Afro-Futurism

(1947-2006)

• Born and raised in segregated Pasadena, California by her mother and maternal grandmother since, unfortunately, her father died when she was young.

• Butler worked a series of odd jobs until she could support herself with writing.

• She established a successful career, in which many of her successors suggest she established the groundwork for what would become Afro-Futurism, where she imagined futures (largely dystopian) where Black people existed as models of resistance and resilience.

• Unfortunately, Butler died a suspicious death outside of her home, either from a stroke, or head trauma caused by a fall

Xenogenesis series

-Dawn

-Adulthood Rites

- Imago

-Xenogenesis

-Lilith's Brood

Standalone novels

-Kindred

-Fledgling

Patternist series

-Patternmaster

- Mind of My Mind

-Survivor

- Wild Seed

- Clay's Ark

- Seed to Harvest

Parable series

- Parable of the Sower

- Parable of the Talents

• Womack is a renowned author, journalist, filmmaker, and dance therapist.

• Her 2013 text, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture, is a primer to the genre and explores its foundations as well as its capacities for changing how science/speculative fiction is consumed, as well as how Black cultures have contrubuted and continue to inform speculative genres.

• Her collaborations with visual artist and scholar John I. Jennings are also notable as he has done the cover art for many of her books.

• Jennings is a standalone champion of Afro-futurism and has converted Butler's novel, Kindred, into a graphic novel.

-Rayla 2213 (2016)

-Post Black: How a New Generation

is Refining African American

Identity (2010)

-Beats, Rhymes and Life: What We Love & Hate About Hip Hop (2007)

John I. Jennings

• Walida Imarisha contributes to the proliferation of the study and practice of Afro-futurism through her anthology, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements (2015)

• The book is co-edited with Adrienne Maree Brown, who is an activist, doula, and whose writings are inspired by Octavia Butler

• Imarisha has taught at Stanford, Portland State, Oregon State, and Pacific Northwest College in varying departments including Black Studies, Women's Gender & Sexuality Studies, Writing & Rhetoric, and Creative writing

Adrienne Maree Brown

"In his 1993 essay “Black to the Future,” cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term Afrofuturism to describe the cross-cultural philosophy of artists, musicians, and writers who drew on the techno-utopian thinking of the space age to reimagine Black life in the United States. Equally indebted to mythologies of the African Diaspora, Afrofuturism is not an artistic style but an approach to the intersections of race and technology that aims to visualize the future." Artsy.net

"Afrofuturism refers to a flourishing contemporary movement of African American, African, and Black diasporic writers, artists, musicians, and theorists. Afrofuturism comprises cultural production and scholarly thought—literature, visual art, photography, film, multimedia art, performance art, music, and theory—that imagine greater justice and a freer expression of black subjectivity in the future or in alternative places, times, or realities. " OxfordBibliographies.com

Thinking Through It

1. Given Pumzi's dystopian setting, how does it help us think through issues of evolution and devolution?

2. Memory and its suppresion are key themes in the film. How do you think it contributes to the human capacity for positive/negative change?

3. Genetic memory (is a memory present at birth that exists in the absence of sensory experience, and is incorporated into the genome over long spans of time). How does what we know about genetics in plants and animals inform how Asha interacts with technology and nature?

"black people come from a big spacious place, under a great big sky. this little country here, we have to fight for any inches we get. but the water has always helped us get free one way or another." (23)

"your river? man, detroit is in that river. the whole river and the parts of the river. certain parts, its like a ancestral burying ground. its like a holy vortex of energy." (25)

"but it could harden her heart a little each day, to see people showing up all the time with jobs, or making new work for themselves and their friends, while folks born and raised here couldn't make a living, couldn't get investors for business. she heard entrepreneurs on the news speak of detroit as this exciting new blank canvas. she wondered if the new folks just couldn't see all the people there, the signs everywhere that there was history and there was a people still living all over that canvas." (26)