What is Afrofuturism?
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In February 2018, Marvel's Black Panther broke box-office records and elevated the phrase AfroFuturism to the forefront of the American lexicon.

But AfroFuturism is a practice that goes far beyond the aesthetic of black people donning cool science-fiction-y costumes. It is a genre of speculative fiction that highlights what regular science fiction can't and won't.

There is a glaring exclusion of black people from works of science fiction and an immense amount of real world problems that black people must face on a consistent basis. As such, one might think that black people would shy away from speculative fiction and instead opt to focus on the present.

AfroFuturism is an artform, practice and methodology that allows black people to see themselves in future despite a distressing past and present.

It calls upon sci-fi imagery and futuristic ideas to reflect upon the marginalization of black people. Practitioners conceptualize an array of visions of what a black future could look like.

But what does that look like? We identified four unique AfroFuturist artists, who have used their work to imagine black life beyond its current state of global oppression.

A 500 year history of colonialism, slavery, racism, and segregation have left people of the African Diaspora with a disjointed idea of what it really means to be at home.

Visual Artist and Hip-Hop MC, Jessica Valoris uses speculative fiction and science fiction tropes to encourage people of the African Diaspora to "Phone Home."

In her play "Enough Vo5 for the Universe" Melanie Goodreaux depicts a world 100 years into the future where God is a gender non binary black person.

It is a vision of the future that celebrates black queer lives in spite of present day queer and transantagonism. A toxic soup of poverty, misogyny, anti-blackness, and transphobia leave black Transgender women and femmes at an exorbitantly high risk for being murdered.

Black people are often caught in the ironic crosshairs of being hyper visible and invisible. Black women for example are often hypersexualized, leaving them at a greater risk for sexual assault and violence. Yet they have also been largely left out of conversations around sexual violence even following the rise of 2017's MeToo movement.

Black people have been engaging in Afrofuturism well before the term was coined in 1994. As long as the state of the black future is in jeopardy folks of the African diaspora will continue to imagine expansive ideas of black life in the past, present, and beyond.

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