Afrofuturism: Past, Present, & Future

More than eighty-five years ago, The Black Girl Passes, written by G. Stewart, stated that, “dark skinned females are regulated to the rear economically and shunned socially” (Steward, 103). It would seem that the social economic categorization from high to low are: wh...

Africans that were brought to the United States, were stripped of their cultural identity and forced to start anew in an alien world of unfamiliarity. Dating back to, “for more than two centuries, African slaves in the United States were effectively forbidden to cultur...

Allow me to speak on something that is Afrocentric, yet not Afrofuturism.

In recent years, many African American women have started to understand that most of America still adheres to the ideas of Eurocentric beauty ideals. The beauty ideals range from fair skin, to str...

There is a clear struggle for African American representation in film, but it goes deeper than simply hiring and casting these actors in the roles. There must be a change in regards to how these actors are cast into stereotypical roles that are deleterious to the Afric...

The story of the Avatar film takes place in the year of 2154 on a jungle-like planet named Pandora. Humanity has sought to colonize the planet due to Earth having been depleted of its natural resources. In the film the alien species are called the Na’vi and are nine-fo...

Within the Star Wars universe ranging from 1977 to present, there seems to be the idea that the planets that are primarily inhabited by a single race are Utopias. Each planet that was inhabited by several species and races, were the ones that most of the fighting occur...

The film The Matrix directed by the Wachowski siblings in 1999, shows a post-apocalyptic world. This fictional human civilization is being destroyed by a computer system known as the Matrix. This destruction is done in a smoke and mirrors type of way, being that the hu...

 Many Science Fiction films can now be linked to Afrofuturism in one way or another. Having an African American character that is represented within the film can be interpreted in many ways. In the past, African American actors were used as parts of the scenery, stereo...

 Later in 1967, through another Science Fiction text, the Euro-American author Harlan Ellison approaches the ideas of gender and race in his short story, “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”. One important change is there is are characters of different races within this...

 Pilgrims through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction, written by James Bailey in 1947, is noted as one of the first to study Science Fiction academically. He stated that, "a piece of scientific fiction is a narrative of an imaginary i...