Imagining oneself in the future creates agency and it's significant because historically people of African descent were not always incorporated into many of the storylines about the future. As a mode of self-healing and self-liberation, it's the use of imagination that is most significant because it helps people to transform their circumstances. An an artistic aesthetic it bridges literature, music, visual arts, film, and dance. It intersects the imagination, technology, Black culture, liberation, and mysticism. It can be part of critical race theory and in other respects its an epistemology as well. There’s a mass of works that fit into the genre and if you’re unfamiliar with the concept, Womack’s new book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy is a good place to start. It is an artistic aesthetic, but also a kind of method of self-liberation or self-healing. Womack says, Afrofuturism is where the past and future meet. Black cultural lens means the people of the African continent in addition to the Diaspora, the Americas, Europe, etc. 'Afrofuturism is a way of looking at the future and alternate realities through a Black cultural lens. Anyone familiar with the multiethnic city of Zion from the Matrix trilogy or the time-traveling androids in the music of Janelle Mone has engaged with Afrofuturisma loose artistic movement. A more targeted and expansive definition by multi-hyphenated author Ytasha Womack best describes what afrofuturism is and how it functions. It's important to note that, although Dery's definition provided an official name for the work that Black writers and artists were doing within this genre, it does not define the full scope of where afrofuturism has been and where it's going. The term 'afrofuturism' was coined by Mark Dery in his 1993 essay, 'Black to the Future.' In the piece, the term is defined as 'speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of the twentieth century technoculture-and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future.' Welcome to the Pratt Institute Libraries' guide to Afrofuturism! This guide was inspired by the theme for BLM Pratt's 2021 Teach In: Black Futures & Utopias.

Afrofuturism by Ytasha L. Womack