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Jason Reynolds On “Miles Morales,” Spider-Man, and His Secret Superpower

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Jason Reynolds On “Miles Morales,” Spider-Man, and His Secret Superpower

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Jason Reynolds wrote a Spider-Man novel with a new protagonist. Miles Morales is half Puerto Rican and half black. In this interview, Jason Reynolds shares his purpose in creating Marvel's new Spider-Man. He also talks about themes like racism and incarceration.

"I needed to delve into how [Miles Morales'] culture and environment changes his relationship with being a superhero. How his family dynamics and his family member’s pasts affect what Miles deems as possible. This was important to me because this is so often the story in communities like the one I grew up in."

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If you typed the URL directly, please make sure the spelling is correct. If you clicked on a link to get here, the link may be outdated. Use the search functionality to find what you came here for.

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This article defines Afrofuturism and introduces contributors to the movement, such as artist Sun Ra. The author, Jamie Broadnax, also praises the film "Black Panther" and discusses its Afrofuturism elements.

"What makes Afrofuturism significantly different from standard science fiction is that it’s steeped in ancient African traditions and black identity...To be Afrofuturism, [the narrative] must be rooted in and unapologetically celebrate the uniqueness and innovation of black culture."

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm. We're hearing the word "Afrofuturism" a lot.

But what exactly is Afrofuturism?

Afrofuturism is the reimagining of a future filled with arts, science and technology seen through a black lens. The term was conceived a quarter-century ago by white author Mark Dery in his essay " Black to the Future," which looks at speculative fiction within the African diaspora. The essay rests on a series of interviews with black content creators.

Dery laid out the questions driving the philosophy of Afrofuturism:

Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn't the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers ― white to a man ― who have engineered our collective fantasies?

What makes Afrofuturism significantly different from standard science fiction is that it's steeped in ancient African traditions and black identity. A narrative that simply features a black character in a futuristic world is not enough. To be Afrofuturism, it must be rooted in and unapologetically celebrate the uniqueness and innovation of black culture.

The biggest proponent of this cultural movement, even before it had its name, was musician Sun Ra, who infused elements of space and jazz fusion in his work as a musical artist. Prolific science fiction author Octavia E. Butler explored black women protagonists in novels like Fledging, Dawn, Parable of the Sower and Lilith's Brood, set in the context of futuristic technology and interactions with the supernatural. In the contemporary music world, singers like Erykah Badu, with her eccentric and experimental imagery in videos and album covers, promote the intersection of art and futurism. Artists like Janelle Monae, with her android alter-ego and electronica sounds, and films like " Brown Girl Begins," a post-apocalyptic tale set in 2049 and directed by Sharon Lewis, pay a huge homage to Afrofuturism.

Then there's "Black Panther." The film wears themes of Afrofuturism proudly on its sleeve. Tech genius Princess Shuri is not only the smartest person in the fictional world, but she's responsible for the creation and maintenance of sophisticated gadgets for her brother T'Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther.

A prosperous alternative afro future can be seen in their fictional East African home of Wakanda, a small country the size of New Jersey that has never been colonized and is steeped in its blackness. It's a utopian society that also boasts one of the world's richest resources, vibranium. Because white supremacy never intruded on Wakandan culture and its people, ancient African traditions remain common practice there.

But this movie is more than just a glorious film ― it's the expression of a movement.

Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

Africans and African-Americans have full autonomy as Afrofuturists. A community of people can take a piece of visual art or notes from a song and develop an entire universe and say, "This is ours." And that's what this film represents to so many excited fans. Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

In addition to the predominantly black cast filled with Hollywood stars and starlets, "Black Panther" also had a black production team spearheading the shaping of this story. The writer, filmmaker and executive producer are African-American. Production designer Hannah Beachler, who was influenced by Afrofuturistic architecture and Afropunk aesthetics, helped lay the groundwork for this world. The African regalia and elaborate costumes by famed wardrobe designer Ruth E. Carter created a Wakandan couture that would give New York Fashion Week a run for its money ― just look at her use of kimoyo beads as both a fashion accessory and a communication device.

This intersection of sci-fi and African pride is what we've come to know as Afrofuturism. For many of us in the blerd community, the film with its love for technology, science, visual art and music (if you haven't checked out the "Black Panther" album, you should make it a priority) is what we've been hungry for.

I hope, for all of our sakes, that this is also just the beginning. I hope that "Black Panther" can prove that stories permeated in blackness have crossover appeal. I hope we get more and more stories of black people who have agency, who are free and subservient to no one. Black people deserve to see themselves leading the way in real or abstract futures.
Jamie Broadnax is the editor-in-chief and creator of the online community for black women called Black Girl Nerds.

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Opinion | What The Heck Is Afrofuturism?

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm.

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Your Brief And Far-Out Guide To Afrofuturism

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Your Brief And Far-Out Guide To Afrofuturism

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The term Afrofuturism was first used by critic Mark Dery. He wrote an essay called "Black to The Future."  It was about how there were not a lot of black science fiction writers.

Niama Safia Sandy is an anthropologist.

"Afrofuturism is often regarded as a cultural genre or style, a re-imagining of African tradition that projects techno-futuristic possibilities. But for Sandy, the movement is more than a literary genre — it’s real life." I think that Afrofuturism is an important subgenre because it helps some people relate to science fiction more.

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CULTURE & ARTS

In anticipation of her "Black Magic" exhibition, curator Niama Safia Sandy shares some of her favorite writers, artists and musicians contributing to the Afrofuturist vision.

"Time is this really fluid thing. Now is now, but the past is now and the future too."

This is how curator and anthropologist Niama Safia Sandy describes the core idea of Afrofuturism, a cultural aesthetic combining elements of science fiction, magical realism and African history.

The artistic, musical and literary movement is often traced back to jazz composer and cosmic philosopher Sun Ra, who, in college in the 1930s, had a hallucinatory experience in which he was abducted, brought to planet Saturn and shown a prophetic future.

"My whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up ... I wasn't in human form ... I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn ... they teleported me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me."

But the actual term Afrofuturism was first used by critic Mark Dery in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future," which examined why there were so few black science fiction writers at the time, given the genre's inextricable links to the other and life on the margins.

"Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?" Dery asks in the text. "Furthermore, isn't the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers -- white to a man -- who have engineered our collective fantasies?"

Afrofuturism is often regarded as a cultural genre or style, a re-imagining of African tradition that projects techno-futuristic possibilities. But for Sandy, the movement is more than a literary genre -- it's real life. "It's not just an ideological thing, it's how people live," Sandy explained to The Huffington Post. "Magical realism is used to talk about literature of the other, literature from pretty much everywhere except the West. But I feel like it isn't just a literary genre, it's how we understand the earth -- an ambulatory cosmology, how we move through the world."

Sandy describes how -- through the lens of Afrofuturism -- certain myths, signs, colors and feelings have become like literary symbols to be decoded. How history and nature have become texts to be interpreted. "Growing up, if we walked outside and it was sunny and all of the sudden it started raining, to my mother, that would mean something," she says. "It's this meaning imbued in everything that you do. That is something that has been passed down to us through generations through our ancestors."

For the past two years, Sandy has been curating an exhibition called " Black Magic: AfroPasts/AfroFutures," featuring multidisciplinary visual artists from the African Diaspora. Photographers like A. Delphine Fawundu deconstruct ideas such as black femininity, exploring its relationship to memory and history in her photographs, many of which were photographed on the plantation where Nat Turner's Rebellion occurred. "There's a lot of looking back and looking forward happening in this work," Sandy said. "Celebrating those journeys whether they are intentional or forced journeys."

Beyond Fawundu, artist like Roger Bonair-Agard contributed video installations and poems, like " How the World Was Made -- a Super Crown." Bonair-Agard's poem revolves around the traditional West African character Anansi -- a spider, a god, and a figure used in children's fables told all around the diaspora. "In the poem, he is Anansi, learning how to go from being a spider to being a person," Sandy said. "It connects these ideas from the folklore and stories we've grown up with."

In an exhibition statement, Sandy summarizes the essence of the exhibition, a magical conjuring of past and present forces: "Intersections of the past, present and future grounded in the magic that was already in the soil, in the air, passed on by our ancestors through breath, bonds, blood, ritual well after we came across the Atlantic all of these many times. We carry it with us wheresoever we go -- this abundant color, rhythm, swagger ... Because of this, we see and hear magic in everything across water, space and time."

In anticipation of her "Black Magic" exhibition, Sandy shared some of her favorite writers, artists and musicians contributing to the Afrofuturist vision. Read on for a far-out introduction to the ruling makers of black magic.

Octavia Butler, author

"Who am I? I am a forty-seven-year-old writer who can remember being a ten-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an eighty-year-old writer. I am also comfortably asocial -- a hermit ... A pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive."
Books to read: Kindred, Parable of the Sower, Fledgling

Ytasha Womack, author

"Mainstream feminism could benefit from the sense of balance that Afrofuturism has around expression. Afrofuturism is very nonconformist and sometimes I feel as if mainstream feminism wants women to express their liberation in very specific ways to specifically counter damaging narratives created by men. Afrofuturism doesn't create in opposition to anything. As a result, women Afrofuturists are free to do what they want and how that shows up is uniquely individual ... Self-expression in Afrofuturism isn't about making a statement, it's about being."
Book to read: Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture

Steven Barnes, author

"His mate Lamiya lay sunning on the hardwood deck with their daughters, Aliyah and Azinza. Lamiya herself was descended from the Afar people on the shore of Lake Abbe in Old Djibouti. A single aged servant, Yohela, had accompanied her on this trip, yet her hair, braided and beaded into the intricate patterns typical of the Afar, never bore the same configuration two days in a row. Four years Kai's senior, Lamiya was in both face and form the most elegantly sensual woman Kai had ever known, and he had adored her since childhood." -from Zulu Heart
Books to read: Lion's Blood, Zulu Heart

"I've always had a hard time writing about space. I am very much an earthling. I don't see myself ever leaving this planet while I am alive (I may be more adventurous after I die, heh). There is so much yet to discover (and fix) on earth, why look elsewhere? And my spiritual beliefs and the systems of magic I'm attracted to are earth-based, born and rooted deep in the soil. They are not in the 'heavens.' Also, when I write about something, I have to get and feel close to the subject. I never feel close to "space", no matter how much research I do."

Book to read: Who Fears Death

Maryse Condé, author

"Heaven is not for me, I dream of an afterlife where we can express all the emotions and desires we have had to stifle during our lifetime: an afterlife where we would be free at last to be ourselves. Ever since I was little, I've wondered if the Christian religion is not a white-folks religion made for white-folks, whether it's right for us who have African blood in our veins." -﻿from Windward Heights

Books to read: Windward Heights, Segu

Ellen Gallagher, artist

"The one area in which it makes sense to talk about race in my work is my idea of the subjective. Some people can stand in front of my work not having any relationship to it, and others can read the signs, making cohesive readings based on either the formal or subjective qualities they see. When you make something, you allow yourself readings that are sometimes mistaken. As an artist I'm creating fiction on top of an existing readability. It's what you talked about doing when you were a kid with Colorforms or what I did as a kid, stapling layers of paper costumes onto my dolls, that improvisational layering, implying call and response. It's not about audience. There's a friction between the material designed to be highjacked. It's improvisational to create another readability through blindness, through a private act on hand with imagination."
See more of her work here.

Underdog, artist

"My work is just a way to recontextualize and stretch the human eye. I flirt with images and bring them into the 'now chapter' of reaffirming and envisioning ourselves. I just want to break peoples hearts and reassemble them in one image."

Cyrus Kabiru, artist

"Being an artist, for me, was that I was a rebel -- I was a bit rude to everyone. I don't care. I don't follow what people want -- I follow what I want. I don't really like people. I want to go my own way. So I do everything the opposite to others, and they feel this guy is a bit of a rebel. When I was a little boy, grownups thought I was a bad example. They used to tell their kids, 'Work hard. If you won't work hard, you'll be like Cyrus.' I was very different. I was always in my house, doing art, painting and making sculptures, and no one understood what I was doing. I didn't study, I wore shaggy clothes. To them it was a bit weird. I didn't know Sunday, I didn't know Monday, I didn't know. I n Africa, we live in a package."
See more of his work here.

Lina Viktor, artist

"I've always been obsessed with gold. I think humanity as a whole has always been obsessed with gold. It's been valued and revered and sacred. It's a form of commerce now. I'm a little bit of an astrophysics nerd; I really love stuff about the universe and learning about the origin of metals. I know that gold, for example, is made from the death of a star -- a supernova. So basically, all the gold that has ever been mined on Earth today can only fit in three Olympic-sized swimming pools. It's really a small amount -- it's a very scarce resource, hence why, I'm sure, it has so much value. But I think there is something much more implicit in the value of gold -- when you see gold, real gold, it has a sort of emotional quotient to it that you can't really get when you use fake gold. There's an emotional reaction when people see real gold."
See more of her work here.

Sun Ra, composer, poet, philosopher

"I'm not real, I'm just like you. You don't exist in this society. If you did, your people wouldn't be seeking equal rights. You're not real. If you were, you'd have some status among the nations of the world. I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as a myth because that's what black people are: myths. I come from a dream that the black man dreamed long ago. I'm actually a presence sent to you from your ancestors." -From Space is the Place
Books to read: This Planet Is Doomed

Janelle Monáe, musician

"I'm a cybergirl without a face a heart or a mind / (a product of the man, I'm a product of the man) / I'm a saviour without a race (without a face)." -from "Violet Stars Happy Hunting"
Albums: "The ArchAndroid," "The Electric Lady"

Ibeyi, musicians

"Carry away my dead leaves
Let me baptize my soul with the help of your waters
Sink my pains and complains
Let the river take them, river drown them
My ego and my blame
Let me baptize my soul with the help of your waters
Those old means, so ashamed
Let the river take them, river drown them"
-from "River"
Albums: "Ibeyi"

Blitz The Ambassador, musician

"I've always felt hip-hop as a culture hasn't really yet embraced its international roots. The more I traveled, the more I realized that there's a specific role that I need to be playing, and that role is about bridging gaps and expanding the culture that I've been so blessed enough to be a part of. That's why I went with the Ambassador."
Albums: "Soul Rebel," "Diasporadical"

"Black Magic: AfroPasts/AfroFutures," curated by Niama Safia Sandy, runs from April 24 until May 22, 2016 at Corridor Gallery in Brooklyn, New York.

BEFORE YOU GO

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Your Brief And Far-Out Guide To Afrofuturism

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CULTURE & ARTS In anticipation of her "Black Magic" exhibition, curator Niama Safia Sandy shares some of her favorite writers, artists and musicians contributing to the Afrofuturist vision. "Time is this really fluid thing. Now is now, but the past is now and the future too."

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Afrofuturism - The Genre that made Black Panther

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Afrofuturism - The Genre that made Black Panther

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Afrofuturism is a subgenre of science fiction. It often contains Black characters that play big roles in the movie/book. Most of the time these stories take place in the near, or far future. Although, some may take place in the past. I really believe that it is a good idea that these authors think about making Black or Hispanic characters being the main hero. It gives all children and teenagers someone to look up to and also feel as if they could become that hero one day.

"We need our own science fiction to give black people and African people our own voices through this wonderful medium," Adeola said.

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afrofuturism: the genre that made black panther  - cnn

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Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther

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Marvel's Black Panther imagines a futuristic African world -- but the ideas behind it were around long before. Learn about the history of Afrofuturism.

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Kornelia Gondek- Afrofuturism Art by joshua Mays- Twitter @tinshackgallery-Pinterest

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Kornelia Gondek- Afrofuturism Art by joshua Mays- Twitter @tinshackgallery-Pinterest

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Right now what is trending is the Afroculturism on the tin shack feed. The tin shack has showcased many different types of african art and culture including the art of Joshua Mays. This specific art by joshua Mays is showing a great example of Afrofuturism and is  giving us a look at what the artist thinks the future might have in store for us.

" Science fiction that explores the experiences and culture of people of color. They’re amazingly diverse not just in their sci-fi visions, but the media they use to express them."

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Afrofuturism Art by Joshua Mays     |     #afrofuturism #africa #painting #art

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Afrofuturism Art by Joshua Mays     |     #afrofuturism #africa #painting #art https://t.co/6yVruC0qAq

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Afrofuturism Art by Joshua Mays | #afrofuturism #africa #painting #art pic.twitter.com/6yVruC0qAq
— Tin Shack (@tinshackgallery) December 20, 2016

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Afrofuturism Art by Joshua Mays     |     #afrofuturism #africa #painting #art https://t.co/6yVruC0qAq

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Afrofuturism Art by Joshua Mays     |     #afrofuturism #africa #painting #art https://t.co/6yVruC0qAq

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Afrofuturism Art by Joshua Mays     |     #afrofuturism #africa #painting #art

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Thomas Carpinelli "The resurgence of Afrofuturism goes beyond ‘Black Panther,’ to Janelle Monáe, Jay-Z and more"

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Thomas Carpinelli "The resurgence of Afrofuturism goes beyond ‘Black Panther,’ to Janelle Monáe, Jay-Z and more"

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This article will teach the reader about how authors and directors want to show and reflect the African experience.  Instead of talking about white people in america they will bring past experience of African Americans and black people throughout the country's. Kids want to look up to people they watch and its easier if they look like you.

" you’re likely to hear one word quite often: Afrofuterism "

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Leena Chang "Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther"

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Leena Chang "Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther"

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Afrofuturism intersects science fiction, technology and ancient African mythologies. Afrofuturism can reflect different types of arts for Africans like in black panther there is an African Superhero  that reflects sci fi.
"The one characteristic of the Wakandan people as far as costumes go is Afrofuturist," Ruth E. Carter, costume designer for Black Panther, told CNN.

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afrofuturism: the genre that made black panther  - cnn

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Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther

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Marvel's Black Panther imagines a futuristic African world -- but the ideas behind it were around long before. Learn about the history of Afrofuturism.

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Noah Laubach Beyond 'Black Panther': A brief history of Afrofuturism 

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Noah Laubach Beyond 'Black Panther': A brief history of Afrofuturism 

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This article will teach the reader about basic elements of afrofuturism. It then shows that  while  most people think the sci-fi movie scene is dominated by white heroes, there have been a few  afrofuturism movies or comic books before black panther (the history part)

"Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called 'Afro-futurism'.”
Quote from Mark Dery, who coined the term Afrofuturism

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Excited for Black Panther? So are we. Which is why we're rolling out obsessive coverage with Black Panther Week.
Among the images glimpsed in Marvel's first Black Panther trailer was a tribal elder in an emerald suit with a matching lip disc, a body modification found in the Suri and Mursi tribes of Ethiopia.

Warriors draped in blue "blankets" (or Seanamarena) soon followed, drawn from the Basotho peoples of South Africa. Alongside them were women in red beaded war garb - the Dora Milaje, Black Panther's female Royal Guard - their vivid outfits remixed from the Maasai ethnoculture of Kenya and Tanzania.

Black Panther looks like no Hollywood film we've ever seen, and it belongs to a deeply rooted artistic philosophy that's often overlooked: Afrofuturism.

The term was coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in "Black to the Future," a 44-page essay from 1993 in which Dery, a white writer, interviews several prominent African American voices: sci-fi author Samuel R. Delaney; musician and former The Village Voice writer Greg Tate; and Tricia Rose, the director of the Center for Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.

Dery's definition of the philosophy is as follows:

Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture-and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future-might, for want of a better term, be called "Afro-futurism."

The unique aesthetic of Black Panther, which has been setting the internet ablaze at regular intervals, can be attributed to its largely black cast and creative team (a rarity in American studio filmmaking), as well as the decision to push back against modern science fiction's penchant for Western design norms.

The genre has often coded colonized peoples and their cultures as the "alien" or "other," as seen in the Klingons' Fu Manchu facial hair on the original Star Trek or the Sand People's Arab-inspired thawbs in the original Star Wars. This tradition continues to this day, with indigenous extraterrestrial tribes in Avatar and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets being little more than haphazard mixtures of Native American and African iconography.

Black Panther is Afrofuturism writ large, the incorporation of distinctly African and African-American narrative symbolism as a means to reclaim modern blackness.

Black Panther, on the other hand, paints its human heroes with an authentically pan-African brush, interweaving Wakanda's advanced technology with imagery straight outta the Continent. This is Afrofuturism writ large, the incorporation of distinctly African and African-American narrative symbolism in sci-fi as a means to reclaim modern blackness.

In his essay, Dery investigates (among other things), contemporary urban uses of technology - specifically the "beeper culture" of the '90s, though its modern equivalent would arguably be the carving out of black spaces on social media.

Delaney expands on this concept, referring to the "scratch" and "sampling" methods of hip-hop remixing as "a specific mis-use and conscientious desecration of the artifacts of technology and the entertainment media."

For instance, the beatbox and the "robot" dance, landmarks in the evolution of hip-hop culture, represent the remixing of the human body: a labor force with limited access to tech innovation recreating technology itself, as if in opposition to systems of control.

In effect, Afrofuturist art has always been at odds with the norms of the mainstream. The black perspective in America has often lent itself to particularly unsettling genre fiction - like, most recently, Jordan Peele's Get Out.

Though contested by 21st century Afrofuturists, Dery's comparison of modern African-Americans to "the descendants of alien abductees" offers a metaphorical link between stranger-in-a-strange-land alien tales and the experiences of an entire people uprooted from their homes, forced to exist in a world that is not their own - much as Peele's protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) must adapt to the conventions and microaggressions of his girlfriend's suburban family home.

For many African-Americans today, the largely white mainstreams of both entertainment and politics might still feel like alien worlds to which they are outsiders. As Tate puts it, "Being black in America is a science-fiction experience."

Novelized science fiction played host to Afrofuturist ideas for the better part of the twentieth century, from authors like Samuel Delaney to Octavia Butler (particularly her Xenogenesis trilogy, which uses the intermingling of human and alien societies to explore cultural hybridization in a manner similar to postcolonial theory). The literary trend remains alive and well today, with the likes of Nnedi Okorafor's Binti series of novellas.

But whether as direct narrative or philosophical backdrop, Afrofuturism has always made its way to other mediums. It's seen perhaps most prominently in the work of jazz musician Sun Ra, whose space-age "Egyptian alien" aesthetic and incorporation of digital synthesizers remixed and elevated the genre, with transformative live performances acting as vessels for grandiose, regal visual narratives yet unexplored.

Which brings us, of course, to the King of Wakanda. Created in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Black Panther, much like his "Afrofuturist" label, was a white creation. Their modern definitions, however, hinge on black artistic contributions.

Much of the Panther's modern mythology and characterization came into being in the late '90s with writer Christopher Priest, whose storyline "The Client" brought King T'Challa face to face with his metatextual New York roots. But it was Reginald Hudlin's 2005-2008 run that began to delve into the geopolitics of Wakanda through a modern globalist lens.

This set the stage for the character's current print incarnation: Ta-Nehisi Coates' and Brian Stelfreeze's heady political saga "A Nation Under Our Feet," on which much of the film's recombining of technology with African tribal symbolism is based.

In Wakanda, unlike in much of the real world, African history and modern innovation are not treated as mutual exclusives. In Coates and Stelfreeze's comic, and in the Marvel Studios film, the nation's ancient culture and its 21st century inventions appear to have evolved not only side-by-side, but as one and the same.

Black Panther is not the only piece of Afrofuturism in the recent American mainstream. Ava DuVernay's "Family Feud" short for Jay-Z's 4:44 posits a future filled with intersections of black, female and Native American leadership. Add to that Janelle Monáe's Fritz-Lang-meets-Sun-Ra cover for The ArchAndroid and DuVernay's own upcoming A Wrinkle in Time, and you have yourself the gradual re-emergence of a trend.

However, there's little denying that Marvel's Wakandan saga is the most prominent example of Afrofuturist art in recent years - in part because of the money and widespread distribution behind it, but also in part because it's arguably the most potent.

As an artistic philosophy within the constraints of both America's own racial history and within the cultural context of the global West, Afrofuturism exists in opposition to a white, postcolonial status quo - whose normalcy stems from prioritizing Western philosophy and design at the cost of cultures disallowed from achieving their full potential in the past.

There's little denying that Black Panther is the most prominent example of Afrofuturist art in recent years.

The premise of Black Panther, as with most Afrofuturist art, goes against the grain of history itself - a violent chronology that stripped African cultures of resources and opportunities, and stripped African peoples of their languages and identities when they were enslaved in America and elsewhere. Few modern African-Americans know their exact origins, and African nations are rarely portrayed in anything resembling positive light in Western media despite their advancements.

Much of what has come to be known as Western culture was dependent on the systemic destruction of African heritage. Wakanda becoming an integral part of one of Western culture's longest-running mainstream narratives - the Marvel Cinematic Universe - is a small step towards undoing the contemporary effects of that destruction, whether by way of creating a new narrative of blackness on a global stage, or simply by affording black artists more opportunities.

Dery's essay begins with an ominous quote from George Orwell's 1984: "Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." This rings especially true when defining modern cultural narratives that are broadcast to all corners of the globe.

Fittingly, he follows this up with thematically appropriate lyrics from Def Jef's "Black to the Future," (for which the essay is named) as if in attempt to unearth the affirming African American counter-foil to the Orwellian omen:

Yo, bust this, Black
To the Future
Back to the past
History is a mystery 'cause it has
All the info
You need to know
Where you're from
Why'd you come and
That'll tell you where you're going.

It is in the re-envisioning of a future for black people, despite their present systemic oppression in every area from voter suppression to police brutality, that Afrofuturism's take on the past is born.

Within the fiction of Black Panther, Wakanda is a nation untouched by Western influence at any point in history, representing the peoples of postcolonial Africa had they been allowed to exist and advance on their own terms.

Afrofuturism, it would seem, is here to stay.

But Wakanda is also untethered to any one specific African ethnoculture (although its "official" language is Xhosa, its influences spread far beyond Bantu), thus allowing it to be a collective reclamation of pan-African identity for those in the global African diaspora uprooted centuries ago.

It is both Afrofuturism as contemporary African advancement, prioritizing non-white, non-Western symbolism in its design, as well Afrofuturism in the context of black America. It transforms a stolen history into a portrait of sci-fi heroism through a character whose superhero mantle is not a thematic externalization of psychosis disconnected from "real identity," as is the case with most superheroes in the Western individualist paradigm.

The Batman was the sole creation of Bruce Wayne, a white man who came from old money but had little reason to connect white readers to their roots. The Black Panther, on the other hand, was passed down through unbroken generational lineage - a luxury rarely afforded to African American readers. It's the Western superhero remixed and reclaimed as a symbol of deeply rooted cultural and tribal identity.

Perhaps most promising in all this, however, is that there is little in common by way of influence between Black Panther and the other aforementioned modern Afrofuturist examples. Even the film's own soundtrack, much of which sounds like tribal instruments beamed into a digital future, has yielded its own distinctly Afrofuturist feel.

"All The Stars," the recently released music video from Kendrick Lamar and SZA, is as unapologetically African as the film, bringing Lamar face to face with gilded Nubian goddesses arriving like alien messengers within a luminous floating temple. But there is barely a narrative or aesthetic element that overlaps with Black Panther itself.

They are each their own unique entities, telling their own stories and carving out their own spaces for contemporary and historical blackness within the mainstream. There is much yet to be explored, and given that there is no singular avenue to Afrofuturist art, there is much yet to be reclaimed. Afrofuturism, it would seem, is here to stay.

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Beyond 'Black Panther': A brief history of Afrofuturism

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Excited for Black Panther ? So are we. Which is why we're rolling out obsessive coverage with Black Panther Week. Among the images glimpsed in Marvel's first Black Panther trailer was a tribal elder in an emerald suit with a matching lip disc, a body modification found in the Suri and Mursi tribes of Ethiopia.

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Beyond 'Black Panther': A brief History of Afrofuturism:

Black Panther looks like no Hollywood film we’ve ever seen, and it belongs to a deeply rooted artistic philosophy that’s often overlooked: Afrofuturism. Alongside them were women in red beaded war garb – the Dora Milaje, Black Panther’s female Royal Guard – their vivid outfits remixed from the Maasai ethnoculture of Kenya and Tanzania. Among the images glimpsed in Marvel’s first Black Panther trailer was a tribal elder in an emerald suit with a matching lip disc, a body modification found in the Suri and Mursi tribes of Ethiopia.

"Being black in America is a science-fiction experience."

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Excited for Black Panther? So are we. Which is why we're rolling out obsessive coverage with Black Panther Week.
Among the images glimpsed in Marvel's first Black Panther trailer was a tribal elder in an emerald suit with a matching lip disc, a body modification found in the Suri and Mursi tribes of Ethiopia.

Warriors draped in blue "blankets" (or Seanamarena) soon followed, drawn from the Basotho peoples of South Africa. Alongside them were women in red beaded war garb - the Dora Milaje, Black Panther's female Royal Guard - their vivid outfits remixed from the Maasai ethnoculture of Kenya and Tanzania.

Black Panther looks like no Hollywood film we've ever seen, and it belongs to a deeply rooted artistic philosophy that's often overlooked: Afrofuturism.

The term was coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in "Black to the Future," a 44-page essay from 1993 in which Dery, a white writer, interviews several prominent African American voices: sci-fi author Samuel R. Delaney; musician and former The Village Voice writer Greg Tate; and Tricia Rose, the director of the Center for Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.

Dery's definition of the philosophy is as follows:

Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture-and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future-might, for want of a better term, be called "Afro-futurism."

The unique aesthetic of Black Panther, which has been setting the internet ablaze at regular intervals, can be attributed to its largely black cast and creative team (a rarity in American studio filmmaking), as well as the decision to push back against modern science fiction's penchant for Western design norms.

The genre has often coded colonized peoples and their cultures as the "alien" or "other," as seen in the Klingons' Fu Manchu facial hair on the original Star Trek or the Sand People's Arab-inspired thawbs in the original Star Wars. This tradition continues to this day, with indigenous extraterrestrial tribes in Avatar and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets being little more than haphazard mixtures of Native American and African iconography.

Black Panther is Afrofuturism writ large, the incorporation of distinctly African and African-American narrative symbolism as a means to reclaim modern blackness.

Black Panther, on the other hand, paints its human heroes with an authentically pan-African brush, interweaving Wakanda's advanced technology with imagery straight outta the Continent. This is Afrofuturism writ large, the incorporation of distinctly African and African-American narrative symbolism in sci-fi as a means to reclaim modern blackness.

In his essay, Dery investigates (among other things), contemporary urban uses of technology - specifically the "beeper culture" of the '90s, though its modern equivalent would arguably be the carving out of black spaces on social media.

Delaney expands on this concept, referring to the "scratch" and "sampling" methods of hip-hop remixing as "a specific mis-use and conscientious desecration of the artifacts of technology and the entertainment media."

For instance, the beatbox and the "robot" dance, landmarks in the evolution of hip-hop culture, represent the remixing of the human body: a labor force with limited access to tech innovation recreating technology itself, as if in opposition to systems of control.

In effect, Afrofuturist art has always been at odds with the norms of the mainstream. The black perspective in America has often lent itself to particularly unsettling genre fiction - like, most recently, Jordan Peele's Get Out.

Though contested by 21st century Afrofuturists, Dery's comparison of modern African-Americans to "the descendants of alien abductees" offers a metaphorical link between stranger-in-a-strange-land alien tales and the experiences of an entire people uprooted from their homes, forced to exist in a world that is not their own - much as Peele's protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) must adapt to the conventions and microaggressions of his girlfriend's suburban family home.

For many African-Americans today, the largely white mainstreams of both entertainment and politics might still feel like alien worlds to which they are outsiders. As Tate puts it, "Being black in America is a science-fiction experience."

Novelized science fiction played host to Afrofuturist ideas for the better part of the twentieth century, from authors like Samuel Delaney to Octavia Butler (particularly her Xenogenesis trilogy, which uses the intermingling of human and alien societies to explore cultural hybridization in a manner similar to postcolonial theory). The literary trend remains alive and well today, with the likes of Nnedi Okorafor's Binti series of novellas.

But whether as direct narrative or philosophical backdrop, Afrofuturism has always made its way to other mediums. It's seen perhaps most prominently in the work of jazz musician Sun Ra, whose space-age "Egyptian alien" aesthetic and incorporation of digital synthesizers remixed and elevated the genre, with transformative live performances acting as vessels for grandiose, regal visual narratives yet unexplored.

Which brings us, of course, to the King of Wakanda. Created in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Black Panther, much like his "Afrofuturist" label, was a white creation. Their modern definitions, however, hinge on black artistic contributions.

Much of the Panther's modern mythology and characterization came into being in the late '90s with writer Christopher Priest, whose storyline "The Client" brought King T'Challa face to face with his metatextual New York roots. But it was Reginald Hudlin's 2005-2008 run that began to delve into the geopolitics of Wakanda through a modern globalist lens.

This set the stage for the character's current print incarnation: Ta-Nehisi Coates' and Brian Stelfreeze's heady political saga "A Nation Under Our Feet," on which much of the film's recombining of technology with African tribal symbolism is based.

In Wakanda, unlike in much of the real world, African history and modern innovation are not treated as mutual exclusives. In Coates and Stelfreeze's comic, and in the Marvel Studios film, the nation's ancient culture and its 21st century inventions appear to have evolved not only side-by-side, but as one and the same.

Black Panther is not the only piece of Afrofuturism in the recent American mainstream. Ava DuVernay's "Family Feud" short for Jay-Z's 4:44 posits a future filled with intersections of black, female and Native American leadership. Add to that Janelle Monáe's Fritz-Lang-meets-Sun-Ra cover for The ArchAndroid and DuVernay's own upcoming A Wrinkle in Time, and you have yourself the gradual re-emergence of a trend.

However, there's little denying that Marvel's Wakandan saga is the most prominent example of Afrofuturist art in recent years - in part because of the money and widespread distribution behind it, but also in part because it's arguably the most potent.

As an artistic philosophy within the constraints of both America's own racial history and within the cultural context of the global West, Afrofuturism exists in opposition to a white, postcolonial status quo - whose normalcy stems from prioritizing Western philosophy and design at the cost of cultures disallowed from achieving their full potential in the past.

There's little denying that Black Panther is the most prominent example of Afrofuturist art in recent years.

The premise of Black Panther, as with most Afrofuturist art, goes against the grain of history itself - a violent chronology that stripped African cultures of resources and opportunities, and stripped African peoples of their languages and identities when they were enslaved in America and elsewhere. Few modern African-Americans know their exact origins, and African nations are rarely portrayed in anything resembling positive light in Western media despite their advancements.

Much of what has come to be known as Western culture was dependent on the systemic destruction of African heritage. Wakanda becoming an integral part of one of Western culture's longest-running mainstream narratives - the Marvel Cinematic Universe - is a small step towards undoing the contemporary effects of that destruction, whether by way of creating a new narrative of blackness on a global stage, or simply by affording black artists more opportunities.

Dery's essay begins with an ominous quote from George Orwell's 1984: "Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." This rings especially true when defining modern cultural narratives that are broadcast to all corners of the globe.

Fittingly, he follows this up with thematically appropriate lyrics from Def Jef's "Black to the Future," (for which the essay is named) as if in attempt to unearth the affirming African American counter-foil to the Orwellian omen:

Yo, bust this, Black
To the Future
Back to the past
History is a mystery 'cause it has
All the info
You need to know
Where you're from
Why'd you come and
That'll tell you where you're going.

It is in the re-envisioning of a future for black people, despite their present systemic oppression in every area from voter suppression to police brutality, that Afrofuturism's take on the past is born.

Within the fiction of Black Panther, Wakanda is a nation untouched by Western influence at any point in history, representing the peoples of postcolonial Africa had they been allowed to exist and advance on their own terms.

Afrofuturism, it would seem, is here to stay.

But Wakanda is also untethered to any one specific African ethnoculture (although its "official" language is Xhosa, its influences spread far beyond Bantu), thus allowing it to be a collective reclamation of pan-African identity for those in the global African diaspora uprooted centuries ago.

It is both Afrofuturism as contemporary African advancement, prioritizing non-white, non-Western symbolism in its design, as well Afrofuturism in the context of black America. It transforms a stolen history into a portrait of sci-fi heroism through a character whose superhero mantle is not a thematic externalization of psychosis disconnected from "real identity," as is the case with most superheroes in the Western individualist paradigm.

The Batman was the sole creation of Bruce Wayne, a white man who came from old money but had little reason to connect white readers to their roots. The Black Panther, on the other hand, was passed down through unbroken generational lineage - a luxury rarely afforded to African American readers. It's the Western superhero remixed and reclaimed as a symbol of deeply rooted cultural and tribal identity.

Perhaps most promising in all this, however, is that there is little in common by way of influence between Black Panther and the other aforementioned modern Afrofuturist examples. Even the film's own soundtrack, much of which sounds like tribal instruments beamed into a digital future, has yielded its own distinctly Afrofuturist feel.

"All The Stars," the recently released music video from Kendrick Lamar and SZA, is as unapologetically African as the film, bringing Lamar face to face with gilded Nubian goddesses arriving like alien messengers within a luminous floating temple. But there is barely a narrative or aesthetic element that overlaps with Black Panther itself.

They are each their own unique entities, telling their own stories and carving out their own spaces for contemporary and historical blackness within the mainstream. There is much yet to be explored, and given that there is no singular avenue to Afrofuturist art, there is much yet to be reclaimed. Afrofuturism, it would seem, is here to stay.

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Beyond 'Black Panther': A brief history of Afrofuturism

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Excited for Black Panther ? So are we. Which is why we're rolling out obsessive coverage with Black Panther Week. Among the images glimpsed in Marvel's first Black Panther trailer was a tribal elder in an emerald suit with a matching lip disc, a body modification found in the Suri and Mursi tribes of Ethiopia.

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Dhruval Patel   "The Afrofuturism behind Black Panther"  

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Dhruval Patel   "The Afrofuturism behind Black Panther"  

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Afrofuturism was first used by Mark Dery when he argued in the 1990's about how African American history was being lost throughout the future. He later coined the term and ever since then, it has been popular. The article also talks about how Afrofuturism has been growing very rapidly in the past Twenty-Five years. A quote in the article was " The film’s most important distinction is that it is told from an Afrocentric point of view; that has always saturated Hollywood films about Africans."

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"The Afrofuturism designs of 'Black Panther' "
This article talks about how the designer of the costumes in Black Panther wanted to show a futuristic culture through her work. Every little piece that was made stood for something important. It also talks about how the costumes were made by a 3D printer, which made them different from other productions.
"Got to envision a futuristic African alternate reality."

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How do you outfit an African queen? For Ruth E. Carter, the costume designer for "Black Panther," it involved a Zulu hat and a 3-D printer.

In her 30 years in film, Ms. Carter has made her career putting images of African-American history and contemporary culture onscreen, from Spike Lee's canon to "Selma" and the recent remake of "Roots." For the Marvel blockbuster "Black Panther," she got to envision a futuristic African alternate reality - made up of diverse tribes and untouched by colonizers.

"I really wanted this movie," Ms. Carter, 57, said. She didn't know much about the Marvel universe when she met with the director and co-writer, Ryan Coogler, but she liked the comic books' portrayal. "You saw people with little kufis," she said. "You saw a tribal council happening and someone was sitting there in a suit, and then they'd have a big Maasai headdress."

To imagine the fictional African nation of Wakanda, without the influence of the Dutch, the British and other colonizers, Ms. Carter borrowed from indigenous people across the continent. During six months of preproduction, she had shoppers scouring the globe for authentic African designs, like the traditional stacked neck rings worn by the Ndebele women of South Africa. Textiles were sourced to Ghana, but many African fabrics are now printed in Holland; Ms. Carter rejected those. "I wanted to create the fabrics, and I wanted them to feel very superhero-like," she said.

There was a strict color palette, drafted by Mr. Coogler: Chadwick Boseman, who plays T'Challa, the Wakanda royal who is also the Black Panther, wears black; Danai Gurira, as the warrior Okoye, and her band of female fighters, the Dora Milaje, are in vibrant red; and Lupita Nyong'o, as the spy Nakia, part of the river tribe, is in shades of green. (Black, red and green are also the colors of the Pan-African flag.) For Mr. Coogler, blue "represented the police and authority." She dressed Michael B. Jordan, as Black Panther's rival, Erik Killmonger, in it.

She also leaned on a visual bible created by Hannah Beachler, the production designer, which laid out the districts and culture of Wakanda. The merchant tribe is inspired by the Tuareg, ethnic Berbers of the Sahara, Ms. Carter said. The mining tribe resembles the Himba of Namibia, known for their red ocher body paint and leather headpieces. And for the artsy Step Town district, she scoured looks from an Afropunk festival in Atlanta, where "Black Panther" was shot.

"She has everything you want in a collaborator," Mr. Coogler said. "She's experienced but still youthful and energetic, still curious and open to trying new things."

Ms. Carter said this was not the most complex production she'd ever done; "Malcolm X," set across several eras, was even more involved. But the chance to explore Afrofuturism with "Black Panther" was meaningful to her. "It is the reason why we have a sense of pride as African-Americans," she said.

The movie "connects everything that I've done about slavery and about how Africans came to this country, and what happened to their culture," she said.

Here, she discusses the inspiration and design of several looks from the film.

The Black Panther Suit

Ryan Meinerding at Marvel designs all of its superhero suits, but Ms. Carter put her stamp on the three versions made for this movie, adding a raised-triangle motif. "It has a little bit of a sheen to it," she said. She calls the triangle "the sacred geometry of Africa, and it makes him not only a superhero, but a king, an African king."

The Black Panther first appeared onscreen in "Captain America: Civil War" in 2016, and when Mr. Boseman donned that suit and helmet for her, "we were, like, wow."

"It was majestic. The superhero thing really is something mystical," Ms. Carter said. "And then he was doing moves and he was telling us, you know, 'I can't raise my arm, and I can't breathe out of my nose.' And we're like, oh, O.K., that's bad, Mr. Black Panther. We'll change that."

Queen Ramonda's Crown

For the headgear worn by T'Challa's mother, Queen Ramonda (played by Angela Bassett), "we found a traditional Zulu married woman's hat, complete with the ocher that makes it red, and like a hairy, furry, texture on it. It was giant, and I really wanted to see that beautiful cylindrical shape, because I've always seen the ones that you get in the tourist trade," which don't always resemble archival images. "I didn't believe that the origins of its shape were real until I saw a real one."

The hat was the model for Ms. Bassett's crown, which was 3-D-printed, with help from the designer Julia Körner, who specializes in wearable plastics. A rounded shoulder mantle, with a bit of African lace, was also 3-D printed. It took six months, Ms. Carter said, to get the design right.

W'Kabi's Cloak

As a leader of a border tribe, W'Kabi, played by Daniel Kaluuya, is wrapped in the Wakandan version of a Lesotho blanket. "The Lesotho do these wonderful blankets with these amazing prints on them that represent their king, they represent harvest," Ms. Carter said. "And we screen-printed on the other side with vibranium" - the fictional metal on which Wakanda runs - "silver Adinkra symbols, so that their blankets could be used as shields during fighting. We worked on those blankets from start to finish."

It was Mr. Coogler's idea to make the blanket a shield. "What I found with African art and clothing and structures - things tend to have multiple uses," he said. "If you see somebody wearing a beautiful cloth, not only does that cloth protect their body, but it also tells the story of their culture and their history, written on the fabric."

Nakia's Striking Looks

The costuming for Nakia, played by Ms. Nyong'o, made the broadest leaps, Ms. Carter said. The spy's river tribe was based partly on the Suri of Ethiopia, so her traditional look was made of shells, beads and leaves.

"That cultural specificity was very, very helpful," Ms. Nyong'o said. "I looked at images of those people and their particular way of life. It's another layer of character development."

But she also has a high-wattage fight scene in a casino in South Korea, for which she wears a striking green, high-neck, open-shoulder dress. Ms. Carter and her team designed the fabric and had it 3-D-printed. They started with a kente cloth, "extracted the line work and created a pattern, hand-painted it," she said. It's covered with Wakandan text - boxes with slashes inside - and it's sexy but not revealing. "It was her Bond Girl moment," Ms. Carter said, "but also, she could fight and move in it, and it wasn't constricting."

Nakia's civilian clothes were the real challenge. "It's hard to figure out what a person's casual looks are when they're a war dog, a C.I.A. operative, a casino girl," she said. "We were trying things on all the time in the fitting room."

Ms. Nyong'o said, "There were days when, like, last minute, we still didn't know what I was going to wear." But Ms. Carter never panicked, she said admiringly. "She's so relaxed, in a way that is just spellbinding."

Dora Milaje Warriors

In their red and gold outfits, these spear-fighting women are the elite warriors of Wakanda. The front of the costume is beaded "in the same tradition that you see throughout Africa - the Turkana, the Maasai," Ms. Carter said. "The overall garment has a texture as well, the same kind of striations and sacred geometry" as the Black Panther suit. The leather harnesses that cross the bodice were made by craftsmen in South Africa so that they appear to be hand-stitched, and the imposing color was chosen to make eight actresses look as bold as 80, she said.

As their general, Ms. Gurira's neckpiece is gold, not silver like her battalion's. Ms. Carter thought through every detail of their armor for battle. "I had back story for the Dora Milaje costumes," she said. "I had back story for Lupita. I have to have that back story, or I just can't move a muscle."

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The Afrofuturistic Designs of 'Black Panther'

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How do you outfit an African queen? For Ruth E. Carter, the costume designer for "Black Panther," it involved a Zulu hat and a 3-D printer. In her 30 years in film, Ms. Carter has made her career putting images of African-American history and contemporary culture onscreen, from Spike Lee's canon to "Selma" and the recent remake of "Roots."

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"Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism" This article explains how Chicanafuturism borrows ideas from Afrofuturism. Chicanafuturism also "defamiliarizes the familiar". "The concept of Chicanafuturism was also inspired by the work of New Mexican artist Marion C. Martinez."

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The concept of Chicanafuturism, which the author introduced in "Aztlan" in 2004, borrows from theories of Afrofuturism. Chicanafuturism explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and culture. It questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color. And like Afrofuturism, which reflects diasporic experience, Chicanafuturism articulates colonial and postcolonial histories of "indigenismo", "mestizaje", hegemony, and survival. While it is indebted to Afrofuturism, the concept of Chicanafuturism was also inspired by the work of New Mexican artist Marion C. Martinez. Instead of applauding science and technology or condemning them altogether, Martinez's work shows how they have transformed Native American and Hispanic life and culture--and how one self-described "Indio-Hispanic" woman has transformed some of the tools of science and technology. Like black people, especially black women, Chicanas, Chicanos, and Native Americans are usually disassociated from science and technology, signifiers of civilization, rationality, and progress. At the same time, many Chicanas, Chicanos, and Native Americans have been injured or killed by and/or for science and technology. In addition, Chicanafuturism interrogates definitions of the human. El Teatro Campesino's "acto Los Vendidos", first performed in 1967 and thus one of the earliest examples of Chicanafuturism, offers a more expansive definition of "human" as it criticizes racist and classist perceptions of Chicanos and Mexicans, especially Mexican workers, as automatons. Finally, Chicanafuturism defamiliarizes the familiar. Like good science fiction, it brings into relief that which is generally taken for granted, such as tradition, history, or the norm, including normative gender and sexuality. (Contains 2 figures and 8 notes.)

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. 193 Haines Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1544. Tel: 310-794-9380; Tel: 310-825-2642; Fax: 310-206-1784; e-mail: press@chicano.ucla.edu; Web site: http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/press

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ERIC - EJ787998 - Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 2008

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The concept of Chicanafuturism, which the author introduced in "Aztlan" in 2004, borrows from theories of Afrofuturism. Chicanafuturism explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and culture. It questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color.

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Title: The resurgence of Afrofuturism goes beyond ‘Black Panther,’ to Janelle Monáe, Jay-Z and more.
Summary:  When reading this article, readers will know that the term Afrofuturism was first written in an essay in 1994 by Mark Dery. They will realize Afrofuturism is used used in a lot of music and art and since it used in a lot of things more people can realate to those things.  Afrofuturism refers to  science  fiction and fantasy with African cultures.

Quote: “When I speak about science-fiction and the future and androids, I’m speaking about the ‘other.’ ”

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This article talks about how  Afrofuturism is becoming a style in this new generation and generations to come.Also how anything such as artists , singers , movies , books ,fashion,clothing , music ,and jewelry. Can have an Afrofuturism theme to it .

"Calvin Klein released a fall advertising campaign starring the rapper Young Thug, dressed in flares and a fitted pinstripe chasuble, its neckline embellished with an astral-looking orb. A recent campaign from Chanel featured Willow Smith festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels".

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The Year in Style 2016

Solange Knowles on "Saturday Night Live" in November, flaunting a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids. Credit... Dana Edelson/NBC, via Getty Images

In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil.

A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe. Flanked on the stage by twin columns of attendants, she was a galactic goddess in a white ermine cape.

In November, on "Saturday Night Live," her sister, Solange Knowles, flaunted a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids, looking every inch a regal visitor from distant planet.

Each was in her way a beacon of Afrofuturism, a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts.

[See more Year in Style articles]
Familiar to some, exotic to others, the term refers loosely to an unlikely fusion of parts: Egyptian and other non-Western mythologies, mysticism and magical realism with Afrocentricity, modern technology and science fiction. A freighted concept in more ways than one, it gained traction this year, muscling its way into the pop cultural mainstream via the intertwined worlds of entertainment, art and style.

Image

Rihanna, as an otherworldly warrior queen, in the September issue of W magazine. Credit... Steven Klein; styled by Edward Enninful

In part, Afrofuturism, an aesthetic dating roughly from the 1970s, has taken on a new public face through a new generation of recording artists - Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Janelle Monáe among them - who have given it not only a voice, but also a look. You will likely know it when you see it: a high-shine mash-up of cyborg themes, loosely tribal motifs, android imagery and gleaming metallics that might be appropriate for a voyage to Pluto's outer reaches.

Its latest incarnation seems timely, if not downright inevitable. "With the diversity of the nation and world increasingly standing in stark contrast to the diversity in futuristic works, it's no surprise that Afrofuturism emerged," writes Ytasha L. Womack, who chronicled and popularized the evolution of the genre in her 2013 book, " Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture."

"But when, even in the imaginary future," she goes on, "people can't fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down."

The internet has lent the movement a force unknown in previous incarnations. A visual metaphor for empowerment on sites like the Afrofuturist Affair and influential Instagram accounts like Inkrayable_girafe, it permits black men and women to take charge of their image. Today, Ms. Womack writes, "a fledgling filmmaker can shoot his sci-fi web series on a $500 DV cam, post it on YouTube, and promote it on Instagram and Twitter."

Lina Iris Viktor, a British-Liberian artist in New York who paints queenly self-portraits with a futuristic edge, picked up the thread. "The internet democratized the playing field," she said. "Now the voices you hear are authentically ours. Instead of everybody else telling you stories, explaining to you what our work is about, we are telling you what it's about."

An Afrofuturist narrative is embedded as well in a recent flurry of museum shows. On view through November at El Museo del Barrio were the fashion illustrations of Antonio Lopez, a pioneer in the genre whose works of the '70s and '80s featured a multiracial cast of robotlike figures and astronauts propelled into a far-off Tomorrowland. It is a brave new world, as a review in The New York Times noted in June, "in which race and gender were fluid, and existing social inequities corrected or transcended."

Afrofuturism is a current in the multimedia installations of the artist Saya Woolfalk, whose utopian universes and Empathics, a future race fusing - and all but erasing - racial and ethnic boundaries, were featured this year in shows at the Brooklyn Museum, a light show in Times Square and, just this month, an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Afrofuturist allusions crop up less overtly in the sprawling canvases of Kerry James Marshall, whose exhibition at the Met Breuer, through Jan. 29, includes idealized portraits of African-American Boy and Girl Scouts wreathed in halos of the kind often seen on comic-book heroes.

This summer, the movement flexed its muscle at the megaplex, where "Captain America: Civil War" featured the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), a superhero who in 2018 will star in "Black Panther" as the king and protector of the imaginary nation of Wakanda.

Afrofuturism's resurgence could not be more timely, arriving as it does in a climate perceived as indifferent, if not downright inimical, to racial and ethnic minorities. In her book, Ms. Womack recalls a time when black or brown sci-fi characters were all but invisible in the culture at large. As a girl, she would fantasize that she was Princess Leia of "Star Wars."

"While it was fun to be the chick from outer space in my imagination," Ms. Womack writes, "the quest to see myself or browner people in this space age, galactic epic was important to me." It was in the absence of minorities from pop lore, she goes on, "that seeds were planted in the imaginations of countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceship too."

Count among them Tim Fielder, a New York graphic artist and animator whose sci-fi illustrations, produced over a 30-year span, drew visitors last spring to " Black Metropolis," at the Gallatin Galleries at New York University. Mr. Fielder's pioneering cartoon narratives - notably those of " Matty's Rocket," his spirited black female cosmonaut, who will lift off next year in graphic novel form - are particularly relevant now, he maintained: "They let young artists know that they're not on dangerous turf, that someone has gone there before them."

Afrofuturism's epic imagery offers youth a mirror, Mr. Fielder said. "These kids are able now to see themselves in environments that are expansive, both technologically and in terms of social mores and gender," he said.

They also see themselves newly reflected in the comic books that remain a potent form of Afrofuturist expression. Last spring, the Black Panther, lately of "Captain America," was resurrected by Marvel as the noble protagonist of his own comic book series, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of "Between the World and Me." And this year, Riri Williams, an Afro-coiffured teenage superheroine with an M.I.T. degree, will slip into the fabled power suit in the "Iron Man" comic series.

Such vanguard characters can trace their genesis to early champions of Afrofuturism, paramount among them Sun Ra, the jazz composer, poet and philosopher who incorporated sci-fi themes into his music and his seminal film, "Space Is the Place," a mid-1970s tale of interplanetary time travel.

Afrofuturism owes as important a debt to the writer Octavia Butler, whose 1979 best-seller, "Kindred," posits an alternate reality in which an African-American heroine is transported from mid-70s Los Angeles to early 19th-century Maryland. It owes a debt as well to the music of George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, with their prophetic lyrics in "Mothership Connection":

Time to move on

Light years in time

Ahead of our time.

Afrofuturist themes were revisited in the '90s, but still as a genre without a name until the cultural critic Mark Dery formally christened it in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future," after which it flourished for a time before retreating to the shadows.

Now the movement has returned in force, beamed down to the concert stage. Last month, the '70s disco diva Grace Jones, Afrofuturism's flat-topped mascot, toured in the British Isles, her stage persona, covered head-to-toe in tribal paint and feathers, a reprise of her hula-hoop-twirling performance at the Afropunk Fest in Brooklyn last year.

On a broadcast of "The Tonight Show" in February, the singer FKA Twigs seemed to alight from the clouds swathed in a incandescent white. Her costume, a-shimmer in crystals, was created with Grace Wales Bonner, a London designer whose work in the past has been rife with Afrofuturist allusions.

In her "Lemonade" album, released in April, Beyoncé reigns in an all-female utopia, leading a phalanx of women in ethereal white dresses that simultaneously conjure ancient and space-age societies.

The style world, too, has now embraced the movement, if only, perhaps, to reinforce its stature as an arbiter of cool. For the W September cover and 18-page editorial feature shot by Steven Klein, Rihanna's over-the-top costumes were cobbled from scratch.

"She's a one-off, a queen," said Edward Enninful, the magazine's fashion and style director. "A queen does not wear clothes off the runways." Instead she wears an otherworldly pastiche of vanguard creations by Gareth Pugh, Prada, Proenza Schouler and others, clothes conceived, Mr. Enninful said, to emphasize Rihanna's majestic persona.

"It's a look that many young black females out there haven't seen before," he said.

Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy was among the first to integrate Afrofuturist imagery into his runway shows. Two years earlier, he signed Ms. Badu as the fierce-looking face of the brand. Mr. Tisci followed up repeatedly, most recently with a fall 2016 line replete with cosmological symbols, including that familiar Afrofuturist talisman, the Egyptian Eye of Horus.

Calvin Klein released a fall advertising campaign starring the rapper Young Thug, dressed in flares and a fitted pinstripe chasuble, its neckline embellished with an astral-looking orb. A recent campaign from Chanel featured Willow Smith festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

The singer Willow Smith in a Chanel campaign, festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

Others are advancing this high-concept aesthetic in more subtle ways, thrusting aside clichés as they go. "Afrofuturism has to become something more than just an idea of black people in shiny metallic clothing," said Michelle Busayo Olupona, the Nigerian-American designer behind Busayo NYC, a label incorporating Afrofuturist themes in a stripped-down, abstract way. "In my own work, I try to create an aesthetic and style evocative of the past but very much grounded in the now."

Ms. Olupona said her abstract, Afrocentric designs, some incorporating fantasy fauna and futurist imagery, "suggest ways in which we can differentiate ourselves."

"What they say about the future," she continued, "is that we're always going to be here."

Another showcase for contemporary, less literal interpretations of Afrofuturism is 9J, a boutique and gallery recently sprung up on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx. It aims to usher in the movement's next wave, with items like a ribbed trunk-neck sweater worthy of "Star Wars," created by a local designer Jesenia Lopez; gravity-defying Birkenstock platforms covered in feathers and Swarovski "gems"; and an outsize headdress of spiraling silver wire. These pieces mingle technology, fantasy and Afrocentric themes with a streamlined progressive-looking opulence.

The shop's owner, Jerome LaMaar, whose line, 5:31 Jérôme, has drawn high-visibility clients like Beyoncé and the model Hailey Baldwin, wore fur-rimmed virtual-reality goggles the other week while presiding at the opening of Africollision, an installation at 9J that eschewed the space-is-the-place hallmarks of old school Afrofuturism.

"We want to play with the idea of what is tribe, what is Africa, what is the future, and mix it all up without being predictable." Mr. LaMaar insisted. "Who wants to see what's already been done?"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Year in Style 2016 In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil. A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe.

# data[].attributes.body
I got the article on The New York Times.
It was about how Afrofuturism is a growing style of music, entertainment, and clothing. It mentions some recent movies like A Wrinkle in Time. It says some people who represent Afrofuturism, like Erykah Badu, Missy Elliot, and Janelle Monae. It also mentions a young girl looking up to princess Leia.

A quote is   "In her book, Ms. Womack recalls a time when black or brown sci-fi characters were all but invisible in the culture at large. As a girl, she would fantasize that she was Princess Leia of “Star Wars.”"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Year in Style 2016

Solange Knowles on "Saturday Night Live" in November, flaunting a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids. Credit... Dana Edelson/NBC, via Getty Images

In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil.

A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe. Flanked on the stage by twin columns of attendants, she was a galactic goddess in a white ermine cape.

In November, on "Saturday Night Live," her sister, Solange Knowles, flaunted a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids, looking every inch a regal visitor from distant planet.

Each was in her way a beacon of Afrofuturism, a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts.

[See more Year in Style articles]
Familiar to some, exotic to others, the term refers loosely to an unlikely fusion of parts: Egyptian and other non-Western mythologies, mysticism and magical realism with Afrocentricity, modern technology and science fiction. A freighted concept in more ways than one, it gained traction this year, muscling its way into the pop cultural mainstream via the intertwined worlds of entertainment, art and style.

Image

Rihanna, as an otherworldly warrior queen, in the September issue of W magazine. Credit... Steven Klein; styled by Edward Enninful

In part, Afrofuturism, an aesthetic dating roughly from the 1970s, has taken on a new public face through a new generation of recording artists - Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Janelle Monáe among them - who have given it not only a voice, but also a look. You will likely know it when you see it: a high-shine mash-up of cyborg themes, loosely tribal motifs, android imagery and gleaming metallics that might be appropriate for a voyage to Pluto's outer reaches.

Its latest incarnation seems timely, if not downright inevitable. "With the diversity of the nation and world increasingly standing in stark contrast to the diversity in futuristic works, it's no surprise that Afrofuturism emerged," writes Ytasha L. Womack, who chronicled and popularized the evolution of the genre in her 2013 book, " Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture."

"But when, even in the imaginary future," she goes on, "people can't fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down."

The internet has lent the movement a force unknown in previous incarnations. A visual metaphor for empowerment on sites like the Afrofuturist Affair and influential Instagram accounts like Inkrayable_girafe, it permits black men and women to take charge of their image. Today, Ms. Womack writes, "a fledgling filmmaker can shoot his sci-fi web series on a $500 DV cam, post it on YouTube, and promote it on Instagram and Twitter."

Lina Iris Viktor, a British-Liberian artist in New York who paints queenly self-portraits with a futuristic edge, picked up the thread. "The internet democratized the playing field," she said. "Now the voices you hear are authentically ours. Instead of everybody else telling you stories, explaining to you what our work is about, we are telling you what it's about."

An Afrofuturist narrative is embedded as well in a recent flurry of museum shows. On view through November at El Museo del Barrio were the fashion illustrations of Antonio Lopez, a pioneer in the genre whose works of the '70s and '80s featured a multiracial cast of robotlike figures and astronauts propelled into a far-off Tomorrowland. It is a brave new world, as a review in The New York Times noted in June, "in which race and gender were fluid, and existing social inequities corrected or transcended."

Afrofuturism is a current in the multimedia installations of the artist Saya Woolfalk, whose utopian universes and Empathics, a future race fusing - and all but erasing - racial and ethnic boundaries, were featured this year in shows at the Brooklyn Museum, a light show in Times Square and, just this month, an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Afrofuturist allusions crop up less overtly in the sprawling canvases of Kerry James Marshall, whose exhibition at the Met Breuer, through Jan. 29, includes idealized portraits of African-American Boy and Girl Scouts wreathed in halos of the kind often seen on comic-book heroes.

This summer, the movement flexed its muscle at the megaplex, where "Captain America: Civil War" featured the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), a superhero who in 2018 will star in "Black Panther" as the king and protector of the imaginary nation of Wakanda.

Afrofuturism's resurgence could not be more timely, arriving as it does in a climate perceived as indifferent, if not downright inimical, to racial and ethnic minorities. In her book, Ms. Womack recalls a time when black or brown sci-fi characters were all but invisible in the culture at large. As a girl, she would fantasize that she was Princess Leia of "Star Wars."

"While it was fun to be the chick from outer space in my imagination," Ms. Womack writes, "the quest to see myself or browner people in this space age, galactic epic was important to me." It was in the absence of minorities from pop lore, she goes on, "that seeds were planted in the imaginations of countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceship too."

Count among them Tim Fielder, a New York graphic artist and animator whose sci-fi illustrations, produced over a 30-year span, drew visitors last spring to " Black Metropolis," at the Gallatin Galleries at New York University. Mr. Fielder's pioneering cartoon narratives - notably those of " Matty's Rocket," his spirited black female cosmonaut, who will lift off next year in graphic novel form - are particularly relevant now, he maintained: "They let young artists know that they're not on dangerous turf, that someone has gone there before them."

Afrofuturism's epic imagery offers youth a mirror, Mr. Fielder said. "These kids are able now to see themselves in environments that are expansive, both technologically and in terms of social mores and gender," he said.

They also see themselves newly reflected in the comic books that remain a potent form of Afrofuturist expression. Last spring, the Black Panther, lately of "Captain America," was resurrected by Marvel as the noble protagonist of his own comic book series, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of "Between the World and Me." And this year, Riri Williams, an Afro-coiffured teenage superheroine with an M.I.T. degree, will slip into the fabled power suit in the "Iron Man" comic series.

Such vanguard characters can trace their genesis to early champions of Afrofuturism, paramount among them Sun Ra, the jazz composer, poet and philosopher who incorporated sci-fi themes into his music and his seminal film, "Space Is the Place," a mid-1970s tale of interplanetary time travel.

Afrofuturism owes as important a debt to the writer Octavia Butler, whose 1979 best-seller, "Kindred," posits an alternate reality in which an African-American heroine is transported from mid-70s Los Angeles to early 19th-century Maryland. It owes a debt as well to the music of George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, with their prophetic lyrics in "Mothership Connection":

Time to move on

Light years in time

Ahead of our time.

Afrofuturist themes were revisited in the '90s, but still as a genre without a name until the cultural critic Mark Dery formally christened it in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future," after which it flourished for a time before retreating to the shadows.

Now the movement has returned in force, beamed down to the concert stage. Last month, the '70s disco diva Grace Jones, Afrofuturism's flat-topped mascot, toured in the British Isles, her stage persona, covered head-to-toe in tribal paint and feathers, a reprise of her hula-hoop-twirling performance at the Afropunk Fest in Brooklyn last year.

On a broadcast of "The Tonight Show" in February, the singer FKA Twigs seemed to alight from the clouds swathed in a incandescent white. Her costume, a-shimmer in crystals, was created with Grace Wales Bonner, a London designer whose work in the past has been rife with Afrofuturist allusions.

In her "Lemonade" album, released in April, Beyoncé reigns in an all-female utopia, leading a phalanx of women in ethereal white dresses that simultaneously conjure ancient and space-age societies.

The style world, too, has now embraced the movement, if only, perhaps, to reinforce its stature as an arbiter of cool. For the W September cover and 18-page editorial feature shot by Steven Klein, Rihanna's over-the-top costumes were cobbled from scratch.

"She's a one-off, a queen," said Edward Enninful, the magazine's fashion and style director. "A queen does not wear clothes off the runways." Instead she wears an otherworldly pastiche of vanguard creations by Gareth Pugh, Prada, Proenza Schouler and others, clothes conceived, Mr. Enninful said, to emphasize Rihanna's majestic persona.

"It's a look that many young black females out there haven't seen before," he said.

Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy was among the first to integrate Afrofuturist imagery into his runway shows. Two years earlier, he signed Ms. Badu as the fierce-looking face of the brand. Mr. Tisci followed up repeatedly, most recently with a fall 2016 line replete with cosmological symbols, including that familiar Afrofuturist talisman, the Egyptian Eye of Horus.

Calvin Klein released a fall advertising campaign starring the rapper Young Thug, dressed in flares and a fitted pinstripe chasuble, its neckline embellished with an astral-looking orb. A recent campaign from Chanel featured Willow Smith festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

The singer Willow Smith in a Chanel campaign, festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

Others are advancing this high-concept aesthetic in more subtle ways, thrusting aside clichés as they go. "Afrofuturism has to become something more than just an idea of black people in shiny metallic clothing," said Michelle Busayo Olupona, the Nigerian-American designer behind Busayo NYC, a label incorporating Afrofuturist themes in a stripped-down, abstract way. "In my own work, I try to create an aesthetic and style evocative of the past but very much grounded in the now."

Ms. Olupona said her abstract, Afrocentric designs, some incorporating fantasy fauna and futurist imagery, "suggest ways in which we can differentiate ourselves."

"What they say about the future," she continued, "is that we're always going to be here."

Another showcase for contemporary, less literal interpretations of Afrofuturism is 9J, a boutique and gallery recently sprung up on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx. It aims to usher in the movement's next wave, with items like a ribbed trunk-neck sweater worthy of "Star Wars," created by a local designer Jesenia Lopez; gravity-defying Birkenstock platforms covered in feathers and Swarovski "gems"; and an outsize headdress of spiraling silver wire. These pieces mingle technology, fantasy and Afrocentric themes with a streamlined progressive-looking opulence.

The shop's owner, Jerome LaMaar, whose line, 5:31 Jérôme, has drawn high-visibility clients like Beyoncé and the model Hailey Baldwin, wore fur-rimmed virtual-reality goggles the other week while presiding at the opening of Africollision, an installation at 9J that eschewed the space-is-the-place hallmarks of old school Afrofuturism.

"We want to play with the idea of what is tribe, what is Africa, what is the future, and mix it all up without being predictable." Mr. LaMaar insisted. "Who wants to see what's already been done?"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Year in Style 2016 In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil. A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe.

# data[].attributes.headline
Noam R.      Title of Article: ¨Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism¨

# data[].attributes.subject
Noam R.      Title of Article: ¨Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism¨

# data[].attributes.body
¨Chicanafuturism explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and culture.¨ Chicanafuturism is a subgenre that adds the classic Science fiction, to everyday duties and cultural practices of Latin Americans. The author of the article, Catherine S. Ramirez, explains that Chicanafuturism is expressed in many ways in Latin america. This subgenre also influences the technology of Latin America, as the countries continue to grow off of books.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The concept of Chicanafuturism, which the author introduced in "Aztlan" in 2004, borrows from theories of Afrofuturism. Chicanafuturism explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and culture. It questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color. And like Afrofuturism, which reflects diasporic experience, Chicanafuturism articulates colonial and postcolonial histories of "indigenismo", "mestizaje", hegemony, and survival. While it is indebted to Afrofuturism, the concept of Chicanafuturism was also inspired by the work of New Mexican artist Marion C. Martinez. Instead of applauding science and technology or condemning them altogether, Martinez's work shows how they have transformed Native American and Hispanic life and culture--and how one self-described "Indio-Hispanic" woman has transformed some of the tools of science and technology. Like black people, especially black women, Chicanas, Chicanos, and Native Americans are usually disassociated from science and technology, signifiers of civilization, rationality, and progress. At the same time, many Chicanas, Chicanos, and Native Americans have been injured or killed by and/or for science and technology. In addition, Chicanafuturism interrogates definitions of the human. El Teatro Campesino's "acto Los Vendidos", first performed in 1967 and thus one of the earliest examples of Chicanafuturism, offers a more expansive definition of "human" as it criticizes racist and classist perceptions of Chicanos and Mexicans, especially Mexican workers, as automatons. Finally, Chicanafuturism defamiliarizes the familiar. Like good science fiction, it brings into relief that which is generally taken for granted, such as tradition, history, or the norm, including normative gender and sexuality. (Contains 2 figures and 8 notes.)

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. 193 Haines Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1544. Tel: 310-794-9380; Tel: 310-825-2642; Fax: 310-206-1784; e-mail: press@chicano.ucla.edu; Web site: http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/press

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
ERIC - EJ787998 - Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 2008

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The concept of Chicanafuturism, which the author introduced in "Aztlan" in 2004, borrows from theories of Afrofuturism. Chicanafuturism explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and culture. It questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color.

# data[].attributes.body
The article I used talks about what Afrofuturism is and mostly about black panther and arts. It tells how it is different from normal, main stream science fiction and how it celebrates black culture. It talks about music, acting, and how black panther is going to influence more  Afrofuturism movies.

A quote from the article is "Black Panther is a super hero for us, by us. We can claim him." This quote speaks to how the black community is represented in the super hero movies by such a marvelous character that they can relate to. I really think this quote is important because it tells how minorities have someone who looks like them that they can relate to better than other super heroes.

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm. We're hearing the word "Afrofuturism" a lot.

But what exactly is Afrofuturism?

Afrofuturism is the reimagining of a future filled with arts, science and technology seen through a black lens. The term was conceived a quarter-century ago by white author Mark Dery in his essay " Black to the Future," which looks at speculative fiction within the African diaspora. The essay rests on a series of interviews with black content creators.

Dery laid out the questions driving the philosophy of Afrofuturism:

Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn't the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers ― white to a man ― who have engineered our collective fantasies?

What makes Afrofuturism significantly different from standard science fiction is that it's steeped in ancient African traditions and black identity. A narrative that simply features a black character in a futuristic world is not enough. To be Afrofuturism, it must be rooted in and unapologetically celebrate the uniqueness and innovation of black culture.

The biggest proponent of this cultural movement, even before it had its name, was musician Sun Ra, who infused elements of space and jazz fusion in his work as a musical artist. Prolific science fiction author Octavia E. Butler explored black women protagonists in novels like Fledging, Dawn, Parable of the Sower and Lilith's Brood, set in the context of futuristic technology and interactions with the supernatural. In the contemporary music world, singers like Erykah Badu, with her eccentric and experimental imagery in videos and album covers, promote the intersection of art and futurism. Artists like Janelle Monae, with her android alter-ego and electronica sounds, and films like " Brown Girl Begins," a post-apocalyptic tale set in 2049 and directed by Sharon Lewis, pay a huge homage to Afrofuturism.

Then there's "Black Panther." The film wears themes of Afrofuturism proudly on its sleeve. Tech genius Princess Shuri is not only the smartest person in the fictional world, but she's responsible for the creation and maintenance of sophisticated gadgets for her brother T'Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther.

A prosperous alternative afro future can be seen in their fictional East African home of Wakanda, a small country the size of New Jersey that has never been colonized and is steeped in its blackness. It's a utopian society that also boasts one of the world's richest resources, vibranium. Because white supremacy never intruded on Wakandan culture and its people, ancient African traditions remain common practice there.

But this movie is more than just a glorious film ― it's the expression of a movement.

Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

Africans and African-Americans have full autonomy as Afrofuturists. A community of people can take a piece of visual art or notes from a song and develop an entire universe and say, "This is ours." And that's what this film represents to so many excited fans. Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

In addition to the predominantly black cast filled with Hollywood stars and starlets, "Black Panther" also had a black production team spearheading the shaping of this story. The writer, filmmaker and executive producer are African-American. Production designer Hannah Beachler, who was influenced by Afrofuturistic architecture and Afropunk aesthetics, helped lay the groundwork for this world. The African regalia and elaborate costumes by famed wardrobe designer Ruth E. Carter created a Wakandan couture that would give New York Fashion Week a run for its money ― just look at her use of kimoyo beads as both a fashion accessory and a communication device.

This intersection of sci-fi and African pride is what we've come to know as Afrofuturism. For many of us in the blerd community, the film with its love for technology, science, visual art and music (if you haven't checked out the "Black Panther" album, you should make it a priority) is what we've been hungry for.

I hope, for all of our sakes, that this is also just the beginning. I hope that "Black Panther" can prove that stories permeated in blackness have crossover appeal. I hope we get more and more stories of black people who have agency, who are free and subservient to no one. Black people deserve to see themselves leading the way in real or abstract futures.
Jamie Broadnax is the editor-in-chief and creator of the online community for black women called Black Girl Nerds.

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Opinion | What The Heck Is Afrofuturism?

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm.

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Chicanafuturism talks about the mexicans using new/everyday technology. "Chicanafuturism explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and culture." Afrofuturism talks about the same thing but about black people. "Afrofuturism, which reflects diasporic experience" Over all they are important so that people can feel included. (all quotes from link)

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The concept of Chicanafuturism, which the author introduced in "Aztlan" in 2004, borrows from theories of Afrofuturism. Chicanafuturism explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and culture. It questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color. And like Afrofuturism, which reflects diasporic experience, Chicanafuturism articulates colonial and postcolonial histories of "indigenismo", "mestizaje", hegemony, and survival. While it is indebted to Afrofuturism, the concept of Chicanafuturism was also inspired by the work of New Mexican artist Marion C. Martinez. Instead of applauding science and technology or condemning them altogether, Martinez's work shows how they have transformed Native American and Hispanic life and culture--and how one self-described "Indio-Hispanic" woman has transformed some of the tools of science and technology. Like black people, especially black women, Chicanas, Chicanos, and Native Americans are usually disassociated from science and technology, signifiers of civilization, rationality, and progress. At the same time, many Chicanas, Chicanos, and Native Americans have been injured or killed by and/or for science and technology. In addition, Chicanafuturism interrogates definitions of the human. El Teatro Campesino's "acto Los Vendidos", first performed in 1967 and thus one of the earliest examples of Chicanafuturism, offers a more expansive definition of "human" as it criticizes racist and classist perceptions of Chicanos and Mexicans, especially Mexican workers, as automatons. Finally, Chicanafuturism defamiliarizes the familiar. Like good science fiction, it brings into relief that which is generally taken for granted, such as tradition, history, or the norm, including normative gender and sexuality. (Contains 2 figures and 8 notes.)

UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. 193 Haines Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1544. Tel: 310-794-9380; Tel: 310-825-2642; Fax: 310-206-1784; e-mail: press@chicano.ucla.edu; Web site: http://www.chicano.ucla.edu/press

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ERIC - EJ787998 - Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 2008

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The concept of Chicanafuturism, which the author introduced in "Aztlan" in 2004, borrows from theories of Afrofuturism. Chicanafuturism explores the ways that new and everyday technologies, including their detritus, transform Mexican American life and culture. It questions the promises of science, technology, and humanism for Chicanas, Chicanos, and other people of color.

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The article I used gave some history about Afrofuturism and talked about various artists who used Afrofuturism in their art. This article also explained how kids will benefit from Afrofuturism.

Quote:
“But when, even in the imaginary future,” she goes on, “people can’t fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down.”

~Afrofuturism: The Next Generation

~https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/fashion/afrofuturism-the-next-generation.html

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Afrofuturism and Is Black Panther a Defining Moment for the United States and Particulary for Black America

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Afrofuturism and Is Black Panther a Defining Moment for the United States and Particulary for Black America

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In the movie Black Panther the audience will learn about Wakanda's advancements in technolgy. Wakanda is the where the movie mostly takes place and Wakanda has these advancements because of something called Vibranium which if falls in the wrong hands that could be dangerous and the Vibranium is nearly indestructable.

A quote from the article is "The tiny country has, for centuries, been in nearly sole possession of vibranium, an alien element acquired from a fallen meteor."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/learning/is-black-panther-a-defining-moment-for-the-united-states-and-particularly-for-black-america.html

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Sanaa Wilson -Afrofuturism (The genre that made Black Panther)    

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Sanaa Wilson -Afrofuturism (The genre that made Black Panther)    

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https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/12/africa/genre-behind-black-panther-afrofuturism/index.html

Afrofuturism places "African  people ,culture, and traditions at it's center."Afrofuturism is a subgenre of science-fiction.Also intersects Ancient African mythologies, and technology.Sometimes Afrofuturism contains  African characters that plays a important role in a movie, novel, or book.
While Black Panther breaks new ground in Hollywood, the film itself owes its vision to Afrofuturism, a 20th century cultural aesthetic that subverted sci-fi -- a white-dominated genre -- by placing black people front and center in futuristic worlds.

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Brooke Zevon- "Afrofuturism and Black Identity in Art, Culture, and Politics." 

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Brooke Zevon- "Afrofuturism and Black Identity in Art, Culture, and Politics." 

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Readers will learn how Afrofuturism is one idea that can stem into many more ideas. Art can demonstrate a more creative and sometimes surreal look on Afrofuturism. Music also shows ideas of Afrofuturism, through powerful lyrics. This article explains how we can take one idea about Afrofuturism, and create so many different products.
An interesting quote I found was, " Rather than separating one from another, we will try to look at all the aspects of Afrofuturism and how its layers are intertwined, reclaiming racial identity in a unique, inspiring manner."

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" For those who adopt the Afrofuturist paradigm, the ideas can take you light-years away from the place you call home, only to return knowing you had had everything you needed from the start. Readers, our future is now."[1]

This is how Ytasha Womack introduces Afrofuturism to her audiences, in the beginning of a book of the same name. If you scratch beneath the surface and start exploring what the term means, you'll find that it is branched into several paths, shaped by a similar ideology. As we will have seen, it might sound that what Womack alludes to in her introduction applies to Afro Surrealism, which some tend to observe as an independent category. Rather than separating one from another, we will try to look at all the aspects of Afrofuturism and how its layers are intertwined, reclaiming racial identity in a unique, inspiring manner.

Afrofuturism - How The Term Came To Be

As it usually happens with ideas that emerge spontaneously, Afrofuturism didn't have a name for a long time. Many of its considered proponents were Afrofuturists without even knowing - years, even decades before the term was coined in 1994 by the writer Mark Dery, who used it in his essay Black to the Future in order to identify a phenomenon he had observed. Namely, Dery discerned a certain trend among young African Americans that was based on science fiction and technology, at the same time being connected to black people and searching for their role in a constructed narrative. The black college students that the author describes were passionate about their vision of popular culture and fiction, presuming that these are the media with an unprecedented power to affect social change. One of the then-students and a prominent Afrofuturist to be, Alondra Nelson, mentions the Internet as a predominant factor in bringing all the people together, discerning the beginning of a new era in black history.[2]

Defining Afrofuturism

So what is Afrofuturism? Womack quotes the curator Ingrid LaFleur who defines it as " a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens".[3] To this concise definition, Womack adds her own personal touch, making the terms future and liberation come together. The context that this correlation provides might be one of the most important aspects of the movement - although the term movement should be used with precaution, given that its pacifist, non-intrusive spirit is contradictory to what revolutionary movements may imply today. In fact, the beauty of Afrofuturism lies in its potential to make a change without interfering with anyone else's reality. In that sense, Afrofuturism is a methodology rather than a movement.

Afrofuturism In Music

During the nineties, the possibility of Afrofuturism as an actual "thing" was considered from various angles, and thus many of its proclaimed pioneers were found among the figures from our collective history. Traces of Afrofuturism exist in music, visual arts, books and popular culture, all of them contributing to a genesis of Afrofuturist aesthetics. As a figure with one of the most distinct styles, both in visual terms and in terms of sound, the avant-garde musician Sun Ra is considered to be the main pioneer of Afrofuturism. Then, there is the funk legend George Clinton and his bands Parliament and Funkadelic; Jimi Hendrix and his otherworldly guitar playing; a list of musicians and DJs from our time, producing electronic music or hip hop jams that include surreal elements, participating in the establishment of a new, mythical black experience. In terms of their appearances and the themes of their songs, we could also consider the iconic Erykah Badu and Grace Jones as two great Afrofuturist women in the music industry. Apart from them, one of the most notable Afrofuturist musicians of our time is certainly Janelle Monáe. Some argue that even the Knowles sisters, Beyonce and Solange, bring the motive of black women into the "future is now" context within pop culture.

Sun Ra

Sun Ra is not merely a pioneer, but also a symbol of Afrofuturism in his own respect. His music was a form of meditation on the African heritage, but also innately progressive, inasmuch as the artist himself was a gifted and intelligent individual, which was apparent from his early beginnings. Performing for many years with his band Arkestra (which continues to perform to this day), his costumes and stage designs were suggestive of science fiction and cyber reality. At the same time, through their aesthetic appeal and gestures, the musicians reflected on ancient Egypt and other motives from the precolonial Africa. But one of the main reasons why we can safely say that this artist is the original Afrofuturists lies in the way that he re-invented himself as a person and a performer, having denied his given name Herman Blount, and turning his entire life story into a myth. At some point - and the actual date remains unknown - Ra claimed to have had an epiphany, which he described as a journey to Saturn (or at least to what he had thought was Saturn). The journey supposedly turned Ra's body into " something else", and made him see through himself.[4] In addition, the "aliens" also made him see that he should drop college (which he did). The musician was persistent in his endeavor to make this story his personal life experience, so much that you would eventually stop questioning it. He even succeeded in keeping his date of birth secret. In a way, Ra's iconic existence was a personification of Afrofuturism.

Science Fiction and Its Relationship with Black Culture

Although we can find lots of Afrofuturist motives in music, it is almost certain that one of its main mediums is a sci fi narrative, transfigured into a book, a comic or a film (just like it usually happens with science fiction). In the process of fantasy reading, we often find our own traits portrayed in one of the universal identities, usually taken from the idealized character that we encounter in these stories - the main hero, the anti hero, sometimes even a really cool villain. Furthermore, seeing that character on screen could have an even greater effect on people. However, in the period between 1950s and 1990s, there had been almost no black cosmonauts, magical beings, heroes or space travelers in the majority of the world's favorite sci fi scripts. In case they do appear, such as in the original Planet of the Apes or Night of the Living Dead, they usually do not last long enough to see the end of the story.

PUMZI from Awali Entertainment on Vimeo.

A New Sci Fi World

This pattern was abandoned in the 90s, partly thanks to some of the ground-breaking movies from this period, such as The Matrix and Blade. The former is known for its multietnic visionary depictions, including the mythical city of Zion, appropriated from the famous William Gibson novel Neuromancer. The latter had its plot line revolve around a black vampire, introducing this type of fictional character to the broader audiences for the first time. Apart from the mainstream movies (Ytasha Womack also mentions Will Smith and his constant reappearance as the leading black sci fi hero), there is an increasing number of books written on the subject of reassessing black history through some of the most miraculous stories. One of them is William Hayashi's Darkside Trilogy that envisions black population living on the dark side of the Moon even before Neil Armstrong was sent off.[5] But this continues to be a very popular topic today - such as Ayesha Hameed's story of the Black Atlantis, inspired by the music of an Afrofuturist electronic duo Drexciya. In her story, former slaves adapt to living underwater and coexist with the rest of the Atlantic inhabitants (the show will be on view in London on November 5th).

Afrofuturism and Afro Surrealism - Is There A Cultural Difference Between the Two?

There were some words about Afro Surrealism earlier and how it stems from the same root, but ends up being somewhat different from Afrofuturism. This type of surrealism is ontologically opposed to European Surrealism, being that it considers real life and the present moment as a platform for the creation of the "surreal". In their manifesto, written by D. Scot Miller, the author claims that Afro Surrealism is " Ambiguous as Prince, black as Fanon, literary as Reed, dandy as André Leon Tallysees".[6] It is inter-sexed, inclusive, cross-boundary, silly and profound (his exact words), and in that sense, in the context of the present, it is surreal. The manifesto mentions the name of Kehinde Wiley and his observation that " There is no objective image. And there is no way to objectively view the image itself". Interestingly, the term was invented in 1988 (before Afrofuturism), by Amiri Baraka, the famous writer associated with the Black Arts Movement. He used it to describe a particular style of writing that he recognized in Henry Dumas' work, based on the ancient mysteries that are ambiguously relevant both to the past and the present.

The Motive Of Alienation and the Non-Human

Alondra Nelson mentioned the significance of the Internet in the development of Afrofuturism referring to an online discussion poll that she had launched in the late nineties. It helped bring all of the thinkers, students and scholars together, and generating a community. The members of this group talked about a phenomenon of "cultural abduction", and apart from the examples that we have already mentioned in this article, this also applied to the systematic ignorance of black scientists whose names were not put in history books. Ytasha Womack goes one step further in analyzing the black experience and the injustice that the African Americans were subject to, in particular. She reminds the readers of the first version of the US Constitution, according to which African people were not considered people at all. Just like the Native Americans and women, Africans were considered not entirely human (three-fifths human, to be precise). However unimaginable this concept may sound to a person living in the 21st century, it is this "dehumanization" of black people (and of anyone who wasn't a white male) that was maliciously used in laws, in order to reinforce the white privilege. In addition, the USA is not the only example of this brutal behavior, nor are the African Americans the only ones who suffered the consequences of such system.

Ytasha Womack uses this example, and inspired by Mark Dery's writings, she compares black people to alien abductees. After examining the plot line of Blade Runner, Dery found relations between slavery and alien abduction, finding a semantic bond between the "alien" and the "other". This metaphor has been recognized as a powerful form of criticism by an Afrofuturist professor Reynaldo Anderson, who speaks about the Africans as the " first alien abductees, kidnapped by strange people who take us over by ships and conduct scientific experiments on us. They bred us. They came up with a taxonomy of the people they bred: mulato, octoroon, quadroon."[7]

People of African Descent - Writing Other Histories, Modeling the Future and Living in the "Now"

Let us reflect, once again, on Sun Ra and his idiosyncratic character. While he may be an extreme example, his mystical, futuristic life story is a perfect illustration of how Afrofuturism can operate. Our history has been shaped by the white civilization, which is something we rarely question, assuming all of the facts to be true - and assuming there's nothing to add to the truth told by the white people. Being that science fiction is one of the main premises of Afrofuturism, we can rely on its curiosity, its imaginative potential and its borderline altruistic nature to help us re-think the past, and re-imagine the possible futures. In that sense, Womack's beautifully put introduction states correctly that the future is now. Creatives, writers and musicians of African descent unite in telling their stories through an afrofuturist perspective, constructing new worlds and realities that anticipate possible futures, coinciding with the present, and at times, reclaiming the past. Being very similar, ideologically, to the Black Arts Movement , Afrofuturism is Afro-centric and affirmative. It offers another channel, another perspective on what has been given. It stems from the idea that the world and the Anthropocene need not be arranged according to the ideals and the stories of a white male figure (at least not any more). It is about assessing and reassessing race, cultural differences, but also some less obviously related phenomena - philosophy, and historical events. It is a way of seeing, or as Womack (whose amazing book I've quoted many times) says herself, a prism for evolution.
References:

1. Womack Y., (2013), Afrofuturism : the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture. Lawrence Hill Books

2. Rambsy II, H., (2012), A Notebook on Afrofuturism. Cultural Front

3. LaFleur, I., Visual Aesthetics of Afrofuturism , TEDx Fort Greene Salon, YouTube, September 25, 2011 [October 14, 2016]

4. Szwed, J. F., (1998). Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. Da Capo Press

5. Hayashi, W., , [October 16, 2016]

6. Scot Miller, D., AfroSurreal Manifesto. Black Is The New Black - A 21st Century Manifesto , http://dscotmiller.blogspot.co.uk/ [October 16, 2016]

7. Anderson, R., (2012). Critical Afrofuturism: A Case Study in Visual Rhetoric, Sequential Art, and Post-Apocalyptic Black Identity.

Featured images: Sun Ra; Drexciya - Mantaray, video still. All images used for illustrative purposes only.

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Afrofuturism and Black Identity in Art, Culture and Politics

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" For those who adopt the Afrofuturist paradigm, the ideas can take you light-years away from the place you call home, only to return knowing you had had everything you needed from the start. Readers, our future is now."[1] This is how Ytasha Womack introduces Afrofuturism to her audiences, in the beginning of a book of the same name.

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Afrofuturism Is More Than Just "Black Sci Fi," It's a Nuanced Black Future

https://www.inverse.com/article/42024-afrofuturism-is-not-just-black-sci-fi

This article is about how afrofuturism isn't just about blacks with "cool sci-fi gear." It talks
about reimagining a future where blacks may be in power, or have their roles with whites reversed. This includes blacks doing to whites what whites have done to blacks for centuries, like forced labor/slavery or false imprisonment.

"Afrofuturism calls upon sci-fi imagery and futuristic ideas to reflect upon the marginalization of black people."

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The Afrofuturism Behind ‘Black Panther’

This article talks about the beggining of Afrofuturism, and who it was first used by. It also talks about how Black Panther is  a very succesful Afrofuturism and is the first superhero movie that includes a black director, and a majority black cast. I think that now more people are getting involved with Afrofuturism and interested with what it's about.

"The ranks of the Afrofuturist creators have grown considerably over the last 25 years. They expanded in dramatic fashion with the release of the wildly successful film “Black Panther,”... The film’s most important distinction is that it is told from an Afrocentric point of view; it breaks with the spirit of derision that has always saturated Hollywood films about Africans."

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Khushi Duggal- Afrofuturism in The Black Panther

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Khushi Duggal- Afrofuturism in The Black Panther

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/24/opinion/afrofuturism-behind-black-panther.html
In Mr. Dery's opinion Afrofuturism is basically there to describe work of people (authors, movie directors, artists, etc.) basically the people who use science fiction, imagining, thinking, about the unbelievable that can be true, or can't.
Black Panther breaks with the spirit of ridiculousness or mockery that has always been thought about hollywood films about africans.
First Black Panther was a comic, but now Black Panther is made into a movie which is very popular, and is the first major movie to have most of the black cast and the other movie crew.
"Mr. Dery coined the term Afrofuturism to describe the work of artists who used the tools of science fiction to imagine possible futures."

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Spawn and Afrofuturism

Spawn is a 1997 film based on a comic book that was the first film to star an african amercan man as a comic book super hero.
It is a futuristic story about a man who was a government assassin who was betrayed and killed by his boss.  He went to 🤬 and was given the chance to return to see his wife if he agreed to lead the army from 🤬 to end the world.
It was not a box office hit but it
"opened the door for future creators of color" and helped to make movies like Blank Panther possible.

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With Netflix's " Luke Cage" gearing up for a second season, Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Black Panther" comic flying off the shelves and Ryan Coogler's " Black Panther" film on the way, show business and audiences appear increasingly ready to embrace Black superheroes. Yet as " Spawn," Hollywood's first major live-action superhero movie to star a Black actor, turns 20 today (August 1), there's surprisingly little fanfare. There's no anniversary restoration or nationwide midnight screenings, just comic creator Todd McFarlane's plan to make a new Spawn film that de-emphasizes the title character, and the movie being added to Netflix.I found the lack of attention strange, especially given how the power of '90s and Y2K nostalgia makes classics out of other mediocre films. But then I streamed "Spawn," on HD, and immediately understood why it's not getting the 2017 victory lap.

Based on the character McFarlane developed in the 1990s for his own Image Comics, the "Spawn" movie stars actor and martial artist Michael Jai White ("Black Dynamite") as Al Simmons, a mercenary working for a government agency whose boss betrays and murders him by immolation.

Simmons arrives in Hell, where the demon leader Malebolgia offersa deal he can't refuse: He can return to Earth to see his beloved fiancé Wanda ( Theresa Randle, "Spawn's" only other Black star) as long as he agrees to lead Hell's army in the impending Armageddon. Simmons accepts, only to return to Earth a grossly deformed being far from the handsome Black actor playing him:

Simmons then becomes the masked, rage-filled Spawn. He balances his quest for revenge with the conspiring of his demon handler, The Violator, ( John Leguizamo), his Hellish superiors' war plans and his pain at seeing his fiancé married to another man.

Sounds ripe for quality explorations of mortality and existential desolation, right? Both the comic and concurrent HBO adult cartoon did run with those themes. The film, however, suffered from corny dialogue, a convoluted plot and horrifically outdated CGI sequences. Dspite the film's $87.8 million box office take -more than twice its budget-its critical rejection destroyed chances for a sequel.

But "Spawn" left something good in its ashes. Its failure opened a door for future creators of color to make their own comic adaptations. Its misfires illuminate missed opportunities for character development that others can pick up in this era of superheroes for whom Blackness isn't a benign quality but a narrative asset.

Photo: Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

"Luke Cage" creator and showrunner Cheo Hodari Coker has a unique connection to "Spawn": the former Los Angeles Times staff writer interviewed McFarlane, White and other principals on the film's set for a 1997 profile. The article asks if "Spawn" can revive what was then a struggling comic film market-something that Coker now doesn't have to worry about.

"The thing about 'Spawn' is that-whether it was the HBO cartoon version, the comic book or the movie-Al Simmons happened to be Black. His cultural background wasn't a central part of his essence," says Coker, who worked with a predominantly Black writing team on "Luke Cage" to flesh out the bulletproof Black characters' identity and conflicts.

Coker contrasts "Spawn" with the Wesley Snipes vehicle " Blade," which came out a year later and led to a successful movie franchise: "['Blade'] had a sort of swagger that was the bridge towards what it would be like to have a Black superhero, given a quality platform."

Photo: Provided to Colorlines by Hinds

Journalist, screenwriter and comic author Selwyn Seyfu Hinds also views " Blade " as the film "Spawn" should have been. "The climate 20 years ago is not the same as today, but even then, there was a distinct sense of what more people wanted from 'Spawn' when 'Blade' came out," he says. " 'Blade' was the creme-de-la-creme in Hollywood: a franchise that's capable of generating more films and other things connected to that brand."

Hinds also laments that the "Spawn" movie Whitewashed two of the comic book and HBO cartoon's most important Black characters. Simmons' best friend, Terry Fitzgerald, who marries Wanda while Simmons languishes in Hell, is played by White actor ("Two and a Half Men"). And Chapel, the Black mercenary who killed Spawn in the comic universe, was replaced by a White character, Jessica Priest, portrayed by Melinda Clarke ("The O.C.").

"There's an inherent power to seeing the palette of brown faces, in looking at a comic that has these three very different Black men," explains Hinds. "I can imagine what [studio or casting executives] might have said back then, that if you throw two more Black male characters in that movie, then all of a sudden, you're making a 'Black' movie-which feels like a different proposition and maybe a bridge too far for where they wanted to be at the time."

Hinds does not lay the blame for "Spawn's" problems with its lead actor, White, whom he calls "great, independent of the film." Coker goes even further to say that White could have been even more famous "if he came five to seven years later." "He's one of the best martial artists in the world, and he's not a bad looking dude, but he's basically stuck in this character that has charred skin, so there's no sex appeal," he opines.

Both Coker and Hinds describe "Spawn" as a missed opportunity, but something changed in the intervening two decades to put Hollywood projects that embrace a hero's Blackness and nuance on big and little screens. Hinds traces it in part to superhero films' current economic value in Hollywood. " Marvel 's success over the last decade has become the dominant paradigm at studios," he says. "Even behind the scenes, Marvel did a lot of their development through the Marvel Program, where they signed writers to term deals and turned them loose on Marvel's intellectual property. That's the system that produced 'Guardians of the Galaxy,' and every studio in town then copied that model."

He also stresses how important activist and audience calls for racial diversity, empowerment and equity in Tinseltown helped make this present context possible. "We're in a more hyper-aware, hyper-politicized and attentive state where the industry realized that diversity-although that term is used in loaded and, frankly annoying ways-is good for business. And 20 years on, we live in a much Browner pop culture than we ever did. You have the combination of an audience ready for certain stories, a business structure that is more and more willing to provide them with certain stories and a creative class with people of color who are anxious to tell them."

Coker believes in the change too. "Nowadays, if you want to deal with a character's essence outside of the superheroes, you can. Commercially, there's a bandwidth that you didn't necessarily have when you were just lucky to have anybody that looked like you with powers."

Even though McFarlane, who many accuse of being prejudiced, wants to downplay Spawn in his upcoming remake, the film introduces the character to the 21st Century. Hopefully, that means treating Al Simmons with depth and incorporating his Blackness into that treatment, for even if Hell's fire incinerated Spawn's skin, he's still Black-and still capable of contemporary relevance.

"There are characters that transcend eras and time," says Coker. "You can revisit 'Spawn' differently now and have an audience ready for it, and explore things that weren't explored the last time around-the complexities of being a Black super soldier, the whole notion of selling your soul, who Al Simmons is."

Al Simmons is, at the very least, a Black man who served his country only for it to mercilessly kill him. He's condemned to serve Hell. He cannot die again and seeks beneficence in revenge. In 2017, that's more than enough reason to justify his significance-and a far better film this time around.

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Why the Universally Panned Black Superhero Flick 'Spawn' Still Matters 20 Years In

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Two decades have passed since Michael Jai White starred in "Spawn," the first superhero film with a Black protagonist. We spoke to "Luke Cage" creator Cheo Hodari Coker and DC Comics author Selwyn Seyfu Hinds about what this notoriously cheesy 1997 film has to do with today's Black superheroes.

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Jaziel Leonardo - Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin

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Jaziel Leonardo - Afrofuturism/Chicanafuturism: Fictive Kin

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https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ787998
Chicanafuturism is a concept that borrows from afrofuturism but it was also inspired by Marion C. Martinez' . It questions the future of science, technology and , humanism for chicanas, chicanos, and other people of color.

"The concept of Chicanafuturism, which the author introduced in "Aztlan" in 2004"

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The Afrofuturism Behind Black Panther

The movie is based off of a 50-year-old Marvel comic superhero who might easily not have existed at all if he did not cross paths with the African-American comic book writer Christopher Priest. He broke into the mainly white industry during the 1980s and achieved influence in time to keep Marvel from throwing away the character that has now become on of it's most money-making heros.

"The comic, as first introduced, was not the least bit radical in the political sense — and not even self-consciously black — but it had a genuinely radical subtext.

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Adam Cook                                This is Afrofuturism

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Adam Cook                                This is Afrofuturism

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Afrofuturism is the term used to take back African culture, art, lifestyle, etc. This term was made in 1993. It tries to make a brighter future for black people. It also shows a culture that black people are as successful, or even more successful, as white people. In the past, superhero movies where about white people.                                                   -

Black Panther is a movie that is an example of Afrofuturism and helped the movement. This movie takes place in Wakanda which is a place where black people are living more advanced than white people. After the movie was released, the Marvel film set new sake records. This shows that people watching enjoy the movie and might enjoy the fact that blacks can become successful just like whites.

Quote: “African science fiction’s blood runs deep, and it’s old, and it’s ready to come forth. And when it does, imagine the new technologies, ideas and sociopolitical changes it will inspire.” - Nnedi Okorafor

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This is Afrofuturism - African Arguments

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Afrofuturism reimagines the past and envisions what can be. If fact follows fiction, the future will belong to Africa and our storytellers. A decade ago, superhero films were almost universally about white male characters, but the buzz around Black Panther reveals a growing appetite for art that pays homage to black history and black power.

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What The Heck Is Afrofuturism?

Afrofuturism is a futuristic sci-fi but through African Americans eyes. "Black people deserve to see themselves leading the way in real or abstract futures." Black Panther is an example of afrofuturism and it was a huge hit. The movie is almost at 1 billion dollars in sales. Black panther is also one of the most recent afrofuturism movies

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm. We're hearing the word "Afrofuturism" a lot.

But what exactly is Afrofuturism?

Afrofuturism is the reimagining of a future filled with arts, science and technology seen through a black lens. The term was conceived a quarter-century ago by white author Mark Dery in his essay " Black to the Future," which looks at speculative fiction within the African diaspora. The essay rests on a series of interviews with black content creators.

Dery laid out the questions driving the philosophy of Afrofuturism:

Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn't the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers ― white to a man ― who have engineered our collective fantasies?

What makes Afrofuturism significantly different from standard science fiction is that it's steeped in ancient African traditions and black identity. A narrative that simply features a black character in a futuristic world is not enough. To be Afrofuturism, it must be rooted in and unapologetically celebrate the uniqueness and innovation of black culture.

The biggest proponent of this cultural movement, even before it had its name, was musician Sun Ra, who infused elements of space and jazz fusion in his work as a musical artist. Prolific science fiction author Octavia E. Butler explored black women protagonists in novels like Fledging, Dawn, Parable of the Sower and Lilith's Brood, set in the context of futuristic technology and interactions with the supernatural. In the contemporary music world, singers like Erykah Badu, with her eccentric and experimental imagery in videos and album covers, promote the intersection of art and futurism. Artists like Janelle Monae, with her android alter-ego and electronica sounds, and films like " Brown Girl Begins," a post-apocalyptic tale set in 2049 and directed by Sharon Lewis, pay a huge homage to Afrofuturism.

Then there's "Black Panther." The film wears themes of Afrofuturism proudly on its sleeve. Tech genius Princess Shuri is not only the smartest person in the fictional world, but she's responsible for the creation and maintenance of sophisticated gadgets for her brother T'Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther.

A prosperous alternative afro future can be seen in their fictional East African home of Wakanda, a small country the size of New Jersey that has never been colonized and is steeped in its blackness. It's a utopian society that also boasts one of the world's richest resources, vibranium. Because white supremacy never intruded on Wakandan culture and its people, ancient African traditions remain common practice there.

But this movie is more than just a glorious film ― it's the expression of a movement.

Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

Africans and African-Americans have full autonomy as Afrofuturists. A community of people can take a piece of visual art or notes from a song and develop an entire universe and say, "This is ours." And that's what this film represents to so many excited fans. Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

In addition to the predominantly black cast filled with Hollywood stars and starlets, "Black Panther" also had a black production team spearheading the shaping of this story. The writer, filmmaker and executive producer are African-American. Production designer Hannah Beachler, who was influenced by Afrofuturistic architecture and Afropunk aesthetics, helped lay the groundwork for this world. The African regalia and elaborate costumes by famed wardrobe designer Ruth E. Carter created a Wakandan couture that would give New York Fashion Week a run for its money ― just look at her use of kimoyo beads as both a fashion accessory and a communication device.

This intersection of sci-fi and African pride is what we've come to know as Afrofuturism. For many of us in the blerd community, the film with its love for technology, science, visual art and music (if you haven't checked out the "Black Panther" album, you should make it a priority) is what we've been hungry for.

I hope, for all of our sakes, that this is also just the beginning. I hope that "Black Panther" can prove that stories permeated in blackness have crossover appeal. I hope we get more and more stories of black people who have agency, who are free and subservient to no one. Black people deserve to see themselves leading the way in real or abstract futures.
Jamie Broadnax is the editor-in-chief and creator of the online community for black women called Black Girl Nerds.

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Opinion | What The Heck Is Afrofuturism?

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm.

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Chloe Davis: Rhythm Nation - Janet Jackson

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Chloe Davis: Rhythm Nation - Janet Jackson

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https://www.google.com/amp/www.okayafrica.com/10-afrofuturistic-music-videos-show-versatility-far-genre.amphttps://www.google.com/amp/www.okayafrica.com/10-afrofuturistic-music-videos-show-versatility-far-genre.amp
The reader can learn more about racial harmony and how racism could be solved in the future. It gives examples of how things could be so different in an alternate universe or even in a different state

“People of the world unite
Strength in numbers we can get it right”

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Ava Cohen-"Is Beyonce the queen of Afrofuturism?"

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Ava Cohen-"Is Beyonce the queen of Afrofuturism?"

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I think that Afrofuturism is important in today's society because there are stereotypes saying that a certain race or religion can't do something. This sub-genre proves that no matter what race, religion,or gender you are, it should not limit you to what you can and cannot do. It also exposes other cultures that we haven not learned about yet.This article explains the ways that Beyonce's performances at various events are  examples of Afrofuturism. She uses her costumes, music, scenery, and her overall message to reflect her African heritage. From performances dating back to 2007 until recently, she has been showing examples of Feminism and Afrofuturism.
The author says "At the end of that performance she sits like royalty alongside Blue Ivy and Tina Knowles, her mother, representing three generations of Black women; the mother represents the past, Beyonce represents the present, and Blue Ivy represents the future."

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PressReader.com - Connecting People Through News

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Connecting People through News. All-you-can-read digital newsstand with thousands of the world's most popular newspapers and magazines. Vast selection of top stories in full-content format available for free.

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Efrain "Beyond 'Black Panther': A brief history of Afrofuturism"

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Efrain "Beyond 'Black Panther': A brief history of Afrofuturism"

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This article talks about Afrofuturism and how it has been implemented in the recent film "Black Panther". It also talks about the history of Afrofuturism and other sources of media that have used afrofuturism. When the author talked about how african-american people were portrayed he said "Black Panther

, on the other hand, paints its human heroes with an authentically pan-African brush, interweaving Wakanda’s advanced technology with imagery straight outta the Continent." I thought this was interesting because I didn't know that Black Panther had so many references to african american culture.

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Excited for Black Panther? So are we. Which is why we're rolling out obsessive coverage with Black Panther Week.
Among the images glimpsed in Marvel's first Black Panther trailer was a tribal elder in an emerald suit with a matching lip disc, a body modification found in the Suri and Mursi tribes of Ethiopia.

Warriors draped in blue "blankets" (or Seanamarena) soon followed, drawn from the Basotho peoples of South Africa. Alongside them were women in red beaded war garb - the Dora Milaje, Black Panther's female Royal Guard - their vivid outfits remixed from the Maasai ethnoculture of Kenya and Tanzania.

Black Panther looks like no Hollywood film we've ever seen, and it belongs to a deeply rooted artistic philosophy that's often overlooked: Afrofuturism.

The term was coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in "Black to the Future," a 44-page essay from 1993 in which Dery, a white writer, interviews several prominent African American voices: sci-fi author Samuel R. Delaney; musician and former The Village Voice writer Greg Tate; and Tricia Rose, the director of the Center for Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University.

Dery's definition of the philosophy is as follows:

Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture-and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future-might, for want of a better term, be called "Afro-futurism."

The unique aesthetic of Black Panther, which has been setting the internet ablaze at regular intervals, can be attributed to its largely black cast and creative team (a rarity in American studio filmmaking), as well as the decision to push back against modern science fiction's penchant for Western design norms.

The genre has often coded colonized peoples and their cultures as the "alien" or "other," as seen in the Klingons' Fu Manchu facial hair on the original Star Trek or the Sand People's Arab-inspired thawbs in the original Star Wars. This tradition continues to this day, with indigenous extraterrestrial tribes in Avatar and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets being little more than haphazard mixtures of Native American and African iconography.

Black Panther is Afrofuturism writ large, the incorporation of distinctly African and African-American narrative symbolism as a means to reclaim modern blackness.

Black Panther, on the other hand, paints its human heroes with an authentically pan-African brush, interweaving Wakanda's advanced technology with imagery straight outta the Continent. This is Afrofuturism writ large, the incorporation of distinctly African and African-American narrative symbolism in sci-fi as a means to reclaim modern blackness.

In his essay, Dery investigates (among other things), contemporary urban uses of technology - specifically the "beeper culture" of the '90s, though its modern equivalent would arguably be the carving out of black spaces on social media.

Delaney expands on this concept, referring to the "scratch" and "sampling" methods of hip-hop remixing as "a specific mis-use and conscientious desecration of the artifacts of technology and the entertainment media."

For instance, the beatbox and the "robot" dance, landmarks in the evolution of hip-hop culture, represent the remixing of the human body: a labor force with limited access to tech innovation recreating technology itself, as if in opposition to systems of control.

In effect, Afrofuturist art has always been at odds with the norms of the mainstream. The black perspective in America has often lent itself to particularly unsettling genre fiction - like, most recently, Jordan Peele's Get Out.

Though contested by 21st century Afrofuturists, Dery's comparison of modern African-Americans to "the descendants of alien abductees" offers a metaphorical link between stranger-in-a-strange-land alien tales and the experiences of an entire people uprooted from their homes, forced to exist in a world that is not their own - much as Peele's protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) must adapt to the conventions and microaggressions of his girlfriend's suburban family home.

For many African-Americans today, the largely white mainstreams of both entertainment and politics might still feel like alien worlds to which they are outsiders. As Tate puts it, "Being black in America is a science-fiction experience."

Novelized science fiction played host to Afrofuturist ideas for the better part of the twentieth century, from authors like Samuel Delaney to Octavia Butler (particularly her Xenogenesis trilogy, which uses the intermingling of human and alien societies to explore cultural hybridization in a manner similar to postcolonial theory). The literary trend remains alive and well today, with the likes of Nnedi Okorafor's Binti series of novellas.

But whether as direct narrative or philosophical backdrop, Afrofuturism has always made its way to other mediums. It's seen perhaps most prominently in the work of jazz musician Sun Ra, whose space-age "Egyptian alien" aesthetic and incorporation of digital synthesizers remixed and elevated the genre, with transformative live performances acting as vessels for grandiose, regal visual narratives yet unexplored.

Which brings us, of course, to the King of Wakanda. Created in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Black Panther, much like his "Afrofuturist" label, was a white creation. Their modern definitions, however, hinge on black artistic contributions.

Much of the Panther's modern mythology and characterization came into being in the late '90s with writer Christopher Priest, whose storyline "The Client" brought King T'Challa face to face with his metatextual New York roots. But it was Reginald Hudlin's 2005-2008 run that began to delve into the geopolitics of Wakanda through a modern globalist lens.

This set the stage for the character's current print incarnation: Ta-Nehisi Coates' and Brian Stelfreeze's heady political saga "A Nation Under Our Feet," on which much of the film's recombining of technology with African tribal symbolism is based.

In Wakanda, unlike in much of the real world, African history and modern innovation are not treated as mutual exclusives. In Coates and Stelfreeze's comic, and in the Marvel Studios film, the nation's ancient culture and its 21st century inventions appear to have evolved not only side-by-side, but as one and the same.

Black Panther is not the only piece of Afrofuturism in the recent American mainstream. Ava DuVernay's "Family Feud" short for Jay-Z's 4:44 posits a future filled with intersections of black, female and Native American leadership. Add to that Janelle Monáe's Fritz-Lang-meets-Sun-Ra cover for The ArchAndroid and DuVernay's own upcoming A Wrinkle in Time, and you have yourself the gradual re-emergence of a trend.

However, there's little denying that Marvel's Wakandan saga is the most prominent example of Afrofuturist art in recent years - in part because of the money and widespread distribution behind it, but also in part because it's arguably the most potent.

As an artistic philosophy within the constraints of both America's own racial history and within the cultural context of the global West, Afrofuturism exists in opposition to a white, postcolonial status quo - whose normalcy stems from prioritizing Western philosophy and design at the cost of cultures disallowed from achieving their full potential in the past.

There's little denying that Black Panther is the most prominent example of Afrofuturist art in recent years.

The premise of Black Panther, as with most Afrofuturist art, goes against the grain of history itself - a violent chronology that stripped African cultures of resources and opportunities, and stripped African peoples of their languages and identities when they were enslaved in America and elsewhere. Few modern African-Americans know their exact origins, and African nations are rarely portrayed in anything resembling positive light in Western media despite their advancements.

Much of what has come to be known as Western culture was dependent on the systemic destruction of African heritage. Wakanda becoming an integral part of one of Western culture's longest-running mainstream narratives - the Marvel Cinematic Universe - is a small step towards undoing the contemporary effects of that destruction, whether by way of creating a new narrative of blackness on a global stage, or simply by affording black artists more opportunities.

Dery's essay begins with an ominous quote from George Orwell's 1984: "Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." This rings especially true when defining modern cultural narratives that are broadcast to all corners of the globe.

Fittingly, he follows this up with thematically appropriate lyrics from Def Jef's "Black to the Future," (for which the essay is named) as if in attempt to unearth the affirming African American counter-foil to the Orwellian omen:

Yo, bust this, Black
To the Future
Back to the past
History is a mystery 'cause it has
All the info
You need to know
Where you're from
Why'd you come and
That'll tell you where you're going.

It is in the re-envisioning of a future for black people, despite their present systemic oppression in every area from voter suppression to police brutality, that Afrofuturism's take on the past is born.

Within the fiction of Black Panther, Wakanda is a nation untouched by Western influence at any point in history, representing the peoples of postcolonial Africa had they been allowed to exist and advance on their own terms.

Afrofuturism, it would seem, is here to stay.

But Wakanda is also untethered to any one specific African ethnoculture (although its "official" language is Xhosa, its influences spread far beyond Bantu), thus allowing it to be a collective reclamation of pan-African identity for those in the global African diaspora uprooted centuries ago.

It is both Afrofuturism as contemporary African advancement, prioritizing non-white, non-Western symbolism in its design, as well Afrofuturism in the context of black America. It transforms a stolen history into a portrait of sci-fi heroism through a character whose superhero mantle is not a thematic externalization of psychosis disconnected from "real identity," as is the case with most superheroes in the Western individualist paradigm.

The Batman was the sole creation of Bruce Wayne, a white man who came from old money but had little reason to connect white readers to their roots. The Black Panther, on the other hand, was passed down through unbroken generational lineage - a luxury rarely afforded to African American readers. It's the Western superhero remixed and reclaimed as a symbol of deeply rooted cultural and tribal identity.

Perhaps most promising in all this, however, is that there is little in common by way of influence between Black Panther and the other aforementioned modern Afrofuturist examples. Even the film's own soundtrack, much of which sounds like tribal instruments beamed into a digital future, has yielded its own distinctly Afrofuturist feel.

"All The Stars," the recently released music video from Kendrick Lamar and SZA, is as unapologetically African as the film, bringing Lamar face to face with gilded Nubian goddesses arriving like alien messengers within a luminous floating temple. But there is barely a narrative or aesthetic element that overlaps with Black Panther itself.

They are each their own unique entities, telling their own stories and carving out their own spaces for contemporary and historical blackness within the mainstream. There is much yet to be explored, and given that there is no singular avenue to Afrofuturist art, there is much yet to be reclaimed. Afrofuturism, it would seem, is here to stay.

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Beyond 'Black Panther': A brief history of Afrofuturism

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Excited for Black Panther ? So are we. Which is why we're rolling out obsessive coverage with Black Panther Week. Among the images glimpsed in Marvel's first Black Panther trailer was a tribal elder in an emerald suit with a matching lip disc, a body modification found in the Suri and Mursi tribes of Ethiopia.

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Dylynne Tutino-"The resurgence of Afrofuturism goes beyond ‘Black Panther,’ to Janelle Monáe, Jay-Z and more"

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Dylynne Tutino-"The resurgence of Afrofuturism goes beyond ‘Black Panther,’ to Janelle Monáe, Jay-Z and more"

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The reader will learn where the word Afrofuturism originated from. They will also learn about where the word Afrofuturism is used in a book or novel. Last they will learn about other people's perspective on Afrofuturism. This article ask lots of good questions too.

Quote: This quote was said by Janelle Monáe, “When I speak about science-fiction and the future and androids, I’m speaking about the ‘other.’”

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Angelica Vellore : ¨Latino Science Fiction¨

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Angelica Vellore : ¨Latino Science Fiction¨

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The reader will learn about Chicanafuturism. Also that Sci-Fi is not a common genre that US Latino authors write in, yet still, the genre ¨has a strong presnence¨.                    Also, that latino sci-fi authors add the themes of immigration, colonialism, racism, Spanglish, and code-switching, and meetings between Latinos and other ethnic groups. Latino writers are finding that science fiction a great way to imagine a Latino . As well as works from sci-fi Latino authors.

¨Furthermore, despite its designation as a “fiction,” science fiction is a multimedia field, and Latinos have been engaged in creating not only science fiction literature, but also comics, film, and television.¨
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199913701/obo-9780199913701-0112.xml#

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Will DeFalco : "Afrofuturism: The Next Generation"

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Will DeFalco : "Afrofuturism: The Next Generation"

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This article informs the reader about Afrofuturism. It will also tell the reader of how it is practiced by several artists, such as Beyonce, Rihanna, and Janelle Monáe and where afrofuturism really originated, or came from.

"Each was in her way a beacon of Afrofuturism, a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts."

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The Year in Style 2016

Solange Knowles on "Saturday Night Live" in November, flaunting a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids. Credit... Dana Edelson/NBC, via Getty Images

In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil.

A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe. Flanked on the stage by twin columns of attendants, she was a galactic goddess in a white ermine cape.

In November, on "Saturday Night Live," her sister, Solange Knowles, flaunted a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids, looking every inch a regal visitor from distant planet.

Each was in her way a beacon of Afrofuturism, a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts.

[See more Year in Style articles]
Familiar to some, exotic to others, the term refers loosely to an unlikely fusion of parts: Egyptian and other non-Western mythologies, mysticism and magical realism with Afrocentricity, modern technology and science fiction. A freighted concept in more ways than one, it gained traction this year, muscling its way into the pop cultural mainstream via the intertwined worlds of entertainment, art and style.

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Rihanna, as an otherworldly warrior queen, in the September issue of W magazine. Credit... Steven Klein; styled by Edward Enninful

In part, Afrofuturism, an aesthetic dating roughly from the 1970s, has taken on a new public face through a new generation of recording artists - Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Janelle Monáe among them - who have given it not only a voice, but also a look. You will likely know it when you see it: a high-shine mash-up of cyborg themes, loosely tribal motifs, android imagery and gleaming metallics that might be appropriate for a voyage to Pluto's outer reaches.

Its latest incarnation seems timely, if not downright inevitable. "With the diversity of the nation and world increasingly standing in stark contrast to the diversity in futuristic works, it's no surprise that Afrofuturism emerged," writes Ytasha L. Womack, who chronicled and popularized the evolution of the genre in her 2013 book, " Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture."

"But when, even in the imaginary future," she goes on, "people can't fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down."

The internet has lent the movement a force unknown in previous incarnations. A visual metaphor for empowerment on sites like the Afrofuturist Affair and influential Instagram accounts like Inkrayable_girafe, it permits black men and women to take charge of their image. Today, Ms. Womack writes, "a fledgling filmmaker can shoot his sci-fi web series on a $500 DV cam, post it on YouTube, and promote it on Instagram and Twitter."

Lina Iris Viktor, a British-Liberian artist in New York who paints queenly self-portraits with a futuristic edge, picked up the thread. "The internet democratized the playing field," she said. "Now the voices you hear are authentically ours. Instead of everybody else telling you stories, explaining to you what our work is about, we are telling you what it's about."

An Afrofuturist narrative is embedded as well in a recent flurry of museum shows. On view through November at El Museo del Barrio were the fashion illustrations of Antonio Lopez, a pioneer in the genre whose works of the '70s and '80s featured a multiracial cast of robotlike figures and astronauts propelled into a far-off Tomorrowland. It is a brave new world, as a review in The New York Times noted in June, "in which race and gender were fluid, and existing social inequities corrected or transcended."

Afrofuturism is a current in the multimedia installations of the artist Saya Woolfalk, whose utopian universes and Empathics, a future race fusing - and all but erasing - racial and ethnic boundaries, were featured this year in shows at the Brooklyn Museum, a light show in Times Square and, just this month, an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Afrofuturist allusions crop up less overtly in the sprawling canvases of Kerry James Marshall, whose exhibition at the Met Breuer, through Jan. 29, includes idealized portraits of African-American Boy and Girl Scouts wreathed in halos of the kind often seen on comic-book heroes.

This summer, the movement flexed its muscle at the megaplex, where "Captain America: Civil War" featured the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), a superhero who in 2018 will star in "Black Panther" as the king and protector of the imaginary nation of Wakanda.

Afrofuturism's resurgence could not be more timely, arriving as it does in a climate perceived as indifferent, if not downright inimical, to racial and ethnic minorities. In her book, Ms. Womack recalls a time when black or brown sci-fi characters were all but invisible in the culture at large. As a girl, she would fantasize that she was Princess Leia of "Star Wars."

"While it was fun to be the chick from outer space in my imagination," Ms. Womack writes, "the quest to see myself or browner people in this space age, galactic epic was important to me." It was in the absence of minorities from pop lore, she goes on, "that seeds were planted in the imaginations of countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceship too."

Count among them Tim Fielder, a New York graphic artist and animator whose sci-fi illustrations, produced over a 30-year span, drew visitors last spring to " Black Metropolis," at the Gallatin Galleries at New York University. Mr. Fielder's pioneering cartoon narratives - notably those of " Matty's Rocket," his spirited black female cosmonaut, who will lift off next year in graphic novel form - are particularly relevant now, he maintained: "They let young artists know that they're not on dangerous turf, that someone has gone there before them."

Afrofuturism's epic imagery offers youth a mirror, Mr. Fielder said. "These kids are able now to see themselves in environments that are expansive, both technologically and in terms of social mores and gender," he said.

They also see themselves newly reflected in the comic books that remain a potent form of Afrofuturist expression. Last spring, the Black Panther, lately of "Captain America," was resurrected by Marvel as the noble protagonist of his own comic book series, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of "Between the World and Me." And this year, Riri Williams, an Afro-coiffured teenage superheroine with an M.I.T. degree, will slip into the fabled power suit in the "Iron Man" comic series.

Such vanguard characters can trace their genesis to early champions of Afrofuturism, paramount among them Sun Ra, the jazz composer, poet and philosopher who incorporated sci-fi themes into his music and his seminal film, "Space Is the Place," a mid-1970s tale of interplanetary time travel.

Afrofuturism owes as important a debt to the writer Octavia Butler, whose 1979 best-seller, "Kindred," posits an alternate reality in which an African-American heroine is transported from mid-70s Los Angeles to early 19th-century Maryland. It owes a debt as well to the music of George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, with their prophetic lyrics in "Mothership Connection":

Time to move on

Light years in time

Ahead of our time.

Afrofuturist themes were revisited in the '90s, but still as a genre without a name until the cultural critic Mark Dery formally christened it in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future," after which it flourished for a time before retreating to the shadows.

Now the movement has returned in force, beamed down to the concert stage. Last month, the '70s disco diva Grace Jones, Afrofuturism's flat-topped mascot, toured in the British Isles, her stage persona, covered head-to-toe in tribal paint and feathers, a reprise of her hula-hoop-twirling performance at the Afropunk Fest in Brooklyn last year.

On a broadcast of "The Tonight Show" in February, the singer FKA Twigs seemed to alight from the clouds swathed in a incandescent white. Her costume, a-shimmer in crystals, was created with Grace Wales Bonner, a London designer whose work in the past has been rife with Afrofuturist allusions.

In her "Lemonade" album, released in April, Beyoncé reigns in an all-female utopia, leading a phalanx of women in ethereal white dresses that simultaneously conjure ancient and space-age societies.

The style world, too, has now embraced the movement, if only, perhaps, to reinforce its stature as an arbiter of cool. For the W September cover and 18-page editorial feature shot by Steven Klein, Rihanna's over-the-top costumes were cobbled from scratch.

"She's a one-off, a queen," said Edward Enninful, the magazine's fashion and style director. "A queen does not wear clothes off the runways." Instead she wears an otherworldly pastiche of vanguard creations by Gareth Pugh, Prada, Proenza Schouler and others, clothes conceived, Mr. Enninful said, to emphasize Rihanna's majestic persona.

"It's a look that many young black females out there haven't seen before," he said.

Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy was among the first to integrate Afrofuturist imagery into his runway shows. Two years earlier, he signed Ms. Badu as the fierce-looking face of the brand. Mr. Tisci followed up repeatedly, most recently with a fall 2016 line replete with cosmological symbols, including that familiar Afrofuturist talisman, the Egyptian Eye of Horus.

Calvin Klein released a fall advertising campaign starring the rapper Young Thug, dressed in flares and a fitted pinstripe chasuble, its neckline embellished with an astral-looking orb. A recent campaign from Chanel featured Willow Smith festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

The singer Willow Smith in a Chanel campaign, festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

Others are advancing this high-concept aesthetic in more subtle ways, thrusting aside clichés as they go. "Afrofuturism has to become something more than just an idea of black people in shiny metallic clothing," said Michelle Busayo Olupona, the Nigerian-American designer behind Busayo NYC, a label incorporating Afrofuturist themes in a stripped-down, abstract way. "In my own work, I try to create an aesthetic and style evocative of the past but very much grounded in the now."

Ms. Olupona said her abstract, Afrocentric designs, some incorporating fantasy fauna and futurist imagery, "suggest ways in which we can differentiate ourselves."

"What they say about the future," she continued, "is that we're always going to be here."

Another showcase for contemporary, less literal interpretations of Afrofuturism is 9J, a boutique and gallery recently sprung up on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx. It aims to usher in the movement's next wave, with items like a ribbed trunk-neck sweater worthy of "Star Wars," created by a local designer Jesenia Lopez; gravity-defying Birkenstock platforms covered in feathers and Swarovski "gems"; and an outsize headdress of spiraling silver wire. These pieces mingle technology, fantasy and Afrocentric themes with a streamlined progressive-looking opulence.

The shop's owner, Jerome LaMaar, whose line, 5:31 Jérôme, has drawn high-visibility clients like Beyoncé and the model Hailey Baldwin, wore fur-rimmed virtual-reality goggles the other week while presiding at the opening of Africollision, an installation at 9J that eschewed the space-is-the-place hallmarks of old school Afrofuturism.

"We want to play with the idea of what is tribe, what is Africa, what is the future, and mix it all up without being predictable." Mr. LaMaar insisted. "Who wants to see what's already been done?"

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The Year in Style 2016 In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil. A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe.

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Title: The past, present and Afrofuturism of 'Black Panther'

Summary: Black Panther is a new amazing movie that came into the Marvel franchise not long ago and experienced lots of afrofuturism. Black Panther takes place in Wakanda a place in which anything can happen. Wakanda is a place mostly filled with really smart Black people that can do amazing things. They have advances in technology and that definitely helps a lot. Wakanda is filled everywhere with afrofuturism such as the setting, the gadgets they use, the king, and etc. Black Panther is a amazing movie that literally made it into the top 10 best movies in the world. This is amazingly epic because this movie made history because of how much money was made from this movie despite the people that were playing the characters were African. This shows that any type of person can change history.

Quote:  "Afrofuturism does a couple of things," filmmaker, author and futurist Ytasha L. Womack explained in a keynote speech at Canada's McGill University in 2015. "It affirms the agency of people who pull from aspects of the African or black experience in the future ... but it also recovers this lost history, heritage and perspectives that aren't talked about in our education system. You can pull from these different aspects to shape your present -- and the future."

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There's a secret at the heart of Marvel's superhero adventure " Black Panther": the African nation of Wakanda, bursting with advanced technology and hidden from the world.

But that's not the only thing this Afrofuturist epic uncovers. By drawing directly from Africa as its source material, " Black Panther" gives us a new way to think about a past, present and future rarely seen in mainstream movies. (Here's CNET's of the film, which opened in US theaters on Friday and earlier worldwide.)

Marvel's latest superhero flick is the perfect example of the genre and movement known as Afrofuturism. It combines elements of sci-fi, fantasy and African history and culture to create a new world to explore and escape into.

The term Afrofuturism was coined in the early 1990s to refer to an analysis of African-American sci-fi. But it's since become a method for speculative thought, imagining "what if" scenarios in fiction, music and even architecture that reclaim and reinvigorate depictions of the black experience. By re-examining historical events through an African lens, we can more deeply understand where we are today and, in sci-fi creations like the high-tech culture of Wakanda, imagine possibilities beyond the status quo.

"Black Panther" star Chadwick Boseman, who plays T'Challa, said he expressly thought about how he should approach his accent as Wakanda's king from a purely African perspective.

"He's the ruler of a nation," Boseman told CNET in a November interview. "And if he's the ruler of a nation, he has to speak to his people. He has to galvanize his people. And there's no way I could speak to my people, who have never been conquered by Europeans, with a European voice."

The "Afro" in the Afrofuturism of "Black Panther," isn't just evident in the predominantly black cast, also featuring Angela Bassett as T'Challa's mother, Ramonda; Michael B. Jordan as zealous villain Killmonger; and Lupita Nyong'o as spy Nakia.

It's everywhere in the aesthetics, from the vibrant design of the sets and costumes to the fictional rituals of Black Panther's home, Wakanda. Look at the ochre earth that covers the floor of the Wakandan throne room. Or the thatched roofs on the country's gleaming skyscrapers. Or gadgets in the form of traditional necklaces and beads. Even the natural landscapes of Wakanda draw on the variety of Africa's beauty, with rolling green hillsides and magnificent snowcapped mountains taking the place of the stereotypical parched desert.

Yet Afrofuturism is more than a visual style bringing African influences into the mainstream. Even before the first (white) men walked on the moon in the 1960s, African-American writers, artists and musicians like Sun Ra looked to space and to the fantasies of science fiction to find the freedom denied them on Earth.

"Afrofuturism does a couple of things," filmmaker, author and futurist Ytasha L. Womack explained in a keynote speech at Canada's McGill University in 2015. "It affirms the agency of people who pull from aspects of the African or black experience in the future ... but it also recovers this lost history, heritage and perspectives that aren't talked about in our education system. You can pull from these different aspects to shape your present -- and the future."

Representation of the historical black experience on screen has often focused on slavery, from 1915's " The Birth of a Nation" to 2013's " 12 Years a Slave." In the present, black people are regularly depicted as passive victims of police brutality and gang warfare who come from violent, impoverished communities the world over.

In sci-fi's future or fantasy settings, black people frequently don't exist: How many are there in "Blade Runner 2049", for example? In sci-fi, people of colour are often replaced by green- or blue-hued aliens or other fantastic beings as a proxy, from " Avatar," " Alien Nation" and " Bright" to " Blade Runner" and "X-Men."

In other words, humanity has been living with a Westernised narrative. But in "Black Panther," the black people and culture we see are very different from stereotypical representations. Wakanda's past is free of colonisation and enslavement. Wakandans of the present are active citizens with agency over their country's resources. And they combine their chief resource, Vibranium, with their knowledge and ingenuity to develop futuristic technology outstripping the rest of the world.

"One of the things that we really wanted to make sure about Wakanda is the technology, and I think that that's something that all the fans want to see," the film's production designer, Hannah Beachler, told Black Girl Nerds. "The other thing that we really talked about was keeping the tradition of several different African tribes. We really delved into what that was and how we mix this new and this old."

For Beachler, Afrofuturism means taking a familiar narrative and "mixing it up and reowning it ... going back to an older time and modernizing it, and reclaiming it, and owning it in a different way."

You'll find Afrofuturism in fiction such as Octavia Butler's 1976 time-travelling slave narrative novel " Kindred", or more recently, the novel " Who Fears Death" by Nigerian-American writer Nnedi Okorafor. Set in a postapocalyptic future version of Sudan, "Who Fears Death" is scheduled to be made into an HBO series produced by " Game of Thrones" author George R.R. Martin.

Even before academic Mark Dery coined the term Afrofuturism in 1993, we saw it in the work of artists like otherworldly jazz performer Sun Ra. His experimental music, extraterrestrial-inspired cosmic philosophy and flamboyant performances produced works like the psychedelic 1974 film "Space Is the Place," in which he comes to us as a "Universal Being" not of this dimension.

Getty Images

African-American singer, songwriter and record producer George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic fame shared many of the cosmic viewpoints of Sun Ra. His music was infused with an Afrofuturist vision of protest, hope, intergalactic mythology and fun, and he was one of the many who laid the groundwork for the evolution of electro. In the 1980s, hip-hop ambassador Afrika Bambaataa appeared as a being somewhere between a robot and an ancient Egyptian godhead for his influential 1982 hit "Planet Rock."

More recently, my personal favourite, Janelle Monae, adopted an android alter ego to take us on a tour of futuristic museums paying homage to rebel artists on the albums "The ArchAndroid" and "Electric Lady."

"I watched 'Metropolis' and was really inspired by it," Monae told The Irish Times. "Then I started to get into 'Alien' and 'Blade Runner', and I started to look at the android as the form of the other, all the discrimination that the android faced in these films. I could relate to that, the idea of being the minority within the majority."

Monae's next album and film will be titled "Dirty Computer" and will continue to explore sci-fi themes. No wonder she was the perfect choice to appear in " Hidden Figures," the award-winning 2016 movie reclaiming the contribution of African-American women to the space race.

By looking to both the past and the future and imagining new possibilities in stories like "Black Panther," we can inspire the present. At Afro Futures_UK, a UK-based collective of researchers, artists, programmers and activists, we explore new ways of seeing ourselves. Through seminars, workshops and social media, our black-led group aims to get more people involved in science, technology and the arts to do our bit toward self-determination and liberation.

As "Black Panther" sinks its teeth into huge box office success, Afrofuturism is now mainstream. A smash hit Marvel blockbuster made by a black cast, director and filmmakers should pave the way to change how Hollywood portrays Africa, the birthplace of humanity. That's the irresistible freedom of Afrofuturism.

Tech Culture: From film and television to social media and games, here's your place for the lighter side of tech.

Crowd Control: A crowdsourced science fiction novel written by CNET readers.

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To understand 'Black Panther,' you need to understand Afrofuturism

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There's a secret at the heart of Marvel's superhero adventure " Black Panther": the African nation of Wakanda, bursting with advanced technology and hidden from the world. But that's not the only thing this Afrofuturist epic uncovers.

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BEHIND THE SCENES OF BLACK PANTHER'S AFROFUTURISM

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BEHIND THE SCENES OF BLACK PANTHER'S AFROFUTURISM

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Marvel has recently released a new movie called Black Panther that takes place in Africa with many African characters. This was a hard science fiction movie to create because the costume and set designers had to create things like outfits and backdrops that looked like they could be from the futuristic Africa.This is a great example of Afrofuturism because not only are Afros involved in the film but it also takes place in a futuristic Africa.  “The challenge was imagining how something futuristic looks in Africa.”

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In Black Panther, the future is female. Sure, the titular hero is the man-king T'Challa, but his bodyguards, advisers, and chief technologist are all women. Same goes for the crew behind the camera: The design of the movie's setting-the fictional African nation of Wakanda-mostly comes from production designer Hannah Beachler ( Moonlight, Beyoncé's Lemonade) and costume designer Ruth Carter ( Amistad, Selma). "The challenge was imagining how something futuristic looks in Africa," Beachler says. "What would Africans have done given reign over their own culture, without having been colonized? How would their cultures have mixed together?" The answer is a future that Tony Stark never could have dreamed of.

Super Suit
The source of Wakanda's wealth, the rare (fictional) metal vibranium, powers everything from weapons to fashions. You can see the telltale silver sheen in T'Challa's bodysuit, but you might miss subtler details in the costume's design. "There's a little pyramid pattern from Mali," Carter says. "In close-up, you can see the suit's connection to Africa."

Language
The people of Wakanda mostly speak English, but there is also a native language, for which Beachler developed a character set based on Nigerian pictographs from the fourth and fifth centuries. The characters show up on street signs, battle gear, and the walls of T'Challa's court. (That last one loosely translates to "We together, under the leopard king.")

Transportation
Golden City, the heart of Wakanda, has two major forms of public transit: the Steptown streetcar and a hyperloop. Both, Beachler says, were intended to fulfill people's visions of trains of the future. Since director Ryan Coogler grew up in Oakland, California, the BART system was an influence. Of course, with the help of vibranium, the cars are considerably more efficient.

Wearables
One of Coogler's main goals with Black Panther was to make sure all of the technology had multiple functions. For example, kimoyo beads are used as jewelry, but also as communication and medical devices. "A big question I was interested in exploring was, what makes something African?" Coogler says. "For us, we said, 'Let's make it human, let's make it tactile.' "

Air Power
There are three main aircraft in Wakanda: Talon Fighters, which are like fighter jets; Dragon Flyers, biomimetically designed helicopters that look like dragonflies; and the Royal Talon Fighter, T'Challa's version of Air Force One. "The top view of the Royal Talon is inspired by an African mask, and the inside is luxurious," Beachler says. "It's techy, but it's not your usual aircraft."

Architecture
The gleaming glass skyscrapers of Golden City have roots in African architecture-like the rondavel tops of traditional thatched huts. "We started digging deeper and grabbing textures from Timbuktu scaffolding and Mali pyramids," Beachler says. The city also has a district called Steptown, where the hipsters wear clothes with, Carter says, "an Afro-Punk feel."

Warriors
Since the Dora Milaje-T'Challa's personal guards-are part Secret Service, part Navy SEALs, their gear has to be regal and combat-friendly. Neck rings protect the warriors and signify rank, while beaded body armor double as family talismans that Dora soldiers can pass down to their daughters. Carter based her designs on the beadwork of the East African Maasai tribe.

Weapons
All the best tech in Wakanda is the work of one woman: T'Challa's younger sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), head of the Wakandan Design Group. "She's like Tony Stark or Elon Musk," Coogler says. Her gauntlets use vibranium power to launch concussive sound waves-but her coolest creation might be high tech ring blades, expertly wielded by Lupita Nyong'o's Nakia.
This article appears in the February issue. Subscribe now.

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'Black Panther': Behind the Scenes of the Marvel Movie's Afrofuturism

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In Black Panther , the future is female. Sure, the titular hero is the man-king T'Challa, but his bodyguards, advisers, and chief technologist are all women. Same goes for the crew behind the camera: The design of the movie's setting-the fictional African nation of Wakanda-mostly comes from production designer Hannah Beachler ( Moonlight, Beyoncé's Lemonade) and costume designer Ruth Carter ( Amistad, Selma).

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K´Andres ´´What The Heck Is Afrofuturism?´´

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K´Andres ´´What The Heck Is Afrofuturism?´´

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You will find that it is mostly african decent going to the future such as the movie black panther, they demonstrate afrofuturism by showing much of the african and african american people in this movie, also the black women and how powerful they are menttaly ans physically. this article also states that afrofuturism is all about bringing the african clothing and traditions etc. it celebrates the uniquness of the african culture

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¨Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.´´

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Adam Chihoub ¨How Afrofuturism Progress from Sci-Fi to Literature to Fashion¨

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Adam Chihoub ¨How Afrofuturism Progress from Sci-Fi to Literature to Fashion¨

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The reader will learn that artists are using their fans to spread the concept of Afrofuturism, such as in Michael Jackson´s music. One example being ¨Rock with you¨ . Janelle Monaé introduced the idea of Afrofuturism through her music in this generation. Her own android character seen in her music videos helps to express Afrofuturism by talking about freedom. This helped encourage other black artists relate to Afrofuturism. Scenes from Beyoncés ´Lemonade´ music video show black women wearing their natural hair, communing in trees and open fields, and gathering food together.

“Natural hair is a lifestyle” - Shayna Watson

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Afrofuturism can be credited to literary greats like Octavia Butler and visual artists like Basquiat. These artists used their mediums to explore a revolutionary world where black characters controlled their own destinies. Musicians from the late 20th century like Sun Ra, George Clinton and Afrika Bambaataa melded the themes of space, alter egos and black culture into a musical and fashion style that was pioneering for the time. Even artists not typically associated with Afrofuturism can be seen borrowing from this "other reality" aesthetic through their fashion sense and visual representations.

Take, for example, Michael Jackson's music; it screams of Afrofuturism. In "Rock With You," Jackson gleamed in metallics; and throughout the video "Scream," Janet Jackson and Michael went full-on gravity-defying space travel. Even Michael's signature moonwalking had a "Jetson" future-world feel, with M.J. somehow floating backward and leaning as if on strings, while the rest of us could only take a few steps back and forth to the rhythm.

While Afrofuturism began as a literary means of exploring the current issues facing members of the African Diaspora and reimagining a different future, this fantastical concept has made its way into the visual aesthetics of many of our greatest fashion icons.

Grace Jones has embodied the ideals of Afrofuturism in her style. Often donning elaborate headpieces, dramatic eye makeup and exaggerated silhouettes, she offered an alternate representation of black femininity and fashion. In reimagining the possibilities of black identity and governance over our own bodies and minds, Afrofuturism was definitely part of this new narrative. Jones has unapologetically owned her choice of expression when it comes to her body and her sexuality. Just as Afrofuturism is about envisioning a future without mental slavery or physical trauma, it is also about the ability to embrace ourselves and black expression, and to exist in a utopia that will eventually become reality.

Janelle Monáe has introduced the concept of Afrofuturism to the current generation. Her android character narrowly escaping destruction for refusing to conform, while in search of a freedom to exist, draws parallels to the current social climate for people of color. But beyond this space-age story, Monáe has used her style to open up discussion about public perception and its connection to black gender norms. Often dressed in menswear-inspired, tailored suiting, Monáe presents a look that has challenged mainstream media's definition of what it is to be pretty and feminine.

This has opened up the space for other black artists, like Jaden Smith, to create a new mainstream when it comes to gender-bending fashion. While many other cultures embrace a unisex style standard, Smith has received backlash for blurring the lines of cisgender norms by wearing skirts and dresses. Choosing the connection between your identity and your expression of selfhood is a freedom yet to be obtained by many people of color, many times because of rigid intercultural perceptions.

Many scenes from the visual album for Beyoncé's Lemonade have been labeled as representations of an Afrocentric future. We see a world that is populated only by black women wearing their natural hair, communing in trees and wide-open fields, and working as a collective to gather food.

While these visuals may not be rooted in space travel or overtly fantastical scenery, like other examples of Afrofuturism, the idea of Afrocentric feminism dominating culture is an actuality yet to be realized. Existing in a society where black standards of beauty are not only celebrated but also revered speaks to the lack of representation in our current reality as a double minority and can feel just as fictional as time travel or alter egos. This matriarchal civilization, free from expectations or conflict, presents an opportunity for black women to see themselves in positions of prestige and power in our version of the future.

In many ways, living in peace and harmony is so far from the present reality for us that the thought and representation of this is Afrofuturistic. The idea of black people communing with nature and embodying our own, natural standards of beauty moves from just a nice thought into Afrofuturistic territory.

Fashion took cues from this concept of reimagining a reality for people of color and evolved into a space where there are no boundaries for black fashion; our Afros are one with the galaxies, our children are carefree and unique, our men and women are creating individual identities and seeing themselves represented in all aspects of society. Many current depictions of Afrofuturism show black models wearing historically African prints and silhouettes. We have been taken so far from an Afrocentric culture that emulating the attire of our shared heritage is our version of a utopian future.

Afrofuturistic fashion tells the narrative of our collective hopes for the future, where our representation is widespread and we have the ability to define ourselves. The current trend of Afrofuturism in fashion shows that our wildest dreams of a black future are to regain a connection to our ancestors-to exist in a world with peace and cooperation. It is about creating a new identity rather than the one that has been given to (or taken away from) us by society.
Shayna Watson is a freelance style and beauty writer who can be heard saying "Natural hair is a lifestyle" at least once a day. A Pittsburgh native, she currently lives in a shoe-box apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y.-which is fitting, since she really loves shoes. You can check out her personal style musings on A Nu Creature and follow her on Instagram.

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How Afrofuturism Progressed From Sci-fi Literature to Fashion

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Afrofuturism can be credited to literary greats like Octavia Butler and visual artists like Basquiat. These artists used their mediums to explore a revolutionary world where black characters controlled their own destinies. Musicians from the late 20th century like Sun Ra, George Clinton and Afrika Bambaataa melded the themes of space, alter egos and black culture into a musical and fashion style that was pioneering for the time.

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Jack Boccanfuso          FINALLY! A SOLID DEFINITION OF AFROFUTURISM AND HOW IT RELATES TO ‘BLACK PANTHER’

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Jack Boccanfuso          FINALLY! A SOLID DEFINITION OF AFROFUTURISM AND HOW IT RELATES TO ‘BLACK PANTHER’

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http://www.blackenterprise.com/black-panther-afrofuturism/

The reader learns that the popular movie "Black Panther" relates to afrofuturism and how powerful it is. Having a black supero movie reach so high in earnings is a huge deal. "Black Panther" gives african americans an idol and something that other kids didn't have. Hopefully this inspires people to make more afrofuturistic films in the future.

The interesting thing about the way Afrofuturism is depicted in Black Panther is that the Marvel universe takes place in modern time—it’s contemporary. It’s assuming that there is an African country was never colonized and that they—through existing without that colonial interference—were able to become more technically advanced than any other society on the planet.” -Tim Fielder

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Afrofuturism: The genre that made black panther

In this article, the reader learns how afrofuturism worked its way into science fiction. The author brings up Black Panther to show how the series has evolved to shake off negative stereotypes about black people. The author also goes on to say how black people are influencing science fiction more.
"This was in an era where African-Americans looked very much like second class citizens. Afrofuturism was a tool that they could use to imagine a better future, and the movement continued into the contemporary era," said Adeola. This quote shows how black people are trying to change being viewed as people in farms and poor. Instead they want to show how they have evolved as a culture and society. They want to show everyone that they are moving with the world's advancement and not stuck in the past culture.

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afrofuturism: the genre that made black panther  - cnn

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Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther

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Marvel's Black Panther imagines a futuristic African world -- but the ideas behind it were around long before. Learn about the history of Afrofuturism.

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This article informs the reader about what military science fiction is and includes many authors that have wrote military science fiction books. He also talks about how different writers use different ways to write about MSF. For example, some authors only write about soldiers and their role in the military. While others write about the organization of militaries. MSF is science fiction that focuses on the military and its weaponry.

"The stories military science fiction tends to tell are generally not about warfare: they're about the people caught up in the flow of wartime events, and the impact of warfare on society."

https://io9.gizmodo.com/5638146/what-is-military-science-fiction

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Black Panther and Afrofuturism

This article readers will teach readers how the black panther movie relate to race, how it become th movie of the year and what is afrofuturism. Readers will also learn how afrofuturism relate to the african culture a lot and they will also read about when the Black Panther Comic was created.
"Marvel is the biggest studio on the planet right now,". And for good reason, they get it right most of the time. But I like how their films work with race, even with Guardians of the Galaxyand now especially Black Panther, we are seeing something more than tokenism."

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First, the good news: The Whistler Village 8 has no plans of closing its doors any time soon.

After I Chicken-Little'd a worst-case scenario last week, management reached out to say the theatre is only cancelling some late shows on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday because you, dear readers, are not showing up for them. Four to eight people a night spread over eight cinemas is not really worth it. (So start going to the movies more! Also, if you see someone vandalizing the Village 8 bathrooms, please kick their teeth in and/or get a photo and bring it to management. Let's help protect our asset, Whistler.)

The other good news is that the most anticipated flick of 2018, Marvel's Black Panther, opens this week. Picking up shortly after where Captain America: Civil War left off, this one sees T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman) return home to Wakanda, his African homeland that has existed in secrecy for generations and become the most technologically advanced nation on Earth thanks to an indestructible alien metal called Vibranium.

T'Challa is home to become king in the wake of his father's death, but there are a couple villains with other plans (Andy Serkis is good, but Michael B. Jordan's ruthless Erik Killmonger is the most nuanced and best Marvel villain yet). Should T'Challa risk revealing Wakanda and sharing its technology to help save a world that has a pretty shitty history of co-existing with resource-rich African nations? Or does he keep the doors closed to protect everything he loves?That heavy dilemma is just the icing on the Black Panther cake however. Director-co-writer Ryan Coogler has also crafted a rich story, populated it with strong characters (including four integral female roles) and hired the best cast of any genre movie in recent memory. Part espionage thriller, part crash-bang Marvel showpiece and 100- per-cent must-see, Black Panther is also the most digestible way to get into the fascinating sub-genre of Afrofuturism.

"Afrofuturism is a way of reimagining the past to infiltrate new futures into the present," explains Dr. tobias c. van Veen, paraphrasing filmmaker and Afrofuturist scholar Kodwo Eshun. "That's called chronopolitics and Black Panther is definitely imagining an alternative timeline to the colonialism of a Western white future."

Dr. van Veen is a Whistler local who recently taught courses in Critical Race Theory and Film as a visiting tutor at Quest University. He explains that "Afrofuturism" is a term created in the 1990s to link together futuristic Black art, film and music (the extraterrestrial mythology and "Mothership Connection" of Parliament/Funkadelic is probably the best-known example.)

"The No. 1 Afrofuturist film is 1974's Space is the Place," van Veen explains. "Jazz musician Sun Ra plays himself as the return of an ancient black alien pharaoh from Saturn. He arrives on Earth to square off with his nemesis 'The Overseer,' who is an archetypal devil and Uncle Tom. They battle over the fate of the 'black race,' a few members of which Sun Ra abducts to Saturn to start a new world. It's all filmed documentary style in Oakland."

While he hasn't seen Black Panther yet, van Veen notes that director Coogler's decision to bring black matriarchy to the forefront of his story is significant. "Besides Grace Jones and Janelle Monáe, the history of Afrofuturist performers and artists is predominantly male, so this is fantastic. It speaks to the powerful role of black women in the Afrodiaspora."

The Black Panther comic character was invented in the late 1960s (by white-dudes Stan Lee and Steve Ditko). While many black audiences took to the character immediately, it seems the rest of the world is now ready for the noble king of a black utopia. Black Panther has sold more pre-sale tix than any Marvel film and is the critical praise is already rolling in. Black Panther has become the film event of the year on a North American continent still entrenched in conflict, prejudices and pain from 300 years of colonialism. Unlike its titular hero, Black Panther the movie might not be able to save the world with a well-timed backflip and a swipe of its claws. But it's a huge step in the right direction.

"Marvel is the biggest studio on the planet right now," van Veen says. "And for good reason, they get it right most of the time. But I like how their films work with race, even with Guardians of the Galaxy and now especially Black Panther, we are seeing something more than tokenism. Is that non-white character a token? Or are they driving the story and speaking to a culture that is not predominant? That is the question here."
van Veen and his creative partner ZiggZaggerZ the Bastard (aka Shannon Theus) recently won a Cinema Politica grant to film an Afrofuturist short right here in the Sea to Sky. They will also be showcasing black cosplay, talking about Afrofuturist radical becoming, and performing live Afrofuturist poetry and alien ambient music as keynote speakers and artists on the Identities panel at the Our Futures conference, Quest University, Saturday the Feb. 24. Find more info at http://ourfutures.co.

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First, the good news: The Whistler Village 8 has no plans of closing its doors any time soon. After I Chicken-Little'd a worst-case scenario last week, management reached out to say the theatre is only cancelling some late shows on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday because you, dear readers, are not showing up for them.

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Jessica Everman- "Afrofuturism Is More Than Just "Black Sci Fi," It's a Nuanced Black Future"

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Jessica Everman- "Afrofuturism Is More Than Just "Black Sci Fi," It's a Nuanced Black Future"

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This articles informs readers that Afrofuturism is not just about African-Americans with cool costumes powers. Instead it is a way of imagining what the future could hold for African-Americans, a future where there is complete equality and where African-Americans have the power they deserve.

"This all-encompassing term describes an artform, practice, and methodology that allows black people to see themselves in future despite a distressing past and present."
https://www.inverse.com/article/42024-afrofuturism-is-not-just-black-sci-fi

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" The afrofuturism behind Black Panther"

" Mr. Dery coined the term Afrofuturism to describe the work of artists who used the tools of science fiction to imagine possible futures." said Mark Dery.
This article is trying to inform us about how back then when African-Americans were bought into slavery they could not share their ideas about the future. The only way was to present their future ideas through art, literature, or stories. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/24/opinion/afrofuturism-behind-black-panther.html

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Afrofuturism: The Next Generation

In this article it shows you a few examples of wonderful women who show us the importance of being black and also how important they are to our society. For example, there is Rihanna and Beyonce. This Article will also tell you about the history of Afrofuturism and how it came to be and what was happening back then.
"Afrofuturism epic imagery offers youth a mirror." -Mr. Fielder

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/12/fashion/afrofuturism-the-next-generation.html

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The Year in Style 2016

Solange Knowles on "Saturday Night Live" in November, flaunting a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids. Credit... Dana Edelson/NBC, via Getty Images

In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil.

A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe. Flanked on the stage by twin columns of attendants, she was a galactic goddess in a white ermine cape.

In November, on "Saturday Night Live," her sister, Solange Knowles, flaunted a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids, looking every inch a regal visitor from distant planet.

Each was in her way a beacon of Afrofuturism, a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts.

[See more Year in Style articles]
Familiar to some, exotic to others, the term refers loosely to an unlikely fusion of parts: Egyptian and other non-Western mythologies, mysticism and magical realism with Afrocentricity, modern technology and science fiction. A freighted concept in more ways than one, it gained traction this year, muscling its way into the pop cultural mainstream via the intertwined worlds of entertainment, art and style.

Image

Rihanna, as an otherworldly warrior queen, in the September issue of W magazine. Credit... Steven Klein; styled by Edward Enninful

In part, Afrofuturism, an aesthetic dating roughly from the 1970s, has taken on a new public face through a new generation of recording artists - Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Janelle Monáe among them - who have given it not only a voice, but also a look. You will likely know it when you see it: a high-shine mash-up of cyborg themes, loosely tribal motifs, android imagery and gleaming metallics that might be appropriate for a voyage to Pluto's outer reaches.

Its latest incarnation seems timely, if not downright inevitable. "With the diversity of the nation and world increasingly standing in stark contrast to the diversity in futuristic works, it's no surprise that Afrofuturism emerged," writes Ytasha L. Womack, who chronicled and popularized the evolution of the genre in her 2013 book, " Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture."

"But when, even in the imaginary future," she goes on, "people can't fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down."

The internet has lent the movement a force unknown in previous incarnations. A visual metaphor for empowerment on sites like the Afrofuturist Affair and influential Instagram accounts like Inkrayable_girafe, it permits black men and women to take charge of their image. Today, Ms. Womack writes, "a fledgling filmmaker can shoot his sci-fi web series on a $500 DV cam, post it on YouTube, and promote it on Instagram and Twitter."

Lina Iris Viktor, a British-Liberian artist in New York who paints queenly self-portraits with a futuristic edge, picked up the thread. "The internet democratized the playing field," she said. "Now the voices you hear are authentically ours. Instead of everybody else telling you stories, explaining to you what our work is about, we are telling you what it's about."

An Afrofuturist narrative is embedded as well in a recent flurry of museum shows. On view through November at El Museo del Barrio were the fashion illustrations of Antonio Lopez, a pioneer in the genre whose works of the '70s and '80s featured a multiracial cast of robotlike figures and astronauts propelled into a far-off Tomorrowland. It is a brave new world, as a review in The New York Times noted in June, "in which race and gender were fluid, and existing social inequities corrected or transcended."

Afrofuturism is a current in the multimedia installations of the artist Saya Woolfalk, whose utopian universes and Empathics, a future race fusing - and all but erasing - racial and ethnic boundaries, were featured this year in shows at the Brooklyn Museum, a light show in Times Square and, just this month, an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Afrofuturist allusions crop up less overtly in the sprawling canvases of Kerry James Marshall, whose exhibition at the Met Breuer, through Jan. 29, includes idealized portraits of African-American Boy and Girl Scouts wreathed in halos of the kind often seen on comic-book heroes.

This summer, the movement flexed its muscle at the megaplex, where "Captain America: Civil War" featured the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), a superhero who in 2018 will star in "Black Panther" as the king and protector of the imaginary nation of Wakanda.

Afrofuturism's resurgence could not be more timely, arriving as it does in a climate perceived as indifferent, if not downright inimical, to racial and ethnic minorities. In her book, Ms. Womack recalls a time when black or brown sci-fi characters were all but invisible in the culture at large. As a girl, she would fantasize that she was Princess Leia of "Star Wars."

"While it was fun to be the chick from outer space in my imagination," Ms. Womack writes, "the quest to see myself or browner people in this space age, galactic epic was important to me." It was in the absence of minorities from pop lore, she goes on, "that seeds were planted in the imaginations of countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceship too."

Count among them Tim Fielder, a New York graphic artist and animator whose sci-fi illustrations, produced over a 30-year span, drew visitors last spring to " Black Metropolis," at the Gallatin Galleries at New York University. Mr. Fielder's pioneering cartoon narratives - notably those of " Matty's Rocket," his spirited black female cosmonaut, who will lift off next year in graphic novel form - are particularly relevant now, he maintained: "They let young artists know that they're not on dangerous turf, that someone has gone there before them."

Afrofuturism's epic imagery offers youth a mirror, Mr. Fielder said. "These kids are able now to see themselves in environments that are expansive, both technologically and in terms of social mores and gender," he said.

They also see themselves newly reflected in the comic books that remain a potent form of Afrofuturist expression. Last spring, the Black Panther, lately of "Captain America," was resurrected by Marvel as the noble protagonist of his own comic book series, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of "Between the World and Me." And this year, Riri Williams, an Afro-coiffured teenage superheroine with an M.I.T. degree, will slip into the fabled power suit in the "Iron Man" comic series.

Such vanguard characters can trace their genesis to early champions of Afrofuturism, paramount among them Sun Ra, the jazz composer, poet and philosopher who incorporated sci-fi themes into his music and his seminal film, "Space Is the Place," a mid-1970s tale of interplanetary time travel.

Afrofuturism owes as important a debt to the writer Octavia Butler, whose 1979 best-seller, "Kindred," posits an alternate reality in which an African-American heroine is transported from mid-70s Los Angeles to early 19th-century Maryland. It owes a debt as well to the music of George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, with their prophetic lyrics in "Mothership Connection":

Time to move on

Light years in time

Ahead of our time.

Afrofuturist themes were revisited in the '90s, but still as a genre without a name until the cultural critic Mark Dery formally christened it in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future," after which it flourished for a time before retreating to the shadows.

Now the movement has returned in force, beamed down to the concert stage. Last month, the '70s disco diva Grace Jones, Afrofuturism's flat-topped mascot, toured in the British Isles, her stage persona, covered head-to-toe in tribal paint and feathers, a reprise of her hula-hoop-twirling performance at the Afropunk Fest in Brooklyn last year.

On a broadcast of "The Tonight Show" in February, the singer FKA Twigs seemed to alight from the clouds swathed in a incandescent white. Her costume, a-shimmer in crystals, was created with Grace Wales Bonner, a London designer whose work in the past has been rife with Afrofuturist allusions.

In her "Lemonade" album, released in April, Beyoncé reigns in an all-female utopia, leading a phalanx of women in ethereal white dresses that simultaneously conjure ancient and space-age societies.

The style world, too, has now embraced the movement, if only, perhaps, to reinforce its stature as an arbiter of cool. For the W September cover and 18-page editorial feature shot by Steven Klein, Rihanna's over-the-top costumes were cobbled from scratch.

"She's a one-off, a queen," said Edward Enninful, the magazine's fashion and style director. "A queen does not wear clothes off the runways." Instead she wears an otherworldly pastiche of vanguard creations by Gareth Pugh, Prada, Proenza Schouler and others, clothes conceived, Mr. Enninful said, to emphasize Rihanna's majestic persona.

"It's a look that many young black females out there haven't seen before," he said.

Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy was among the first to integrate Afrofuturist imagery into his runway shows. Two years earlier, he signed Ms. Badu as the fierce-looking face of the brand. Mr. Tisci followed up repeatedly, most recently with a fall 2016 line replete with cosmological symbols, including that familiar Afrofuturist talisman, the Egyptian Eye of Horus.

Calvin Klein released a fall advertising campaign starring the rapper Young Thug, dressed in flares and a fitted pinstripe chasuble, its neckline embellished with an astral-looking orb. A recent campaign from Chanel featured Willow Smith festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

The singer Willow Smith in a Chanel campaign, festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

Others are advancing this high-concept aesthetic in more subtle ways, thrusting aside clichés as they go. "Afrofuturism has to become something more than just an idea of black people in shiny metallic clothing," said Michelle Busayo Olupona, the Nigerian-American designer behind Busayo NYC, a label incorporating Afrofuturist themes in a stripped-down, abstract way. "In my own work, I try to create an aesthetic and style evocative of the past but very much grounded in the now."

Ms. Olupona said her abstract, Afrocentric designs, some incorporating fantasy fauna and futurist imagery, "suggest ways in which we can differentiate ourselves."

"What they say about the future," she continued, "is that we're always going to be here."

Another showcase for contemporary, less literal interpretations of Afrofuturism is 9J, a boutique and gallery recently sprung up on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx. It aims to usher in the movement's next wave, with items like a ribbed trunk-neck sweater worthy of "Star Wars," created by a local designer Jesenia Lopez; gravity-defying Birkenstock platforms covered in feathers and Swarovski "gems"; and an outsize headdress of spiraling silver wire. These pieces mingle technology, fantasy and Afrocentric themes with a streamlined progressive-looking opulence.

The shop's owner, Jerome LaMaar, whose line, 5:31 Jérôme, has drawn high-visibility clients like Beyoncé and the model Hailey Baldwin, wore fur-rimmed virtual-reality goggles the other week while presiding at the opening of Africollision, an installation at 9J that eschewed the space-is-the-place hallmarks of old school Afrofuturism.

"We want to play with the idea of what is tribe, what is Africa, what is the future, and mix it all up without being predictable." Mr. LaMaar insisted. "Who wants to see what's already been done?"

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The Year in Style 2016 In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil. A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe.

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Katie-  Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther

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Katie-  Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther

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"Black Panther, set in the near-futuristic fictional African nation of Wakanda, is a captivating Afro-vision." This quote from the article I chose encompasses the main idea of the article because it talks about how showing the afrofuturism is important as it helps kids see themselves as important in the future. "It's people of African descent looking at themselves in the future and what their society and their culture will look like ten years from now, twenty years from now, a thousand years from now,". It also shows how many children may not want to be seen in loin cloths, as many early comics showed, while there are many wealthy places such as Wakanda, the setting of black panther.

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afrofuturism: the genre that made black panther  - cnn

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Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther

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Marvel's Black Panther imagines a futuristic African world -- but the ideas behind it were around long before. Learn about the history of Afrofuturism.

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This article talks about black panther, the history of him, and how this superhero ties in with afrofuturism. This movie had many reasons it was created, one of them is to try to abolish the African tribal lion clothes stereotype. This film is known for its afrofuturism because of the characters and location. It takes place in a hidden highly advance African nation. The movie also tried to reflect African culture and aesthetics from Africa.

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afrofuturism: the genre that made black panther  - cnn

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Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther

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Marvel's Black Panther imagines a futuristic African world -- but the ideas behind it were around long before. Learn about the history of Afrofuturism.

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Aditi Moturi - "What the heck is Afrofuturism"

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Aditi Moturi - "What the heck is Afrofuturism"

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 Riley Burns: Afrofuturism: The Next Generation

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 Riley Burns: Afrofuturism: The Next Generation

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The article explains how Beyonce used afrofuturism to help with her performances. Many people believe that afrofuturism has create a new generation for music artists in fashion. Beyonce has worn multiple futuristic outfits that promote the idea of afrofuturism in fashion and music. For example, Beyonce wore a outfit at the MTV awards with a very futuristic vibe. Over all, the article tells about how afrofuturism
is making its way into fashion and music.
Quote: Afrofuturism, a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts.

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The Year in Style 2016

Solange Knowles on "Saturday Night Live" in November, flaunting a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids. Credit... Dana Edelson/NBC, via Getty Images

In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil.

A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe. Flanked on the stage by twin columns of attendants, she was a galactic goddess in a white ermine cape.

In November, on "Saturday Night Live," her sister, Solange Knowles, flaunted a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids, looking every inch a regal visitor from distant planet.

Each was in her way a beacon of Afrofuturism, a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts.

[See more Year in Style articles]
Familiar to some, exotic to others, the term refers loosely to an unlikely fusion of parts: Egyptian and other non-Western mythologies, mysticism and magical realism with Afrocentricity, modern technology and science fiction. A freighted concept in more ways than one, it gained traction this year, muscling its way into the pop cultural mainstream via the intertwined worlds of entertainment, art and style.

Image

Rihanna, as an otherworldly warrior queen, in the September issue of W magazine. Credit... Steven Klein; styled by Edward Enninful

In part, Afrofuturism, an aesthetic dating roughly from the 1970s, has taken on a new public face through a new generation of recording artists - Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Janelle Monáe among them - who have given it not only a voice, but also a look. You will likely know it when you see it: a high-shine mash-up of cyborg themes, loosely tribal motifs, android imagery and gleaming metallics that might be appropriate for a voyage to Pluto's outer reaches.

Its latest incarnation seems timely, if not downright inevitable. "With the diversity of the nation and world increasingly standing in stark contrast to the diversity in futuristic works, it's no surprise that Afrofuturism emerged," writes Ytasha L. Womack, who chronicled and popularized the evolution of the genre in her 2013 book, " Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture."

"But when, even in the imaginary future," she goes on, "people can't fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down."

The internet has lent the movement a force unknown in previous incarnations. A visual metaphor for empowerment on sites like the Afrofuturist Affair and influential Instagram accounts like Inkrayable_girafe, it permits black men and women to take charge of their image. Today, Ms. Womack writes, "a fledgling filmmaker can shoot his sci-fi web series on a $500 DV cam, post it on YouTube, and promote it on Instagram and Twitter."

Lina Iris Viktor, a British-Liberian artist in New York who paints queenly self-portraits with a futuristic edge, picked up the thread. "The internet democratized the playing field," she said. "Now the voices you hear are authentically ours. Instead of everybody else telling you stories, explaining to you what our work is about, we are telling you what it's about."

An Afrofuturist narrative is embedded as well in a recent flurry of museum shows. On view through November at El Museo del Barrio were the fashion illustrations of Antonio Lopez, a pioneer in the genre whose works of the '70s and '80s featured a multiracial cast of robotlike figures and astronauts propelled into a far-off Tomorrowland. It is a brave new world, as a review in The New York Times noted in June, "in which race and gender were fluid, and existing social inequities corrected or transcended."

Afrofuturism is a current in the multimedia installations of the artist Saya Woolfalk, whose utopian universes and Empathics, a future race fusing - and all but erasing - racial and ethnic boundaries, were featured this year in shows at the Brooklyn Museum, a light show in Times Square and, just this month, an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Afrofuturist allusions crop up less overtly in the sprawling canvases of Kerry James Marshall, whose exhibition at the Met Breuer, through Jan. 29, includes idealized portraits of African-American Boy and Girl Scouts wreathed in halos of the kind often seen on comic-book heroes.

This summer, the movement flexed its muscle at the megaplex, where "Captain America: Civil War" featured the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), a superhero who in 2018 will star in "Black Panther" as the king and protector of the imaginary nation of Wakanda.

Afrofuturism's resurgence could not be more timely, arriving as it does in a climate perceived as indifferent, if not downright inimical, to racial and ethnic minorities. In her book, Ms. Womack recalls a time when black or brown sci-fi characters were all but invisible in the culture at large. As a girl, she would fantasize that she was Princess Leia of "Star Wars."

"While it was fun to be the chick from outer space in my imagination," Ms. Womack writes, "the quest to see myself or browner people in this space age, galactic epic was important to me." It was in the absence of minorities from pop lore, she goes on, "that seeds were planted in the imaginations of countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceship too."

Count among them Tim Fielder, a New York graphic artist and animator whose sci-fi illustrations, produced over a 30-year span, drew visitors last spring to " Black Metropolis," at the Gallatin Galleries at New York University. Mr. Fielder's pioneering cartoon narratives - notably those of " Matty's Rocket," his spirited black female cosmonaut, who will lift off next year in graphic novel form - are particularly relevant now, he maintained: "They let young artists know that they're not on dangerous turf, that someone has gone there before them."

Afrofuturism's epic imagery offers youth a mirror, Mr. Fielder said. "These kids are able now to see themselves in environments that are expansive, both technologically and in terms of social mores and gender," he said.

They also see themselves newly reflected in the comic books that remain a potent form of Afrofuturist expression. Last spring, the Black Panther, lately of "Captain America," was resurrected by Marvel as the noble protagonist of his own comic book series, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of "Between the World and Me." And this year, Riri Williams, an Afro-coiffured teenage superheroine with an M.I.T. degree, will slip into the fabled power suit in the "Iron Man" comic series.

Such vanguard characters can trace their genesis to early champions of Afrofuturism, paramount among them Sun Ra, the jazz composer, poet and philosopher who incorporated sci-fi themes into his music and his seminal film, "Space Is the Place," a mid-1970s tale of interplanetary time travel.

Afrofuturism owes as important a debt to the writer Octavia Butler, whose 1979 best-seller, "Kindred," posits an alternate reality in which an African-American heroine is transported from mid-70s Los Angeles to early 19th-century Maryland. It owes a debt as well to the music of George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, with their prophetic lyrics in "Mothership Connection":

Time to move on

Light years in time

Ahead of our time.

Afrofuturist themes were revisited in the '90s, but still as a genre without a name until the cultural critic Mark Dery formally christened it in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future," after which it flourished for a time before retreating to the shadows.

Now the movement has returned in force, beamed down to the concert stage. Last month, the '70s disco diva Grace Jones, Afrofuturism's flat-topped mascot, toured in the British Isles, her stage persona, covered head-to-toe in tribal paint and feathers, a reprise of her hula-hoop-twirling performance at the Afropunk Fest in Brooklyn last year.

On a broadcast of "The Tonight Show" in February, the singer FKA Twigs seemed to alight from the clouds swathed in a incandescent white. Her costume, a-shimmer in crystals, was created with Grace Wales Bonner, a London designer whose work in the past has been rife with Afrofuturist allusions.

In her "Lemonade" album, released in April, Beyoncé reigns in an all-female utopia, leading a phalanx of women in ethereal white dresses that simultaneously conjure ancient and space-age societies.

The style world, too, has now embraced the movement, if only, perhaps, to reinforce its stature as an arbiter of cool. For the W September cover and 18-page editorial feature shot by Steven Klein, Rihanna's over-the-top costumes were cobbled from scratch.

"She's a one-off, a queen," said Edward Enninful, the magazine's fashion and style director. "A queen does not wear clothes off the runways." Instead she wears an otherworldly pastiche of vanguard creations by Gareth Pugh, Prada, Proenza Schouler and others, clothes conceived, Mr. Enninful said, to emphasize Rihanna's majestic persona.

"It's a look that many young black females out there haven't seen before," he said.

Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy was among the first to integrate Afrofuturist imagery into his runway shows. Two years earlier, he signed Ms. Badu as the fierce-looking face of the brand. Mr. Tisci followed up repeatedly, most recently with a fall 2016 line replete with cosmological symbols, including that familiar Afrofuturist talisman, the Egyptian Eye of Horus.

Calvin Klein released a fall advertising campaign starring the rapper Young Thug, dressed in flares and a fitted pinstripe chasuble, its neckline embellished with an astral-looking orb. A recent campaign from Chanel featured Willow Smith festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

The singer Willow Smith in a Chanel campaign, festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

Others are advancing this high-concept aesthetic in more subtle ways, thrusting aside clichés as they go. "Afrofuturism has to become something more than just an idea of black people in shiny metallic clothing," said Michelle Busayo Olupona, the Nigerian-American designer behind Busayo NYC, a label incorporating Afrofuturist themes in a stripped-down, abstract way. "In my own work, I try to create an aesthetic and style evocative of the past but very much grounded in the now."

Ms. Olupona said her abstract, Afrocentric designs, some incorporating fantasy fauna and futurist imagery, "suggest ways in which we can differentiate ourselves."

"What they say about the future," she continued, "is that we're always going to be here."

Another showcase for contemporary, less literal interpretations of Afrofuturism is 9J, a boutique and gallery recently sprung up on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx. It aims to usher in the movement's next wave, with items like a ribbed trunk-neck sweater worthy of "Star Wars," created by a local designer Jesenia Lopez; gravity-defying Birkenstock platforms covered in feathers and Swarovski "gems"; and an outsize headdress of spiraling silver wire. These pieces mingle technology, fantasy and Afrocentric themes with a streamlined progressive-looking opulence.

The shop's owner, Jerome LaMaar, whose line, 5:31 Jérôme, has drawn high-visibility clients like Beyoncé and the model Hailey Baldwin, wore fur-rimmed virtual-reality goggles the other week while presiding at the opening of Africollision, an installation at 9J that eschewed the space-is-the-place hallmarks of old school Afrofuturism.

"We want to play with the idea of what is tribe, what is Africa, what is the future, and mix it all up without being predictable." Mr. LaMaar insisted. "Who wants to see what's already been done?"

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The Year in Style 2016 In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil. A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe.

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Sai K.     Utopian and Dystopian Visions of Afrofuturism

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Sai K.     Utopian and Dystopian Visions of Afrofuturism

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Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images, Sean Carter Photography via U Mich/ Flickr CC.

This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and . Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. On Thursday, Dec. 3, Future Tense will host "Afrofuturism: Imagining the Future of Black Identity" in New York. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website.
Afrofuturism pioneers such as jazz musician Sun Ra-who walked around the streets of Chicago with custom-made electric space suits in the 1950s-and science fiction author Octavia Butler wouldn't have used the label Afrofuturism during their lifetimes, because it hadn't been invented yet. It wasn't in common parlance even a decade ago. As World Fantasy Award winner Nnedi Okorafor put it: "My first novel was published in 2005 when I'd never heard the word. Now it's being retroactively labeled. Why?"

In the early '90s, academic Mark Dery coined the term Afrofuturism to encompass a wide variety of creative explorations across numerous fields-music, art, film, and literature-over nearly a half-century in black culture. Afrofuturism is loosely marked by a passion for technology and innovation, as well as mysticism rooted in African-American and African culture. Narratives often feature black protagonists, and the aesthetic can draw upon design elements sourced from the rich traditions of the diaspora. Authors may reach back into the tribal histories of the Igbo, while mingling myths with spaceships or alien invasions.

Afrofuturism-the idea, if not the word-appears to be bubbling up into the mainstream. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, is writing an update of the Marvel comic book Black Panther, which was originally created by Stan Lee. Jaden Smith starred alongside his father Will Smith in 2013's After Earth. Neil de Grasse Tyson is the most popular astrophysicist on the planet today. While I write this, I'm drinking an IPA with a black superhero on the label and the fourth Lagos Comicon just wrapped in Nigeria.

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But it's unclear whether Afrofuturism is taking permanent hold or whether science fiction is merely featuring a few additional cast members of color. If, like me, you grew up believing that characters like Lando Calrissian and Princess Leia would soon become commonplace in popular entertainment, you've learned that empowerment across racial, gender, and ethnic lines isn't guaranteed. (For instance, Will Smith was already a bankable star when he made After Earth-which wasn't exactly a roaring success.)There is a bright utopian vision of Afrofuturism, and a much bleaker dystopian possibility of exclusion from mainstream culture once again.

Ytasha Womack, author of the seminal work Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture,is upbeat about the movement. "As people create more works and more spaces to share their work, growth will continue," she said. "Ultimately, creating more intersections of thought and works will create a web of healing and inspiration that anyone can connect to and grow from."

Making the utopian vision come to fruition will require a few things. Lisa Lucas, publisher of the art and politics magazine , and a woman of color, says, "There is this ever-growing, snowballing movement of people who are interested in alternate storytelling forms for writers of color and for readers of color." But she says the movement requires growth outside the creative spotlight, among what she calls "administrators of color." These are the expediters who drive the business decisions surrounding entertainment-the producers, editors, and owners. Administrators of color would look to cultivate new audiences instead of relying on sales metrics that tend to exclude marginalized voices. The notion could be extended to the boardrooms of major publishing houses and studios, neglected spaces for advancing progressive causes.

Afrofuturism will also thrive when writers immerse themselves in technology in their studies or in their work. Speculative fiction can succeed through narrative discipline and intellectual curiosity alone, while sci-fi subgenres like space opera tend to be written by engineers. It helps to know some physics when you're writing about a spaceship that is five kilometers long. Only about 1 percent of engineers at Facebook and Google are black Americans. And this has been my experience working in tech, too-meeting a black employee is like happening upon a crocus peeking through the snowmelt.

A truly transformative Afrofuturism would find creators confronting prejudices within black culture. They would question laws that force LGBTQ writers to flee from Africa, or fight gender discrimination couched under arguments of tradition. It could become a liberation movement of the imagination for all people.

This utopian vision of Afrofuturism is enticing, but it hasn't arrived yet. Right now there are a number of very real challenges for Afrofuturism to overcome in order to take hold in mainstream culture.

In the dystopian vision, no one on the business end of creative industries-the agents, marketers, publishers, producers-takes risks on creators of color. Artists might be forced to revert to addressing explicitly black themes. "We have to write a slave narrative," Lisa Lucas said, "or a story about civil rights, a retelling of Rosa Parks, some kind of better understanding of what it was like in 1960 or 1830, or what it was like on a slave boat."

It's a mistake, too, to think that crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Patreon can solve the problem of structural exclusion. The impressive speculative fiction collection Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction From the Margins of History was created from a Kickstarter campaign. The volunteer-run Tumblr blog We Are Wakanda, which is named for the fictional African kingdom in Marvel's Black Panther series, publishes an incredible volume of content about black comics and science. Founder Lionel Queen recently launched an Indiegogo campaign to develop a new app to support underrepresented creators. It's a great idea, well worth supporting, but an Afrofuturism that relies upon crowdfunding to survive is dystopian. It means there's no sustainable investment.

Afrofuturism also needs to overcome its geographic myopia. Nnedi Okarafor, one of the most prominent science fiction writers working today, said: "My issue with Afrofuturism is that it has traditionally been based and rooted far too much in American culture." She champions what she calls "Africa-based sci-fi." Authors such as Fred Strydom, Lauren Beukes, and Sarah Lotz are writing engaging fiction set on the continent. But it's dangerous to oversimplify this trend. To my knowledge, not a single black sci-fi writer has been published by a major publishing house in Africa, and most writers working in Africa-based sci-fi hail from South Africa or Nigeria-not coincidentally, the largest economies on the continent.

There are other threats to Afrofuturism, too. Safe online spaces could become mired in hate and vitriol. The recent controversy surrounding the Hugo Awards-one of the most prestigious awards for science fiction writing-shows that the "administrators of color" whom Lisa Lucas supports tend to be missing from sci-fi culture. In that distasteful example, white authors attempted to game the voting system to fight against the rise in sci-fi of nontraditional and marginalized voices, such as LGBTQ authors. (They did not succeed.)

In some ways, the new film Star Wars: The Force Awakens exemplifies both the utopian and dystopian visions of Afrofuturism. The film stars the black British actor John Boyega as Finn, reportedly a major character in the storyline. Boyega can inspire the next generation of black sci-fi actors, but none of the credited writers will become a role model for the next generation of black writers-they're all white.

Whether you call it Afrofuturism or another name, creators of color have developed support networks to imagine their own futures, ones in which they have agency, intellect, and purpose. Something special is happening.

"Afrofuturism existed before it was called Afrofuturism," Ytasha Womack says, "and it will always exist. It's a human desire to want to shape your present and future. It's a human desire to embrace the imagination."

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Utopian and Dystopian Visions of Afrofuturism

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This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University , New America , and . Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. On Thursday, Dec. 3, Future Tense will host "Afrofuturism: Imagining the Future of Black Identity" in New York.

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The article explains what Afrofuturism is and how it began or started out. Jamie Broadnax, the author, uses Black Panther as its main example explaining how it is an example of Afrofuturism. The author uses one of the first examples of Afrofuturism which was an essay written by Mark Dery called "Black to the future" and another of an artist named Sun Ra who was a part of Afrofuturism's uprise. The author shows her clear love for the movie Black Panther and supports it hoping to bring more awareness to Afrofuturism.

One sentence I thought was interesting was when she stated, "Afrofuturism is the reimagining of a future filled with arts, science and technology seen through a black lens." I liked his/her wording of "seen through a black lens" since it is from black people's point of view.

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm. We're hearing the word "Afrofuturism" a lot.

But what exactly is Afrofuturism?

Afrofuturism is the reimagining of a future filled with arts, science and technology seen through a black lens. The term was conceived a quarter-century ago by white author Mark Dery in his essay " Black to the Future," which looks at speculative fiction within the African diaspora. The essay rests on a series of interviews with black content creators.

Dery laid out the questions driving the philosophy of Afrofuturism:

Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn't the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers ― white to a man ― who have engineered our collective fantasies?

What makes Afrofuturism significantly different from standard science fiction is that it's steeped in ancient African traditions and black identity. A narrative that simply features a black character in a futuristic world is not enough. To be Afrofuturism, it must be rooted in and unapologetically celebrate the uniqueness and innovation of black culture.

The biggest proponent of this cultural movement, even before it had its name, was musician Sun Ra, who infused elements of space and jazz fusion in his work as a musical artist. Prolific science fiction author Octavia E. Butler explored black women protagonists in novels like Fledging, Dawn, Parable of the Sower and Lilith's Brood, set in the context of futuristic technology and interactions with the supernatural. In the contemporary music world, singers like Erykah Badu, with her eccentric and experimental imagery in videos and album covers, promote the intersection of art and futurism. Artists like Janelle Monae, with her android alter-ego and electronica sounds, and films like " Brown Girl Begins," a post-apocalyptic tale set in 2049 and directed by Sharon Lewis, pay a huge homage to Afrofuturism.

Then there's "Black Panther." The film wears themes of Afrofuturism proudly on its sleeve. Tech genius Princess Shuri is not only the smartest person in the fictional world, but she's responsible for the creation and maintenance of sophisticated gadgets for her brother T'Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther.

A prosperous alternative afro future can be seen in their fictional East African home of Wakanda, a small country the size of New Jersey that has never been colonized and is steeped in its blackness. It's a utopian society that also boasts one of the world's richest resources, vibranium. Because white supremacy never intruded on Wakandan culture and its people, ancient African traditions remain common practice there.

But this movie is more than just a glorious film ― it's the expression of a movement.

Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

Africans and African-Americans have full autonomy as Afrofuturists. A community of people can take a piece of visual art or notes from a song and develop an entire universe and say, "This is ours." And that's what this film represents to so many excited fans. Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

In addition to the predominantly black cast filled with Hollywood stars and starlets, "Black Panther" also had a black production team spearheading the shaping of this story. The writer, filmmaker and executive producer are African-American. Production designer Hannah Beachler, who was influenced by Afrofuturistic architecture and Afropunk aesthetics, helped lay the groundwork for this world. The African regalia and elaborate costumes by famed wardrobe designer Ruth E. Carter created a Wakandan couture that would give New York Fashion Week a run for its money ― just look at her use of kimoyo beads as both a fashion accessory and a communication device.

This intersection of sci-fi and African pride is what we've come to know as Afrofuturism. For many of us in the blerd community, the film with its love for technology, science, visual art and music (if you haven't checked out the "Black Panther" album, you should make it a priority) is what we've been hungry for.

I hope, for all of our sakes, that this is also just the beginning. I hope that "Black Panther" can prove that stories permeated in blackness have crossover appeal. I hope we get more and more stories of black people who have agency, who are free and subservient to no one. Black people deserve to see themselves leading the way in real or abstract futures.
Jamie Broadnax is the editor-in-chief and creator of the online community for black women called Black Girl Nerds.

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Opinion | What The Heck Is Afrofuturism?

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm.

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Graham Walter- Afrofuturism; the genre that made the Black Panther

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Graham Walter- Afrofuturism; the genre that made the Black Panther

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In the World of Marvel, it hasn’t had a black superhero with a hit movie. The Black Panther was released on February 16th, 2018. In this article, you read about the Nation of Wakanda and how it combines Afrofuturism with a Superhero story, and how the film was made from Afrofuturism.

“It's people of African descent looking at themselves in the future and what their society and their culture will look like ten years from now, twenty years from now, a thousand years from now," Fikayo Adeola, founder of arts and animation company Kugali, told CNN.

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afrofuturism: the genre that made black panther  - cnn

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Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther

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Marvel's Black Panther imagines a futuristic African world -- but the ideas behind it were around long before. Learn about the history of Afrofuturism.

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]Afrofuturism is the reimagining of a future full of all sorts of advanced technology revolving around black people and around African traditions. This topic was hit on a quarter century ago by white author in an essay called, “Back to the Future.” Afrofuturism can hit on different topics than just regular science fiction like racism and slavery. I think it's interesting to see what the future would be like in another races perspective.

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm. We're hearing the word "Afrofuturism" a lot.

But what exactly is Afrofuturism?

Afrofuturism is the reimagining of a future filled with arts, science and technology seen through a black lens. The term was conceived a quarter-century ago by white author Mark Dery in his essay " Black to the Future," which looks at speculative fiction within the African diaspora. The essay rests on a series of interviews with black content creators.

Dery laid out the questions driving the philosophy of Afrofuturism:

Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn't the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers ― white to a man ― who have engineered our collective fantasies?

What makes Afrofuturism significantly different from standard science fiction is that it's steeped in ancient African traditions and black identity. A narrative that simply features a black character in a futuristic world is not enough. To be Afrofuturism, it must be rooted in and unapologetically celebrate the uniqueness and innovation of black culture.

The biggest proponent of this cultural movement, even before it had its name, was musician Sun Ra, who infused elements of space and jazz fusion in his work as a musical artist. Prolific science fiction author Octavia E. Butler explored black women protagonists in novels like Fledging, Dawn, Parable of the Sower and Lilith's Brood, set in the context of futuristic technology and interactions with the supernatural. In the contemporary music world, singers like Erykah Badu, with her eccentric and experimental imagery in videos and album covers, promote the intersection of art and futurism. Artists like Janelle Monae, with her android alter-ego and electronica sounds, and films like " Brown Girl Begins," a post-apocalyptic tale set in 2049 and directed by Sharon Lewis, pay a huge homage to Afrofuturism.

Then there's "Black Panther." The film wears themes of Afrofuturism proudly on its sleeve. Tech genius Princess Shuri is not only the smartest person in the fictional world, but she's responsible for the creation and maintenance of sophisticated gadgets for her brother T'Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther.

A prosperous alternative afro future can be seen in their fictional East African home of Wakanda, a small country the size of New Jersey that has never been colonized and is steeped in its blackness. It's a utopian society that also boasts one of the world's richest resources, vibranium. Because white supremacy never intruded on Wakandan culture and its people, ancient African traditions remain common practice there.

But this movie is more than just a glorious film ― it's the expression of a movement.

Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

Africans and African-Americans have full autonomy as Afrofuturists. A community of people can take a piece of visual art or notes from a song and develop an entire universe and say, "This is ours." And that's what this film represents to so many excited fans. Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

In addition to the predominantly black cast filled with Hollywood stars and starlets, "Black Panther" also had a black production team spearheading the shaping of this story. The writer, filmmaker and executive producer are African-American. Production designer Hannah Beachler, who was influenced by Afrofuturistic architecture and Afropunk aesthetics, helped lay the groundwork for this world. The African regalia and elaborate costumes by famed wardrobe designer Ruth E. Carter created a Wakandan couture that would give New York Fashion Week a run for its money ― just look at her use of kimoyo beads as both a fashion accessory and a communication device.

This intersection of sci-fi and African pride is what we've come to know as Afrofuturism. For many of us in the blerd community, the film with its love for technology, science, visual art and music (if you haven't checked out the "Black Panther" album, you should make it a priority) is what we've been hungry for.

I hope, for all of our sakes, that this is also just the beginning. I hope that "Black Panther" can prove that stories permeated in blackness have crossover appeal. I hope we get more and more stories of black people who have agency, who are free and subservient to no one. Black people deserve to see themselves leading the way in real or abstract futures.
Jamie Broadnax is the editor-in-chief and creator of the online community for black women called Black Girl Nerds.

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Opinion | What The Heck Is Afrofuturism?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm.

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Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther

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Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther

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This article is mainly about how while the movie Black Panther  is definitely the most iconic version of afrofuturism it is not the first. In the 1990's the word "Afro-futurism" was used an essay by Mark Dery BUT the idea of afrofuturism has been here  way longer than that. In the 1950's  a musician named Sun Ra used "ancient African influences" to create his music.

' "This was in an era [1950's] where African-Americans looked very much like second class citizens. Afrofuturism was a tool that they could use to imagine a better future, and the movement continued into the contemporary era," said Adeola."

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afrofuturism: the genre that made black panther  - cnn

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Afrofuturism: The genre that made Black Panther

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Marvel's Black Panther imagines a futuristic African world -- but the ideas behind it were around long before. Learn about the history of Afrofuturism.

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 movie of the year and what is afrofuturism. Readers will also learn how afrofuturism relate to the african culture a lot and they will also read about when the Black Panther Comic was created.
"Marvel is the biggest studio on the planet right now," van Veen says. "And for good reason, they get it right most of the time. But I like how their films work with race, even with Guardians of the Galaxyand now especially Black Panther, we are seeing something more than tokenism."

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The reader will learn about the genre Afrofuturism and how it originated. Afrofuturism is somewhat like science fiction, but mainly involves Black and/or African-American people. Afrofuturism was convinced by a white author, Mark Dery, through his essay, "Black to the Future." What I found was interesting, was that "To be Afrofuturism, it must be rooted in and unapologetically celebrate the uniqueness and innovation of black culture."

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm. We're hearing the word "Afrofuturism" a lot.

But what exactly is Afrofuturism?

Afrofuturism is the reimagining of a future filled with arts, science and technology seen through a black lens. The term was conceived a quarter-century ago by white author Mark Dery in his essay " Black to the Future," which looks at speculative fiction within the African diaspora. The essay rests on a series of interviews with black content creators.

Dery laid out the questions driving the philosophy of Afrofuturism:

Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn't the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers ― white to a man ― who have engineered our collective fantasies?

What makes Afrofuturism significantly different from standard science fiction is that it's steeped in ancient African traditions and black identity. A narrative that simply features a black character in a futuristic world is not enough. To be Afrofuturism, it must be rooted in and unapologetically celebrate the uniqueness and innovation of black culture.

The biggest proponent of this cultural movement, even before it had its name, was musician Sun Ra, who infused elements of space and jazz fusion in his work as a musical artist. Prolific science fiction author Octavia E. Butler explored black women protagonists in novels like Fledging, Dawn, Parable of the Sower and Lilith's Brood, set in the context of futuristic technology and interactions with the supernatural. In the contemporary music world, singers like Erykah Badu, with her eccentric and experimental imagery in videos and album covers, promote the intersection of art and futurism. Artists like Janelle Monae, with her android alter-ego and electronica sounds, and films like " Brown Girl Begins," a post-apocalyptic tale set in 2049 and directed by Sharon Lewis, pay a huge homage to Afrofuturism.

Then there's "Black Panther." The film wears themes of Afrofuturism proudly on its sleeve. Tech genius Princess Shuri is not only the smartest person in the fictional world, but she's responsible for the creation and maintenance of sophisticated gadgets for her brother T'Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther.

A prosperous alternative afro future can be seen in their fictional East African home of Wakanda, a small country the size of New Jersey that has never been colonized and is steeped in its blackness. It's a utopian society that also boasts one of the world's richest resources, vibranium. Because white supremacy never intruded on Wakandan culture and its people, ancient African traditions remain common practice there.

But this movie is more than just a glorious film ― it's the expression of a movement.

Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

Africans and African-Americans have full autonomy as Afrofuturists. A community of people can take a piece of visual art or notes from a song and develop an entire universe and say, "This is ours." And that's what this film represents to so many excited fans. Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

In addition to the predominantly black cast filled with Hollywood stars and starlets, "Black Panther" also had a black production team spearheading the shaping of this story. The writer, filmmaker and executive producer are African-American. Production designer Hannah Beachler, who was influenced by Afrofuturistic architecture and Afropunk aesthetics, helped lay the groundwork for this world. The African regalia and elaborate costumes by famed wardrobe designer Ruth E. Carter created a Wakandan couture that would give New York Fashion Week a run for its money ― just look at her use of kimoyo beads as both a fashion accessory and a communication device.

This intersection of sci-fi and African pride is what we've come to know as Afrofuturism. For many of us in the blerd community, the film with its love for technology, science, visual art and music (if you haven't checked out the "Black Panther" album, you should make it a priority) is what we've been hungry for.

I hope, for all of our sakes, that this is also just the beginning. I hope that "Black Panther" can prove that stories permeated in blackness have crossover appeal. I hope we get more and more stories of black people who have agency, who are free and subservient to no one. Black people deserve to see themselves leading the way in real or abstract futures.
Jamie Broadnax is the editor-in-chief and creator of the online community for black women called Black Girl Nerds.

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Opinion | What The Heck Is Afrofuturism?

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm.

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This is an article about the Movie black panther. African Americans feel very happy about this since it is difficult for them to find there selves in a representation of them selves and in mass media. This is a movie about both being black in America and Africa. African Americans now have something to agree on and to be proud of since this is one of the most money making movies to ever come out and to be popular. “Superhero films that deal with issues of being of African descent.” said Ryan Coogler.

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The first movie I remember seeing in a theater had a black hero. Lando Calrissian, played by Billy Dee Williams, didn't have any superpowers, but he ran his own city. That movie, the 1980 Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, introduced Calrissian as a complicated human being who still did the right thing. That's one reason I grew up knowing I could be the same.

If you are reading this and you are white, seeing people who look like you in mass media probably isn't something you think about often. Every day, the culture reflects not only you but nearly infinite versions of you-executives, poets, garbage collectors, soldiers, nurses and so on. The world shows you that your possibilities are boundless. Now, after a brief respite, you again have a President.

Those of us who are not white have considerably more trouble not only finding representation of ourselves in mass media and other arenas of public life, but also finding representation that indicates that our humanity is multifaceted. Relating to characters onscreen is necessary not merely for us to feel seen and understood, but also for others who need to see and understand us. When it doesn't happen, we are all the poorer for it.

This is one of the many reasons Black Panther is significant. What seems like just another entry in an endless parade of superhero movies is actually something much bigger. It hasn't even hit theaters yet and its cultural footprint is already enormous. It's a movie about what it means to be black in both America and Africa-and, more broadly, in the world. Rather than dodge complicated themes about race and identity, the film grapples head-on with the issues affecting modern-day black life. It is also incredibly entertaining, filled with timely comedy, sharply choreographed action and gorgeously lit people of all colors. "You have superhero films that are gritty dramas or action comedies," director Ryan Coogler tells TIME. But this movie, he says, tackles another important genre: "Superhero films that deal with issues of being of African descent."

Black Panther is the 18th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a franchise that has made $13.5 billion at the global box office over the past 10 years. (Marvel is owned by Disney.) It may be the first megabudget movie-not just about superheroes, but about anyone-to have an African-American director and a predominantly black cast. Hollywood has never produced a blockbuster this splendidly black.

The movie, out Feb. 16, comes as the entertainment industry is wrestling with its toxic treatment of women and persons of color. This rapidly expanding reckoning-one that reflects the importance of representation in our culture-is long overdue. Black Panther is poised to prove to Hollywood that African-American narratives have the power to generate profits from all audiences. And, more important, that making movies about black lives is part of showing that they matter.

The invitation to the Black Panther premiere read "Royal attire requested." Yet no one showed up to the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard on Jan. 29 looking like an extra from a British costume drama. On display instead were crowns of a different sort-ascending head wraps made of various African fabrics. Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o wore her natural hair tightly wrapped above a resplendent bejeweled purple gown. Men, including star Chadwick Boseman and Coogler, wore Afrocentric patterns and clothing, dashikis and boubous. Co-star Daniel Kaluuya, an Oscar nominee for his star turn in Get Out, arrived wearing a kanzu, the formal tunic of his Ugandan ancestry.

After the Obama era, perhaps none of this should feel groundbreaking. But it does. In the midst of a regressive cultural and political moment fueled in part by the white-nativist movement, the very existence of Black Panther feels like resistance. Its themes challenge institutional bias, its characters take unsubtle digs at oppressors, and its narrative includes prismatic perspectives on black life and tradition. The fact that Black Panther is excellent only helps.

Back when the film was announced, in 2014, nobody knew that it would be released into the fraught climate of President Trump's America-where a thriving black future seems more difficult to see. Trump's reaction to the Charlottesville chaos last summer equated those protesting racism with violent neo-Nazis defending a statue honoring a Confederate general. Immigrants from Mexico, Central America and predominantly Muslim countries are some of the President's most frequent scapegoats. So what does it mean to see this film, a vision of unmitigated black excellence, in a moment when the Commander in Chief reportedly, in a recent meeting, dismissed the 54 nations of Africa as "sh-thole countries"?

As is typical of the climate we're in, Black Panther is already running into its share of trolls-including a Facebook group that sought, unsuccessfully, to flood the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes with negative ratings of the film. That Black Panther signifies a threat to some is unsurprising. A fictional African King with the technological war power to destroy you-or, worse, the wealth to buy your land-may not please someone who just wants to consume the latest Marvel chapter without deeper political consideration. Black Panther is emblematic of the most productive responses to bigotry: rather than going for hearts and minds of racists, it celebrates what those who choose to prohibit equal representation and rights are ignoring, willfully or not. They are missing out on the full possibility of the world and the very America they seek to make "great." They cannot stop this representation of it. When considering the folks who preemptively hate Black Panther and seek to stop it from influencing American culture, I echo the response that the movie's hero T'Challa is known to give when warned of those who seek to invade his home country: Let them try.

The history of black power and the movement that bore its name can be traced back to the summer of 1966. The activist Stokely Carmichael was searching for something more than mere liberty. To him, integration in a white-dominated America meant assimilation by default. About one year after the assassination of Malcolm X and the Watts riots in Los Angeles, Carmichael took over the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from John Lewis. Carmichael decided to move the organization away from a philosophy of pacifism and escalate the group's militancy to emphasize armed self-defense, black business ownership and community control.

In June of that year, James Meredith, an activist who four years earlier had become the first black person admitted to Ole Miss, started the March Against Fear, a long walk of protest from Memphis to Mississippi, alone. On the second day of the march, he was wounded by a gunman. Carmichael and tens of thousands of others continued in Meredith's absence. Carmichael, who was arrested halfway through the march, was incensed upon his release. "The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin' us is to take over," he declared before a passionate crowd on June 16. "We been saying freedom for six years and we ain't got nothin'. What we gonna start sayin' now is Black Power!"

Black Panther was born in the civil rights era, and he reflected the politics of that time. The month after Carmichael's Black Power declaration, the character debuted in Marvel Comics' Fantastic Four No. 52. Supernatural strength and agility were his main features, but a genius intellect was his best attribute. "Black Panther" wasn't an alter ego; it was the formal title for T'Challa, King of Wakanda, a fictional African nation that, thanks to its exclusive hold on the sound-absorbent metal vibranium, had become the most technologically advanced nation in the world.

It was a vision of black grandeur and, indeed, power in a trying time, when more than 41% of African Americans were at or below the poverty line and comprised nearly a third of the nation's poor. Much like the iconic Lieutenant Uhura character, played by Nichelle Nichols, that debuted in Star Trek in September 1966, Black Panther was an expression of Afrofuturism-an ethos that fuses African mythologies, technology and science fiction and serves to rebuke conventional depictions of (or, worse, efforts to bring about) a future bereft of black people. His white creators, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, did not consciously conjure a fantasy-world response to Carmichael's call, but the image still held power. T'Challa was not only strong and educated; he was also royalty. He didn't have to take over. He was already in charge.

"You might say that this African nation is fantasy," says Boseman, who portrays T'Challa in the movie. "But to have the opportunity to pull from real ideas, real places and real African concepts, and put it inside of this idea of Wakanda-that's a great opportunity to develop a sense of what that identity is, especially when you're disconnected from it."

The character emerged at a time when the civil rights movement rightfully began to increase its demands of an America that had promised so much and delivered so little to its black population. Fifty-two years after the introduction of T'Challa, those demands have yet to be fully answered. According to the Federal Reserve, the typical African-American family had a median net worth of $17,600 in 2016. In contrast, white households had a median net worth of $171,000. The revolutionary thing about Black Panther is that it envisions a world not devoid of racism but one in which black people have the wealth, technology and military might to level the playing field-a scenario applicable not only to the predominantly white landscape of Hollywood but, more important, to the world at large.

The Black Panther Party, the revolutionary organization founded in Oakland, Calif., a few months after T'Challa's debut, was depicted in the media as a threatening and radical group with goals that differed dramatically from the more pacifist vision of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Lewis. Marvel even briefly changed the character's name to Black Leopard because of the inevitable association with the Panthers, but soon reverted. For some viewers, "Black Panther" may have undeservedly sinister connotations, but the 2018 film reclaims the symbol to be celebrated by all as an avatar for change.

The urgency for change is partly what Carmichael was trying to express in the summer of '66, and the powers that be needed to listen. It's still true in 2018.

Moviegoers first encountered Boseman's T'Challa in Marvel's 2016 ensemble hit Captain America: Civil War, and he instantly cut a striking figure in his sleek vibranium suit. As Black Panther opens, with T'Challa grieving the death of his father and coming to grips with his sudden ascension to the Wakandan throne, it's clear that our hero's royal upbringing has kept him sheltered from the realities of how systemic racism has touched just about every black life across the globe.

The comic, especially in its most recent incarnations as rendered by the writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay, has worked to expunge Eurocentric misconceptions of Africa-and the film's imagery and thematic material follow suit. "People often ask, 'What is Black Panther? What is his power?' And they have a misconception that he only has power through his suit," says Boseman. "The character is existing with power inside power."

Coogler says that Black Panther, like his previous films-including the police-brutality drama Fruitvale Station and his innovative Rocky sequel Creed -explores issues of identity. "That's something I've always struggled with as a person," says the director. "Like the first time that I found out I was black." He's talking less about an epidermal self-awareness than about learning how white society views his black skin. "Not just identity, but names. 'Who are you?' is a question that comes up a lot in this film. T'Challa knows exactly who he is. The antagonist in this film has many names."

That villain comes in the form of Erik "Killmonger" Stevens, a former black-ops soldier with Wakandan ties who seeks to both outwit and beat down T'Challa for the crown. As played by a scene-stealing Michael B. Jordan, Killmonger's motivations illuminate thorny questions about how black people worldwide should best use their power.

In the movie, Killmonger is, like Coogler, a native of Oakland. By exploring the disparate experiences of Africans and African Americans, Coogler shines a bright light on the psychic scars of slavery's legacy and how black Americans endure the real-life consequences of it in the present day. Killmonger's perspective is rendered in full; his rage over how he and other black people across the world have been disenfranchised and disempowered is justifiable.

Coogler, who co-wrote the screenplay with Joe Robert Cole, also includes another important antagonist from the comics: the dastardly and bigoted Ulysses Klaue (Andy Serkis). "What I love about this experience is that it could have been the idea of black exploitation: he's gonna fight Klaue, he's gonna go after the white man and that's it-that's the enemy," Boseman says. He recognizes that some fans will take issue with a black male villain fighting black protagonists. Killmonger fights not only T'Challa, but also warrior women like the spy Nakia (Nyong'o), Okoye (Danai Gurira) and the rest of the Dora Milaje, T'Challa's all-female royal guards. Killmonger and Shuri (Letitia Wright), T'Challa's quippy tech-genius sister, also face off.

T'Challa and Killmonger are mirror images, separated only by the accident of where they were born. "What they don't realize," Boseman says, "is that the greatest conflict you will ever face will be the conflict with yourself."

Both T'Challa and Killmonger had to be compelling in order for the movie to succeed. "Obviously, the superhero is who puts you in the seat," Coogler says.

"That's who you want to see come out on top. But I'll be damned if the villains ain't cool too. They have to be able to stand up to the hero, and have you saying, 'Man, I don't know if the hero's going to make it out of this.'"

"If you don't have that," Boseman says, "you don't have a movie."

This is not just a movie about a black superhero; it's very much a black movie. It carries a weight that neither Thor nor Captain America could lift: serving a black audience that has long gone underrepresented. For so long, films that depict a reality where whiteness isn't the default have been ghettoized, marketed largely to audiences of color as niche entertainment, instead of as part of the mainstream. Think of Tyler Perry's Madea movies, Malcolm D. Lee's surprise 1999 hit The Best Man or the Barbershop franchise that launched in 2002. But over the past year, the success of films including Get Out and Girls Trip have done even bigger business at the box office, led to commercial acclaim and minted new stars like Kaluuya and Tiffany Haddish. Those two hits have only bolstered an argument that has persisted since well before Spike Lee made his debut: black films with black themes and black stars can and should be marketed like any other. No one talks about Woody Allen and Wes Anderson movies as "white movies" to be marketed only to that audience.

Black Panther marks the biggest move yet in this wave: it's both a black film and the newest entrant in the most bankable movie franchise in history. For a wary and risk-averse film business, led largely by white film executives who have been historically predisposed to greenlight projects featuring characters who look like them, Black Panther will offer proof that a depiction of a reality of something other than whiteness can make a ton of money.

The film's positive reception-as of Feb. 6, the day initial reviews surfaced, it had a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes-bodes well for its commercial prospects. Variety predicted that it could threaten the Presidents' Day weekend record of $152 million, set in 2016 by Deadpool.

Some of the film's early success can be credited to Nate Moore, an African-American executive producer in Marvel's film division who has been vocal about the importance of including black characters in the Marvel universe. But beyond Wakanda, the questions of power and responsibility, it seems, are not only applicable to the characters in Black Panther. Once this film blows the doors off, as expected, Hollywood must do more to reckon with that issue than merely greenlight more black stories. It also needs more Nate Moores.

"I know people [in the entertainment industry] are going to see this and aspire to it," Boseman says. "But this is also having people inside spaces-gatekeeper positions, people who can open doors and take that idea. How can this be done? How can we be represented in a way that is aspirational?"

Because Black Panther marks such an unprecedented moment that excitement for the film feels almost kinetic. Black Panther parties are being organized, pre- and post-film soirées for fans new and old. A video of young Atlanta students dancing in their classroom once they learned they were going to see the film together went viral in early February. Oscar winner Octavia Spencer announced on her Instagram account that she'll be in Mississippi when Black Panther opens and that she plans to buy out a theater "in an underserved community there to ensure that all our brown children can see themselves as a superhero."

Many civil rights pioneers and other trailblazing forebears have received lavish cinematic treatments, in films including Malcolm X, Selma and Hidden Figures. Jackie Robinson even portrayed himself onscreen. Fictional celluloid champions have included Virgil Tibbs, John Shaft and Foxy Brown. Lando, too. But Black Panther matters more, because he is our best chance for people of every color to see a black hero. That is its own kind of power.
Jamil Smith is a journalist born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He lives in Los Angeles.

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The Revolutionary Power of Black Panther

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The first movie I remember seeing in a theater had a black hero. Lando Calrissian, played by Billy Dee Williams, didn't have any superpowers, but he ran his own city. That movie, the 1980 Star Wars sequel The Empire Strikes Back, introduced Calrissian as a complicated human being who still did the right thing.

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‘Black Panther’ and the Politics of Afrofuturism

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‘Black Panther’ and the Politics of Afrofuturism

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In Black Panther it is mainly about war and poverty.They see a the world a threat to them.Something else that they talked about was self determination is said in the article ¨the process by which a country determines its own statehood, allegiance and government. This is visible on two different levels: isolationist economics and an untouched culture.¨ So they were able to create more things but they are still growing like any country.

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Marvel

Marvel's latest blockbuster, Black Panther, opened in theaters last week and is already being called the most radical superhero movie yet . The movie explores the character of T'challa, the Black Panther, King of the fictional East-African country of Wakanda, the most technologically advanced nation in the Marvel universe. The movie is a shift away from traditional depictions of the continent of Africa which focus almost exclusively on poverty and war, exploring rather a perspective in which Africa is on the other side of the development paradigm - so advanced it sees globalization as a threat.

The movie is heavily linked to the theory of Afrofuturism, which is a theory that challenges traditional representations of the future world, setting it in conjunction with African and black culture. The term "Afrofuturism" was first used in the 1994 Mark Dery essay " Black to the Future ," where he defines it as the possible future of communities whose pasts have been deliberately rubbed out and "whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search of legible traces of its history." In many ways, Black Panther creates a credible alternative to colonialism, exploring an afrofuturistic narrative of a country that had never been colonized and oppressed.

Unlike other African countries, Wakanda was able to fully explore the concept of self-determination, the process by which a country determines its own statehood, allegiance and government. This is visible on two different levels: isolationist economics and an untouched culture.

In the movie, the media portrays the Kingdom of Wakanda like any developing African country: subsistence agriculture, extreme poverty, and traditional tribal clothes. However, the media notes that Wakanda is unique in its reluctance to accept international aid and globalization. While the media doesn't know what to make of this, viewers are aware that this is because the actual Kingdom uses special technology to make it invisible to the outside world. Wakanda is economically self-sufficient, and isolates itself from the rest of the world to avoid exposure to international trade instabilities. One can see the legitimacy of Wakandan fears of market dependency in the real word case of the Zambian copper crisis. The legacy of extractive colonialism, made Zambia's economy inextricably linked to the international market, and when world copper prices in 2015 plummeted, Zambia experienced an economic crisis .

Moreover, Wakanda has full ownership of its natural resource, Vibranium, which it uses for its own technological advancement. A recurrent theme in the movies is T'Challa's reluctance to open its border in fear that access to Vibranium in the market will cause political unrest in his country. This is a clear reference to the vested interest of neocolonial forces that looms over many African countries: with 80 percent of France's energy depending on African Uranium , the true goals behind French military presence in Niger is questionable. Furthermore, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the largest producer of Cobalt in the world , a mineral used for telephone technologies. Cobalt played a role in the political unrest in the Katanga region , as militias were constantly fighting over the ownership of Cobalt mines. The Kingdom of Wakanda's strengths does not only lie in the fact that it has cut itself off from the outside world; but rather in that they have escaped the plague of colonisation that isolated and insulated the continent of Africa during the most dynamic period in world history. It is important to understand that the current biased globalization is an exploitative offspring of colonisation.

Afrofuturism is also associated with aesthetics and culture, which helps us wrap our heads around how an African country that had never been colonized could look like and function. In the movie, alternatives to patriarchal societies are emphasized, particularly in the all women military leadership of Wakanda: the Dora Milaje. These structures where women hold positions of power are reminiscent of specific instances in African history, such as the revolution led by Queen Mother Yaa Asantewaa during the Anglo-Ashanti War (modern day Ghana) in 1901 or the Amazons of King of Dahomey , an all women military regiment that operated in the 19th century in what is now Benin. The Kingdom of Wakanda participate in seeing an evolution of African tradition into the future by exploring a culture that has not been corrupted by western values.

Afrofuturism can also be linguistic, specifically as it pertains to the reappropriation of specific languages. In an interview, Chadwick Boseman, the actor who played the Black Panther, discusses how he created his accent, emphasizing that he did not want a British accent or a western sounding accent because it would be "conveying a white supremacist idea of what being educated is." While French or English became the national language of many African countries after the departure of their colonizer, demoting English to a second language in the movie emphasizes Wakandan idiosyncrasy.

Although the fictional country of Wakanda and struggles of African countries contrast in many ways, highlighting the extent of the consequences of neo-colonial forces, fiction meets reality in relation to political assassination. In the Avenger series, we witness the assassination of T'Chakka, the father of the Black Panther, because he refused to open access to Wakanda Vibranium resources. This is reminiscent to the U.S. and Belgian assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961, first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or the 1987 assassination of Thomas Sankara , the well-liked leader of Burkina Faso. In both cases, anti-colonial and communist tendencies drove their assassinations.

Furthermore, if it wasn't for the assassinations of progressive Pan-African leaders, many African countries would be at a different place today. Thomas Sankara, for example, was a strong proponent of self-sufficiency and female empowerment. He argued against international aid, " He who feeds you, controls you ," and within four years Burkina Faso was able to achieve food surplus by producing twice as much more wheat per hectares than neighboring countries. The African liberalization struggles have been defined and contained by neo-colonial forces to promote their Western agenda. T'Chakka's assassination in Avengers, Civil War is aligned with this historical western practice of annihilating political opposition.

The Kingdom of Wakanda provides an alternative to the fatalistic mediatized depiction of African countries. Colonial pasts and neocolonialist forces still impede the advancement of many African countries, whether it's the company Total acquiring ownership of offshore oil plants in Senegal, or extensive European military bases all over the continent. Despite, these colonial actions, we are starting to see a breakthrough with many African cities becoming major technological hubs similar to Wakanda's advancement: Nairobi, Kenya has been compared to Silicon Valley with its surge in tech investment , or Nigeria's initiative with Google to allow access to social media using less internet data. In terms of gender equality, women hold 42.7% of parliament positions in Senegal and 61.3% in Rwanda. When considering these developments, maybe we can posit that the Kingdom of Wakanda is on the path to exist, however on a much smaller and more sporadic scale across different African cities.

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'Black Panther' and the Politics of Afrofuturism

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Marvel Marvel's latest blockbuster, Black Panther, opened in theaters last week and is already being called the most radical superhero movie yet . The movie explores the character of T'challa, the Black Panther, King of the fictional East-African country of Wakanda, the most technologically advanced nation in the Marvel universe.

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1. Afrofuturism: The Next Generation

3. My article talked about famous people, that some people might even look  up too. It talked about African Americans who have accomplished many things. In my article it says "who have not only given them a voice". This quote is talking about people who give African American chances to take that let them express themselves. For example "Rhianna was cast as tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen". This shows that people have changed their thinking and this is because of afrofuturism. People not longer think of them as slaves or nobodys. People believe that they can also achieve great things. I think that this has improved our community by letting african americans show who they can be.

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The Year in Style 2016

Solange Knowles on "Saturday Night Live" in November, flaunting a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids. Credit... Dana Edelson/NBC, via Getty Images

In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil.

A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe. Flanked on the stage by twin columns of attendants, she was a galactic goddess in a white ermine cape.

In November, on "Saturday Night Live," her sister, Solange Knowles, flaunted a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids, looking every inch a regal visitor from distant planet.

Each was in her way a beacon of Afrofuturism, a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts.

[See more Year in Style articles]
Familiar to some, exotic to others, the term refers loosely to an unlikely fusion of parts: Egyptian and other non-Western mythologies, mysticism and magical realism with Afrocentricity, modern technology and science fiction. A freighted concept in more ways than one, it gained traction this year, muscling its way into the pop cultural mainstream via the intertwined worlds of entertainment, art and style.

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Rihanna, as an otherworldly warrior queen, in the September issue of W magazine. Credit... Steven Klein; styled by Edward Enninful

In part, Afrofuturism, an aesthetic dating roughly from the 1970s, has taken on a new public face through a new generation of recording artists - Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Janelle Monáe among them - who have given it not only a voice, but also a look. You will likely know it when you see it: a high-shine mash-up of cyborg themes, loosely tribal motifs, android imagery and gleaming metallics that might be appropriate for a voyage to Pluto's outer reaches.

Its latest incarnation seems timely, if not downright inevitable. "With the diversity of the nation and world increasingly standing in stark contrast to the diversity in futuristic works, it's no surprise that Afrofuturism emerged," writes Ytasha L. Womack, who chronicled and popularized the evolution of the genre in her 2013 book, " Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture."

"But when, even in the imaginary future," she goes on, "people can't fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down."

The internet has lent the movement a force unknown in previous incarnations. A visual metaphor for empowerment on sites like the Afrofuturist Affair and influential Instagram accounts like Inkrayable_girafe, it permits black men and women to take charge of their image. Today, Ms. Womack writes, "a fledgling filmmaker can shoot his sci-fi web series on a $500 DV cam, post it on YouTube, and promote it on Instagram and Twitter."

Lina Iris Viktor, a British-Liberian artist in New York who paints queenly self-portraits with a futuristic edge, picked up the thread. "The internet democratized the playing field," she said. "Now the voices you hear are authentically ours. Instead of everybody else telling you stories, explaining to you what our work is about, we are telling you what it's about."

An Afrofuturist narrative is embedded as well in a recent flurry of museum shows. On view through November at El Museo del Barrio were the fashion illustrations of Antonio Lopez, a pioneer in the genre whose works of the '70s and '80s featured a multiracial cast of robotlike figures and astronauts propelled into a far-off Tomorrowland. It is a brave new world, as a review in The New York Times noted in June, "in which race and gender were fluid, and existing social inequities corrected or transcended."

Afrofuturism is a current in the multimedia installations of the artist Saya Woolfalk, whose utopian universes and Empathics, a future race fusing - and all but erasing - racial and ethnic boundaries, were featured this year in shows at the Brooklyn Museum, a light show in Times Square and, just this month, an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Afrofuturist allusions crop up less overtly in the sprawling canvases of Kerry James Marshall, whose exhibition at the Met Breuer, through Jan. 29, includes idealized portraits of African-American Boy and Girl Scouts wreathed in halos of the kind often seen on comic-book heroes.

This summer, the movement flexed its muscle at the megaplex, where "Captain America: Civil War" featured the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), a superhero who in 2018 will star in "Black Panther" as the king and protector of the imaginary nation of Wakanda.

Afrofuturism's resurgence could not be more timely, arriving as it does in a climate perceived as indifferent, if not downright inimical, to racial and ethnic minorities. In her book, Ms. Womack recalls a time when black or brown sci-fi characters were all but invisible in the culture at large. As a girl, she would fantasize that she was Princess Leia of "Star Wars."

"While it was fun to be the chick from outer space in my imagination," Ms. Womack writes, "the quest to see myself or browner people in this space age, galactic epic was important to me." It was in the absence of minorities from pop lore, she goes on, "that seeds were planted in the imaginations of countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceship too."

Count among them Tim Fielder, a New York graphic artist and animator whose sci-fi illustrations, produced over a 30-year span, drew visitors last spring to " Black Metropolis," at the Gallatin Galleries at New York University. Mr. Fielder's pioneering cartoon narratives - notably those of " Matty's Rocket," his spirited black female cosmonaut, who will lift off next year in graphic novel form - are particularly relevant now, he maintained: "They let young artists know that they're not on dangerous turf, that someone has gone there before them."

Afrofuturism's epic imagery offers youth a mirror, Mr. Fielder said. "These kids are able now to see themselves in environments that are expansive, both technologically and in terms of social mores and gender," he said.

They also see themselves newly reflected in the comic books that remain a potent form of Afrofuturist expression. Last spring, the Black Panther, lately of "Captain America," was resurrected by Marvel as the noble protagonist of his own comic book series, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of "Between the World and Me." And this year, Riri Williams, an Afro-coiffured teenage superheroine with an M.I.T. degree, will slip into the fabled power suit in the "Iron Man" comic series.

Such vanguard characters can trace their genesis to early champions of Afrofuturism, paramount among them Sun Ra, the jazz composer, poet and philosopher who incorporated sci-fi themes into his music and his seminal film, "Space Is the Place," a mid-1970s tale of interplanetary time travel.

Afrofuturism owes as important a debt to the writer Octavia Butler, whose 1979 best-seller, "Kindred," posits an alternate reality in which an African-American heroine is transported from mid-70s Los Angeles to early 19th-century Maryland. It owes a debt as well to the music of George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, with their prophetic lyrics in "Mothership Connection":

Time to move on

Light years in time

Ahead of our time.

Afrofuturist themes were revisited in the '90s, but still as a genre without a name until the cultural critic Mark Dery formally christened it in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future," after which it flourished for a time before retreating to the shadows.

Now the movement has returned in force, beamed down to the concert stage. Last month, the '70s disco diva Grace Jones, Afrofuturism's flat-topped mascot, toured in the British Isles, her stage persona, covered head-to-toe in tribal paint and feathers, a reprise of her hula-hoop-twirling performance at the Afropunk Fest in Brooklyn last year.

On a broadcast of "The Tonight Show" in February, the singer FKA Twigs seemed to alight from the clouds swathed in a incandescent white. Her costume, a-shimmer in crystals, was created with Grace Wales Bonner, a London designer whose work in the past has been rife with Afrofuturist allusions.

In her "Lemonade" album, released in April, Beyoncé reigns in an all-female utopia, leading a phalanx of women in ethereal white dresses that simultaneously conjure ancient and space-age societies.

The style world, too, has now embraced the movement, if only, perhaps, to reinforce its stature as an arbiter of cool. For the W September cover and 18-page editorial feature shot by Steven Klein, Rihanna's over-the-top costumes were cobbled from scratch.

"She's a one-off, a queen," said Edward Enninful, the magazine's fashion and style director. "A queen does not wear clothes off the runways." Instead she wears an otherworldly pastiche of vanguard creations by Gareth Pugh, Prada, Proenza Schouler and others, clothes conceived, Mr. Enninful said, to emphasize Rihanna's majestic persona.

"It's a look that many young black females out there haven't seen before," he said.

Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy was among the first to integrate Afrofuturist imagery into his runway shows. Two years earlier, he signed Ms. Badu as the fierce-looking face of the brand. Mr. Tisci followed up repeatedly, most recently with a fall 2016 line replete with cosmological symbols, including that familiar Afrofuturist talisman, the Egyptian Eye of Horus.

Calvin Klein released a fall advertising campaign starring the rapper Young Thug, dressed in flares and a fitted pinstripe chasuble, its neckline embellished with an astral-looking orb. A recent campaign from Chanel featured Willow Smith festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

The singer Willow Smith in a Chanel campaign, festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

Others are advancing this high-concept aesthetic in more subtle ways, thrusting aside clichés as they go. "Afrofuturism has to become something more than just an idea of black people in shiny metallic clothing," said Michelle Busayo Olupona, the Nigerian-American designer behind Busayo NYC, a label incorporating Afrofuturist themes in a stripped-down, abstract way. "In my own work, I try to create an aesthetic and style evocative of the past but very much grounded in the now."

Ms. Olupona said her abstract, Afrocentric designs, some incorporating fantasy fauna and futurist imagery, "suggest ways in which we can differentiate ourselves."

"What they say about the future," she continued, "is that we're always going to be here."

Another showcase for contemporary, less literal interpretations of Afrofuturism is 9J, a boutique and gallery recently sprung up on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx. It aims to usher in the movement's next wave, with items like a ribbed trunk-neck sweater worthy of "Star Wars," created by a local designer Jesenia Lopez; gravity-defying Birkenstock platforms covered in feathers and Swarovski "gems"; and an outsize headdress of spiraling silver wire. These pieces mingle technology, fantasy and Afrocentric themes with a streamlined progressive-looking opulence.

The shop's owner, Jerome LaMaar, whose line, 5:31 Jérôme, has drawn high-visibility clients like Beyoncé and the model Hailey Baldwin, wore fur-rimmed virtual-reality goggles the other week while presiding at the opening of Africollision, an installation at 9J that eschewed the space-is-the-place hallmarks of old school Afrofuturism.

"We want to play with the idea of what is tribe, what is Africa, what is the future, and mix it all up without being predictable." Mr. LaMaar insisted. "Who wants to see what's already been done?"

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The Year in Style 2016 In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil. A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe.

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Black Panther: The Afrofuturistic Designs of Black Panther.

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Black Panther: The Afrofuturistic Designs of Black Panther.

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This article is about the combination of different ideas from Afrofuturistic movies and the putting in images  of African American history into the movie "Black Panther". All of these designs and ideas were created by Ruth E. Carter. She is a costume designer who worked hard on the clothes in "Black Panther". She was excited to work on Black Panther because she was happy with the idea of African-American history being put into the movie. She thought the chance to explore Afrofuturism in Black Panther was meaningful to her. “It is the reason why we have a sense of pride as African-Americans,” she said. The movie “connects everything that I’ve done about slavery and about how Africans came to this country, and what happened to their culture,” she said.

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How do you outfit an African queen? For Ruth E. Carter, the costume designer for "Black Panther," it involved a Zulu hat and a 3-D printer.

In her 30 years in film, Ms. Carter has made her career putting images of African-American history and contemporary culture onscreen, from Spike Lee's canon to "Selma" and the recent remake of "Roots." For the Marvel blockbuster "Black Panther," she got to envision a futuristic African alternate reality - made up of diverse tribes and untouched by colonizers.

"I really wanted this movie," Ms. Carter, 57, said. She didn't know much about the Marvel universe when she met with the director and co-writer, Ryan Coogler, but she liked the comic books' portrayal. "You saw people with little kufis," she said. "You saw a tribal council happening and someone was sitting there in a suit, and then they'd have a big Maasai headdress."

To imagine the fictional African nation of Wakanda, without the influence of the Dutch, the British and other colonizers, Ms. Carter borrowed from indigenous people across the continent. During six months of preproduction, she had shoppers scouring the globe for authentic African designs, like the traditional stacked neck rings worn by the Ndebele women of South Africa. Textiles were sourced to Ghana, but many African fabrics are now printed in Holland; Ms. Carter rejected those. "I wanted to create the fabrics, and I wanted them to feel very superhero-like," she said.

There was a strict color palette, drafted by Mr. Coogler: Chadwick Boseman, who plays T'Challa, the Wakanda royal who is also the Black Panther, wears black; Danai Gurira, as the warrior Okoye, and her band of female fighters, the Dora Milaje, are in vibrant red; and Lupita Nyong'o, as the spy Nakia, part of the river tribe, is in shades of green. (Black, red and green are also the colors of the Pan-African flag.) For Mr. Coogler, blue "represented the police and authority." She dressed Michael B. Jordan, as Black Panther's rival, Erik Killmonger, in it.

She also leaned on a visual bible created by Hannah Beachler, the production designer, which laid out the districts and culture of Wakanda. The merchant tribe is inspired by the Tuareg, ethnic Berbers of the Sahara, Ms. Carter said. The mining tribe resembles the Himba of Namibia, known for their red ocher body paint and leather headpieces. And for the artsy Step Town district, she scoured looks from an Afropunk festival in Atlanta, where "Black Panther" was shot.

"She has everything you want in a collaborator," Mr. Coogler said. "She's experienced but still youthful and energetic, still curious and open to trying new things."

Ms. Carter said this was not the most complex production she'd ever done; "Malcolm X," set across several eras, was even more involved. But the chance to explore Afrofuturism with "Black Panther" was meaningful to her. "It is the reason why we have a sense of pride as African-Americans," she said.

The movie "connects everything that I've done about slavery and about how Africans came to this country, and what happened to their culture," she said.

Here, she discusses the inspiration and design of several looks from the film.

The Black Panther Suit

Ryan Meinerding at Marvel designs all of its superhero suits, but Ms. Carter put her stamp on the three versions made for this movie, adding a raised-triangle motif. "It has a little bit of a sheen to it," she said. She calls the triangle "the sacred geometry of Africa, and it makes him not only a superhero, but a king, an African king."

The Black Panther first appeared onscreen in "Captain America: Civil War" in 2016, and when Mr. Boseman donned that suit and helmet for her, "we were, like, wow."

"It was majestic. The superhero thing really is something mystical," Ms. Carter said. "And then he was doing moves and he was telling us, you know, 'I can't raise my arm, and I can't breathe out of my nose.' And we're like, oh, O.K., that's bad, Mr. Black Panther. We'll change that."

Queen Ramonda's Crown

For the headgear worn by T'Challa's mother, Queen Ramonda (played by Angela Bassett), "we found a traditional Zulu married woman's hat, complete with the ocher that makes it red, and like a hairy, furry, texture on it. It was giant, and I really wanted to see that beautiful cylindrical shape, because I've always seen the ones that you get in the tourist trade," which don't always resemble archival images. "I didn't believe that the origins of its shape were real until I saw a real one."

The hat was the model for Ms. Bassett's crown, which was 3-D-printed, with help from the designer Julia Körner, who specializes in wearable plastics. A rounded shoulder mantle, with a bit of African lace, was also 3-D printed. It took six months, Ms. Carter said, to get the design right.

W'Kabi's Cloak

As a leader of a border tribe, W'Kabi, played by Daniel Kaluuya, is wrapped in the Wakandan version of a Lesotho blanket. "The Lesotho do these wonderful blankets with these amazing prints on them that represent their king, they represent harvest," Ms. Carter said. "And we screen-printed on the other side with vibranium" - the fictional metal on which Wakanda runs - "silver Adinkra symbols, so that their blankets could be used as shields during fighting. We worked on those blankets from start to finish."

It was Mr. Coogler's idea to make the blanket a shield. "What I found with African art and clothing and structures - things tend to have multiple uses," he said. "If you see somebody wearing a beautiful cloth, not only does that cloth protect their body, but it also tells the story of their culture and their history, written on the fabric."

Nakia's Striking Looks

The costuming for Nakia, played by Ms. Nyong'o, made the broadest leaps, Ms. Carter said. The spy's river tribe was based partly on the Suri of Ethiopia, so her traditional look was made of shells, beads and leaves.

"That cultural specificity was very, very helpful," Ms. Nyong'o said. "I looked at images of those people and their particular way of life. It's another layer of character development."

But she also has a high-wattage fight scene in a casino in South Korea, for which she wears a striking green, high-neck, open-shoulder dress. Ms. Carter and her team designed the fabric and had it 3-D-printed. They started with a kente cloth, "extracted the line work and created a pattern, hand-painted it," she said. It's covered with Wakandan text - boxes with slashes inside - and it's sexy but not revealing. "It was her Bond Girl moment," Ms. Carter said, "but also, she could fight and move in it, and it wasn't constricting."

Nakia's civilian clothes were the real challenge. "It's hard to figure out what a person's casual looks are when they're a war dog, a C.I.A. operative, a casino girl," she said. "We were trying things on all the time in the fitting room."

Ms. Nyong'o said, "There were days when, like, last minute, we still didn't know what I was going to wear." But Ms. Carter never panicked, she said admiringly. "She's so relaxed, in a way that is just spellbinding."

Dora Milaje Warriors

In their red and gold outfits, these spear-fighting women are the elite warriors of Wakanda. The front of the costume is beaded "in the same tradition that you see throughout Africa - the Turkana, the Maasai," Ms. Carter said. "The overall garment has a texture as well, the same kind of striations and sacred geometry" as the Black Panther suit. The leather harnesses that cross the bodice were made by craftsmen in South Africa so that they appear to be hand-stitched, and the imposing color was chosen to make eight actresses look as bold as 80, she said.

As their general, Ms. Gurira's neckpiece is gold, not silver like her battalion's. Ms. Carter thought through every detail of their armor for battle. "I had back story for the Dora Milaje costumes," she said. "I had back story for Lupita. I have to have that back story, or I just can't move a muscle."

Correction: February 25, 2018

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The Afrofuturistic Designs of 'Black Panther'

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How do you outfit an African queen? For Ruth E. Carter, the costume designer for "Black Panther," it involved a Zulu hat and a 3-D printer. In her 30 years in film, Ms. Carter has made her career putting images of African-American history and contemporary culture onscreen, from Spike Lee's canon to "Selma" and the recent remake of "Roots."

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Stephenie mauro

1. What the heck is afrofuturism?

2.  https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-broadnax-afrofuturism-black-panther_us_5a85f1b9e4b004fc31903b95

3.  I learned that Afrofuturism is away of adding to the science fiction stories and movies with historical problems with diversity with africans.Which help celebrates the black culture. Afrofuturism was described as the future but seeing two black lenses. This content that is made has black characters and black backgrounds with black problems. Face to be as if it was in a white world less Problems different issues and different fights. The Black Panther movie has said a big stage for afrofuturism, because the set was described to have only black people and same with the characters.

4. The writer describes it well as I did not watch this movie but I know the background of it being an uprising of a black superhero. Is brilliant to think that a different race would it contribute to the story in a different way. I have learned towards the end of the article about Ethiopian Society, and how “white Supremacy never intruding on Wonka dating culture and its people” if they did it would have changed the setting along with a background in the ancient African traditions.

5. Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers ― white to a man ― who have engineered our collective fantasies?-Mark Dery

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1. Afrofuturism: What the heck is afrofuturism? 

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1. Afrofuturism: What the heck is afrofuturism? 

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2.Link:https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-broadnax-afrofuturism-black-panther_us_5a85f1b9e4b004fc31903b95

3. ¨I learned that afrofuturism is a future filled with arts, science and technology seen through the blacks lens.¨ The movie Black Panther is a movie with only blacks. Unlike other superhero movies like superman Black Panther has a black playing the role of the Panther

4. The writer describes what afrofuturism is and means by saying it is the future for the blacks.
5.¨Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers ― white to a man ― who have engineered our collective fantasies?

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opportunity to but also how women should have these things as well. In the 

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Simara Rodriguez Meet Eight New Afrofuturism Artists Creating a Future of Color 

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Simara Rodriguez Meet Eight New Afrofuturism Artists Creating a Future of Color 

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" Afrofuturism, science fiction that explores the experiences and culture of people of color." These artists who created these pieces were inspired by the diversity of African-Americans. When you think of the genre  Sci-Fi you think of Spiderman and Superman, not of T'Challa from Black Panther and Meg or Mrs. Which from A Wrinkle in Time. This gallery of art are made by some new artists. We are now able to look at art pieces and movies and say that person looks like me, instead of seeing a white male or female thinking that is the expectation for Science Fiction.
"Painting, comics, illustration, mixed-media collage, even masks—there are endless ways to bring the future to life."

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This stunning gallery on Blavity showcases eight up-and-coming visual artists influenced by Afrofuturism, science fiction that explores the experiences and culture of people of color. They're amazingly diverse not just in their sci-fi visions, but the media they use to express them. Painting, comics, illustration, mixed-media collage, even masks-there are endless ways to bring the future to life.

For example, up top is the work of Oakland-based artist Joshua Mays, whose huge, Art Noveau-influenced futuristic murals turn science fiction into part of the neighborhood.

This smiling chainsaw cyborg by Ten is typical of her imaginative creepy-cute illustrations. Look, she's so happy to be wreaking bloody mayhem!

Cyrus Kabiru, from Kenya, makes wearable "C-Stunners," glasses that look into the future.

Get to know the rest of the artists (and more images from these folks) at Blavity. When you've finished poring over all the images on Blavity, click on to each artist's website for even more.

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Meet Eight New Afrofuturism Artists Creating a Future of Color

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This stunning gallery on Blavity showcases eight up-and-coming visual artists influenced by Afrofuturism, science fiction that explores the experiences and culture of people of color. They're amazingly diverse not just in their sci-fi visions, but the media they use to express them. Painting, comics, illustration, mixed-media collage, even masks-there are endless ways to bring the future to life.

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Sai Kommuru     Utopian and Dystopian Visions of Afrofuturism

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Sai Kommuru     Utopian and Dystopian Visions of Afrofuturism

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"In the early ’90s, academic Mark Dery coined the term Afrofuturism to encompass a wide variety of creative explorations across numerous fields—music, art, film, and literature—over nearly a half-century in black culture" I picked this quote because it embraces all the types of Afrofuturism because mostly people think of books or movies but there is a plethora of different kinds of Afrofuturism.Also on the other hand the article suggests that it may take hold for a brief amount of time or as they say it "unclear of whether it may take permanent hold."So in that case they state that for something to hold, the idea or concept must be extraordinary for people to realize that it is important to have this sub-genre.

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Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images, Sean Carter Photography via U Mich/ Flickr CC.

This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and . Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. On Thursday, Dec. 3, Future Tense will host "Afrofuturism: Imagining the Future of Black Identity" in New York. For more information and to RSVP, visit the New America website.
Afrofuturism pioneers such as jazz musician Sun Ra-who walked around the streets of Chicago with custom-made electric space suits in the 1950s-and science fiction author Octavia Butler wouldn't have used the label Afrofuturism during their lifetimes, because it hadn't been invented yet. It wasn't in common parlance even a decade ago. As World Fantasy Award winner Nnedi Okorafor put it: "My first novel was published in 2005 when I'd never heard the word. Now it's being retroactively labeled. Why?"

In the early '90s, academic Mark Dery coined the term Afrofuturism to encompass a wide variety of creative explorations across numerous fields-music, art, film, and literature-over nearly a half-century in black culture. Afrofuturism is loosely marked by a passion for technology and innovation, as well as mysticism rooted in African-American and African culture. Narratives often feature black protagonists, and the aesthetic can draw upon design elements sourced from the rich traditions of the diaspora. Authors may reach back into the tribal histories of the Igbo, while mingling myths with spaceships or alien invasions.

Afrofuturism-the idea, if not the word-appears to be bubbling up into the mainstream. National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example, is writing an update of the Marvel comic book Black Panther, which was originally created by Stan Lee. Jaden Smith starred alongside his father Will Smith in 2013's After Earth. Neil de Grasse Tyson is the most popular astrophysicist on the planet today. While I write this, I'm drinking an IPA with a black superhero on the label and the fourth Lagos Comicon just wrapped in Nigeria.

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But it's unclear whether Afrofuturism is taking permanent hold or whether science fiction is merely featuring a few additional cast members of color. If, like me, you grew up believing that characters like Lando Calrissian and Princess Leia would soon become commonplace in popular entertainment, you've learned that empowerment across racial, gender, and ethnic lines isn't guaranteed. (For instance, Will Smith was already a bankable star when he made After Earth-which wasn't exactly a roaring success.)There is a bright utopian vision of Afrofuturism, and a much bleaker dystopian possibility of exclusion from mainstream culture once again.

Ytasha Womack, author of the seminal work Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture,is upbeat about the movement. "As people create more works and more spaces to share their work, growth will continue," she said. "Ultimately, creating more intersections of thought and works will create a web of healing and inspiration that anyone can connect to and grow from."

Making the utopian vision come to fruition will require a few things. Lisa Lucas, publisher of the art and politics magazine , and a woman of color, says, "There is this ever-growing, snowballing movement of people who are interested in alternate storytelling forms for writers of color and for readers of color." But she says the movement requires growth outside the creative spotlight, among what she calls "administrators of color." These are the expediters who drive the business decisions surrounding entertainment-the producers, editors, and owners. Administrators of color would look to cultivate new audiences instead of relying on sales metrics that tend to exclude marginalized voices. The notion could be extended to the boardrooms of major publishing houses and studios, neglected spaces for advancing progressive causes.

Afrofuturism will also thrive when writers immerse themselves in technology in their studies or in their work. Speculative fiction can succeed through narrative discipline and intellectual curiosity alone, while sci-fi subgenres like space opera tend to be written by engineers. It helps to know some physics when you're writing about a spaceship that is five kilometers long. Only about 1 percent of engineers at Facebook and Google are black Americans. And this has been my experience working in tech, too-meeting a black employee is like happening upon a crocus peeking through the snowmelt.

A truly transformative Afrofuturism would find creators confronting prejudices within black culture. They would question laws that force LGBTQ writers to flee from Africa, or fight gender discrimination couched under arguments of tradition. It could become a liberation movement of the imagination for all people.

This utopian vision of Afrofuturism is enticing, but it hasn't arrived yet. Right now there are a number of very real challenges for Afrofuturism to overcome in order to take hold in mainstream culture.

In the dystopian vision, no one on the business end of creative industries-the agents, marketers, publishers, producers-takes risks on creators of color. Artists might be forced to revert to addressing explicitly black themes. "We have to write a slave narrative," Lisa Lucas said, "or a story about civil rights, a retelling of Rosa Parks, some kind of better understanding of what it was like in 1960 or 1830, or what it was like on a slave boat."

It's a mistake, too, to think that crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Patreon can solve the problem of structural exclusion. The impressive speculative fiction collection Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction From the Margins of History was created from a Kickstarter campaign. The volunteer-run Tumblr blog We Are Wakanda, which is named for the fictional African kingdom in Marvel's Black Panther series, publishes an incredible volume of content about black comics and science. Founder Lionel Queen recently launched an Indiegogo campaign to develop a new app to support underrepresented creators. It's a great idea, well worth supporting, but an Afrofuturism that relies upon crowdfunding to survive is dystopian. It means there's no sustainable investment.

Afrofuturism also needs to overcome its geographic myopia. Nnedi Okarafor, one of the most prominent science fiction writers working today, said: "My issue with Afrofuturism is that it has traditionally been based and rooted far too much in American culture." She champions what she calls "Africa-based sci-fi." Authors such as Fred Strydom, Lauren Beukes, and Sarah Lotz are writing engaging fiction set on the continent. But it's dangerous to oversimplify this trend. To my knowledge, not a single black sci-fi writer has been published by a major publishing house in Africa, and most writers working in Africa-based sci-fi hail from South Africa or Nigeria-not coincidentally, the largest economies on the continent.

There are other threats to Afrofuturism, too. Safe online spaces could become mired in hate and vitriol. The recent controversy surrounding the Hugo Awards-one of the most prestigious awards for science fiction writing-shows that the "administrators of color" whom Lisa Lucas supports tend to be missing from sci-fi culture. In that distasteful example, white authors attempted to game the voting system to fight against the rise in sci-fi of nontraditional and marginalized voices, such as LGBTQ authors. (They did not succeed.)

In some ways, the new film Star Wars: The Force Awakens exemplifies both the utopian and dystopian visions of Afrofuturism. The film stars the black British actor John Boyega as Finn, reportedly a major character in the storyline. Boyega can inspire the next generation of black sci-fi actors, but none of the credited writers will become a role model for the next generation of black writers-they're all white.

Whether you call it Afrofuturism or another name, creators of color have developed support networks to imagine their own futures, ones in which they have agency, intellect, and purpose. Something special is happening.

"Afrofuturism existed before it was called Afrofuturism," Ytasha Womack says, "and it will always exist. It's a human desire to want to shape your present and future. It's a human desire to embrace the imagination."

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Utopian and Dystopian Visions of Afrofuturism

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This article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University , New America , and . Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. On Thursday, Dec. 3, Future Tense will host "Afrofuturism: Imagining the Future of Black Identity" in New York.

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women deserve to all of the warriors are female which

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The main idea of this article is that Afrofuturism brings out a type of equality by making people of different color and race the focus in sci-fi movies, music, books, ect. The article gives many examples of the way Afrofuturism was used back then in journals and old books as their ideas of the future.

In my opinion in order to advance in society today and in the future we need the physical and cultural as well as gender differences which is what Afrofuturism gives us. If Afrofuturism has been around even before the American Civil War then why haven't seen it more. The American dream states "every US citizen should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and initiative,". Speaking about movies specifically the different colored people who are citizens of America aren't given the chance to succeed in acting for movies even they work hard. By having different races the face of a big movie or book it gives the younger children of that race or color to look up to and want to be.

"AFROFuturism is more than the iconic "I Have a Dream""

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If you bump into someone who claims to be an expert on "AFROFuturism" immediately warp jump into a safer reality. There are as many explanations of AFROFuturism as there are superheroes and villains in Marvel comic's alternative and vastly conflicting universes. The term was coined by a white writer (Mark Dryer, 1993) but aspects of AFROFuturism existed before the American Civil War when Black abolitionists and political radicals dreamt of a better society. The term is popular today because many artistic creators have tired of typical depictions of futures where few nonwhite citizens exist or have positions of power.

People of color are not strangers to the core tenets of AFROFuturism: a world where all people peacefully co-exist and equally enjoy the fruits of science and art. True AFROFuturists don't claim a single path to the future; they embrace a variety of expressions using literature, design, and multimedia as inspiration.

It may be best to start with broad definitions of AFROFuturism and work up to more detailed expositions:

A) AFROFuturism invokes sci-fi writing, music, art, dance and multimedia with people of color as the focus.

B) Black power where Africa rules the world is not the sole objective. Nor is AFROFuturism "race neutral" where skin color doesn't matter to succeed. It is not a bland, homogenous sameness. Speculative creators conceive contrasting elements that work harmoniously to build a stronger "whole" for our prodigy who will see things differently from us.

C) Cultural, intellectual and physical differences are essential to societal advancement today and in the future. A mash of physiology, gender, religious beliefs, age and emotional perspectives are incorporated into novels and short stories with diverse characters in prominent roles in plot development and final reconciliation. Music and dance express fantastic opportunities to free our mind and allow other bodily parts to follow (George Clinton, 1970). AFROFuturism is not new; it has been found in books & short stories, graphic novels & comics, portraits & posters, music, dance, short film & feature length movies for more than a century.

Every journey begins with a single step. To better understand AFROFuturisum, it is necessary to examine the works of the creators. George Schuyler an early architect of AFROFuturism was writing in the 1930s when Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were shooting ray guns at bad guys in weekly movie serials. These were visions of the future for white people living during the Great Depression. Schuyler's publication "Black Empire" offered Black people a scenario where scientists and innovators from Harlem and Africa defeat pre-World War Two Europe and build a hi-tech civilization on the mother continent. Black people flew sophisticated aircraft, made exotic weapons and created a new religion to escape the ravages of racial inequality.

AFROFuturism is more than the iconic "I Have a Dream". AFROFuturism is "ideas" put into action. Speculative creators are also innovators; building new constructs on the ashes of old themes. AFROfuturism as with American Jazz cannot be confined to a single interpretation; it has to be experienced in all its complexities.

-- Stafford Battle is a blogger and AFROFuturist. You can visit his web site "A Jetplane is not a Spaceship" at: www.sbattle.com

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If you bump into someone who claims to be an expert on "AFROFuturism" immediately warp jump into a safer reality. There are as many explanations of AFROFuturism as there are superheroes and villains in Marvel comic's alternative and vastly conflicting universes.

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Ciarra Terrell-Smith: The resurgence of Afrofuturism goes beyond "Black Panther"

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Ciarra Terrell-Smith: The resurgence of Afrofuturism goes beyond "Black Panther"

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Afrofuturism is not just shown on Black Panther, it goes beyond that one movie. It can be seen in many superheroes like Cyborg, Nick Fury, Luke Cage and Sam Wilson. Afrofuturism can be seen in many movies and. Can make many African American seem special "They drained of us our dirt, and all the things that make us special. And then you were lost, and didn't remember anything at all". Afrofuturism shows that not just white people have to be the superhero any race or religion can.

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"Afrofuturism is a social, political, and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors, and other sci fi characters". In my understanding of this, Afrofuturism is genre with normal sci fi characters that are African American and it could fall under social, political, and cultural genres. The term is very unknown to others but for some can be a normal genre. The reason is because the "normal" sci fi character would be white in the stereotypical world. The article gives examples, such as Beyonce as Afrofuturism. This intrigues me because even though Beyonce hasn't been in a sci fi movie or book, her performances and costumes on stage give kinds of Afrofuturistic vibes. The article emphasizes the idea of Afrofuturism taking a big part of fashion and style, which refers back to Beyonce. The article also shows the idea of Egyptian Mythology and other magical practices being Afrofuturistic.

Ytasha L. Womack said,
“With the diversity of the nation and world increasingly standing in stark contrast to the diversity in futuristic works, it’s no surprise that Afrofuturism emerged"

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The Year in Style 2016

Solange Knowles on "Saturday Night Live" in November, flaunting a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids. Credit... Dana Edelson/NBC, via Getty Images

In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil.

A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe. Flanked on the stage by twin columns of attendants, she was a galactic goddess in a white ermine cape.

In November, on "Saturday Night Live," her sister, Solange Knowles, flaunted a sundial-size headdress of crystals and tight-woven braids, looking every inch a regal visitor from distant planet.

Each was in her way a beacon of Afrofuturism, a social, political and cultural genre that projects black space voyagers, warriors and their heroic like into a fantasy landscape, one that has long been the province of their mostly white counterparts.

[See more Year in Style articles]
Familiar to some, exotic to others, the term refers loosely to an unlikely fusion of parts: Egyptian and other non-Western mythologies, mysticism and magical realism with Afrocentricity, modern technology and science fiction. A freighted concept in more ways than one, it gained traction this year, muscling its way into the pop cultural mainstream via the intertwined worlds of entertainment, art and style.

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Rihanna, as an otherworldly warrior queen, in the September issue of W magazine. Credit... Steven Klein; styled by Edward Enninful

In part, Afrofuturism, an aesthetic dating roughly from the 1970s, has taken on a new public face through a new generation of recording artists - Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Janelle Monáe among them - who have given it not only a voice, but also a look. You will likely know it when you see it: a high-shine mash-up of cyborg themes, loosely tribal motifs, android imagery and gleaming metallics that might be appropriate for a voyage to Pluto's outer reaches.

Its latest incarnation seems timely, if not downright inevitable. "With the diversity of the nation and world increasingly standing in stark contrast to the diversity in futuristic works, it's no surprise that Afrofuturism emerged," writes Ytasha L. Womack, who chronicled and popularized the evolution of the genre in her 2013 book, " Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture."

"But when, even in the imaginary future," she goes on, "people can't fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down."

The internet has lent the movement a force unknown in previous incarnations. A visual metaphor for empowerment on sites like the Afrofuturist Affair and influential Instagram accounts like Inkrayable_girafe, it permits black men and women to take charge of their image. Today, Ms. Womack writes, "a fledgling filmmaker can shoot his sci-fi web series on a $500 DV cam, post it on YouTube, and promote it on Instagram and Twitter."

Lina Iris Viktor, a British-Liberian artist in New York who paints queenly self-portraits with a futuristic edge, picked up the thread. "The internet democratized the playing field," she said. "Now the voices you hear are authentically ours. Instead of everybody else telling you stories, explaining to you what our work is about, we are telling you what it's about."

An Afrofuturist narrative is embedded as well in a recent flurry of museum shows. On view through November at El Museo del Barrio were the fashion illustrations of Antonio Lopez, a pioneer in the genre whose works of the '70s and '80s featured a multiracial cast of robotlike figures and astronauts propelled into a far-off Tomorrowland. It is a brave new world, as a review in The New York Times noted in June, "in which race and gender were fluid, and existing social inequities corrected or transcended."

Afrofuturism is a current in the multimedia installations of the artist Saya Woolfalk, whose utopian universes and Empathics, a future race fusing - and all but erasing - racial and ethnic boundaries, were featured this year in shows at the Brooklyn Museum, a light show in Times Square and, just this month, an installation at Art Basel Miami Beach.

Afrofuturist allusions crop up less overtly in the sprawling canvases of Kerry James Marshall, whose exhibition at the Met Breuer, through Jan. 29, includes idealized portraits of African-American Boy and Girl Scouts wreathed in halos of the kind often seen on comic-book heroes.

This summer, the movement flexed its muscle at the megaplex, where "Captain America: Civil War" featured the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), a superhero who in 2018 will star in "Black Panther" as the king and protector of the imaginary nation of Wakanda.

Afrofuturism's resurgence could not be more timely, arriving as it does in a climate perceived as indifferent, if not downright inimical, to racial and ethnic minorities. In her book, Ms. Womack recalls a time when black or brown sci-fi characters were all but invisible in the culture at large. As a girl, she would fantasize that she was Princess Leia of "Star Wars."

"While it was fun to be the chick from outer space in my imagination," Ms. Womack writes, "the quest to see myself or browner people in this space age, galactic epic was important to me." It was in the absence of minorities from pop lore, she goes on, "that seeds were planted in the imaginations of countless black kids who yearned to see themselves in warp-speed spaceship too."

Count among them Tim Fielder, a New York graphic artist and animator whose sci-fi illustrations, produced over a 30-year span, drew visitors last spring to " Black Metropolis," at the Gallatin Galleries at New York University. Mr. Fielder's pioneering cartoon narratives - notably those of " Matty's Rocket," his spirited black female cosmonaut, who will lift off next year in graphic novel form - are particularly relevant now, he maintained: "They let young artists know that they're not on dangerous turf, that someone has gone there before them."

Afrofuturism's epic imagery offers youth a mirror, Mr. Fielder said. "These kids are able now to see themselves in environments that are expansive, both technologically and in terms of social mores and gender," he said.

They also see themselves newly reflected in the comic books that remain a potent form of Afrofuturist expression. Last spring, the Black Panther, lately of "Captain America," was resurrected by Marvel as the noble protagonist of his own comic book series, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of "Between the World and Me." And this year, Riri Williams, an Afro-coiffured teenage superheroine with an M.I.T. degree, will slip into the fabled power suit in the "Iron Man" comic series.

Such vanguard characters can trace their genesis to early champions of Afrofuturism, paramount among them Sun Ra, the jazz composer, poet and philosopher who incorporated sci-fi themes into his music and his seminal film, "Space Is the Place," a mid-1970s tale of interplanetary time travel.

Afrofuturism owes as important a debt to the writer Octavia Butler, whose 1979 best-seller, "Kindred," posits an alternate reality in which an African-American heroine is transported from mid-70s Los Angeles to early 19th-century Maryland. It owes a debt as well to the music of George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic, with their prophetic lyrics in "Mothership Connection":

Time to move on

Light years in time

Ahead of our time.

Afrofuturist themes were revisited in the '90s, but still as a genre without a name until the cultural critic Mark Dery formally christened it in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future," after which it flourished for a time before retreating to the shadows.

Now the movement has returned in force, beamed down to the concert stage. Last month, the '70s disco diva Grace Jones, Afrofuturism's flat-topped mascot, toured in the British Isles, her stage persona, covered head-to-toe in tribal paint and feathers, a reprise of her hula-hoop-twirling performance at the Afropunk Fest in Brooklyn last year.

On a broadcast of "The Tonight Show" in February, the singer FKA Twigs seemed to alight from the clouds swathed in a incandescent white. Her costume, a-shimmer in crystals, was created with Grace Wales Bonner, a London designer whose work in the past has been rife with Afrofuturist allusions.

In her "Lemonade" album, released in April, Beyoncé reigns in an all-female utopia, leading a phalanx of women in ethereal white dresses that simultaneously conjure ancient and space-age societies.

The style world, too, has now embraced the movement, if only, perhaps, to reinforce its stature as an arbiter of cool. For the W September cover and 18-page editorial feature shot by Steven Klein, Rihanna's over-the-top costumes were cobbled from scratch.

"She's a one-off, a queen," said Edward Enninful, the magazine's fashion and style director. "A queen does not wear clothes off the runways." Instead she wears an otherworldly pastiche of vanguard creations by Gareth Pugh, Prada, Proenza Schouler and others, clothes conceived, Mr. Enninful said, to emphasize Rihanna's majestic persona.

"It's a look that many young black females out there haven't seen before," he said.

Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy was among the first to integrate Afrofuturist imagery into his runway shows. Two years earlier, he signed Ms. Badu as the fierce-looking face of the brand. Mr. Tisci followed up repeatedly, most recently with a fall 2016 line replete with cosmological symbols, including that familiar Afrofuturist talisman, the Egyptian Eye of Horus.

Calvin Klein released a fall advertising campaign starring the rapper Young Thug, dressed in flares and a fitted pinstripe chasuble, its neckline embellished with an astral-looking orb. A recent campaign from Chanel featured Willow Smith festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

The singer Willow Smith in a Chanel campaign, festooned in Afrofuturistic jewels.

Others are advancing this high-concept aesthetic in more subtle ways, thrusting aside clichés as they go. "Afrofuturism has to become something more than just an idea of black people in shiny metallic clothing," said Michelle Busayo Olupona, the Nigerian-American designer behind Busayo NYC, a label incorporating Afrofuturist themes in a stripped-down, abstract way. "In my own work, I try to create an aesthetic and style evocative of the past but very much grounded in the now."

Ms. Olupona said her abstract, Afrocentric designs, some incorporating fantasy fauna and futurist imagery, "suggest ways in which we can differentiate ourselves."

"What they say about the future," she continued, "is that we're always going to be here."

Another showcase for contemporary, less literal interpretations of Afrofuturism is 9J, a boutique and gallery recently sprung up on Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx. It aims to usher in the movement's next wave, with items like a ribbed trunk-neck sweater worthy of "Star Wars," created by a local designer Jesenia Lopez; gravity-defying Birkenstock platforms covered in feathers and Swarovski "gems"; and an outsize headdress of spiraling silver wire. These pieces mingle technology, fantasy and Afrocentric themes with a streamlined progressive-looking opulence.

The shop's owner, Jerome LaMaar, whose line, 5:31 Jérôme, has drawn high-visibility clients like Beyoncé and the model Hailey Baldwin, wore fur-rimmed virtual-reality goggles the other week while presiding at the opening of Africollision, an installation at 9J that eschewed the space-is-the-place hallmarks of old school Afrofuturism.

"We want to play with the idea of what is tribe, what is Africa, what is the future, and mix it all up without being predictable." Mr. LaMaar insisted. "Who wants to see what's already been done?"

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The Year in Style 2016 In the September issue of W magazine, Rihanna was cast as Tomorrow, an otherworldly warrior queen and champion of the downtrodden, resplendent in diamonds and foil. A month earlier, at the MTV Video Music Awards, Beyoncé projected a similarly astral vibe.

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"Exploring Afrofuturism in Film, Where Sci-Fi and Mythology Blur"

Afrofuturism has been around since 1993, although many people don’t know what it is. Recently, there has been a new interest in it, with the release of marvel's, Black Panther. Black Panther was an incredibly successful movie and incorporated many interesting ideas including Afrofuturism. This article talks about a few other movies involving Afrofuturism. In the article it states, “T’Challa, also known as the Black Panther, the title character of the blockbuster movie, wasn’t the first person to land a spaceship (or something like it) in downtown Oakland, Calif” One of the movies this article mentions is called “Space Is the Place” which was made in 1973.

“Space is the Place” partly takes place in Oakland, which is mentioned in Black Panther as the place for the technical exchange. The article also states that “Afrofuturism is more prominent in music and the graphic arts than it is in cinema” This surprised me because I would think that Afrofuturism is more prominent in movies but with things like Beyonce album Lemonade and the broadway musical Hamilton I understand how music could be more prominent in music.

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"Space Is the Place," which can be viewed in its 81-minute cut on YouTube (a 61-minute cut, which omits some odd sexploitation-movie elements, had been available to stream on the arts site UbuWeb, but the video link would not respond when I checked) was conceived as a concert picture by John Coney, a PBS director, but Sun Ra had something different in mind when he wrote the narrative film with Joshua Smith; it begins with the Sun Ra Arkestra chanting "It's after the end of the world."

The movie time-travels back to the 1940s, and Sun Ra's origins as a boogie-woogie and stride piano player. It allegorically pits the enlightened orchestra leader against a Machiavellian "Overseer;" the two play cards in an obscure battle for black humanity.

The crux of Sun Ra's philosophy emerges in a scene in which he and his emissaries, dressed in garb that evokes both sci-fi and ancient Egypt, confront a group of skeptical teenagers in an Oakland youth center. "I do not come to you as a reality, but as a myth," he says. "Because that's what black people are. Myths. I am a dream that the black man dreams long ago. I'm actually a present sent to you by your ancestors."

The use of the present tense in describing a black man who "dreams long ago" is no accident. In Afrofuturism, time is frequently looped. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, a musical collective affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (a group that tended to distance itself from Sun Ra because of differences in praxis) made its motto "Great Black Music: Ancient to Future." In the Wakanda of "Black Panther," incredible medical and construction technology exists hand in hand with ancient practices like the "Challenge Day" battle ritual shown early in the movie.

Similarly, although it deals exclusively with a circa-13th-century African myth, "Yeelen," or "Brightness," a 1987 film directed by Souleymane Cissé, can be considered in the context of Afrofuturism, particularly because Mr. Cissé, a director from Mali, approaches it like a narrative documentary. The movie, available to stream on Kanopy, follows a young mage on a journey to confront his power-mad father. A man-hyena speaking from a treetop is treated matter-of-factly, rather than as a mystical or mystifying occurrence. Mr. Cissé's languid but mindful pacing and his indifference to Western film language conventions on space and time transitions also contribute to the movie's distinction.

More radical still is "Touki Bouki," a 1973 road movie of sorts directed by the Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, which is available for streaming on the Criterion Channel of FilmStruck. Mory (Magaye Niang), a cattle herder (trigger warning: the movie opens with some very graphic slaughterhouse footage) rides a motorbike with a bull's horns attached to its handlebars; he's aiming to leave Africa for France and enlists the lithe, enigmatic Anta (Mareme Niang) to join him.

Egged on by the Josephine Baker song "Paris Paris," they go in search of money and find mostly trouble. In one scene, in a tricked-out car, Mory is driven down a deserted road, declaiming his greatness; Mambéty cuts to scenes of crowds on a different road, seemingly cheering him on; these two lines of footage eventually converge. The movie is replete with such purposeful disjointedness, the better to articulate space-time dissociations. (And the movie's influence continues to resonate. Earlier this week, to announce their joint tour, Jay-Z and Beyoncé posted on Instagram an image paying direct homage to "Touki Bouki": a shot of the couple seated on a motorcycle with a horned animal skull mounted on its handlebars.)

"Yeelen" and "Touki Bouki" are both arguably art films, but Afrofuturism doesn't adhere to genre hierarchies. If it did, you wouldn't be able to discuss it in the context of a superhero movie based on a comic book. Afrofuturism is equally at home with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Parliament-Funkadelic.

In his essay, Mr. Dery also examined the works of African-American science-fiction writers like Samuel R. Delany. On Fandor, there's a good documentary film about him, "The Polymath: Or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman." Mr. Delany has a fascinating life story and a truly radical philosophy of life that reverberates through his books. Being an African-American gay man, he says, imposes on him a responsibility to live his life "as if the world worked differently." Subsequently, he notes, to read his works "you have to inhabit the world I live in."

The film, directed by Fred Barney Taylor, presents central points in Mr. Delany's life out of linear order, as if the movie itself were unstuck in time. One of Mr. Delany's key works, his 1975 novel, "Dhalgren," is an after-the-end-of-the-world epic that's also reflective of the sexually exuberant pre-AIDS New York underground Mr. Delany inhabited at the time.

"He's a philosophical, confessional and fictional genius," the author Jonathan Lethem says of Mr. Delany in the movie. One tidbit in the documentary brings us back around to the medium in which "Black Panther" originated: In the 1970s Mr. Delany was the writer for two issues of the DC comic "Wonder Woman."

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Exploring Afrofuturism in Film, Where Sci-Fi and Mythology Blur

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" Space Is the Place," which can be viewed in its 81-minute cut on YouTube (a 61-minute cut, which omits some odd sexploitation-movie elements, had been available to stream on the arts site UbuWeb, but the video link would not respond when I checked) was conceived as a concert picture by John Coney, a PBS director, but Sun Ra had something different in mind when he wrote the narrative film with Joshua Smith; it begins with the Sun Ra Arkestra chanting "It's after the end of the world."

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I learned that Afrofuturism is away of adding to the science fiction stories and movies with historical problems with diversity,challenges  in  africans.Which help celebrates the black culture. Afrofuturism can help bring details to the story that a white person can’t experience that a black person could. “Black to the future ”-Mary Dery the quote help the definition come to life because Afrofuturism bring future elements and believes with black figures.

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm. We're hearing the word "Afrofuturism" a lot.

But what exactly is Afrofuturism?

Afrofuturism is the reimagining of a future filled with arts, science and technology seen through a black lens. The term was conceived a quarter-century ago by white author Mark Dery in his essay " Black to the Future," which looks at speculative fiction within the African diaspora. The essay rests on a series of interviews with black content creators.

Dery laid out the questions driving the philosophy of Afrofuturism:

Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn't the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, streamliners, and set designers ― white to a man ― who have engineered our collective fantasies?

What makes Afrofuturism significantly different from standard science fiction is that it's steeped in ancient African traditions and black identity. A narrative that simply features a black character in a futuristic world is not enough. To be Afrofuturism, it must be rooted in and unapologetically celebrate the uniqueness and innovation of black culture.

The biggest proponent of this cultural movement, even before it had its name, was musician Sun Ra, who infused elements of space and jazz fusion in his work as a musical artist. Prolific science fiction author Octavia E. Butler explored black women protagonists in novels like Fledging, Dawn, Parable of the Sower and Lilith's Brood, set in the context of futuristic technology and interactions with the supernatural. In the contemporary music world, singers like Erykah Badu, with her eccentric and experimental imagery in videos and album covers, promote the intersection of art and futurism. Artists like Janelle Monae, with her android alter-ego and electronica sounds, and films like " Brown Girl Begins," a post-apocalyptic tale set in 2049 and directed by Sharon Lewis, pay a huge homage to Afrofuturism.

Then there's "Black Panther." The film wears themes of Afrofuturism proudly on its sleeve. Tech genius Princess Shuri is not only the smartest person in the fictional world, but she's responsible for the creation and maintenance of sophisticated gadgets for her brother T'Challa, a.k.a. Black Panther.

A prosperous alternative afro future can be seen in their fictional East African home of Wakanda, a small country the size of New Jersey that has never been colonized and is steeped in its blackness. It's a utopian society that also boasts one of the world's richest resources, vibranium. Because white supremacy never intruded on Wakandan culture and its people, ancient African traditions remain common practice there.

But this movie is more than just a glorious film ― it's the expression of a movement.

Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

Africans and African-Americans have full autonomy as Afrofuturists. A community of people can take a piece of visual art or notes from a song and develop an entire universe and say, "This is ours." And that's what this film represents to so many excited fans. Black Panther is a superhero who is for us by us. We can claim him.

In addition to the predominantly black cast filled with Hollywood stars and starlets, "Black Panther" also had a black production team spearheading the shaping of this story. The writer, filmmaker and executive producer are African-American. Production designer Hannah Beachler, who was influenced by Afrofuturistic architecture and Afropunk aesthetics, helped lay the groundwork for this world. The African regalia and elaborate costumes by famed wardrobe designer Ruth E. Carter created a Wakandan couture that would give New York Fashion Week a run for its money ― just look at her use of kimoyo beads as both a fashion accessory and a communication device.

This intersection of sci-fi and African pride is what we've come to know as Afrofuturism. For many of us in the blerd community, the film with its love for technology, science, visual art and music (if you haven't checked out the "Black Panther" album, you should make it a priority) is what we've been hungry for.

I hope, for all of our sakes, that this is also just the beginning. I hope that "Black Panther" can prove that stories permeated in blackness have crossover appeal. I hope we get more and more stories of black people who have agency, who are free and subservient to no one. Black people deserve to see themselves leading the way in real or abstract futures.
Jamie Broadnax is the editor-in-chief and creator of the online community for black women called Black Girl Nerds.

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Opinion | What The Heck Is Afrofuturism?

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Many of us blerds (black nerds, to you) who have read the Black Panther comics never thought the day would come when we would finally see this story adapted for the big screen. With the movie's already profound effect on pop culture, it is provoking deeper discussions around reimagined worlds with black politicians, spiritual leaders and monarchs at the helm.