Rossbach 1

Futures Past and Cyborg Chronicles:

Afrofuturism and W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Steel Princess”

By Nora Rossbach

Within the range of W. E. B. Du Bois’s prolific writing, his novels are often relegated to

a lower register of political and social thought than his non-fictional historical books, essays, and

articles. Indeed, his first novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) has been criticized for its

“Victorian diction and sometimes purple prose,” while The Dark Princess (1928) is described in

as “another odd work” and a “somewhat messy novel” (Gates, Jr. 2006, xx-xxi). In Homi

Bhabha’s introduction to Du Bois’s novel Dark Princess (2007), Bhabha admits that “the novel

does not smoothly work its way across its various locations and diverse plots. There is often a

kind of wooden compartmentalization of themes. . . that reveals the narrative machinery as it

lurches from one section to another. . .The seams that suture. . . are all too visible” (xxix). Du

Bois’s fiction is, of course, remarkable for its strange inconsistency of pacing and the abrupt

shifts between fantastical and realistic elements of the narrative, seemingly without purpose. Yet,

Bhabha explains, “there is a method in this messiness: a larger philosophical purpose that is

revealed in the way these geopolitical locations abut one another, while their corresponding

ideological and aesthetic genres are placed adjacent to each other. Such a fictional mode of side-

by-side representation articulates an ethical and aesthetic principle that Du Bois describes as the

‘rule of juxtaposition’” (2007, xxix). The tactical use of the rule of juxtaposition, which often

sets a present world of oppression and inequality against a parallel vision of a better world, is

present throughout Du Bois’s fiction. It is deployed to uncover the discontinuities and obscured

realities of an imperial world order which depends upon the racial logics of Black inferiority and

white superiority at the same time that it claims belief in equality and free competition. The rule

of juxtaposition, as a literary technique, infuses Du Bois’s fiction with an overtly political

 Rossbach 2

agenda—another quality for which his novels and short stories have been maligned. In “Criteria

of Negro Art” ([1926] 1986), Du Bois openly declares that “all art is propaganda and ever must

be, despite the wailing of the purists” (1000). Du Bois’s fiction, it seems, was in fact intended to

convey a political message and to convey certain social and racial dispositions. It is curious,

then—given the enthusiastic scholarly engagement with Du Bois’s non-fiction regarding politics,

sociology, and race relations—that there has been relatively little engagement with his stories

and novels as works engaging in political thought.

It has lately become clear to many that Du Bois’s fiction provide illuminating access to

his thought process and the development of concepts and ideas. Scholars have begun

“excavating,” among them Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert (2015), to investigate “how Du

Bois used fiction to test out and amplify his developing philosophical and sociological positions

over the many decades of his career” (819). The rule of juxtaposition provided Du Bois with a

tool for rendering conflicting and countervailing planes of experience on a shared spatio-

temporal stage to set in opposition various explanations and visions of social and political

realities. In his literary works, Du Bois experiments, problematizing and synthesizing his own

philosophical standpoint on the relationship between political economy and the “race concept

which dominated [his] life” (Du Bois [1940] 1986, 651). Using speculative fiction, Du Bois was

able to reconsider the history of the color line, colonialism, and race theory as they manifested in

the uniquely racialized life-worlds of America in the early twentieth century, investigating their

interrelations to international world through financial globalization and imperialism.

Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert’s recent recovery of Du Bois’s unpublished short story

“The Princess Steel” ([1910] 2015) provides a new and particularly potent example of the

experimental juxtapositions in Du Bois’s speculative fiction. Written some time between 1908-
 Rossbach 3

1910 (Brown and Rusert 2015), “The Princess Steel” bears the seeds early incarnations of

historical reinterpretations and political visions that Du Bois would later take up in more

objective language in “Marxism and the Negro Problem” (1933), “A Negro Nation Within a

Nation” (1935), and Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Yet, what is unique about “The

Princess Steel” is its narrative engagement with science and technology as the primary method of

reclaiming lost knowledge and rearranging social and political imaginaries. Professor Hannibal

Johnson (a Black sociologist), uses his invention “the megascope” to study what he calls “the

Great Near,” or the realities which are simultaneously so near and powerful that they are usually

imperceptible. When the (white) narrator submits to a demonstration of Johnson’s megascope, he

is confronted with a vision of the steel industry centered around Pittsburgh in mythical

proportion and rendition. Using his scientific and technological innovations, Professor Johnson

can transmit a rich and complex picture of racialized capitalist domination across the color-line,

rendering “invisible” political and economic forces legible for the white narrator.

The use of scientific thought and technology as an ideologically disruptive force,

particularly in the service of minority populations, is extremely unusual the early nineteenth

century. While a vibrant lineage of Black speculative thought had been engaged in re-imagining

and re-conceptualizing reality through works of fiction long before Du Bois, it is not until the

rise of Afrofuturism in the late twentieth century that science and technology became central

tools of political intervention in Black speculative fiction. Yet, I argue that reading “The Princess

Steel” as Afrofuturism helpfully turns our attention toward the technological and scientific

framework for the narrative and provides a framework for interpreting the re-imaginative process

which the story alludes to, suggesting the potential Du Bois saw in both technological

advancement and the social sciences as resources for the production of a better future for non-
 Rossbach 4

white people around the world. Adopting the lens of Afrofuturism allows me to investigate the

Du Bois’s tactical manipulation of narrative through a reappropriation and reinvention of

hegemonic knowledge and belief. Using Professor Johnson’s “megascope” as a mechanism for

harnessing and communicating the transformative power of technology and its potential for

(re)construction and (re)invention of the past, present, and future, I will examine the mega-scope

as the nexus around which Du Bois anchors the rule of juxtaposition to imbricate conflicting

political visions. In the hands of a Black scientist, the “restorative” and “reconfiguring” potential

of scientific knowledge is juxtaposed with its “normalizing” and “enhancing” tendencies in the

service of imperial capitalism and white supremacy. Instead, Johnson’s mega-scope serves as a

technological and narrative intervention which exposes the limitations of widely-accepted

political logics while re-configuring and re-presenting social relations on more favorable terms.

Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Fiction

The use of what is often called “speculative fiction” to recover and reconfigure the past

and devise potential futures was not unique to Du Bois in the African diaspora. Within

nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America alone, a vast community of Black writers,

including Martin Delaney (1812-1885), Frances Harper, (1825-1911), Charles Chestnutt (1858-

1932), Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930), Edward A. Johnson (1860-1944), Sutton Griggs (1872-

1933), and George S. Schuyler (1895-1977), produced short stories and novels positing utopian

visions for Black liberation and empowerment. Walter Mosley, in an essay entitled “Black to the

Future” (2000), describes the desire of Black Americans to fill the narrative void which

surrounded their past and future in the country: “Black people have been cut off from their

African ancestry by the scythe of slavery and from an American heritage by being excluded from
 Rossbach 5

history” (405). Thus, the speculative fiction of Du Bois, his contemporaries, and prior authors in

the genre, was primarily concerned with projects of historical recovery—projects which Du Bois

also took up in his non-fiction works such as The World and Africa ([1947] 2007) and Black

Reconstruction in America ([1935] 2007)—in which a history of African civilization and the

African diaspora could be constructed from a combination of sparse material evidence,

imaginative interpretation, and myth-making.

But Black speculative fiction also demonstrates concerns and re-imaginings of the

present and the future. Writers of the African diaspora from the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries constructed counter-histories as a foundation for redefining the role of Black people in

the political, economic, and cultural order of the present, and clearing space in which alternative,

more empowering futures can be imagined. The exclusion of the earlier writers from

Afrofuturism tends to hinge on their lack of engagement with explicitly technological innovation

in the discovery of revised foundations and the development of imaginary futures (Anderson and

Jones 2016; Anderson 2016; Elia 2016; Yaszek 2006). In Passing and the African American

Novel, Maria Giulia Fabi (2001) describes how, in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries,

“less convinced of the liberatory potential of technological progress than their white

counterparts, African American utopian writers focused on the process of individual and

collective ideological change rather than on the. . . utopia itself” (46). Accordingly, Du Bois’s

writing, especially The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and “The Comet” ([1920] 1999), are

often characterized as “proto-”Afrofuturism (Elia 2016; Anderson 2016) or “speculative

romance” (Bhabha 2007; Brown and Rusert 2015). It is true that, despite their innovative

treatment of time and space, and their use of speculative themes to uncover and reimagine racial

ideologies, neither work is particularly invested in a technological intervention in existing or

 Rossbach 6

future conditions. The Quest of the Silver Fleece remains firmly within the realm of the existing

technology of its time, only depicting a reconfiguration of labor relations and land ownership on

southern cotton plantations; “The Comet,” an apocalyptic vision of New York after a comet has

killed nearly everyone, also does not use speculative technology or use it to imagine new futures.

However, “The Steel Princess” presents a peculiar case of early twentieth-century Black

speculative fiction which does rely centrally on technology and scientific knowledge for its

subversive power. If, at its core, Afrofuturism entails, as Nettrice R. Gaskins contends in

“Afrofuturism on Web 3.0” (2016), that the artist “visualize the social imaginary. . . [and] build

on the premises that cultural systems and data can be modeled to communicate spatial

information in unique ways” (34), then “The Princess Steel” is certainly an example of this. The

megascope reconfigures the spatio-temporal surroundings of its users, exposing hidden elements

of their social world by collapsing time and allowing one to see the interconnections of global

economy in both its vastness and its origins. The “experiments” of Professor Johnson are

invested in historical revision, re-constructing the bases for identity and interaction with the

technological, social, and economic world. It is, of course, true that Du Bois would not have

thought of his own work as “Afrofuturist” since the concept did not exist, but “The Princess

Steel” conforms to the themes, tropes, and dynamics of Afrofuturism—the invention of

fantastical new technology, the emphasis on data reinterpretation, representation, and the

potential for hegemonic technologies to be reappropriated for the benefit of people of color.

Therefore, I contend that this story is most productively understood in the context of

Afrofuturism, as perhaps a very early example of reappopriating and re-deploying Western

technological knowledge against itself to unravel the complex contradictions of the capitalist and

white-supremacist political imaginary.

 Rossbach 7

Many have traced Afrofuturism’s origins to W.E.B. Du Bois’s political and literary

contributions, citing the lasting impact of his racial philosophy on authors and political thinkers

today. In particular, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is widely accepted as a foundational text for

the articulation of Black experience in a white world and the framework for inventing future

potentialities in Afrofuturism. Du Bois’s articulations of the “color-line” (which divides the

world between “white” and “colored” and enforces the separation and disenfranchisement of

those on the “colored” side); “double-consciousness” (in which Black people must adopt a self-

concept and historical understanding of the white hegemony); “second-sight” (the heightened

perceptual insight of Black people, especially regarding white culture); and the “Veil” (which

both obscures or prevents white people from awareness of Black existence) all serve as recurring

themes throughout 20th century African American speculative fiction and provide a political

framework for an Afrofuturist imaginary. Du Bois re-deploys these concepts, although not

explicitly, in “The Princess Steel,” which was written only a few after The Souls of Black Folk.

The Megascope and Cybernetic Deconstruction

Understanding “The Princess Steel” as a work of Afrofuturism becomes most probable if

we turn our attention away from the medieval romance at the center of the story and direct our

analysis toward its technological framing. The megascope, as a highly-advanced and speculative

technology, places the narrative in the “context of twentieth-century techno-culture,” and it is

through using the megascope that Professor Johnson engages in “African-American signification

that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (Dery qtd. in

Anderson and Jones 2016, viii). As the nexus between the narrator’s familiar life-world and the

“Over-world” of Steel, the megascope is an essential vehicle for destabilizing dominant political
 Rossbach 8

imaginaries in the narrative, and its very functioning requires both appropriation of technological

images and the imbrication with the human subject (i.e. the suturing of man and machine). It

relies upon astonishingly advanced (for 1908-1910) concepts of data processing and virtual

reality simulation. On each level of technological functioning that Du Bois describes, the

megascope re-arranges some aspect the narrator’s logic, self-understanding, or life-world,

juxtaposing an Afrofuturist vision against the narrator’s established dominant world-view. The

way in which data is gathered, interpreted, and represented virtually by the megascope presents a

subversive alternative to a Western capitalist and white-supremacist paradigm, revealing that

paradigm’s perceptual limitations by supplementing, enhancing, and altering the narrator’s range

of perceptions.

Future Histories and the Chronicle of the Silent Brotherhood

Du Bois sets the recovery, reconstruction, and reclamation of the past as the foundation

for the Afrofuturist project of “The Princess Steel.” The contents of the Chronicle, which was

“kept with surprising accuracy by a Silent Brotherhood for 200 years” (Du Bois 2015, 823)

provides the foundational data for Professor Johnson’s technological invention and experiments.

While the volume of information contained in the Chronicle is immense (200 years of recorded

minutiae of day-to-day experiences and interactions), the identity of its record keepers is

suggestive of its origins. Likely, the “Silent Brotherhood” is meant to be understood as the

bearers of the lost or obscured historical record of Africa and the African diaspora. In The World

and Africa ([1947] 2007), Du Bois laments that “it is almost universally assumed that history can

be truly written without reference to Negroid peoples” and then presents the book as “a history of

the world written from the African point of view; or better, a history of the Negro as part of the
 Rossbach 9

world which now lies in ruins” (xxxi). Due to the scarcity of written historical records from the

African continent, much of African history has been written from a European perspective, often

unfairly casting Africa and colored peoples as devoid of history. In light of the conspicuous

absences from history, the Brotherhood is called “Silent” because their narration of history is

missing from the record. They are a symbolic representation of Du Bois’s concept of “the Veil”

which renders the humanity, agency, and histories of Black people invisible to dominant white

culture. Without a firm and legible foundation on which to base a Black identity, Black

Americans are often plagued by “double-consciousness” or “this sense of always looking at

one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on

in amused contempt and pity” ([1903] 1986, 364). The “silence” of the record for the last 200

years is an implicit suggestion of the revolutionary scope and potential of the Chronicle’s

contents.

The process of re-appropriating and re-claiming African diasporic history is concerned

with both uncovering past injustices and re-envisioning the accomplishments of the past which

have been erased. As Du Bois writes in Dusk of Dawn, “Lions have no historians” (663). Du

Bois himself dedicated many pages to reconstructing and reinterpreting these histories including

Black Reconstruction in America ([1935] 2007), Dusk of Dawn ([1940] 1986), and The World

and Africa ([1947] 2007). The process of re-appropriating and re-claiming African diasporic

history is concerned with both uncovering past injustices and re-envisioning the

accomplishments of the past which have been erased. As Du Bois writes in Dusk of Dawn,

“Lions have no historians” (663). Professor Johnson’s possession, then, of the Silent

Brotherhood’s Chronicle forms the foundation for his own liberatory use of this knowledge.

Through the reappropriation and interpretation of the Chronicle, Professor Johnson’s work
 Rossbach 10

“dialectically deconstructs and radically reconstructs. . . ‘double-consciousness’ into a critical

black consciousness or, rather, a critical Africana consciousness grounded in and growing out of

continental and diaspora African history, culture, and struggle” (Rabaka 2015, 16). The Silent

Brotherhood’s history, in Professor Johnson’s interpretation, professes a counter-history to the

European narrative of development and the naturalness of white supremacy. As a database for

untold human history, the Chronicle reveals the insufficiency of the dominant Anglo-European

record—the data based upon the Chronicles, the Professor claims, is “infinitely more accurate

and extensive” (Du Bois 2015, 822). When contrasted with this insufficiency, the “Silence” of

the Brotherhood adopts yet another meaning, one which empowers the people who exist “within”

the Veil. While the Veil “blurs” the perception of whites or even “blinds” them to its existence

and the humanity behind it, those within the Veil are “gifted with second-sight in this American

world” (Du Bois [1903] 1986, 364). Du Bois suggests, both in this passage from The Souls of

Black Folk and in “The Princess Steel” that Black consciousness possesses greater powers of

perception—the Silent Brotherhood, “silent” and “invisible” within the safety of the Veil, were

the keepers of an accumulating “treasure” (Du Bois 2015, 823) which Professor Johnson has

come into possession of because he, too, possesses the second-sight of those within the Veil.

Stepping out from the Veil, the Professor reappropriates and “experiments” with reinterpreting

history. The restoration of a history of racialized capitalist domination from the obscurity of

silence and ideological white supremacy provides a foundation for re-interpreting the present,

including the social hierarchies, capitalist logics, and oppressed subjectivity.

Alchemy and Data-Processing

 Rossbach 11

In the processing of historical data from the Chronicles, Professor Johnson employs a

number of complicated and innovative graphing techniques and instruments to render visible the

interconnection of human deeds and actions, re-deploying accepted scientific methods and

techniques but juxtaposing these with more esoteric elements. Notably, Du Bois allows Professor

Johnson’s explanation to slip between scientifically sound practice and metaphysical

understandings. For instance, professor describes his technique for “plotting” data on a

“transparent film, covered with tiny holes,” then proceeds to “place plane over plane, dot over

dot and you have a history of these deeds in days and months and years” (Du Bois 2015, 823).

Through overlapping images of data, Professor Johnson performs a kind of layered mapping

which transforms the two-dimensional line graph of human deeds at one time into a three-

dimensional overlay, collapsing disparate temporal moments onto a single plane. Next, Johnson

explains his innovation to this sociological mapping: “If now these planes be curved about one

center and reflected to and fro we get a curve of infinite curvings which is. . . the Law of Life”

(823). Johnson’s transition into metaphysical claims about the “Law of Life” seem

understandably questionable to the narrator, since he’s essentially described the process of three-

dimensional graphing on the surface of a sphere.

After re-deploying scientific knowledge Johnson reappropriates an instrument from

alchemical practice in the service of data representation and the demonstration of the limitations

of mathematical calculation. As a large crystal ball descends before the viewing window, the

professor explains, “this. . . is the globe on which I plot my curves of life. You know in the

Middle Age they used to use spheres like this. . . but that was mere playing with science just as

their alchemy was but the play and folly of chemistry” (Du Bois 2015, 823). By re-deploying an

instrument from alchemy in tandem with more accepted “scientific” instruments and methods, he
 Rossbach 12

is assigning the two epistemological systems to the same register. In “Afrofuturism 2.0,”

Reynaldo Anderson (2016) argues that this is a prominent feature of Afrofuturism: “a critical

project with the mission of laying the groundwork for a humanity that is not bound up with the

ideals of white Enlightenment universalism” (228). The hybrid device does not work, not

because of the limitations of alchemy, but due to the limitations of scientific calculation: “when I

would cast the great lines of this Curve I was continually hampered by curious counter-curves

and shadows and crossings—which all my calculations could not eliminate” (Du Bois 2015,

823). In Professor Johnson’s experiments, the language and methods of hegemonic social science

are reappropriated, re-conceived, and re-deployed to demonstrate the scope of their limitations

before offering an alternative vision. The conceptual limitations of mathematical calculation

reveal themselves in their inability to account for the complexity, to decode it, or to represent it

in a coherent way. The epistemological re-thinking in “The Princess Steel” engages with

scientific knowledge and technology, but critically resists these forces at the same time. To

study the “world of steel” and render his results legible to the narrator and his wife, Professor

Johnson is working within social science’s credible framework while juxtaposing it with

language, methods, and structures which have been reimagined to present a counter-reality in

opposition to the narrator and his wife’s sociological training. In Professor Johnson’s

experiments, the language and methods of hegemonic social science are reappropriated, re-

conceived, and re-deployed in excess of the narrator’s knowledge and understanding, or else in

opposition to it.

The Cyborg within the Veil

 Rossbach 13

Computing technology using similar data-processing and representation as those depicted

in “The Princess Steel” had been invented and discussed since at least the mid-nineteenth

century, but the features of the mega-scope which absorb the subject in an almost fully-

immersive virtual reality gesture toward a more advanced conception of the relationship between

humans and machine technology—one which depends on cybernetic theory for as its functional

mechanism. Although the term “cybernetics” would not be coined by Norbert Wiener until

around 1948, he explains in The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society ([1950]

1954) how “automatic machines” or “the machine which is conditioned by its relation to the

external world, and by the things happening in the external world, is with us and has been for

some time” (23). A cybernetic system, in short, is one which can send and receive messages—

that is, it can receive data input from the exterior world and output data to the exterior world

based upon the data it received. The power of a cybernetic system is its capacity to control

entropy through a regulatory apparatus which provides a feedback loop; Wiener emphasizes that

the necessary functioning is one in which “their performed action on the outer world, and not

merely their intended action, is reported back to the central regulatory apparatus” ([1950] 1954,

27). In other words, the cybernetic system adapts its output based on the input from external

forces and conditions which are processed through its regulatory apparatus. Humans, according

to Wiener, interact with the world through a similar process:

both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that
is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from
the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation
of the individual or machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken
neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be
alive or dead. ([1950] 1954, 26)
 Rossbach 14

To extend this model to Du Bois’s concepts regarding racial theory, the Color-line serves as the

“sensory receptor” of racial consciousness for both Black and white individuals, for “the white

man, as well as the Negro, is bound by the color-line” (Du Bois, [1903] 1986, 489). While both

races are receiving input messages from the color-line, only Black Americans have the necessary

regulatory apparatus for processing and storing these messages: second-sight. While the Veil

blinds or blurs the perceptions of whites who are outside of it, those on the other side are

invested with “second-sight,” providing heightened observation and special knowledge. In his

1920 essay “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois expresses keen observatory powers with regard

to white people: “Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them, I view them

from unusual points of vantage. . . Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side.

I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know” (1986, 923).

Second-sight allows for the processing and storage of information about race relations and

worldview.

Lacking this or any similar regulatory apparatus, the white narrator and his wife are

severely limited in their perception; information which refutes their existing knowledge or

beliefs about race and relations between races simply cannot be incorporated. As the narrator and

his wife enter the professor’s office on the top floor of a sky scraper in New York, they rudely

walk right past him without seeing him (Du Bois 2015, 822). The Veil blinds them to the

presence of a Black man in their presence. Even after they acknowledge him, the narrator and his

wife are still incapable of conceiving of a Black man possessing scientific knowledge, he is

initially invisible to them. Even after they have laid eyes on him, the narrator recounts how “my

little Southern wife was aught but a servant” (822). They are missing an essential aspect of the

feeback loop that is necessary for accurate perception of the world around them, refusing to
 Rossbach 15

adjust their conceptual frame despite proof of its incoherence. Du Bois observes this white

resistance to adaptation based on exposure to information in Dusk of Dawn ([1940] 1986): “All

this is Truth, but unknown, unapprehended Truth. Indeed, the greatest and most immediate

danger of white culture, perhaps least sensed, is its fear of the Truth, its childish belief in the

efficacy of lies as a method of human uplift” (664). While the narrator is repeatedly confronted

with his own perceptual limitations, he lacks necessary apparatus for receiving feedback about

his interactions with others and his environment.

Within the narrative, the mega-scope provides the technological innovation capable of

making Du Bois’s desired intervention in race relations, providing a sort of cybernetic

“prosthetic” Veil to the white man whose perceptual capacities are naturally deficient. According

to the editors of The Cyborg Handbook (1995), a “cybernetic organism” or a “cyborg” is the

result of “the melding of the organic and the machine, or the engineering of the union between

separate organic systems” (Gray, Mentor, and Figueroa-Sarriera, 2). The “melding” of the man

and machine is affected by the sensory appendages which Johnson attaches to the narrator and

his wife: “Then he raised the silken cords with what I now saw were head and eye and ear and

hand pieces and placed them on my wife. She did not hesitate but eagerly stared into the tube. I

did hesitate but at last followed suit” (Du Bois 2015, 824). Effectively, the subject plugged in to

the mega-scope becomes a cyborg, able to perceive the “Life so near ourselves that we think it is

ourselves, and yet so vast that we vaguely identify it with the universe” (Du Bois 2015, 823).

Indeed, it is only with the aid of the mega-scope’s assistance that the narrator is able to perceive

the Over-men and the Great Near.

Using the megascope, Du Bois brings the narrator as well as the reader into the Veil,

“Leaving, then, the world of the white man, I have stepped within the Veil, raising it that you
 Rossbach 16

may view faintly its deeper recesses—the meaning of its religion, the passion of its human

sorrow, and the struggle of its greater souls” ([1903] 1986, 359). Within the Veil, (natural or

artificial), a mechanism develops racial awareness, always inextricably “[the] merging of the

evolved and the developed, [the] integration of the constructor and the constructed, [the] systems

of dying flesh and undead circuits, and of living and artificial cells” (Gray, Mentor, and

Figueroa-Sarriera 1995, 2). But Afrofuturism provides a creative plane on which to tease out our

racial relationships past and present— the “traditional narratives” of colonization and

progressive industry are interrupted and inverted as counter-histories, counter-logics, and

counter-subjectivities are re-appropriated from the past, imagined anew, or the result of

experimentation with wild clashes between political imaginaries: In the words of Professor

Hannibal Johnson, “Now. . . the experiment begins—Look—feel—see!” (Du Bois 2015, 824).
 Rossbach 17

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