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Contents
Introduction
Race and class
Theoretical
Approach
Mark Dery : Black to the Future
Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic
Kodwo Eshun: More Brilliant than the Sun
Practical
Approach
Jazz & Funk: Sun Ra and George Clinton
Hip Hop: From Afrika Bambaataa to the Electronic
Black Market
Techno: Black Secret Technology
Sources
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Introduction: the slave, the robot and the alien
Afro-Futurism is a term recently used to refer to a specific -
mostly urban and black - subculture that evolved around dance music,
science fiction and diaspora and is strongly interwoven with other
youth cultures such as hip hop and techno culture.
To cover the cultural background of Afro-Futurism, let's go
back in time, and start in New York of the 1920s and 1930s with Harlem
Renaissance's jazz and blues clubs and W.E.B. Du Bois announcing the
"twoness" and "double consciousness" of Black Folks.
African-American urban art and club culture began to flourish. In the
1940s and 1950s the clubs played Bebop and Norman Mailer added the
"white negro" to the black hipster. After 1960s' soul, in the 1970s
disco, the forerunner of black electronic music, emerges in the night
club scene, the crowd being mostly black and queer, representing a
widely marginalized segment of the population. With 1980s' and 1990s'
hip hop jams and techno raves black electronic music has gained an
outstanding position within youth and club culture. Protagonists of the
scene have always been mostly underclass suburban (male) blacks. As
Quincy Jones put it: "Hip Hop is in many ways the same as Bebop,
because it was renegade-type music. It came from a disenfranchised
sub-culture that got thrown out of the way. They said, 'We'll make up
our own life. We'll have our own language.'"1)
The extensive use of synthesizers and rhythm machines has
technofied both music und thinking. As Detroit's techno artist Mike
Banks points out: "[B]asically we're expressing ourselves using the
instruments available at this particular time in space. Chuck Berry,
Little Richard, Miles Davis and George Clinton expressed themselves
with the instruments they had available in that time frame. [...] This
music is an extension of all that soul."2)
"That soul" is eager to write the "neglected history" anew
using images of science fiction iconology: the robot as an image for
the modern slave; and that of the alien twofold as being from another
place and as the abductor. In Black to the Future Mark Dery
formulates: "African-Americans, in a very real sense, are descendants
of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but
no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their
movements; official histories undo what has been done and technology is
too often brought to bear on black bodies."3) The
connection between Black Electronic Music and Black Science Fiction is
the experience that Apocalypse had already happened; "Black SF writers
- Samual Delany, Octavia Butler - write about worlds after catastrophic
disaster; about modalities of identity without hope of resolution,
where race and nation and neighbourhood and family are none of them
enough to aviate betrayal."4)
And so, Paul Gilroy stresses that the primary aim of protagonists of
the African-American cultural community shifted from anti-rassistic to
anti-elitistic education as rassism has been "successfully undermined",
but up to now far more African-Americans than European-Americans form
the lower class in the USA.
The writers and musicians introduced on this site share the
attitude that the deterior social status of African-Americans is
directly influenced by the lack of understanding and respect for their
culture and history.
1) quoted in Gilroy
108
2) Wraight 23
3) Dery
4) Sinker
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