Afrofutrism (space is the place )

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Is their a movement among African Americans to view sci fi as a way to escape racism. As a sort of escape or an appreciation of the ultimate other. ( ie late Trane,George Clinton,Sun Ra in music or Nation of Islam in religon or Sam Delany in lit ( that may be a function of his sexuality as well) Any comments .

― anthony, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Yes there is. Obvious source if you want to read up on the subject is "More Brilliant than the Sun" by Kowdo Eshun. Detroit Techno is also full of these theme's (Model 500 - 'No Ufo's', Drexciya, Underground Resistance/Red Planet). Maybe I'm on my own here, but two- step could really use some thematic input from this side.

Funny thing that I notice in Delaney is that his protagonists never seem to be black. I always start imagining them that way only to find out after 80/100 pages they're not. But Delany seems out to destroy all dualistic thinking, I was bit sceptic at first but I've come to love that guy.

Oh yeah don't forget Ian Penman's essay on Tricky (you can find it at The Wire website under articles) Essential reading.

― Omar, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

I do not know much about Detroit Music or Two Step.
That is why i put the caveat about Delany , he is more of a "queer" writer then a black writer. I mean his idenity seems to come from the repression of Sexuality as opposed to someone like Baldwin for example whose Race seems to trump. I know this is a minefield so if i stepped on any please note my missing limbs.
Can you give me the URL about wire i googled it and got 10 000 articles on steros and engineering .

― anthony, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

http://www.thewire.co.uk

― ambrose, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

a saint . Thanx

― anthony, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Wiresite where is also my 1992 Black Sci- Fi/Delany piece which Started It All (= completely untrue, but I find this "fact" all over the web, me and Mark Dery — who I know not from Adam — like Virtual Siamese Twins...)

Some of Delany's earlier (60s-SF) central characters are black. dhalgren's central character = mixed and/or unclear: most of his buds are black, not all. The twat in Triton = white. Neveryon ppl: actually I forget, but surely one of the most Xena/ Conan-esque alpha males is black. Stars in my pocket = 'hero' is black.

He talks in the "theoretical essay" in Triton abt the shock he got as a kid when Heinlein's hero in [forget] turned out, 300 pages in, to be black, when he looks in a mirror. A trick SD likes and uses (te revelation is tiny and buried).

― mark s, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Once read Stephen King doing a similar neat trick with a lead character not previously identified as black, by comparing said character's looks to Bill Cosby some pages into the narrative (can't remember which one it was now..) Casually challenged all sorts of assumptions on the part of this reader, anyhow...

― Andrew L, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

That was you Mark, I completely forgot. So that's also sur l'argent and worth checking out.

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Some of Delany's earlier (60s-SF) central characters are black.

----

well, whadda ya know, I seem to have read the ones with non-black c.c.'s (Dhalgren/Nova/Triton/Babel-17). Fantasy-stuff is out-of- bounds for me: I dread the words Sword/Sorcerer/Dragon ;)

Also have some doubts as to Delaney-as-queer-writer. Seems a bit of a reduction. Might be the right moment to ask which Delaney one should read after the ones I mentioned above?

― Omar, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Read Hogg/The Madman: good to test yr limits of "queer" tolerance, if nothing else. Both grate/disturbing. "Emetic," says K.Eshun of The Madman.
ONE maybe TWO of Nova/Babel/Einstein Intersection has a central black character, surely? Not read for some years, I have to admit, and a (real-life) madman of my brief acquaintance borroed Nova (and my Michel Serres books! Hey!!) and never gave 'em back.
The Fantasy stuff = All-Male Xena written in collab. between Derrida and Pat Califia. This too tests limits, heh... And no dragons that I recall: mucho leather bondage however.
Plus def. read his autobiog: The movement of Light on Water, and his BRILLIANT essay on sex-zones within cities TIMES SQUARE RED/ TIMES SQUARE BLUE

― mark s, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

He has talked often and elqouently about his fiction as a forum for sexaul freedom. As well alot of hisearly novels featured sexauilty as a central metaphor for freedom. If you look at a novel like Dhalgren where the sex is polymorphus and fluid , it seems like a much more central image then his race . I am not saying that he is only black or only queer. It just seems he writes about beign queer in his novels as well as his personal fiction ( an essay in Boys like Us, The book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue .) Now i do not read alot of scifi or "black" writign whatever that is. So amybe its my personal views . Anyway great interview in Nerve about all of this : http://www.nerve.com/Dispatches/Westerfeld/SpaceCowboy/

― anthony, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

i go to Word to construct my response and mark s has already trumped me . grrrrr

― anthony, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

PS To date Afro-Futurism has (nervously?) tiptoed round the SEX dimension of all this, esp. in re interps of Miles, Ra, even Clinton (also Cecil Taylor)... Delany's versh of pan- sexual materialist libertarianism = mine (in principle!?!?), but am not yet brave enuff to think thru on the page. Minefield = too weak a word.

― mark s, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Clinton tip-toeing around sex? "Cosmic Slop", "Jimmy's Got a Li'l Bit of Bitch in Him", "No Compute"?

― tarden, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Read, if you haven't:

More Brilliant Than The Sun by Kodwo Eshun.

Lots of release from the gutter/street by looking at the stars/ Mothership.

― suzy, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Cheers Mark...still not too convinced about the fantasy part ;) [not to make too much of it: but C.C. in Nova = white (crew = mixed), Babel-17 (can't remember but she's female/crew another mixed bag), haven't read Einstein Intersection so can't help there]

And save G.Clinton (and Eshun goes on a bit about Kraftwerk as bachelors) you're hitting on an interesting subject there re. Afrofuturism/Sex.

― Omar, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Tarden: no, I certainly didn't mean CLINTON was tiptoing! I meant Afro-Futurism as a Mere Critical Appraisal of Clinton had not caught up with Clinton in re sex dimension. And I think Delany wd be a good vector for this. (Yes: Kodwo does touch on it...But there is more to say. cf also Hendrix Underwater, come to think of it....)

― mark s, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Isn't science-fiction a peculiarly sexless genre though? (Aliens as either pre-pubertal androgynes [Nobody's mentioned Delany's short stories - "Aye, and Gomorrah" has astronauts neutered by outer-space radiation becoming fetishistic fixations - I think, 12 yrs since I read it]or robots) - sci-fi is often distaste/fear of sticky, secreting bodies and flight into space/'ideas'/antiseptic future - just as Xarthon the Barbarian-style shit is escapism into the restoration of medieval sex-role imagery. Delany is the exception to sci-fi writing, a large proportion is about 150 years behind the rest of society in dealing with matters sexual.

― tarden, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

No discussion of Afro-futurism is complete without Chuck Berry. You can bet he preferred motorvatin' with tailfins. And what about Bo Diddley's custom guitars?

― tarden, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Well, yes, perhaps, Tarden — if you define SF very narrowly (eg Golden Age 30s-50s). (anbd even then, recall the many We-Want- Sex-with-Aliens pulp mag covers... ) Burroughs? Ballard? Tom Disch? Ursula LeGuin? Joana Russ? The shock of the New Wave (so-called) was that it leapt into sexmatter with some verve: OK, it got shut up again, but still... No fair for you to jump in with the shutters-up...

cf also outpouring of Fan Fiction round eg Star Trek: the absence of sex allowed the reader to project with great intensity. Since arrival of net, these projections increasingly BUILT INTO the body of the text...

James Brown = Pioneer AfroSex-Futurist: "Sex Machine"

― mark s, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

John Lee Hooker's Boogie Chillun = the call to electric alien revolt, come to think of it.

― mark s, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Mmm, depends on which S.F. certainly Philip K. Dick/Ballard are not sexless (even Asimov did some interesting things in that area, can't quite remember the title, something like 'Even the gods...' although that may be a translation back from Dutch). Mmm would this amount to a 'the more space in S.F./the less sex' rule? ;)

As for Hendrix going underwater, didn't Reynolds/Press mention this in a refusal to grow up/leave the womb? Also seemed to tie in with Miles circa In A Silent Way/Bitches Brew: rebel man's plunge into the aquatic/fear of the Female. Sorry bit of reduction there, must re- read that section.

Other than that I can only say that Miles' 'He Love Him Madly' is my favourite make-out music, but this may be a very personal choice ;)

also a good list of sources:

www.afrofuturism.net

― Omar, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Rebel opinion: the Sex Revolts not that good on sex IMPO...

Ra was very anti-sex, was he not?: perhaps this is what SPACE IS THE PLACE means!

(I mean: *really* anti-sex, as in TOTALLY DEPOPULATE THE PLANET NOW!! No humans left alive please...)

― mark s, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Great thread! I have little to immediately add except to show off a bit by saying that my paper comparing James Baldwin's _Another Country_ and _Dhalgren_ as pre and post apocalyptic landscapes seen through a racial and sexual lens is actually what got me into grad school. I read the Neveryon books back in high school -- they were marketed as straight up sf, so needless to say I was a little thrown when I actually read them and started understanding what was going on.

― Ned Raggett, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

What I've gathered Sun Ra was indeed anti-sex, running the Arkestra as a military operation (no women/no drugs/no fun ;) But yeah, that seems to be one important strand in afrofuturism "no sex please, we're aliens". Certainly can't imagine a more sexless music that prime Underground Resistance, also Model 500 (K.Saunderson gravitates to the disco so there's already more of a sexual friction in most of his music, hence the utter genius of 'Rock to the Beat'). A thoroughly enjoyable exception to the rule is Dopplereffekt, check 'Plastiphilia' (perv answer to Kraftwerk's 'The Model' und 'Showroom Dummies'), 'Pornoviewer' and the totally ace 'Pornoactress' (all on cd 'Gesamtkunstwerk') for a continuation of Zapp's erotic electro.

― Omar, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

'Fear of a Black Planet' is by the most anti-sex collective ever. They even managed to engineer an ultra-masculine image with all the homoeroticism taken out.

― tarden, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Had some deep thoughts w/r/t this earlier today, trying to reconstruct. Essential point being comparitive futurism -- why is afro-futurism distinct from trad-futurism? Trad rock-futurism seems dystopian as far as I can tell. Radiohead-stylee lone individual struggling vs. forces of mechanization. Technology as enemy of humanism. But then there's Britney-futurism of the "Oops I did it again" school where the individual/mechanization tension is simply dissolved in the pop massive. Savage Garden videos operate in a similar way, I think. So afro-futurism is the inverse of rock-futurism, seeing technology as the agent for liberation. A few theories: A) Black folk are already on the bottom, hence nowhere to go but up. B)In the blues tradition, the individual is rendered isolated by, ironically, broad racial categorization (cf, as always, Crossroads). Thus an inversion of the blues similarly inverts the very desire for individuation. C) Funk and reggae are deeply human, dirty, nasty forms of music. Hence futurism grafts on and the music gains resonance through the tension thus created. Y'know -- fuck keepin it real, reality sucks, our funk can be freed through anti-human means (coz we've tried the other ones). Certainly a deep contrast to the nationalist glorification of existing conditions. Hence, space or not, same resonance as NOI back in the day of X -- (and indeed, some of same themes) -- the NOI mythology was fuckin' goofy, but nobody had any better answers.

Eh, that's all sorta getting at the same thing, and in ways that others have done better. But I still think Eshun is full of it. Oh, and I'd categorize af less as any defined movement than a loose continuity of heresy which spans genres fairly thoroughly.

As far as Delany, the stuff I've read by him has seemed less concerned with either race or gender than general epistemological concerns of postmodernism.

― Sterling Clover, Sunday, 8 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Oh yes. Delaney also came up with my favorite sentence construction ever. Using the semicolon to translate the direct object of the part before the semicolon into the subject of the part after. Thus, the immortal sentence: "He released the axe; flew through the air!"

― Sterling Clover, Monday, 9 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

dood . sun ra didnt even care about any of this. he was just an ancient being that floated around this universe. mmm space is indeed the place. great album...influenced the residents. matt

― matt, Monday, 9 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Delany writes on "general epistemological concerns of postmodernism"; are the most boring reaches of his work. (Is that right?) (Does he do it often? I don't remember it AT ALL!!)

― mark s, Monday, 9 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Muchmoreso in his short stories, where I think he handles things obliquely and quite nicely. I've only read the first book of Neveronya, but that seemed to deal with bringing of literacy, et cet. and perhaps gender, but only in the context of discourse forms. Dhalgren is concerned similarly with unreliable narrative issues.

― Sterling Clover, Monday, 9 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Unreliable narratives or unreliable landscapes? I'd argue more the latter, though of course the beginning and end of the novel suggest an extremely unstable framing device in the first place.

― Ned Raggett, Monday, 9 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Sorry: "does he do it often" was pointed at the semicolon thing, not the epistemology thing. The semicolon thing which I had just tried to emulate (I think not competently...) in order to agree with Sterling in a cheerful friendly way!!

I never reread the Neveryona stuff: I found it tiresome (but now am big Xena-fan I might revisit...). Dhalgren predates his encounter (anyone's) with PoMo proper (not that PoMo exists, but that's completely another argt: anyway, SD thinks it does): it contains unstable narrative devices, tho they're more a pretext for lyric social realism (Oakland in the late 60s) impossible in a trad context (consider it a generous and fascinating and insightful portrait of eg the milieu of the Black Panthers, w/o having to trip out on irrelevant "political" assent or refusal). Triton has a huge semi-explanatory "post- structuralist" afterword which I have never bothered finishing. I think SD is the classic example of someone who'd gone far down a road on his own, then found this portentous French bizwoz that seemingly affirmed his lonely insight, leapt in relievedly with both feet as spouter-supporter, and took a long long long time to rediscover his actual own more powerful unaffirmed vision. (ie Derrida = kewl by me but he never wrote anything like Hogg...)

― mark s, Tuesday, 10 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

some more recent afrofuturists: afrika bambaata, outkast, kool keith...

― fritz, Wednesday, 11 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

Afrika Bambaata, recent? ;) What about Cannibal Ox though? On 'Cold Vein' they built spaceships! Best astro-hop since Killah Priest IMHO.

― Omar, Wednesday, 11 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

three months pass...

I think Sun Ra's "anti-sex" tendencies may be based on his own unhappy experiences in that aspect of life. There may have even been some physiological problems there. (I seem to remember something of this sort mentioned in his biography by Szwed.) I don't say this to be dismissive. I respect Sun Ra a whole lot. I don't think that the discipline in the Arkestra was necessarily quite as strict as is sometimes suggested. I know someone whose sister was dating an Arkestra member (I live in Philadelphia, "the worst place on the planet"), and she said that Sun Ra disapproved because she was white, with the implication being that the dating was okay. Also, I don't remember hearing anything in Sun Ra about voluntary extinction, though I could have missed it. (I mean, how many of his albums have I actually heard? how many of his poems have I read? etc.)

― DeRayMi, Tuesday, 6 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

http://afrofuturism.net/

― Ben Williams, Tuesday, 6 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-three years ago) link

three months pass...

The Einstein Intersection - essential reading, one of my favourite books. Cant understand why not more known... Unfortunately the only Delaney I've read so can't compare, but looking for more.

This thread is a little curious - should it be strange that a black person is into sci-fi? The science fiction influences mentioned at the start were pretty huge through pop culture in general, and it would be strange if some artistes in every genre hadn't absorbed them into their music at some point.

― Marina, Thursday, 21 February 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

"Of course Sun Ra's out to lunch. Same place I eat at." -- George Clinton.

― Lord Custos, Friday, 22 February 2002 01:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

six years pass...

Finally got around to Space is the Place and, in addition to it being great, it kind of tied a bunch of things together for me that I hadn't really made the obvious connection between before - the Nation of Islam's "mothership" thing, the art on 70s Miles Davis albums, P-Funk, etc. I've always found it kind of interesting how there seems to have been a kind of parallel or alternate black psychedelic era where the drugs were the same and there were a lot of ostensible aesthetic similarities but really things were coming from a very different place.

This thread looks like one of those actually-worth-reading earlier ILM threads and I'll get around to it soon but it's bedtime.

― Hurting 2, Monday, 11 August 2008 04:43 (sixteen years ago) link

octavia e. butler surely belongs on this thread. and this too:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/61XO5tsD5SL._SS500_.jpg

― tipsy mothra, Monday, 11 August 2008 04:57 (sixteen years ago) link

not to mention this:

http://dreamchimney.com/slvs/B000008U0X.01.LZZZZZZZ_20060809040117.jpg

― Hurting 2, Monday, 11 August 2008 05:00 (sixteen years ago) link

is there like a taschen book or something of afrofuturist album covers and artwork? i would buy.

― tipsy mothra, Monday, 11 August 2008 05:01 (sixteen years ago) link

Can we just post pictures of them in the meantime?

http://bp1.blogger.com/_so03YBYbtLs/R3XWmJ1qIKI/AAAAAAAABGo/2vViQru8sDM/s400/Miles+Davis+Live+Evil.jpg

― Hurting 2, Monday, 11 August 2008 05:07 (sixteen years ago) link

http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~mdst322/miles_davis_-_bitches_brew_.jpg

― Hurting 2, Monday, 11 August 2008 05:09 (sixteen years ago) link

http://www.hollowearth.org/images/jazz/hancock/hancock_flood.jpg

― Hurting 2, Monday, 11 August 2008 05:11 (sixteen years ago) link

http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/images/Sunra_v1_FLAT.jpg

― Hurting 2, Monday, 11 August 2008 05:17 (sixteen years ago) link

fuk I do need to go to bed though

― Hurting 2, Monday, 11 August 2008 05:18 (sixteen years ago) link

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2122/2299348506_cc1de533a5.jpg?v=0

― tipsy mothra, Monday, 11 August 2008 05:23 (sixteen years ago) link

http://www.softshoe-slim.com/covers2/e/ewf03.jpg

― tipsy mothra, Monday, 11 August 2008 05:26 (sixteen years ago) link

I <3 <3 <3 Afrofuturism.

― The Reverend, Monday, 11 August 2008 07:16 (sixteen years ago) link

how awesome is this shirt btw
http://store.okayplayer.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=177

― deej, Monday, 11 August 2008 07:40 (sixteen years ago) link

Finally got around to Space is the Place

Would that be the film or the biography? Or the soundtrack album, or the NON-soundtrack album? (Don't mean to deprive you of sleep, Hurting - you can reply tomorrow!)

― Myonga Vön Bontee, Monday, 11 August 2008 07:56 (sixteen years ago) link

The Arkestra will always play for one week at ZXZW http://www.zxzw.nl/2008/event/11

― joost666, Monday, 11 August 2008 13:29 (sixteen years ago) link

It was the film. Great film!

― Hurting 2, Monday, 11 August 2008 14:19 (sixteen years ago) link

Just got that King Britt comp called Cosmic Lounge - the Brother Ah track is simply incredible.

― Marco Damiani, Monday, 11 August 2008 14:30 (sixteen years ago) link

six years pass...

http://bam150years.blogspot.com/2015/03/space-is-place-afofuturist-music-videos.html

― 龜, Monday, 30 March 2015 19:33 (nine years ago) link

Brooklyn film series includes Space Is the Place

http://www.bam.org/film/2015/space-is-the-place-afrofuturism-on-film

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/movies/space-is-the-place-offers-otherworldly-takes-on-identity.html

― the increasing costive borborygmi (Dr Morbius), Friday, 3 April 2015 15:45 (nine years ago) link

six months pass...

http://www.nassauweekly.com/ferguson-is-the-future/

I quickly understood that this event would go beyond the usual when Professor Benjamin began with a call and response of a quote from renowned sci fi author Octavia E. Butler. Three times, she proclaimed, “There is nothing new under the sun,” and each time the audience chanted back, “But there are new suns.”

― Milton Parker, Thursday, 22 October 2015 18:32 (nine years ago) link

one month passes...

http://www.radionz.co.nz/assets/news/55263/eight_col_Patea_Maori_Club%E2%80%99s_Aku_Raukura.jpg
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/nat-music/audio/201782605/aotearoa-futurism-part-one

― etc, Thursday, 17 December 2015 03:58 (nine years ago) link

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