Afrofuturism, Science Fiction,

and the History of the Future

Lisa Yaszek

In his introduction to the 1989 re-issue of Invisible Man Ralph

Ellison provocatively notes, “a piece of science fiction is the last thing
I expected to write” (xv). Both this claim and the way Ellison phrases
it are striking. Literary scholars usually talk about Invisible Man as a
prime example of the Great American Novel, but throughout his
career Ellison carefully distanced himself from that phrase. Indeed,
when he accepted the National Book Award for this work in 1953 he
rather cheerfully described it as a failed example of the Great American
Novel. But Ellison does not just flip the script and call Invisible Man a
work of science fiction either – at most he implies that there is some-
thing fantastic about it. Thus it seems that Ellison could not make
sense of his own novel because he did not have a name for a literature
predicated upon both realist and speculative modes of storytelling.
Recently, however, artists and scholars have indeed coined a name
for this kind of storytelling: Afrofuturism. Over the past three decades
both science fiction and Afrodiasporic scholars have become increas-
ingly interested in what Sheree R. Thomas calls “speculative fiction
from the African diaspora.” Leading science fiction journals such as
Extrapolation and Science Fiction Studies regularly include essays about
black authors in their pages, and as early as the summer of 1984,
Black American Literature Forum devoted an entire special issue to the
subject of race in science fiction. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s,
however, there was little discussion of this fiction as a literary mode
with its own distinct themes, techniques, and relations to other kinds
of black cultural production.
This situation changed with the emergence of Afrofuturist studies in
the 1990s, when cultural critics including Mark Dery, Greg Tate, Tricia
Rose, and Kodwo Eshun first drew attention to the centrality of
science fiction themes and techniques in the work of many black
authors, artists, and musicians. The term is generally credited to Dery,
who, in his 1994 edited collection Flame Wars: The Discourse of
Socialism and Democracy, Vol.20, No.3, November 2006, pp.41–60
ISSN 0885-4300 print/ISSN 1745-2635 online
DOI: 10.1080=08854300600950236 # 2006 The Research Group on Socialism and Democracy
42 Socialism and Democracy

Cyberculture, introduces the term “Afrofuturism” to define “speculative

fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-
American concerns in the context of 20th-century technoculture – and
more generally, African-American signification that appropriates
images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” to explore
how people of color negotiate life in a technology intensive world
(136). As the first part of Dery’s definition suggests, Afrofuturism is
closely related to science fiction as an aesthetic genre; indeed, contem-
porary authors whom critics such as Dery, Tate and Rose identify as
Afrofuturist (e.g. Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, and Nalo
Hopkinson) explicitly identify themselves as science fiction authors.
However, as Dery argues in the second half of his definition, Afrofutur-
ism is not only a subgenre of science fiction. Instead, it is a larger
aesthetic mode that encompasses a diverse range of artists working in
different genres and media who are united by their shared interest in
projecting black futures derived from Afrodiasporic experiences.
More recently, sociologist Alondra Nelson has been instrumental
in developing Afrofuturism as a coherent mode of critical inquiry.
According to Nelson, the task of the Afrofuturist scholar is to
“explore futurist themes in black cultural production and the ways in
which technological innovation is changing the face of black art and
culture” (Nelson and Miller 2006). Because this kind of cultural
production crosses conventional aesthetic boundaries (including the
hypothetical boundaries between canonical and popular culture),
Afrofuturist scholars must be prepared to work both within and
without the academy. And indeed, Nelson’s own work on
Afrofuturism does just that. In 1998 Nelson and multimedia artist
Paul D. Miller created the Afrofuturist listserve (which includes scho-
lars, musicians, authors, and artists) and in 2000 they launched
www.Afrofuturism.net. In 2002, Nelson introduced her group’s work
to academia with a special issue of Social Text, which demonstrated
how the insights generated by members of the Afrofuturist listserve
could open up new areas of scholarly inquiry.
This new critical perspective enables us to understand Afro-
futurism as a coherent narrative tradition in its own right. Sheree
R. Thomas’s Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the
African Diaspora (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004) have
introduced readers to stories from dozens of African American
authors ranging from Charles W. Chesnutt and W.E.B. Du Bois to
Samuel Delany and Amiri Baraka. Nalo Hopkinson’s Whispers from
the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000) introduces
readers to the more global dimensions of Afrofuturism through
 Lisa Yaszek 43

stories by well-known Caribbean authors including Jamaica Kincaid

and Wilson Harris as well as tales from newcomers including Tobias
S. Buckell and Marcia Douglas. Taken together, then, these anthologies
demonstrate how literary Afrofuturism has developed across both time
and space – and both within and without the science fiction tradition.
But of course one of the primary ways that artists project black
futures in writing is by adopting the tropes and narrative techniques
of science fiction or by writing from an Afrodiasporic perspective
from within the science fiction community. Accordingly, in this essay
I specifically explore how Afrofuturist literature has developed over
the past century in tandem with science fiction. After briefly reviewing
the history and aesthetic mission of Afrofuturism I consider what I see
as one of the central texts of literary Afrofuturism: Ralph Ellison’s Invis-
ible Man. Here, I will examine how Ellison uses science fictional motifs
to aggressively critique American institutions and practices that erase
black people and their history from the future imaginary. In the
second half of this essay I discuss a series Afrofuturist stories written
between 1920 and the present that restore people of color to this
future imaginary. I am particularly interested in demonstrating how
these stories follow a specific historical trajectory. While early Afro-
futurists were 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.

A brief history of Afrofuturism

The history of Afrofuturist storytelling both parallels and intersects
that of science fiction. Science fiction scholars generally agree that science
fiction developed from the scientifically- and technologically-inspired
stories of classic 19th-century authors including Mary Shelley and
H.G. Wells in Great Britain, Jules Verne in France, and Edgar Allan
Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the United States.1 In essence, these
authors updated older, well-established story forms – including the

1. For discussions of 19th-century British and continental influences on the deve-

lopment of science fiction, see especially Aldiss and Wingrove (1986) and James
(1994). For discussions of 19th-century American authors on the development of
this genre, see Atterbery (2002) and Franklin (1995). Finally, for more specific
considerations of Mary Shelley’s legacy to women science fiction writers, see
Lefanu (1988), Roberts (1993), and Donawerth (1997).
44 Socialism and Democracy

gothic, the fantastic journey, and utopian fiction – with detailed refer-
ences to modern scientific theories and technological developments. In
doing so they took the first important steps in creating a new mode of
speculative literature that directly engaged the changing relations of
science and society as a whole.
Afrofuturist stories also begin to appear in this period, and, more
often than not, were also written by respectable mainstream writers
including African Americans Martin Delany, Charles Chesnutt, and
Edward Johnson. Much like their white counterparts, 19th-century Afro-
futurists wrote in a diverse range of fantastic and proto-science fictional
forms. For example, Delany’s 1857 novel Blake, or the Huts of America is an
alternate history novel in which Cuban and American slaves engineer a
successful revolution; Chesnutt’s 1887 short story “The Goophered
Grapevine” combines elements of gothic and trickster narratives to
examine the relations of northern whites and southern blacks; and
Johnson’s 1904 novel Light Ahead for the Negro depicts an African
American man who travels into the future and explores a racially-
egalitarian socialist America (Delany 2000: 383f). Whatever narrative
forms they worked in, then, 19th-century Afrofuturist authors were
bound together by a shared interest in representing the changing
relations of science and society as they specifically pertained to African
American history – including, of course, the history of the future.
Although American science fiction evolved into a distinct genre
replete with its own authors, editors, and magazines in the first
decades of the 20th century, Afrofuturist authors of this period
were still more likely to publish in black magazines and newspapers
such as Crisis and the Pittsburgh Courier. Of course, this does not
mean that there were not any black science fiction authors – since
science fiction magazines such as Amazing and Astounding Stories
carried out most of their business by mail, it would have been
impossible to determine the race (or even gender) of any individual
authors unless they announced it publicly. What it does mean,
however, is that authors associated with these magazines generally
did not write stories that addressed racial issues in meaningful
ways (Delany 2000: 384).2

2. There were, of course, a few exceptions to this rule. In a 1997 interview, Leslie F. Stone –
one of the first women to publish in the new science fiction magazines of the early 20th
century – notes that her popular story “The Fall of Mercury” (1935) featured a black
protagonist. Significantly, however, she also notes that to the best of her knowledge
neither her editors nor her readers ever commented on this one way or another. Thus
it might be more accurate to say that science fiction authors sometimes imagined
futures that included people of color, but not ones that extrapolated from the racial
 Lisa Yaszek 45

There seem to have been two broad reasons for this silence. The
first has to do with the cultural status of science fiction in America
at that time. Because early American science fiction magazines were
made of cheap pulp paper featuring crudely drawn images of exp-
loding planets, scantily-clad women, and bug-eyed monsters, they
were often perceived as somewhat immature and disreputable
(James 1994: 37). As such, they were hardly ideal forums for
authors interested in serious speculation about the future of race in
America.
The second reason is more directly political. While individual
members of the science fiction community were often advocates of
civil rights, science fiction storytelling as a whole tended to revolve
around futures that were implicitly – and sometimes explicitly –
racist ones. Consider, for instance, Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “A
Martian Odyssey” (1934). This story holds a special place in science
fiction history because it is one of the first sympathetic depictions of
the alien other, emphasizing the intellectual similarities between
technologically advanced humans and aliens over their obvious
physical differences. Unfortunately, it does so in a spectacularly
racist manner: the predominantly white humans who populate
Weinbaum’s story know that the Martians they encounter are intelli-
gent and rational beings precisely because their knowledge classification
systems are more sophisticated than those of African people back on Earth.
Even at their literary best, then, early science fiction authors seemed
incapable of writing stories about tomorrow that did anything other
than reflect the prejudices of the current day.3
After World War II, new sciences and technologies including
everything from the atom bomb to the automatic coffeemaker
seemed to propel Americans into a brave new future that would be
radically different from the past. Not surprisingly, science fiction
became an increasingly popular – and increasingly respectable –
way to make sense of these changes. Although Afrofuturists still

tensions of their own day. Instead, they seem to have implicitly assumed that such
tensions would be eliminated in rationally-planned worlds of tomorrow.
3. For further discussion, see Delany’s “Racism and Science Fiction” (2000) and
Thomas’s introduction to Dark Matter (2000). Indeed, as Thomas notes, this trend
continued well into the 1950s, when well-meaning science fiction writers like Ray
Bradbury wrote allegorical stories about the civil rights movement that only
addressed race relations from the perspective of white characters. Although such
stories were in some ways a marked improvement over their pulp-era predecessors,
they still rendered black people silent and relegated them to the margins of social and
political action.
46 Socialism and Democracy

did not have much formal contact with the science fiction community
in the postwar era, their storytelling practices became an increasingly
central aspect of another popular art form: jazz music. Indeed, many
Americans first encountered what we now call Afrofuturism in the
work of 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s jazz musicians such as Sun
Ra and Lee “Scratch” Perry, who depicted themselves (and by exten-
sion all Afrodiasporic people) as the descendants of aliens who came
to Earth to prepare humanity for its eventual destiny among the stars.
Thus these artists projected noble pasts for people of color while care-
fully crafting a heroic black face for the future as well. Eventually,
Afrofuturist storytelling became a regular aspect of black popular
music, informing the work of funk musicians such as George
Clinton in the 1970s, rap artists such as Public Enemy in the 1980s,
and techno DJs such as Spooky: That Subliminal Kid in the 1990s
and 2000s.4
As the explosion in Afrofuturist music over the past 40 years
suggests, science fiction has woven itself into the fabric of everyday
life. Indeed, scholars including Darko Suvin and Fredric Jameson
sometimes even talk about science fiction as “THE literature of late
capitalism” because it so effectively captures the experience of living
in a high-tech world (Yaszek 2002: 97).5 If nothing else, films including
The Matrix from America, Tetsuo: The Iron Man from Japan, and Night
Watch from Russia indicate the very real extent to which science
fiction pervades global culture.
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Afrofuturist authors
increasingly ally themselves with the science fiction community.
These new alliances began in the 1960s and 1970s with pioneering
black authors such as Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Charles Saun-
ders, and Jewelle Gomez. Today, this community is home to
dozens if not hundreds of black authors from around the world.
And indeed, science fiction and Afrofuturism have come together
in a number of other ways: through the rise of conferences such as
Black to the Future, the publication of books such as Thomas’s

4. For detailed discussion of Afrofuturism in jazz and other popular forms of Afrodias-
poric music, see especially Kodwo Eshun’s groundbreaking book More Brilliant than
the Sun (1999) and John Akomfrah’s equally groundbreaking film The Last Angel of
History (1995).
5. See especially Suvin (1989) and the discussion of science fiction in Jameson (1991 and
2005 [the latter reviewed in this issue]). Although both authors are primarily inter-
ested in the science fiction subgenre of cyberpunk, their comments are relevant to
much of science fiction in general.
 Lisa Yaszek 47

Dark Matter anthologies, and the establishment of author collectives

such as the Carl Brandon Society.6
Afrofuturism has evolved into a coherent mode not only aestheti-
cally 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 200 years.
According to author Toni Morrison, these projects do more than
simply combat the erasure of black subjects from Western history.
They also demonstrate how African slaves and their descendants
experienced conditions of homelessness, alienation, and dislocation
that anticipate what philosophers like Nietzsche describe as the found-
ing conditions of modernity (see Gilroy 1993: 178). Thus Afrodiasporic
histories insist both on the authenticity of the black subject’s experience
in Western history and the way this experience embodies the
dislocation felt by many modern peoples.
As a popular aesthetic movement centered on seemingly fantastic
tropes such as “the encounter with the alien other” and “travel
through time and space,” Afrofuturism holds the potential to bring
the Afrodiasporic experience to life in new ways. As Alondra Nelson
explains, the science fictional elements of Afrofuturism provide both
“apt metaphors for black life and history” and inspiration for “technical
and creative innovations” of artists working in a variety of traditional
and new media.7 Furthermore, by harnessing one of the signature
languages of modernity – the language of science fiction – Afrofuturist
artists automatically create new audiences for their stories: those
primarily young, white, Western, and middle-class men who comprise
the majority of science fiction fans and who might never otherwise
learn much about the history of their country save what they
haphazardly pick up in the high school classroom.
As its name implies, Afrofuturism is not just about reclaiming the
history of the past, but about reclaiming the history of the future as
well. Cultural critic Kodwo Eshun proposes that mainstream under-
standings and representations of the future derive from three closely
related sources. These sources include big science, which generates
data about the past and the present in order to predict the future; big
business, which funds scientific research and acts upon its results;
and the global media, which synthesizes scientific and corporate
activity into a relatively coherent narrative and then disseminates

6. For more information about Black to the Future, see the conference website at http://
cdforum.org/bttf/. On the Carl Brandon Society, go to http://www.carlbrandon.org/.
7. http://www.afrofuturism.net/text/about.html.
48 Socialism and Democracy

this narrative throughout the world. Together, these institutions consti-

tute what Eshun calls the “futures industry.” More often than not, the
agents of this über-industry conflate blackness with catastrophe. For
example, Eshun writes that “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” (2003:
291f). Other places populated by descendants of the African diaspora –
such as the Caribbean islands and the inner cities of North America –
receive similar treatment in futurist scenarios. As such they become
sites of absolute dystopia; imaginary spaces where the persistence of
black identity signifies a disastrous failure in the ongoing progress of
global capital itself.
Afrofuturist artists fight these dystopic futures in two related ways.
First, they use the vocabulary of science fiction to demonstrate how
black alienation – what W.E.B. Du Bois called “double conscious-
ness” – is exacerbated rather than alleviated by those visions of to-
morrow that are disseminated by the futures industry. Second,
they disrupt, challenge, and otherwise transform those futures with
fantastic stories that, as Ruth Mayer puts it, “move seamlessly back
and forth through time and space, between cultural traditions and
geographic time zones” – and thus between blackness as a dystopic
relic of the past and as a harbinger of a new and more promising
alien future (2000: 556). These acts of “chronopolitical intervention,”
as Eshun calls them, double, triple, quadruple, and even quintuple
our consciousness about what it might mean to live in a black future
(2003: 298).

Fighting the futures industry: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Although Afrofuturism, like science fiction, has developed over the
course of two centuries, I begin my own history of this aesthetic tra-
dition in the middle of the 20th century with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible
Man. Ellison’s novel is a particularly compelling example of Afrofutur-
ism because it invites readers to think about how the rhetoric of the
futures industry impacts people of color. As readers are likely to
remember, Invisible Man follows the adventures of an unnamed prota-
gonist who tries to become an American leader by allying himself with
various organizations: the historic black college he attends as a young
man in the South, the paint factory he works for when he first moves
north, and then finally the leftist political group known as the
Brotherhood.
 Lisa Yaszek 49

As I read Ellison’s novel in the history of Afrofuturism, what the

invisible man is looking for is the possibility of a black future that he
cannot find.8 In each case his dreams of self-realization are thwarted
because he is treated as little more than a blank slate upon which insti-
tutional authority projects its own vision of the future. The most expli-
cit acknowledgement of this comes from Mr. Norton, the rich white
college trustee who tells Ellison’s protagonist: “You are my fate,
young man. Only you can tell me what it really is . . . Through you
. . . I can observe in terms of living personalities to what extent my
money, my time and my hopes have been fruitfully invested” (42,
45). Here then the black subject is figured as venture capital, a
natural resource available to white investors speculating in the stock
market of tomorrow.
Although white members of the Brotherhood explicitly oppose
themselves to capitalists like Norton, they, too, treat black men as
natural resources rather than human beings. This attitude is clearly
encapsulated in a Brotherhood poster entitled “After the Struggle:
The Rainbow of America’s Future.” The poster depicts “a group of
heroic figures. An American Indian couple, representing the dispos-
sessed past; a blond brother (in overalls) and a leading Irish sister,
representing the dispossessed present; and [black] Brother Tod
Clifton and a young white couple (it had been felt unwise simply to
show Clifton and the girl) surrounded by a group of children of
mixed races, representing the future” (385). Much like Norton then,
the Brotherhood equates blackness with futurity, but only insofar as
the black subject conforms to a predictable and carefully controlled
vision of the future.
Eventually Ellison’s protagonist learns to say no to these white-
washed histories of the future predicated on the erasure of black sub-
jectivity. He learns this lesson from Brother Tarp. As a young man in
the South, Tarp refuses to give up his possessions to a white man;
later, he refuses to accept the sentence of life imprisonment he receives
for doing so, and after 19 years of patient waiting, he finds his oppor-
tunity and escapes to the North. As he tells the invisible man: “I said no
to a man who wanted to take something from me; that’s what it cost me
for saying no and even now the debt ain’t fully paid and will never be
paid in their terms . . . I said no . . . I said hell no! And I kept saying no
until I broke the chain and left” (387). I think this passage is significant
because it does more than demonstrate one man’s refusal to play the

8. As I have argued elsewhere (Yaszek 2005), this proto-Afrofuturist sensibility per-

vades both Ellison’s fiction and his critical essay writing.
50 Socialism and Democracy

role that has been socially scripted for him. It shows how, in refusing
this role, one man can change the future: Tarp’s debt – such as it is –
will never be paid because he refuses to become the subservient
black man he is supposed to be. Instead, he removes himself from
the bad future that has been imposed on him and allies himself with
the Brotherhood in hope of a better tomorrow.
But if Ellison’s protagonist says no to all those whitewashed
futures that deny the complexity of his history and identity – including
those offered by the Brotherhood – what is left to him? Toward the end
of the novel he encounters two possible black futures, but neither is
very satisfactory. On the one hand, Ras the Exhorter/Destroyer
dreams of a Black Nationalist future in Africa, but these dreams turn
out to be little more than recycled scenarios from old Hollywood
films. Indeed, one observer directly compares Ras’s warrior-king
clothes to “the kind you see them African guys [wearing] in the
moving pictures” and his horse to “Heigho, the goddam Silver”
(563). On the other hand, Rinehart the gangster suggests that black
Americans might do best to resist predetermined futures and “open
up new sections of reality” by embracing whatever role is most appro-
priate at the moment: preacher or pimp, lover or fighter, criminal or
informer. Unfortunately, when the invisible man tries this out on his
political constituency it backfires horribly and Harlem explodes in a
night of apocalyptic rioting that tears the community apart and
leaves the invisible man trapped in the sewer system beneath
New York City.
At first this seems to be a fortunate fall for Ellison’s protagonist.
Once the invisible man is outside – or underneath – American
society he finds that he can begin to exert some control over it.
Indeed, he becomes a kind of proto-hacker, stealing electricity from
Broadway to light his hiding place and power his Louis Armstrong
records. He also becomes a proto-Afrofuturist author, rethinking the
relations of his past and present and mapping the networks of power
that would propel him into various futures not of his own making.
Thus the basement becomes a time and space vessel that carries
Ellison’s protagonist toward a new identity, a new aesthetic practice,
and perhaps, finally, a truly new future.9
But the invisible man never quite gets there. In the final pages of
Ellison’s novel he admits, “it escapes me. What do I really want, I’ve

9. If nothing else, the basement does become a literal time machine for the invisible man.
According to Patrick W. Shaw, the chronology of the novel indicates that he stays in
his basement from 1931 to 1948, or 17 years (119).
 Lisa Yaszek 51

asked myself. Certainly not the freedom of a Rinehart or the power of

[the Brotherhood], nor simply the freedom not to run. No, but the
next step I [can’t] make, so I’ve remained in the hole” (574). As
such, the invisible man remains perpetually on the edge of revelation
and the edge of action, aware that he holds within himself the
possibility of a new future, but one that doesn’t seem quite ready to
be born just yet.

Making it new: Afrofuturist fictions of the 20th and 21st centuries

Although Ellison’s invisible man may never be ready to confront
the future, many other Afrofuturist artists have done just that – and
in a range of provocative ways. Consider the visions of tomorrow
crafted by two Afrofuturist authors from the first half of the 20th
century: W.E.B. Du Bois and George S. Schuyler. In many ways,
Du Bois and Schuyler could not be more different from one another.
Du Bois was a radical sociologist and civil rights activist who firmly
believed that people of color from across the world should come
together to fight racism. By way of contrast, Schuyler was a con-
servative journalist for the Pittsburgh Courier who fiercely condemned
racism but who also rejected the notion of a globally unified black
art, culture, or politics. Nonetheless, both men were committed to
using speculative narrative forms to imagine how black people might
participate in the creation of the future.
For example, W.E.B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet,” which first
appeared in the 1920 collection Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil,
both invokes and rewrites the science fiction disaster story. According
to science fiction scholars David Pringle and Peter Nicholls, disaster
stories generally imagine how “vast biospheric changes . . . might
drastically affect human life” (1993: 338). The stories appeal to
modern Western readers because “they represent everything we
most fear and, at the same time, perhaps, secretly desire: a depopulated
world, escape from the constraints of a highly organized industrial
society, [and] the opportunity to prove one’s ability as a survivor”
(338). This is certainly true of Du Bois’s story, which uses the natural
disaster of a comet passing through Earth’s atmosphere to explore
whether or not there might be a future in which humans finally
escape the constraints of a highly racist industrial society.
“The Comet” follows the story of Jim Davis, a talented young black
man who quietly resents that his skin color has doomed him to the
menial job of errand boy for a large New York City bank. Indeed, as
Jim rather grimly notes to himself upon being ordered to retrieve
52 Socialism and Democracy

some ancient records from an abandoned subterranean vault at the

beginning of the story, “of course they wanted him to go down to the
lower vaults. It was too dangerous for more valuable men” (5).
Somewhat ironically, this “dangerous” errand actually saves Jim’s life
when the comet’s poisonous tail passes through the city and kills every-
one aboveground. At first Jim is understandably horrified by the comet’s
destruction because it seems he is the only person left alive on Earth.
And yet once he eats a meal in an upscale whites-only restaurant and lib-
erates a car from its dead white driver, Jim begins to see some distinct
advantages to the situation. For the first time in his life, he does not
have to worry about his skin color but can instead enjoy all the luxuries
available to white people in a high-tech society.
Jim’s newly enlarged sense of humanity is further confirmed by his
chance meeting with one other survivor: a rich young white woman
who happens to be working in her basement darkroom at the time of
the comet’s passage. Although she initially sees Jim as “a man alien in
blood and culture” (12), the young woman quickly casts off her race
and class prejudices and discovers that she truly likes Jim. Moreover,
once she realizes that she and Jim might be responsible for repopulating
the entire Earth, affection quickly becomes something else:

Slowly the mighty prophecy of her destiny overwhelmed her . . . She was no mere
woman. She was neither high nor low, white nor black, rich nor poor. She was
primal woman; mighty mother of all men to come and Bride of Life. She looked
upon the man beside her and forgot all else but his manhood, his strong, vigorous
manhood . . . She saw him glorified. He was no longer a thing apart, a creature
below, a strange outcast of another clime and blood, but her brother humanity
incarnate, Son of God and great All-Father of the race to be. (15)

Thus Du Bois suggests that the comet is not really a disaster for our
hero. Rather it is an extremely fortunate event that catapults him into
a brave new world where sex matters more than race.
But alas, this future is not meant to be. Just as Jim and the young
woman prepare to consummate their love, they are discovered by a
rescue party whose leader informs them that the comet tail only
affected New York City; that the rest of America is just the same as it
ever was and that normal services and relations are already being
restored to the city itself. He then promptly demonstrates this, of
course, by trying to lynch Jim for touching a white woman. Although
the young woman intervenes to save Jim’s life, she quickly loses inter-
est in him once she is reunited with her rich white fiancé. And even
though Jim is finally reunited with his own wife, it is only to learn
that the comet has killed their baby. Thus Du Bois ends his story by
 Lisa Yaszek 53

suggesting not only that it will take a natural disaster to eradicate

racism in America, but that without such a disaster there may no
future whatsoever for black Americans.
By way of contrast, George S. Schuyler combines elements of two
other science fiction story types – the military adventure and the
utopian journey – to depict a future in which diasporic blacks join
forces to conquer the world. American science fiction written
between the two world wars often revolved around battles with
alien races in which sympathetic humans saved the day with their
superior knowledge of science and technology (Stableford 1993b:
1297). This is certainly true of “Black Internationale” and “Black
Empire,” two interlocking serialized stories that Schuyler published
in the Pittsburgh Courier between 1936 and 1938. Schuyler’s stories
follow the adventures of Carl Slater, a young journalist for The
Harlem Blade who is swept up into a global battle between two
alien races on Earth: white people and everyone else. This global
battle – or, more properly, this global revolution – is led by the
wealthy and brilliant Dr. Henry Belsidus. Belsidus begins his revolu-
tion by gathering together a “Black Internationale” comprised of
Afrodiasporic scientists, soldiers, artists, and businesspeople from
around the globe. Although they have little common history or
culture, these future world leaders are bound together by their frus-
tration with the inability to succeed in a racist world – and, more
altruistically, by their commitment to actively creating a new future
for black men and women everywhere.
And this is precisely what they do. After decimating the United
States with biological warfare, the Black Internationale liberates
Africa from its European colonial oppressors and announces the
birth of a new Black Empire. When the Europeans protest, Belsidus’s
second-in-command General Patricia Givens masterminds a series of
air raids that quickly bring Europe to its collective knees. Givens’s
efforts are greatly enhanced by timely aid from Martha Gaskins, a
young white stockbroker who becomes Belsidus’s lover and, even-
tually, the head of his European espionage unit. Thus Schuyler
suggests that the battle for racial equality will naturally appeal to
right-thinking people everywhere, regardless of race and gender.10

10. While Schuyler remains clearly and firmly committed to women’s rights throughout
the Black Internationale/Black Empire serials, he treats the possibility of egalitarian
race relations in a far more complex manner. Belsidus is generally portrayed as dis-
missive of white women; indeed, in an early installment of Black Internationale he
tells Slater that “I use [white] women to aid in [white people’s] destruction. As
long as they succeed in carrying out my mission, I spare them. When they fail, I
54 Socialism and Democracy

Even though these scenes of carnage must have been great fun for
Schuyler to write – nearly 70 years later, they are certainly still great
fun to read – it is important to note that Schuyler balances the
carnage with scenes that celebrate Afrodiasporic intellectual prowess
and preview the utopian future in store for subjects of the new Black
Empire. Indeed, Carl Slater decides to join the black revolution pre-
cisely because Belsidus’s people have already done so much. They
have invented new crops to eliminate world hunger, new information
networks to create global community, and even new religions to instill
both individual dignity and racial pride in their worshippers. And
herein lies the central irony of Schuyler’s story. As Bellarius dramati-
cally explains to Slater, it is precisely the experience of slavery and
racial discrimination that has prepared Afrodiasporic people for
world domination:

All laws here are the laws of the white man, designed to keep us in subjugation
and perpetuate his rule. All the means of education and information, from
nursery to college, from newspaper to book, are mobilized to perpetuate
white supremacy; to enslave and degrade the darker peoples. No student of
the race problem, Slater, can escape that conclusion. . . . But white people
haven’t got all the brains. We are going to out-think and out-scheme the
white people, my boy. I have the organization already, Slater, scattered all
over the world; young Negroes like yourself: intellectuals, scientists, engineers.
They are mentally the equals of whites. They possess superior energy, superior
vitality, they have superior, or perhaps I should say more intense, hatred and
resentment, that fuel which operates the juggernaut of conquest. . . . You will
see in your time a great Negro nation in Africa, all powerful, dictating to the
white world. (Schuyler 1991: 14f)

Like any good science fiction author, then, Schuyler uses his utopian
society to estrange readers from their assumptions about the past,
present, and future of their own world. In Black Internationale and
Black Empire, recent Western history is not just a confirmation of
white supremacy, nor is it just a racist tragedy. Rather, it is a series
of fortunate events that facilitate the evolution of Afrodiasporic
people into supermen and superwomen who will lead all humanity
into a new age.

destroy them” (Schuyler 1991: 11). Slater, however, clearly admires Belsidus’s white
lover Martha Givens, and she is a key character in both Black Internationale and Black
Empire. Indeed, Schuyler ends both serials with highly ambivalent images of Martha
weeping because Belsidus refuses to return her love. Even as Schuyler invites
readers to revel in Belsidus’s world conquest, then, he seems to caution that such
triumph can only come at the cost of one’s essential humanity.
 Lisa Yaszek 55

Much like Ralph Ellison, then, early Afrofuturist authors such as

Du Bois and Schuyler wrote stories that revolved around a specific
issue: the ability of Afrodiasporic blacks to make a place for them-
selves in Western – and even global – futurity. By way of contrast,
contemporary Afrofuturist authors such as Octavia Butler and Nalo
Hopkinson readily assume that people of color will indeed be key
players in the history of the future. But this does not mean that they
simply create Technicolor versions of traditional science fiction
stories, making a few heroic scientists black or brown and a few
evil alien others white or pink. Rather, they actively draw upon
Afrodiasporic history and culture to tell complex and sometimes
contradictory stories about how and why race relations might continue
to matter in the future. In doing so, they also contribute to the ongoing
development of science fiction itself.
Consider, for example, Octavia Butler’s short story “Bloodchild,”
which first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1984. At
first glance “Bloodchild” seems to be a simple variation on the classic
alien invasion story, revolving around the pseudo-Darwinian notion
that species must compete with one another to ensure that only the
fittest survives (Stableford 1993a: 16). Butler’s story takes place in a
far-off future where a group of humans have migrated to an alien
world to escape persecution on Earth. When they arrive they promptly
attempt to exterminate the bug-like T’lic who live there. Unfortunately
for the humans, the T’lic are highly advanced people with problems of
their own: they are facing certain extinction because the mammals they
rely on to incubate their larvae have all but died out. Not surprisingly,
the T’lic quickly conquer the human invaders and drug them into sub-
mission so human women will bear as many children as possible and
thus the T’lic can use surplus human men as hosts for their own
larvae, thereby endowing the men with a traditionally female bio-
logical function. Given this situation, an apocalyptic struggle
between the T’lic and humanity seems inevitable.
However, Butler refuses to indulge in apocalyptic storytelling,
instead drawing inspiration from African American history to
explore how different races might survive and co-evolve through
compromise and cooperation. “Bloodchild” revolves around a
human adolescent boy named Gan whose family lives with T’Gatoi,
a powerful female T’lic politician who has already radically improved
human – T’lic relations by stopping the sale of human men away from
their families, creating preserves where humans can live without T’lic
interference, and encouraging progressive-minded T’lic and humans to
join together into new interspecies families. What T’Gatoi hasn’t done,
56 Socialism and Democracy

however, is adequately prepare Gan for childbirth, which the T’lic

think of as a highly private matter. It’s also a dangerous one: if the
larvae are not surgically removed from their hosts at a precise time,
they will kill the host by trying to eat their way out from inside him.
Understandably, when Gan sees a birth go wrong, all his fears about
T’lic control over human “host animals” come rushing to the surface
and the young boy threatens to kill both himself and T’Gatoi.
Gan refrains from doing this, however. Instead, he and T’Gatoi talk
out their differences – and then, more importantly, recognize their
similarities. As the alien neatly puts it:

the animals we once used began killing our eggs after implantation long before
your ancestors arrived . . . Because your people arrived, we are relearning what
it means to be a healthy, thriving people. And your ancestors, fleeing from their
homeworld, from their own kind who would have killed or enslaved them –
they survived because of us. We saw them as people and gave them the Pre-
serve when they still tried to kill us as worms. (137)

Recognizing that their species can no longer survive without one

another, Gan puts down his gun, reaffirms his love for T’Gatoi, and
promises to bear her children. T’Gatoi, meanwhile, vows to make pol-
itical amends for her cultural short-sightedness. And thus the story
ends with Gan and T’Gatoi in one another’s arms, conceiving the chil-
dren that will affirm the possibility of human – T’lic co-evolution.
Significantly, although this is a happy ending for Gan and T’Gatoi,
it is probably a very uncomfortable one for Butler’s readers. The T’lic
still have more power than humans, human women still give birth to
human men who will, in turn, give birth to alien babies, and we
simply do not know if T’Gatoi will really be able to convince her
peers to do right by their new human partners. What Butler does
insist upon, however, is that much like African American slaves of
the 18th and 19th centuries, the captive humans on T’Gatoi’s world
do have a choice: they most likely cannot win their freedom by vio-
lence, but at the same time, they do not have to be doomed victims
or martyrs. Instead, they can forge new kinds of emotional and physical
connections with other like-minded individuals to ensure that every-
one lives to see a better day. As I read it, then, Gan’s choice to bear
T’Gatoi’s children is a risky but incredibly brave one because it
affirms the complexity of historical reality over simple misrepresen-
tations of so-called biological necessity.
I end this essay at the new millennium with Nalo Hopkinson’s
short story “Ganger (Ball Lightning).” First published in Thomas’s
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora
 Lisa Yaszek 57

(2000), “Ganger (Ball Lightning)” updates Isaac Asimov’s classic robot

puzzle stories. Throughout the 1940s Asimov wrote a series of stories
about robots whose behavior was guided by three immutable rules
designed to protect humans against harm by robots. In each tale a
robot does something unexpected, and the reader races against
Asimov’s characters to see who can solve the puzzle first. Hopkinson’s
story follows a similar, if saucier, pattern. “Ganger” relates the story of
Cleve and Issy, who have recently bought full-body sex suits in a
desperate attempt to save their marriage (readers learn at the beginning
of the story that the only time Cleve and Issy actually communicate
anymore is in bed). One night the couple swaps suits to see what it is
like to be the opposite sex, and are so surprised by the intensity of
the experience that they rip off the suits and throw them in a corner.
In the morning Issy wakes up to find out that the suits have merged
and come to life. As a kind of electrified double of Cleve and
Issy, the doppleganger – or “ganger,” as Hopkinson’s characters call
it – wants nothing more than to have sex with its owners. But
because it is made of almost pure electricity, this will obviously
kill them.
And hence the puzzle of the story. Where did the ganger come
from? How can Issy and Cleve stop it? Like any good Asimovian
character, Hopkinson’s sex suit hackers quickly and logically figure
out what happened: the suits merged and took on a life of their own
because Cleve and Issy failed to follow the manufacturer’s warning
to discharge and separate the suits after every use. They then figure
out how to stop the ganger just as quickly and logically. As Issy
explains to Cleve, the suits are their doubles, and so the ganger will
probably respond to stimuli in much the same manner as Issy and
Cleve. Therefore, since the one thing they never want to do anymore
is talk, then talking to each other is what’s most likely to kill the
ganger. And thus Issy and Cleve finally talk, the ganger is destroyed,
and their marriage is saved.
In its broadest dimensions, then, Hopkinson’s story does not seem
to be about race. And yet, it is profoundly engaged with race at two
very different levels. First and most obviously, race is the key to unlock-
ing the puzzle at the heart of this tale. During the final battle with the
ganger, readers learn why Cleve and Issy do not talk anymore. Cleve
reveals that he is afraid to express his feelings because “look at
the size of me, the blackness of me. You know what it is to see
people cringe for fear when you shout?” (151). Issy, meanwhile,
admits that she channels her anxiety about personal relationships
into more abstract anger at racial injustice, thereby allowing herself
58 Socialism and Democracy

to “talk around stuff, not about it” (150). Here then Hopkinson extends
the tradition initiated by Du Bois, Schuyler, and Butler, insisting not
only that race will matter to entire nations in the future, but that it
will matter to individual people in their everyday lives as well.
Second, race is central to “Ganger (Ball Lightning)” – and indeed
all of Hopkinson’s fiction – in a much more celebratory way as well.
Science fiction has traditionally been thought of as the “literature of
engineers”; accordingly, authors generally use the same standard
American English that is found in engineering textbooks. Hopkinson,
however, departs from this tradition by allowing her narrators and
characters to speak in the dialects of her pan-Caribbean childhood. In
doing so she fulfills the goals of both science fiction and Afrofuturist
writing. She reminds us that science fiction is not just the literature of
engineers, but the literature of all people who live in a high-tech world.

Conclusion: black to the future

In conclusion, I want to propose two reasons why it is important to
recover the history of Afrofuturism as it has unfolded over the past two
centuries. The first reason is a scholarly one, and has to do with our
understanding of literary and cultural history. The past two decades
have been marked by an explosion of interest in literary representations
of science and technology. These studies tend to follow a very specific
and very raced trajectory: they tell us that white authors including T.S.
Eliot, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gibson are the real founders of
modern technocultural narrative and that authors of color did not
engage in this kind of storytelling until identity politics exploded in
the 1960s. Thus it seems that white authors got there first, and that
people of color have been mere respondents to the new literary forms
of 20th and 21st centuries. But this just isn’t true! By recovering Afrodias-
poric future story telling traditions we gain a better understanding of the
important intellectual and aesthetic work that these authors have per-
formed on both national and global cultural fronts. In doing so, we
also learn more about how Afrofuturism transforms science fiction
and other modes of technologically engaged literature today.
My second reason for wanting to direct attention to Afrofuturism is
political. From the ongoing war on terror to Hurricane Katrina, it seems
that we are trapped in an historical moment when we can think about
the future only in terms of disaster – and that disaster is almost always
associated with the racial other. Of course, there are many artists, scho-
lars, and activists who want to resist these terrifying new represen-
tations of the future. As a literary scholar myself, I believe that one
 Lisa Yaszek 59

important way to do this is to identify the narrative strategies that

artists have used in the past to express dissent from those visions of
tomorrow that are generated by a ruthless, economically self-interested
futures industry. Hence my interest in Afrofuturism, which assures us
that we can indeed just say no to those bad futures that justify social,
political, and economic discrimination. In doing so this mode of
aesthetic expression also enables us to say yes to the possibility
of new and better futures and thus to take back the global cultural
imaginary today.

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