Butler’s character Dana leaves her comfy life in 1976 California and is transported to a slave plantation in 1815. She faces her ancestors, including a young boy with a slave mother and slave-master father. Survival is her greatest triumph.
Slavery is neither the utopian future nor an ancient far-removed past. The tragedy that split the nation into warring factions has effects that can be felt in the politics of the present. Slavery is feared. The historic hot potato, there is no romanticized imagery that makes for fictitious time-travel stories in the antebellum South that aren’t emotional firestorms. Slavery is a stone’s throw away from exploring death, and even death writhes with freedom.
One of the greatest achievements of Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 film Django Unchained—a slave revenge story told as part spaghetti western, part romance, and part action film—was the fact that a Hollywood hero story where the black former slave wins could even be told in the antebellum South and be historically relevant, entertaining, and relatable. The film defied all conventions and was a critically acclaimed blockbuster. Butler’s book Kindred was published in 1979—but only after being rejected by many publishers, most of whom didn’t understand how a sci-fi novel could take place in such an uncomfortable time and have a black hero. Butler made her point, a declaration of humanity and social justice, and the result is a classic.
The book likely has inspired other slave-based time-travel tales. For example, the independent movie Sankofa, directed by Haile Gerima, follows Mona, a model who has a photo shoot at a Ghanian slave castle that held captured Africans before shipping them to the Americas. Mona is instantly transported through time, survives the Middle Passage, and becomes a slave who eventually aligns with a rebellious West Indian plotting to rebel. Both Dana and Mona, who had been relatively disengaged from social issues and history, return to their modern worlds with a greater understanding of their slave and African lineage.
Butler argued that Kindred wasn’t technically sci-fi because Dana didn’t use scientific means to travel. The same can be said of Mona in Sankofa, yet both Butler and Gerima used time travel as a tool to ingrain the realities of slave life and the ensuing sense of responsibility into their protagonists. They used time travel to encourage connections to a painful past.
“Reasons” circa Earth, Wind & Fire
Time travel is a fun way to free black characters from the restrictions of the times. But the time-travel element transcends storytelling and is a popular, albeit unidentified, practice taken up by musicians and theorists alike.
“As African Americans and blacks in the diaspora, we think cyclically,” says musician Shawn Wallace. “We view time cyclically. We usually return to something in the past to interpret it. That’s almost how we create our music; we go back to something and see how we can do it differently. Let’s speed it up, let’s slow it down.” Wallace points to Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire and the band’s use of the kalimba, sometimes called the African thumb piano. “He took a very simple instrument that opened him up rhythmically and it changed his music. We’re always going back to go forward.”
Almost reminiscent of Torah Midrash methods, a method of analyzing Hebrew text, Afrofuturists are constantly recontextualizing the past in a way that changes the present and the future. Sometimes seemingly distant occurrences are linked as an evolution of liberation consciousness. President Obama’s election is recast as a manifestation of Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy. Hope is a deep-rooted catchphrase anchored by President Obama that was echoed with as much fervor by Rev. Jesse Jackson and Dr. King before him. If you read passages by Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and Frederick Douglass, you’d think you’re reading the same person. How are these voices linked, and how do they inform the future? Is the narrative stronger that the speakers themselves?
“We’re constantly trying to figure out how we got here,” says Wallace. “We are still grappling with how quickly our lives have changed as Americans and African Americans—how within my lifetime our family structure has so drastically shifted. I’m not saying one is better than another, I’m just noting a difference. Well, how did we get here, what music was the soundtrack? What theater were we into? What dances were we doing? What was our cultural output when we got to a certain point in our lives? Can we go back to that? I think, too, because of our particular experience in America, we’re still piecing ourselves together and we’re constantly going back to grab a piece as we move forward.”
Photographer Alisha Wormsley is working on her Reverse Migration Project. She writes, “In the interest of time travel, I’m following the reverse order of my ancestral migration. It will go something like this: Pittsburgh—Appalachian Mountains—Virginia—North Carolina—South Carolina—Barbados—Cape (Slave) Coast, West Africa. Then I will make something.”
Ancient to the Future
The continent of Africa frequently serves as the alpha and omega of motherlands, a cosmic metaphor for a utopian future and the past. It’s evident in Afrofuturistic comic art, music, and literature.
The AACM’s motto is “Ancient to the Future,” and they work to play and teach the ancient musical healing traditions combined with the instruments of the past and today. “[Music] is a portal for time travel in a literal and figurative way,” says Khari B., president of the AACM.
“For an African American who’s never left America, Africa feels like the future,” says musician Morgan Craft, who believes that great things will emerge from the continent. It’s the reason you’ll see graphic images of characters like Mshindo Kuumba’s stunning illustration of Aniku, a mask-wearing, sword-wielding man with samurai leanings, or Demeke, a man in a golden cloak and African staff, and it’s not clear whether they’re images from the ancient African past or figures on a far-off planet in the future. “I think we as black artists are trying to come to grips with our epic past and what it could be again. The Garden of Eden of the future is in Africa,” says Craft.
“It’s that sankofa effect,” says Khari B., referring to the Asante image of a bird that looks backward with the egg of the future on her back. He adds, “One step into the future while looking back. It’s not that we’re going backward, but we’re evolving using the strength and characteristics of things that are why we’re here today. We get to pull from our past to build our future. That’s what Afrofuturism is about, going back to ancient traditions so that we can move more correctly into the future.”
But the idea of time travel, oddly enough, also reemphasizes the present. “Not being able to literally fold time, how do we think about time travel in the present?” asks Stacey Robinson, artist and cocreator of the Black Kirby exhibit. “What do we do in the present?” he asks, adding that staying in the present tense reemphasizes responsibility. Even the hypothetical time-travel concept still alters the present. He says, “I would approach time travel as an extension of the person traveling. How would time travel affect me?”
Robinson is correct. If today is future’s past, what does that say about the present? Who are we in real time?
Poet and artist D. Scot Miller was intrigued by Afrofuturism. As an advisor to the experimental journal Nocturnes Literary Review, Miller was immersed in the genre at the onset. The San Francisco resident frequented Alondra Nelson’s Afrofuturism Listserv and later consulted with the East Coast collective the Black Futurists. But when Miller began writing his book Knot Frum Hear, he wasn’t sure if Afrofuturism was the best way to describe the endeavor. “It’s like science fiction, but it’s not. It’s like fantasy, but it happens in real time,” he said, recalling attempts to describe it to friends. It wasn’t until he read Black Arts movement vanguard Amiri Baraka’s introduction to Henry Dumas’s Ark of Bones and Other Stories that he discovered the term Afrosurreal.
Baraka claimed that Dumas’s hybrid mystical lens is Afro-surreal. Dumas “created an entirely different world organically connected to this one,” Baraka writes. “They are morality tales, magical resonating dream emotions and images, shifting ambiguous t
error, mystery, implied revelation,” writes Baraka in his essay “Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist.” He continues, “But they are also stories of real life, now or whenever, constructed in weirdness and poetry in which the contemporaneousness of essential themes is clear.” Afro-surreal would come to explain the southern folklore and magic of Zora Neale Hurston as well as the hauntings and history of Toni Morrison.
Afro-surreal triggered a new worldview for Miller too. It described the mystical, present-day leanings in his work. In 2002 Miller reached out to Baraka and interviewed him. Impressed with Miller’s excitement, Baraka encouraged the young poet. “He said I was open to continue to explore and continue to open up doors,” Miller says. “It was like wind at my back. I took it pretty seriously.”
Miller, a pop culture writer, wrote a bevy of essays on art and referenced Afro-surrealism as he saw it appear in film and music. “My editor said, ‘OK, what is it?’ and that’s how we came up with the Afro-surrealism edition of the San Francisco Bay Guardian.” The edition ran in 2009 and featured essays and art from the likes of Greg Tate, known for his hip-hop and Afrofuturism critiques, and Amy Wiley. But it was Miller’s “Afrosurrealism Manifesto” that became the anchor for a new wave of surrealists. Referencing the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the Negritude movement by black francophones, Miller argued that Afro-surrealism, in all its fantastic forms, is not Afrofuturism, nor is it surrealism. The first world and third world have collapsed, says the manifesto. What we live in today is the Afro-surreal.
“Afro-surrealists expose this from a ‘future-past’ called right now,” writes Miller. “Right now, Barack Hussein Obama is America’s first black president. Right now, Afro-surreal is the best description to the reactions, the genuflections, the twists and the unexpected turns this ‘browning’ of White-Straight-Male-Western-Civilization has produced.”
“I honestly believe it’s the in-betweens,” Miller says. “It’s outside of everyone’s comfort zone.”
The manifesto’s tenets celebrate the invisible world and nature, the absurd and the whimsical, in depicting the beauties and dichotomies of the day. “Afro-surrealists use excess as the only legitimate means of subversion and hybridization as a form of disobedience,” Miller writes. “Afro-surrealists strive for rococo: the beautiful, the sensuous, and the whimsical.” With a penchant for masks, dandyism, and eighteenth-century aesthetics, Afro-surrealism decontextualizes the day. To quote surrealist poets Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, Afro-surrealism sparkles with “the marvelous.” The emphasis on today rather than the future, the minimal tech, heavy folklore, and mystical prism, according to Miller, makes an aesthetic all its own.
Miller is on to something. These are surreal times. President Obama’s election and the countermovements, extremist media, and confusion of analysts and journalists who just can’t reconcile what they were seeing without dropping dated lingo of the past would read as the sci-fi of yesteryear. Today the reelection of a black president, gay marriage, legalized marijuana, the war against women’s fertility rights, violent outbreaks, the Arab Spring, class didactics, and the browning of America are causing some serious reevaluation, and the outbreak of fuming anger juxtaposed with excitable glee makes for great art.
Saturday Night Live made history with their record-breaking political parodies, but most of the laughable skits were verbatim quotes from presidential debates and press conferences. No satire needed. If you followed the chair debacle from the 2012 Republican National Convention, at which actor Clint Eastwood berated an empty chair, supposedly talking to the president in an attempt at improv theater, you’ve seen the surreal. Thousands of people took to their cell phones and iPads, tweeting photos of themselves waving a finger at an empty La-Z-Boy during the convention, to which President Obama’s feed responded with a photo of him seated in a White House chair, back to the audience, full ears in profile, and the caption, “This seat’s taken.” It’s the ultimate slam-dunk tweet. The next day, all the political media talked about was Eastwood’s chair episode. Forget the party platform, forget the other speakers that night; the chair stole the show. It could all read like a bizarro-world alternative history if it weren’t reality. Capturing the dramatic victories and the about-face politics in all their folkloric glory in real time is Afro-surrealism.
In fact, Miller says he couldn’t have written his manifesto without President Obama’s polar shift. “It highlights so much of the module change that has taken place, and the absurdities of the outcomes of that change. Like when Bill O’Reilly said America is no longer a white nation … America hasn’t been a white nation in a long time.”
Now and Forever
When I think about Afro-surrealism, I think of divvying up Sun Ra’s work into a right brain/left brain, masculine/feminine hybrid, with, say, his love of all things futuristic, space-bound, and electric on one side and his African mythmaking, metaphysics, and real-world efforts to heal through music on the other.
The attempt to divide him in two is very sci-fi, but it makes for a great example. Afro-surrealism, as Miller frames it, is lowtech, present-day, and sees very little difference between the dream world and the waking one. “For other cultures dream time and real time is the same time. This idea that dreams are premonitions, all of us do that,” Miller says.
“It’s not about tapping into the subconscious, but you’re already tapped in to that. You’re bringing in the dream, the fantasy and the marvelous. While you’re asleep and awake you are manifesting. People have to be able to transform their living situation.”
The genre differs from surrealism only in the highly mystical bent. Leopold Senghor, Senegal’s first president and also a poet, saw a difference between early black surrealists and their European contemporaries, believing that European surrealism was “empirical” while African surrealism was “mystical and metaphorical.”
What else is Afro-surreal? Wale Kehinde’s Renaissance-style paintings of modern-day black men with the flower-tinged backgrounds and Kara Walker’s infamous Victorian-style silhouettes of slave-era stereotypes fall within this vein, says Miller. Wale takes men with hip-hop swag and poses them like the French kings, knights, and dukes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Walker’s silhouettes, despite their popularity, are harshly criticized as profane and offensive for their large-scale size and the freakish sex and violence.
“With Afro-surreal, it allows us to address the absurdity head-on,” says Miller. “That’s why. Kara Walker has an understanding of the absurdity of it. Sometimes you have to be irreverent. Sometimes the situation is so absurd that the only way to address it is to be absurd.”
Artist Nick Cave’s Soundsuits exhibit, a hybrid of monstersize wearable art and sculpture is Afro-surreal. Writer Johnny Ray Huston described them as “acid-trip Bigfoot creatures.” A former Alvin Ailey dancer and chair of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s fashion department, Cave made the giant ensembles from natural and artificial materials.
Rapper Nicki Minaj’s cartoonish high fashion, neon wigs, comical expressions, and multiple personalities; the social commentary, spaghetti western violence, and humor in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained; the mythology in the post-Katrina narrative Beasts of the Southern Wild; even the over-the-top irreverent antics in rapper Trinidad James’s near-ridiculous video for “All Gold Everything” are evidence of the Afro-surreal in pop culture.
Afro-surrealism also flirts with sexual ambiguity, one of the tenets in Miller’s manifesto. The androgyny and dandyism of pop star Prince (who pioneered the seventeenth-century French aesthetic in 1980s fashion) is a strong influence. But Afro-surrealism relishes ambiguity in general. In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Rinehart the runner, a dandy pimp, snakes through a fluid underworld as a prophetic underlord who brings light to a world that the main character has never seen, thus blurring reality. Miller says that Rinehart’s trademark sunglasses and hat are masks. Masks are treasured in the Afro-surreal—the more gothic and indigenous, the bette
r. Why? The mask is magical, draws wearers out of their conventions. But Afro-surrealism isn’t always over the top. The theater of Suzan-Lori Parks and her contemporary plays about black life are also under the Afro-surreal banner.
“Afro-Surrealism rejects the quiet servitude that characterizes existing roles for African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women and queer folk. Only through the mixing, melding and cross-conversion of these supposed classifications can there be hope for liberation. Afro-Surrealism is intersexed, Afro-Asiatic, Afro-Cuban, mystical, silly and profound,” write Miller.
Today, many artists who create Afro-surreal writing and art are also Afrofuturists. Just as Sun Ra embodies both aesthetics (he wouldn’t have called himself Afrofuturist or Afro-surreal), so do the new wave of artists working in the twenty-first century. But like Sun Ra, even those who describe themselves as both often have a hard time separating the two ideals in their work. “I actually like that struggle, that both of these terms are very much still being defined,” says Krista Franklin, a renowned collagist interviewed by Sixty Inches From the Center. “I’m a science fiction geek and I love horror and the supernatural, so it makes a lot of sense for my work to be described as Afrofuturist and Afro-surrealist.”
The two are flipsides of the same coin, with shared influences and champions. Today, the two aesthetics are so intertwined that it’s nearly impossible to talk about one without talking about the other. For the Afrofuturist, the future can be mystical and technology can be mythical. As a society, we’re hardwired to technology we can’t live without, from Google Maps and satellites to energy pipelines that heat our homes. We are technology dependent today. In this space-time continuum where the future is now, the idea of the present gets sticky. But the best distinction is that Afrofuturism is more tech-heavy and races between the future and the distant past, whereas Afro-surrealism is low-tech and placed squarely in today, though it has a serious infatuation with seventeenth-century fashion and masks.
Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture Page 13