Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text

by Alondra Nelson (Editor), Ron Eglash (Contributor), Anna Everett (Contributor)

Challenging mainstream technocultural assumptions of a raceless future, Afrofuturism explores culturally distinct approaches to technology. This special issue addresses the intersection between African diasporic culture and technology through literature, poetry, science fiction and speculative fiction, music, visual art, and the Internet and maintains that racial identity fundamentally influences technocultural practices.
The collection includes a reflection on the ideologies of race created by cultural critics in their analyses of change wrought by the information age; an interview with Nalo Hopkinson, the award-winning novelist and author of speculative fiction novels Midnight Robber and Brown Girl in the Ring, who fuses futuristic thinking with Caribbean traditions; an essay on how contemporary R&B music presents African American reflections on the technologies of everyday life; and an article examining early interventions by the black community to carve out a distinct niche in cyberspace.

Contributors. Ron Eglash, Anna Everett, Tana Hargest, Nalo Hopkinson, Tracie Morris, Alondra Nelson, Kalí Tal, Fatimah Tuggar, Alexander G. Weheliye
Alondra Nelson is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies Program at New York University and is the Ann Plato Fellow at Trinity College. She will begin teaching in the African American Studies and Sociology Departments at Yale University in the fall of 2002.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory, Ebooks

156 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Alondra Nelson is professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she has served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science and director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Before arriving at Columbia, she was on the faculty of Yale University and received the Poorvu Award for interdisciplinary teaching excellence.

She is the author or editor of four books, including Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, for which she was recognized with the Mirra Komarovsky award as well as several other prizes. Her most recent book is The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome. She is also an editor of Genetics and the Unsettled Past The Collision of DNA Race and History; Technicolor: Race Technology and Everyday Life; and "Afrofuturism" (a special issue of Social Text).

Her essays, reviews, and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Science, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. For more information, please see www.alondranelson.com. You can follow Alondra on Twitter.

Reviews

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over my years as a college student, I have read from many journals, but I have never read from a physical copy cover-to-cover. Although I agree with the sentiment that there should be a modern response to this text, as it is Afrofuturism is fascinating. From Alondra Nelson's meditation upon what constitutes Afrofuturism, Kalì Tal's investigation of blacks science fiction's invisible legacy, Ron Eglash's analysis of black nerd identity, and more, this slim volume contains a hidden narrative that illuminates the flaws in the traditional history and a model for an alternative future where colorblindness is not the answer to sociological disparity.

[Derrick Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been over a decade since this book was published, and the rapid pace of technological change has shown this book no mercy. The essays do a great job of situating the black digital presence into various theoretical frameworks. But just like the digital communities/cultures they describe, the frameworks are nascent --bordering on speculative. It's a credit to their richness that I wish a sequel were published today, which take into account social networks and the unforeseen ubiquity (but not universality, yet) of Internet access among people of color.