & Winants 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? Heres one potential way critical drone mythology might work
(again, this is just a hypothesis, so Im 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 timbreterror.
Consider the resonance between that idea and Kodwo Eshuns claim that neoliberal
capitalismmobilizes 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). Eshuns concept of futurity sounds a lot like my
notion of droningtheyre 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 antiblackness 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 Afrofuturisms 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-inprogress-strategic-disruptions-black-feminism-and-afrofuturism-by-cherie-annturpin/
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 AfricanAmerican 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 womens
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 Smiths 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 womens 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). Christians concerns were in part a
response to Hazel Carby, who debated and disagreed with Christian and McDowells
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 Afro-American 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 womens
literature, in Carbys 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

theiroutempowered 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 Masters Tools to
dismantle the Masters House, which could be considered as signified through
imposition of theoretical discourse. For example, Wallace borrowed Houston
Bakers trope of the black hole, in which black holes may give access to other
dimensionsand object enters the black hole and is infinitely compressed to zero
volumeit passes through to another dimension, whereupon the object
reassumesall of the properties of visibility and concreteness, but in another
dimension Wallace (1990). The dialectic of black womens 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
OConnor considered to be nothingness.as a place of origin for much of black
feminist writingimposed from without, entity defined by the patriarchal and white
world of power and wealth. Mary Helen Washington declared that black women
have been hidden artistscreative geniuseswhose 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 womens creative works reached back into the broken and
silenced past and re-cover 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 prescriptivethe 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 womens 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 selfsufficient 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 womens 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). Hendersons critical
model proposed the existence of heteroglossia in black womens writing, borrowing
from Mikhail Bakhtins notion of dialogism, in which voices of the other(s)
`encounter one another and coexist in the consciousness of real peoplethat
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 fictionthat 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 feminisms 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 womens 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 discourseother than silencecan 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). Nashs essay rethinking
intersectionality criticized intersectionalitys tendency to persist in Black
feminisms 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, LovePolitics, and Post-Intersectionality takes on Audre Lordes 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 existenceindeed, 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 humanitys 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 elses 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 hegemonys script: Like [Ishmael Reeds] 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). Reeds 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. Its 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 countertheoretical 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
Morrisons vampiric Beloved, who sucks the past out of Sethe, to Eddie Murphys
Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), which replays Draculas 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 Eshuns theorization moves in a direction similar to that of Nelsons
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 websitehas 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, thinkingwhoever "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 selfconsciously 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 bodieshybrid multispecies and multi ethnic
subjectivitiesfor 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 Mone's Cold
War Journal of Popular Music Studies, Volume 23, Issue 4 December 2011 Pages
393411, 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 alsoand more provocativelyas 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 (19471957) 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 Mone 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, Mone 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, Mone'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 Mone'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 Mone'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, Mone 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 Kelleythose maneuvers within the black radical tradition that
recover historical methods to generate and mobilize futures of alternative
possibilities.4 Surrealism is one such maneuver Mone 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, Mone 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).
Mone's invention and use of scale is highlighted in the second video release from
her albumThe ArchAndroid, entitled Cold War, which she describes as one of my
most intimate releases to date (Neon Limelight). At stake within this songas a
sound and sight productionis the reconfiguration and substantiation of the
emotional and bodily planes of existence for marginalized and alienated groups.
Mone'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. Mone'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, Mone 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. Mone 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, Mone
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 youre fighting for?
disrupts the historical narrative oftheCold War by announcing its multiplication
across time and space (acold war). She additionally dismisses the sectarianism
of the Cold War (Do you knowwhoyoure fighting for?) and replaces it with a call to
a cause ([D]o you knowwhatyoure 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, Mone's
picture is not outside of and beyond mundane social relationsin 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 Mone'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 Mone 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 Mone, 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. Mone 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 tooa 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 Im
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 jurepractices of
segregation. Mone 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 forumthe
music videoalso 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 usanother character
in her production. Mone'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 selfselected 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. Mone'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, Mone'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. Mone'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). Mone 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). Mone'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 Mone 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

womens 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 Mone's 'Cold War' Landscape":This Safer Space: Janelle Monaes "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
anti-black 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-whileBlack-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 affirmatives 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 longsuppressed 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, theres 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 wont 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 self-identity 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 Badus
Next Lifetime video which highlights West African traditions in a futuristic society
to Nnedi Okorofors book Who Fears Death chronicling a mystical young girl in
post-apocalyptic 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 secondclass 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 Records Berry Gordy looking to Detroits
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 self-determination are common themes.While all works
dubbed Afrofuturist arent created by people of African descent or dont 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 societys 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/afrofuturismwhere-space-pyramids-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 Orwells 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 Tates 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 centurys start,
Dubois termed the condition of structural and psychological alienation as double consciousness. T he 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. Afrofuturisms 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 Eshuns 1998 volume More Brilliant than the Sun:

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 weve all been living in an alien-nation 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. Its 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 Eshuns 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
Adventures in Sonic Fiction

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 Afrodiasporic futurism and the humanist futureshock absorbers of mainstream black culture. Eshuns 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 Mone's 'Cold War'
Landscape":This Safer Space: Janelle Monaes "Cold War", Post45 Conference,
Roundtable/Panel, Refereed Paper, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, Post45, Spring
2011 )
Monaes 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 exposureperformancesignals 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 Monae is able,
through various creative and organizing techniques, to construct a "Cold War" free
speech zonea 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. Monae
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 Mone's 'Cold War'
Landscape":This Safer Space: Janelle Monaes "Cold War", Post45 Conference,
Roundtable/Panel, Refereed Paper, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland, OH, Post45, Spring
2011 TAM)

Monaes 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). Monae 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).Monaes
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
its 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
%2Fpolitical-science%2F2014%2Fjan%2F07%2Fafrofuturism-where-space-pyramidsand-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 Orwells 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=0CB8QFjAAah
UKEwiFnf2msODGAhWq83IKHU3vB_U&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.amherst.edu
%2Fmedia%2Fview%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=f3JfnNmO38KAOXsMO0NZ
uQ
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 mediacentric 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 Ill focus on the unstable generic status of the film, as well as
its musicin 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 Ras 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 Overseers 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 epic2. 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 films production and post-production, some
at Ras 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 films 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 racialsocial segregation and division. Though Knights 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 dure 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 Ras 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. Well set up a colony for black people here.
See what they can do on a planet all their own, without any white people there.
Well 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. Ras 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 ground8. 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 Ras music has become something of a point of origin for todays
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 transformation10. Gershon Kingsley, a musician-engineer who worked with
Robert Moog, programmed Sun Ras Minimoog for him11 . But Jon Weiss, who
worked on the overall design of the Moog, comments that Ra had taken this
synthesizer and I dont 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 werent oscillating anymore, nothing was working but it was
fabulous12. Sun Ras soundtrack for the film, recorded in 1972, exploits the
Minimoogs 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 Ras electrical keyboard armoury.
The Arkestras 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 Arkestras horns lead the marches of many pro-space anthems
such as We travel the spaceways and Watusa, but also propel the films 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 Ras soft voice offers
pedagogical monologues, engages in dialogues and declamations (such as I am
the Brother the Wind), June Tysons voice dominates with her repeated long
phrases, chants, slogans and quasi-jingles for outer space travel. The Arkestras
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 isif its 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 clichs) of black
nationalism in the urban African American film of the period. The films 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
governments audiovisual surveillance of citizens and resident aliens. These themes
make the film and Sun Ras 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

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
critical-theoretical project. On the one hand,

hand, the specifically negative dimension of the utopian dialectic-the dimension of critique in the familiar sense of astringent

in every concrete instance it points

to a corresponding positivity and plenitude, that is, to authentic utopian fulfillment.
demystification -can never, as we have seen, remain wholly self-identical:

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

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,
argue that, for Bakhtin,

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,

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
ultimately,

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 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
detective fiction with science fiction), which are, however, philosophically antithetical.

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 Not-Yet, 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

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
entire view of the society that his artistic achievements will retroactively redefine.

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
utopian aspect of such science-fictional 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
the superficially mundane context is dynamically reconstituted as a potential future, new and strange. Furthermore,

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

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
I have already discussed,

(whose ultimate overthrow in 1991 constituted only the sickening final chapter of a downward narrative begun with

has it been harder and lonelier to

imagine a social organization beyond alienation and exploitation , or to imagine sociopolitical
bureaucratization and Stalinist betrayal almost six decades earlier)

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
forces more decisive than the regime of exchange-value (of "the market," in currently fashionable jargon).

situation (however hostile, in most other respects, postmodernity may be to the critical and utopian power of science fiction at its

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
most radical).

from the very invention of history and the future as these terms are now meaningful. Though this does not, as we have also seen,

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
imply any sort of futurism in the positivistic sense, it does mean

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 Gibsons 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 transplantsthat 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 Daviss 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).

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: Whats most important to me, he has explained, is that its about the
present.... Its 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 thoughtexperiments) 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.
More important, of course,

Science fiction scenarios solve all the advantages of public policy better than their
framework doessci 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 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)

most important project may be to try to identify mechanisms through

which science fiction could be meaningfully integrated into societys 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
Over time, the

the framing of its regulatory gaze. As highlighted by the dissenting opinions to the recent Supreme Court ruling

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
forcing the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases,

Assessment, a major international scientific assessment, which used drama to communicate scenarios to a range of

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
publics in Africa. We should learn from this experience. But

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,

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 (
globalization.

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 authors empirical environment (1979: 9) that, through strategies like extrapolation

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
and estrangement, helps us to transcend our mundane environment. So what is the connection to world politics?

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 Treks 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 Reagans vision of a defensive military umbrella, successfully relabeling it Star Wars after George
Lucass block-buster SF movie (1977) (Smith, nd.). Hiroshima/Locksley Hall: U.S. President Harry Trumans 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 Tennysons 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 socalled 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. Armys Army Vision 2010 or U.S. Space Commands Vision for 2020) and in
a broader corpus of think tank projections (e.g., Shukman, 1996; OHanlon, 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,

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 SFs characteristic anxieties, desires, fears, fetishes, insecurities, and
cognitive and affective predispositions (10). Neo-liberal globalization/Foundation : The neo-liberal discourse of
fixations, and desires (Latham, 2001: 9). In fact,

globalization dominating public discussion is a self-fulfilling 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

this discourse displays striking homologies

to American techno-utopian SF (exemplified in Isaac Asimovs 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 Asimovs 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
pacific liberal politics. As Ive argued elsewhere (Weldes, 2001),

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 SDIs critics attempt to dismiss it as Star Wars (but even these relations turn out to be more complex).

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
In other cases,

was no different from many of his compatriots, who had grown up in a cultural matrix bubbling with fantasies of ultimate weapons.

fantasies, Franklin explains, profoundly shaped the nations 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
Such

of the Worlds (1898), through Robert Heinleins Starship Troopers (1959), to Roland Emmerichs 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. Clarkes
Childhoods 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:

the politics of the popular is among the most

under-valued and therefore under-analyzed aspects of international politics (2001: 134).
Whether by neglect, by design, or by displacement,

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

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
significant aspect of the SF/world politics intertext. Instead,

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 goodthe 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. self-determination) 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

fiction will be treated as a genre of the

beyond. On this view, the political appears in the different usages of the beyond and not
in the specific details of a storys narrative dilemmas. What is said is less interesting
than how the beyond is used.
political problems. For the purposes of this chapter, science

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

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 selfideologi- cal way) simple prediction.

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

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.
elaborately circumstantial lies (1976).

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 background, 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 enoughstudents 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

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
work of Jean Piaget. To brutally reduce the idea I have borrowed from him, it is that,

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

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 course s, 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 .
of an idea.

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 Checks 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 thats why Im 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 Bla ck 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 others racist speech in
private. The rot goes deeper. Firstly, because its 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 peoples personal enforcerssometimes as agents of terror against Black children, women, and men, and
against other people of colorrather 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. Its 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

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 cant protect through ownership. Theres 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 peoples lives and wellbeing for the gratification of our own ego s. We need to reject the moral authority of anyone whose
away with raping non-white women, are white men.

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 weve 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 familys 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 Jeffersons 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 victimblaming 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 anyones authentic self. Its a box built for womens 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 doesnt deny the
misogyny weve been subjected to for us to acknowledge any of this. That isnt 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, its a lie that turning ourselves into
wish-fulfillment objects for white men will make us safe. Objects cant 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

We must stop
forgiving each others 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. Its 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
other to walk away from learned passivity and towards love, as many times as it takes.

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 asking for

white people
must absolutely listen to the requests of the Black community that we stop asking
them to act like the Rev. Martin Luther King, another peaceful Black person murdered by a white supremacist.
forgiveness before the bodies were even cold. In the aftermath of white supremacist terrorism,

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 churchs 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

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 Kings 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
murdered other Black people they could not own or control.

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 wont 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/teacher-network/2015/jul/07/teach-black-studentschange-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, Ive 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 wasnt 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 citys
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 ones 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
countrys 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/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/RTLfrom-CI.pdf>.)
Here I want to advance my claim first by offering a conceptual framework to think with and against visuality and

Visualitys 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
then by applying it to todays permanent crisis of visuality.

by subalternsthe new lowest ranked officer class created for this purposeand 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

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.
what he called the tradition of heroic leadership, which visualizes history to sustain autocratic authority.7

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 Carlyles 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
Carlyles 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

todays counterinsurgency doctrine indirectly relies on strategies of local

and remote visualization.
Carlyle, while

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

Afrofuturisms 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)

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 resistance to hegemonic ontologies. Afro-Futurism's alienating effects thus take aim equally at
In other words,

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 Afro-Futurisman effect exacerbated by the editor's insistent selfpositioning as a "pioneer" in this field (251; cf. ix, 245). Barr's editorial self-positioning (with its problematically

highly selective representation of Afro-Futurist

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 Afro-Futurist 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 magic-infused 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
colonialist figuring) relates the collection's

Hopkinson and some contributors to Mojo are African-Canadian (or African-Caribbean-Canadian, in Hopkinson 's

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
case) is only mentioned in passing by Kilgore (120), who

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),

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
whose antagonist Rogan describes as "Canada's Premier Uttley" (90).

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 USAs 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 wasnt digital enough, it didnt 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 systemwe

It
seemed like Afrofuturism just didnt 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). Its basically a hall of mirror s, a smoke and fog routine in a middle brow
cheap magic show. But hey... even that can be interesting sometimes.
are the system. I guess that many people outside of the arts have awakened to the day and age and moved on.

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 Stanfords Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity. June 2,
2011 http://queeringafrofuturism.tumblr.com/post/6126537901/female-presence-inthe-afro-future)

Rollefsons work The Robot Voodoo Power Thesis: Afrofuturism and anti-antiargues 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
In J. Griffith

essentialism from Sun Ra to Kool Keith the author

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-

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 leaders ability to institute a new wave
destinies, still through practice and position reify notions of hetro-patriarchy and sexism.

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-

and other noted leaders such as George Clinton

and Parliament-Funkadelic, as well as MCs such as Kool Keith established
the core tenet of anti-anti-essentialist collapsed binaries. He continues further: I
verse. Rollefson, notes that Sun Ra

would like to assert that they do have real political efficacy because they problematize the rigid binary

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 Rollefsons reading we find that the female presence is nonexistent 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
of blackness/whiteness and the matrix of binaries that are inscribed up this central set.

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 Stanfords 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
ones 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

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 patriarchys face what it
different than their prescribed bodies. In hir reading of

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
Jamess 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 Jamess 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 womens bodies have been demonized by
the patriarchy. Indeed, considering the historical associations of women with witches, demons, and other ill-

especially womens
menstrual cycles have been delegitimized by men. Part of the project of second wave feminism was
intentioned creatures it is pretty easy to recognize that womens bodies

reclamation of womens 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,

womens 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

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? Jamess 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
the womens rights movement. This is why

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 womans 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 Kanyes 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 its 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.
bodies. Male consumers and fans often comment on how hot they are. I wonder

Sci-Fi Bad - Feminism

The Alt cant 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

By drawing a line between womens science

and science itself, we lose our ability to address current problems within scientific
practice, and we dont 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 cant do science as it is traditionally construed . This further
removes an already marginalized group from mainstream scientific discourse and fails
practices and products of science and technology.

to give credit to women who have fought to succeed as researchers in what continues to be a mans game. Finally,
we need to guard against essentializing womens 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 scenariosthats 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 worlds 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

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
danger of impaired vision and loss of consciousness. But

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

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
must make if they are to deal successfully with an uncertain future.

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 Kahns 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 unthinkable, immoral, insane, hideous, or

highly unlikely, but it is not impossible. 30 Kahns motivation was, in part, recognition of the counterintuitive notion that planning could be a necessary means of avoidance. Analyzing scenarios reached
greater methodological 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 countrys prospects; in 1987, the Guardian Weekly quoted Margaret Thatchers 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 Wacks proteges, 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

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
governmental transition.33

principal deficiency of such government-sponsored efforts is simply the narrowness of their focus e they are, by design, only
concerned about a single governments 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 cant 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)

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
This

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

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.
contempt the most mundane and ridiculous chores of a member of Congress. By

SF alone isnt 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

realistictheir science fiction stories dont 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 Bulls anarchical society and Daniel Deudneys
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

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
exogenous static structures seeking to constrain those forces.24

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 todays growing commercial and exploratory

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
activities.

for scenariobuilding techniques to inform these choices by providing rigorous detailed visions of future worlds that account for a

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
wide range of current realities and span the spectra of the most important uncertainties.

longer time-frames entailed in scenario building also facilitate dialogue among diverse parties divided on nearer-term questions.

The collaboration enabled can inspire innovation and integrated analysis among
diverse experts, leading to the development of a productive epistemic
community25 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 factthis 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 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
The problem is,

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

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
German allies. Being historically illiterate is bad. Being scientifically illiterate, however, is even worse if only because

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

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?
is established and accepted, whether you want to admit it or not. Then of course there are the

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

Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex a combination museum and theme park on the
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
made after the launch at the

Cape Canaveral grounds. The center's special feature

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

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 .
little fun and Star Trek is undeniably cool. But do we really not get enough fun and cool elsewhere?

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_futuris
m.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 were going in the past. Steffen
suggests that its 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 worlds 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. (Gibsons famous
quote is some semblance of: The Future is here; its 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 fake-product 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 arent
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. Its
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 dont 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, identityconfirming 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 selfdetermination. 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 nationstates. 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 postmodernisms
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 nave
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
shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them (Exodus : ). This
prohibition, of course, 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 future, but not see it. Ernst Blochs Spirit of Utopia, the classic work in
this genre, offers 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 utopianismiconoclastic 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 lions 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.

Bellamys 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 . By contrast, 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. Blochs 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 wordboth written and oralseems 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 humanitys 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
Manuels 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 Wests successful projects of social democracy and the welfare
state had taken much of the allure out of utopian projects, mainly by creating a
politico-economic 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 explanationand 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 Polish-Jewish refugee, coined genocide in to denote an old
practice in its modern developmentthe 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 genocidewith few rewards44he 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. From Hannah
Arendts Origins of Totalitarianism to Martin Malias Soviet Tragedy
its last chapter is titled The Perverse Logic of Utopiascholars 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 aboutand 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 Reich. What An Anarchic Breeze
JACOBY CH 01 1/24/05 9:23 PM Page 13 connects Thomas Mores Utopia and
Hitlers 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. Bu t 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

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.
who eloquently

(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 substitutes 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 masse s," 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/visualarts/detail/19943/art-criticism-is-the-prefix-afro-as-in-afro-futurism-arresting-ourimagination-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 wouldnt have a problem with it because creativity is about modifying
elements that are already there to create something new, but given whats 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 Afro-Surrealist manifesto
written by D. Scot Miller and it had me asking a few questions. In this manifesto,
Miller outlines what isnt 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 Afro-Surrealism, [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 thats different from
Surrealism and calls it Afro-Surreal. My question when I read Millers 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/visualarts/detail/19943/art-criticism-is-the-prefix-afro-as-in-afro-futurism-arresting-ourimagination-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 cant foresee
and cover the entire use of the prefix, I am referring to the points that Ive 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
pre-existing manifestos and make it harder for ourselves to come up with something
unique. Minimizing the afro prefix would promote fresh thinking . Afromanifestos 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 havent 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 dont
think Im 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. Its 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 wouldnt
like to speak only for myself, Id like to believe that there must be others who feel
the same as I do. I dont, 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 Marxismwhich 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 the historian (and social

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
scientists in general) should guard against. But

another model, actively opposing theory (even "Marxist" theory) 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 self-critique, 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

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
struggles of the oppressed. Moreover,

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

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
meaningful than that.

recently to texts such as Postmodern Marketing, which attempts to utilize the insights of thinkers like Foucault,

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
Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudillard to market goods within a capitalist economy.

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_obam
a_and_afrofuturism.pdf)

Dery coined the term Afrofuturism, he

suggested to author Samuel Delany that the young 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 leastand was available now even to those members of the populace to whom
access to societal advances had generally been denied . Delany took issue with Derys
assessment, responding: I can detect the possibility of a nave assumption that the
redistribution of commodities is somehow congruent with the redistribution of
wealthwhich 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 its a technological culture thats 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) Delanys critique of consumerism disguised as participation and power is at the
root of ieks assertion in 1997 that the ideology of cyberspace capitalism obliterates
individuality and the particularity of social position. For iek, 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 Delanys 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 Delanys equitable input; they are participants
Multiculturalism: Yes You Can In the 1993 article in which

in the production of technology, of the 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 celebritys manifestation. It is for this very

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 . iek, like Delany and Bould, argues against the
idea that subversion could exist within the structures of the market. Against the image, allpresent 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 itselfThe gesture
of self-censorship is co-substantial with the exercise of power. 23 For iek, 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 ieks 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 staycritical 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
reason that

and todays 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.ams Yes We Canwith its development out of the most commercial arms of the entertainment
industry, its dependence on celebrity, and its strained reach toward multiracialityraises important questions about
the silent acceptance of systems of oppression. The videos vision of multicultural unity, while not presenting a
clear power source, operates entirely within the capitalist homogeneity iek outlines. Its beautiful representatives
of diversity mask the capitalist ideology behind it, which goes unquestioned by anyone in the video, or by Obama

science fictions 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
himself. Bould cites ieks critique, stating that

attention to the many who will continue to suffer under capitalism, even if a certain disrupted contemporary
appearance of racism also characterizes will.i.ams 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 Obamas
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

survival by futurity.28
begs the question of whether mere survival isor should bethe end goal, or
whether a more radical break for future freedom is needed . Survival, iek might argue, is
multiculturalism. will.i.am probably does not imagine Yes We Can adhering to ieks model of multicultural
when the word hope turns to vote what is left is a sense of what DeClue calls
This

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 notesrecalling iek
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 Nstor Garca Canclini calls the illusion of
participation.31 As iek and Bould remind us,
Conclusion

the idea of liberation may very well be a trap.

The purpose of this study has not been to dislocate will.i.ams Yes We Can video and Obamas

is rather to caution, as Bould does from

against the dangerous assumption that Afrofuturism or any artistic movement,
for that matteris synonymous with cultural or political resistance . DeClues conceptualization of
presidential campaign and victory from the field of Afrofuturism. It
within the field,

Obama as Afrofuturist has a relationship with Victor Turners concept of an intercultural 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

Artistic production, technological advance, and future

visioning will not take us the whole way to political transformation. This is a position that iek
be wary of simple answers. 33

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

outcomes can be characterized not as good or bad, positive or

negative, but more in terms of what they open up . Obamaand the cultural production that has
developed with himhas 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.
resistance is problematic;

Cap or Wilderson Link

If Wilderson:
Afrofuturism relies on a grammar of futurity which assumes a
chronopolitical landscape in which blackness has agency. This
nave simulation allows whiteness to predetermine and
maintain predictable market futures.
If Cap:
The future is pre-determined by Capitalisms 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/v003/3.2esh
un.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

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
"melancholia in revolt."

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

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 .
through Prediction Fast forward to

Rather, it aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards

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)
the proleptic as much as the retrospective. It is clear that

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 papersand 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
predictionhas

been to fuel the desire for a technology boom. Given this context, it
would be nave 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

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
apparent that

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

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
(NGOs),

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.