Afrofuturism

In America, Afrofuturism begins with the earliest songs, poetry, and stories about a better time to come outside of and away from slavery and the anti-Black oppression that free African-Americans endured. The life of the enslaved was clearly a dystopia, so various forms of imaginative escapism that might have taken the form of religion or revolution enabled a sense of collective hopefulness that a better time was an inevitable part of a Black future. Poetry and song like, "I Thank God I'm Free at Last," "Steal Away to Jesus," and "Go Down Moses" became traditional anthems for the afro-future that mixed history, religion, mysticism, and futurism to create a distinct Black sense of the future, a type of speculative fiction that would inspire institutional forms of resistance, and a large body of futurist poetry, fiction, music, and art. For instance, Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1913 dialect poem, "An Antebellum Sermon,” relies on the narration of a biblical past juxtaposed with America's slave legacy in order to satirically attack the Jim Crow politics of Dunbar's own time. It is a poem that looks backward as well as forward, with brief interludes signifying the speaker's present moment. Just like the novel is a safe space for us to explore fictional minds and develop our empathy, speculative dreaming and writing are our safe spaces for exploring ideas that may change our world for the better.