Recursive futurities

@FINOkoye | @AfroFutures_UK

Getting the future right is big business and ultimately business is a question of intent, of design.

Source: Queen MuXubo da Solar Buccaneer by Quentin VerCetty

Afrofuturism is a literary and cultural aesthetic that uses the tropes of science fiction, as well as references to African and non-Western mythology, as a means to confront and analyze the present-day issues faced by people of color.

- PATRICK SISSON, Space is the Place: The Architecture of Afrofuturism
Source: There are Black People in the Future by Alisha B Wormsley

Many of us are children of imperialism and colonialism and we do not have the luxury of vast archives and documentation about our ancestors. Reclaiming the colonial past is a radical act - in order to transform the present and future...

- DIANE MORGAN, Why Afrofuturism?

"...[AfroFuturism is] a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afro- diasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken...."

--Kodwo Eshun, Further Considerations on AfroFuturism

1. Their presence reveals the trajectories which brought the community to its current point.

2. They remind the community that the futures are both built up from and exist simultaneously with their presents.

3. They speculate futurities where the community can exist at its best.

"...The idea of being a critical engineer is to intervene at this point and say "No! Stop!".

 

We need to reflect on what we are working with and how what we depend upon is shaping us."

-- Julian Oliver, 'Feedback, White noise and glitches: cyberspace strikes back'

1. To explicitly understand it as a revelatory act which is never truly complete but whose cycles are marked by the user, not solely by enterprise;

2. To explicitly understand it as born of the community, as well as the individual.