Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: In your book, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics, you touch upon the issue of Afrofuturism, but in your approach, it is just a part of a more complex case you call Black Technopoetics.Could you explain the term and its connections to Afrofuturism -I mean Afrofuturistic practices and ideas?What differences -if any -do you see in Afrofuturism depending on latitude?What's different in the Caribbean, North America, and Africa?Black Technopoetics addresses the wide range of black engagements with technology -imaginative, material, literal and cultural -without committing to the identitarianism that Afrofuturism was fated to manifest, particularly as it became increasingly American and as it has become a wider, popular cultural phenomena.For many of us who emerged before and alongside Afrofuturism, the issues and themes that gave birth to it also enabled a critique of nationalist notions of race and an expansion of possibilities outside the framework of racial affirmation, pride, and identity.This difference is clear in the tension between Greg Tate's take on Afrofuturism via his reading of Samuel Delany's work and Delany's response to Tate in the foundational conversation that names Afrofuturism, Mark Dery's "Black to the Future" interviews.Tate's desire for a stronger nationalist 'blackness' in Delany's work contrasts Delany himself for whom futurity is simply too unpredictable a context within which to assume racial continuities based on current political and cultural realities.This is why the horizon of Black Technopoetics is always a creole horizon.It assumes that race + futurity = unstable, incommensurable and alien to contemporary formations and ideologies.It acknowledges the historical constructedness and contingencies of race, which because they were present in the past will therefore be there in the future.As Afrofuturism became focused more on its prefix than its suffix -Afro instead of futurity, in my view -it became necessary to signal a commitment to its foundational themes and issues alongside an openness to a plethora of black approaches to them that were free to resist, contradict, fracture and reject each other and in doing so construct a diaspora not centered on any specific location -Africa or Black America, for example.My work, in general, is committed to wider 'latitudes' of race and PRZEGLĄD KULTUROZNAWCZY NR 3 (49) 2021, s.
Source: Przegląd Kulturoznawczy
Language: Polish
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4210680659