Goldsmiths, University of London.

Department of Theatre and Performance

'What role do time and space play in Afrofuturist art?"

Candidate Number 33565077

Year of Study 2

Module MOPO B: Theatre and the Artistic Avant Garde

Module Code DR52112A

Word Count 4013

Module Convenor Philippa Burt

Tutor for this Philippa Burt

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Write Essay Here:

Across Western arts scholarship, we have become familiar with avant-garde

movements that have shaken the framework of artistic practices throughout history: Futurists,
who captured movement in still images; Expressionists, who distorted realism to share their
subjective states; young dadaists, who decried war in words we could not understand;
Surrealists, who melted clocks and transformed heads into fruits. These avant-garde practices
have pervaded the landscape of artistry and changed our present notion of what it means to
create art, but we have only relatively recently come to listen to the stirrings of other artists in
the margins, who create art away from the largely white, European legacy featured in all of
the movements listed above. In the early 1990s, Mark Dery first used the term Afrofuturism1
to describe a cultural and artistic aesthetic that “combines elements of science fiction,
historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic-realism with non-
Western beliefs”2 in order to centre black visions of the future in art. Importantly, these
visions of blackness are not constricted by the historical injustices black people have faced. A
key element of Afrofuturism is to use the motifs of technology combined with the esoteric to
detangle the image of blackness from the notion of the colonial subject, the slave, or the
savage. Throughout the 20th Century, works spanning literature, visual art, music, fashion,
film, and others have been retroactively credited as Afrofuturistic, while in more recent years,
the aesthetic has been developed into a more conscious movement among artistic creators
across disciplines.

1
Dery, Mark. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.
2
Womack, Ytasha L. Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture. Chicago: Lawrence Hill
Books, 2013. pp. 9.

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The Birth of Afrofuturism

Alondra Nelson, an academic at the Institute of Advanced Study, created a Listserv in
the late 1990s called ‘AfroFuturism’, forming a discussion of the role of black people in
science fiction as a kind of online Cabaret Voltaire. Here, many contributors noted the
absence of black people across pop culture, but especially when the content concerns
technology and the future. Ytasha L. Womack, author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black
Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture, explains that, “black people are minimized in pop culture
depictions of the future, conspicuously absent from the history of science, or marginalized in
the roster of past inventors,” and goes on to say that “set[ting] out to do something about it
could arguably qualify as Afrofuturist”3. In Alondra Nelson’s Listserv, users began sharing
music, comics, writing and other forms of artistic expression that could be described as “one
part sci-fi, one part mysticism, and one part an advanced environment, derived from an
Africanized thought pattern”4.

These pieces often strongly feature the kinds of sci-fi style technology that we are
familiar with but subvert our expectations regarding where these advancements have come
from, and what they can look like, utilising images from current Afrodiasporic culture and
ancient Africa to visualize images of the future. Afrocentric schools of thought and ancient,
pre-colonial, pre-Middle Passage history play an important role for Afrofuturists in
combatting the way the “parameters of race [have] completely chained [our] imagination[s]”5,
limiting the ways we can even conceive of black futures. If a significant proportion of
technological, philosophical and scientific progress already has stemmed from black minds in
both the recent and distant past, we can imagine a future born out of black ideas, and thus
recognize the power and potential of the present moment for black people.

The Fabric of Time and Afrofuturism

Because Western society consistently casts black people in the shadow of the racial
classifications that justify systemic discrimination and exploitation dating from slavery
through to today, the Afrofuturist “[constructs] an alternate worlding by way of a timeline
freed of the teleology of Western white colonialism.”6 This is to say that when there is no
space or time in which black people are able to picture a future that is not characteristically
3
Ibid, pp. 7.
4
Womack pp. 143.
5
Womack pp. 15.

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hopeless, Afrofuturists must cast their minds beyond the past, present, and future prescribed
by Western culture. As a result, Afrofuturistic art often plays with the fabric of time in a
manner that reflects the malleability of history, storytelling, mythology and memory.

Cultural anthropologist Dorothy Lee has published writing that compares Western
codifications of reality to those of other cultures, and suggests that linear thought common to
the Western world is not the only way to perceive the “real world”:
“We trace a historical development; we follow the course of history and evolution
down to the present and up from the ape [...] I am not convinced [...] that we have not
created our recording instruments in such a way that they have to picture time and
motion, light and sound, heartbeats and nerve impulses lineally, on the unquestioned
assumption of the line as axiomatic. The line is omnipresent and inescapable, and we
are incapable of questioning the reality of its presence.”7
If we accept the idea of “the line as axiomatic,” the history we have been told by the very
people who benefit from the colonial invention of blackness to justify commodifying black
bodies is unchangeable, static. We would live with the notion that black people cannot escape
the horrors of slavery, even in their imaginations. The axiomatic line leads us in only one
direction: our present, which stems directly from the subjugation of black people, a present
that feels inextricable from the thus far unresolved battle for civil rights across races.
However, this is not the only way to perceive time and reality, especially not in art.

We need not reach very far to imagine a reality in which time is not based in our
concepts of causality and linearity; we see it even in Western astronomy. It can take millions
of years after they have actually happened for us to observe supernovae in our present
moment because of the amount of time it takes for light to travel from distant stars to planet
earth.8 The ancient past, in this sense, happens in the present. Similarly, we can say from this
example that the future has already happened long ago. Utilising the fluidity of time and the
potential for different realities that the future holds, Afrofuturism is devoted to “either

6
van veen, tobias c. “Destination Saturn: Sun Ra's Afrofuturist Utopias in the Art of Stacey Robinson.” TOPIA:
Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 39 (2018): 145.
7
Lee, Dorothy. "Lineal and Nonlineal Codifications of Reality." ETC: A Review of General
Semantics 8, no. 1 (1950): 13-26.
8
"Kepler's Supernova." Wikipedia. April 12, 2020.

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imagining alternate futures or rewriting the past so as to change the present (from which
futures are imagined)” 9.

Afrofuturists have many reasons to meld time in their art, not least due to a concept
known as the Armageddon Effect. The phrase was born from the rap group Public Enemy’s
song “Countdown to Armageddon,” in which they explain, “Armageddon, it been in effect,
go get a late pass.”10 Public Enemy is describing in their lyrics the idea that, at least for
Afrodiasporic peoples, the apocalypse has already happened in the brutal times of the Middle
Passage. tobias c. van veen explains that “Armageddon commences with Africans abducted
by aliens to a strange land; everything that follows is played out in a post-apocalyptic
dystopia.”11 Since “the violence of enslavement sought to erase the past, its rituals, religions,
and languages, so as to remake living labour,”12 there is no “normal” reality left for black
people descended from slaves to return to. Everything that follows after the Middle Passage
exists already in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi realm. This “void of origin is as enabling as it is a
locus of trauma”13, and Afrofuturists aim to fill it with their creations and use this historical
black hole as a springboard for creativity. How does a culture invent its own myths after any
remnants of its ancestry have been erased? How do we reject Western ontologies rooted in
Greece and Rome and build something of our own? What comes after Armageddon?

Two distinct responses to the Armageddon effect are possible.

The first is a backwards-looking attempt to appropriate the
cultures of ancient African civilisations in the forms of black
nationalism or Afrocentrism. A popular image to signify this
effort is the Asante image of Sankofa (Fig. 1)14, which depicts
“a bird that reaches backward for the egg of the future on her
back.”15 In the Ghanaian language Twi, Sankofa is literally

9 Fig. 1:Nation.”
van veen, tobias c. “The Armageddon Effect: Afrofuturism and the Chronopolitics of Alien The Sankofa
In Bird.
Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, ed. Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones. New York:
Lexington Books (2016): 80.
10
"Public Enemy – Countdown to Armageddon." Genius. June 28, 1988.
11
van veen in “The Armageddon Effect: Afrofuturism and the Chronopolitics of Alien Nation.”: 69.
12
Ibid 67.
13
Ibid 65.
14
Figure 1: Berea College. “The Power of Sankofa: Know Your History.” 2020. 262x251.
https://www.berea.edu/cgwc/the-power-of-sankofa/.
15
Samatar, Sofia. "Toward a Planetary History of Afrofuturism." Research in African Literatures 48, no. 4
(2017): 187.

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translated as to “go back and get it”16. Afrofuturists use the concept of Sankofa to retrieve
artefacts from the past and bring them into present artworks in order to reimagine the future.
Ytasha L. Womack explains that the Afrofuturist’s “celebration of ancient wisdom [is] steam-
powered by this idea that there simply must be more to the mythological canon than the
stories we inherit. Just as Greek, Roman and Norse myths undergird Western art, literature,
entertainment, and architecture, Afrofuturists are among those thirsty for other ancient
frameworks.”17 As a result, Afrofuturistic creators often “go back and get” images from
ancient Egypt, Nubia, the Dogon and many others to inform imagery in today’s popular
culture, reminding us that the allegedly primitive continent from which Afrodiasporic peoples
were displaced actually offer a history of advanced societies, scientific progress, riches and
royalty, that black excellence is nothing new.

The second response to the Armageddon effect is an attempt to use the same tools of
revising history to embrace the void, push past the world as we know it and imagine a
grander exodus. “It remakes black culture by pushing its boundaries, by questioning the
value of “authentic” blackness, finding its most extravagant expression in Afrofuturism, in
which “Earth” and “human” are abandoned apace”18. In other words, these Afrofuturists
jettison past the limitations of our planet and our species to find a new space to imagine black
futures. Here we find Afrofuturistic artists who use science and technology as a primary
vehicle to liberate the black imagination. Womack writes that “there’s this often-understated
agreement that to think freely and creatively, particularly as a black person, one has to not
just create a work of art, but literally or figuratively create the space to think it up in the first
place.”19 Where better to start than literal outer space, where the history of black people has
hardly begun?

Both of these approaches rely on revisiting and intervening in the past as we know it
to construct new futures. “The past is but an archive for repurposing, a timeline to be
sampled, a chronology to be upset with intervention.”20 What is important to Afrofuturism is
how we use this archive for artistic exploration to radically remodel the invention of

16
"Sankofa." Wikipedia. June 01, 2020.
17
Womack 95.
18
van veen 78.
19
Womack 142.
20
van veen 78.

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blackness as an identity to suit the present day and, vitally, to alter our expectations of
blackness in the future.

Case Studies
Thus far we have considered Afrofuturism and its relationship to time from a
theoretical perspective. We will now turn to examples of artistic work that puts this theory
into practice. As mentioned earlier, Afrofuturism finds its way into a vast variety of artistic
disciplines; we will focus on music, as it is a very popular form for Afrofuturist art and also
extremely performative, both in the live moment and recorded. Sun Ra’s persona and uses of
wide-ranging media alongside his 1974 film Space is the Place will serve as our chief
examples of his contributions to the Afrofuturist aesthetic and philosophy. Kendrick Lamar’s
album “To Pimp a Butterfly” provides a Sankofa-style lens into Afrofuturistic musical
practices, revisiting the archives of history to create Afrofuturistic work.

Sun Ra & Space is the Place

It is difficult to complete a discussion of Afrofuturism without spending time on
South Side Chicago’s “Egyptian deity, cosmic explorer [and] mystic messenger Sun Ra,
otherwise known as the bandleader of the “MythScience Arkestra,” prolific jazz composer,
avant-gardist keyboardist, pamphleteer, and philosopher poet.”21 Sun Ra is described by
Amiri Baraka as “some space metaphysical surrealistic bop funk. Some blue pyramid home
nigger southern different color meaning hip shit.”22 These accounts of Ra’s work and persona
especially between the 1950’s and the 1970’s begin to unravel the mind-bending,
overwhelmingly interdisciplinary style that earned him his retroactive reputation as the father
of Afrofuturism, although he was cast to the margins of even the avant-garde jazz scene
throughout his career.23

Christine Mullen Kreamer says that “in contrast to the Western inclination to separate
bodies of knowledge into distinctive fields, African systems are often more expansive and
inclusive, bringing together philosophical, religious and scientific concepts into a more
holistic approach toward comprehending reality”24. Sun Ra takes this Afrocentric approach to

21
van veen 73.
22
Baraka, Amiri. "Jazzmen: Diz & Sun Ra." African American Review 29, no. 2 (1995): 253.
23
Kreiss, Daniel. "Performing the Past to Claim the Future: Sun Ra and the Afro-Future
Underground, 1954-1968." African American Review 45, no. 1 (2012): 197.
24
Quoted in Womack 90.

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the maximum in his poetry, music, pamphlets, and of course in his film Space is the Place.
Ra was a prolific writer, thinker, theologian, scholar of the technological, mystical, esoteric
and ancient, and his mind, music, and other creations reach far beyond the scope of this
essay.25 That said, it is with all of the tools in the Afrofuturist toolbox (and more) that Sun Ra
tackles the issues we consider presently of lost history, time travel, alienation, and the
promises a black exodus from Earth could hold for Afrodiasporic people.

Sun Ra gladly welcomes the notion that we are living in the wake of the apocalypse,
and our present planet is “uneducated, unenlightened, savage, destructive, already in the
past”26. Ra offers the option to invent a ‘false fantasy’27 in order to
remedy the fantasy that exists for African Americans on this
outdated Earththe fabricated and limited notion of blackness that
colonizes the minds of black America. In his poem “The Invented
Memory”, Ra references a “manufactured history” that is born out
of a void (understood to nod to the Armageddon Effect) that left
men empty28. In Space is the Place, Ra fills this void with ancient
Egyptian-inspired costumes (see Figure 2)29, psychedelic/sci-fi sets
and imagery, and an offer to black America to soar off to a distant
planet of their own, liberate their minds and change the world
through music.

As the Sankofa bird does, Ra reaches back to a time in Figure 2: Poster of Space is the Place (1974)
African history where society was ahead of the globe in
advancement and black royalty was dressed in precious materials recovered from the earth;
he then brings these images into his futuristic universe to create his persona, an alien from
Saturn who can save the black population of Earth from their planet’s approaching
destruction. He toys with time, almost taunting his audience at the start of the film with the

25
Kreiss 198.
26
Baraka 253.
27
van veen in “Destination Saturn: Sun Ra's Afrofuturist Utopias in the Art of Stacey
Robinson.” 153.
28
Sun Ra, quoted in van veen in “The Armageddon Effect: Afrofuturism and the Chronopolitics of Alien
Nation.” 79.
29
Figure 2: Beautiful Bizarre. “Sun Ra Space is the Place (1974): Afrofuturism After 43 Years.” 5 Feb 2017.
575x1024. https://beautifulbizarre-net.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/
Sun_Ra_BeautifulBizarre_002.jpeg?strip=all&lossy=0&resize=600%2C1069&ssl=1

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musical chant, “It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?”30 Ra urges the black
population of Oakland, California, to understand this, that the world in which they live is
already in the past, that they must abandon what they know to join him in utopia. The
character of the Overseer, Ra’s black competitor who “suppl[ies] drugs, prostitutes and—
most crucially—false consciousness”31 represents the narratives we as an audience and Ra’s
characters in Oakland are used to: a paralytic narrative imbued with hopelessness. To escape
this cycle both in black lives and in oppressive narratives of blackness, Sun Ra competes
within the black community against the Overseer, against the white, unjust forces of the FBI,
at the root against our primitive conception of what blackness can be, and uses his at times
hypnotic, other times electrifying experimental jazz to guide us to a new world after the end
of time. Ra’s ability to synthesize these Afrofuturistic themes into one persona, one sound,
and one utopian message, earns him credit across galaxies for challenging his audience to
imagine better for blackness, imagine peace and enlightenment, and for him, space is the
place to turn this into real fantasy.

Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly

It is widely understood that Compton’s Pulitzer-winning Kendrick Lamar has become
one of the most influential rappers, songwriters and producers of the 21st Century, and among
the greatest artists in the genre throughout history. Commonly known as a “conscious
rapper,” Lamar has used his music to address issues close to Compton, an area in southern
California famous for its large black population and the prevalence of crime and violence.
The community is on the map globally mainly because one of few paths out of danger and
poverty for young black men in Compton (like many other parts of the United States) is often
to pursue a career in music, which many have. Throughout his career Kendrick Lamar has
never shied away from poetically shedding light on the struggles within communities like his,
but in his 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly (TPAB) he takes a pronounced Afrofuturist spin on
innovation within his genre, at a time when the African American experience was changing
drastically. With the Obama administration drawing to an end, a rise in mass incarceration
that disproportionately affected black people, and the birth of the Black Lives Matter
movement in response to racially motivated police brutality, a new Civil Rights Movement
was beginning.

30
Coney, John. Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Arkestra: Space is the Place. (1974; California, USA.) North
American Star System. Film.
31
Wall, David C. "John Coney, Space Is the Place." Black Camera 1, no. 2 (2010): 165.

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Lamar responded to the feeling among many that the cyclical nature of time was once
again bringing racial issues in America and throughout our planet to the forefront of political
and artistic discourse. What is a better tool to consider the black experience in the present
moment and throughout history, but most importantly to provide a message of hope for the
future, than time travel? Throughout TPAB, Kendrick travels between the past, present and
future of black music, black history, and his own life in a grand celebration of blackness,
inspiring his audience to work with him in forging a path towards freedom for black America.

The album opens with a track titled “Wesley’s Theory”, which serves as an
introduction to each major Afrofuturistic influence who collaborated with Lamar on TPAB
and to each musical style he combines in his vast soundscape of black expression32.
Afrofuturist funk superstar George Clinton is a guest on the song, contemporary jazz fusion
musician Thundercat plays bass guitar (both on this track and throughout the album), and the
futuristic Flying Lotus alongside hip-hop legend Dr. Dre are the coproducers. Each of these
artists represent innovative eras of music vital to both black liberation in the form of rhythm
and dance, and to the cultural effort to broaden the notion of what black people are capable
of. Each stylefunk, jazz, hip hop and Fly Lo’s experimental, electronic genre-fusingfind
their place in the universe Lamar builds in this album. TPAB combines musical activism with
soul-searching as the album progresses, using all of these sounds to guide listeners through a
narrative akin to a minefield:
The protagonist’s path to freedom takes him around predatory lending schemes
(“Wesley’s Theory”), a rigged prison system (“Institutionalized”), gang violence
(“Hood Politics”), alcohol abuse (“u”), and colorism (“Complexion”). In the middle
of the album, “Alright” sticks out, invoking the steely composure of old Negro
spirituals, songs about tarrying through tough times in search of the glory on the other
side, in emancipation or in death.
- Craig Jenkins, “We Are Not ‘Alright’”33
As Lamar bridges the gap between his old life growing up in a community at the mercy of a
racist system, and his new life, in which he fears his own hypocrisy, losing or wasting his
wealth, among other troubles, Kendrick calls on the strength of his predecessors and the

32
Nielsen, Jack J. The Afrofuturism Cyclicality of Past, Present, and Future in Kendrick Lamar’s
To Pimp a Butterfly. Coppell, TX: Jack J. Nielsen, 2019.
33
Jenkins, Craig. "We Are Not 'Alright'." Vulture. June 18, 2020.

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excitement of new practices to paint the picture of a black America that is exhausted,
battered, and still of strength and pride, wracked with infighting and poor leadership, and still
overflowing with soul.

Kendrick delves into the Sankofa of retrieving musical material from Afrodiasporic
history, but he also reaches further than African American memory, into Ethiopia. On the
track ‘i’, Lamar performs the song at a fictional concert in which members of the audience
begin fighting while he plays. In response to their use of the N-word, Lamar launches into a
verse about the self-hatred that can come with African Americans using the N-word to refer
to each other or themselves, and offers an alternative from the African continent:
Well, this is my explanation straight from Ethiopia
N-E-G-U-S. Definition: royalty; king royalty - wait listen
N-E-G-U-S. Description: black emperor, king, ruler, now let me finish
The history books overlook the word and hide it
America tried to make it to a house divided
The homies don't recognize we been using it wrong
So I'ma break it down and put my game in a song
N-E-G-U-S, say it with me, or say it no more
- Kendrick Lamar, ‘i’34
In these lyrics, Lamar revises history to include black royalty from the African continent,
brings this past into a present conversation about the way a common telling of American
history is geared towards the division and disenfranchisement of black communities, and
proposing a future in which “the homies” respect each other, themselves, and claim their
identity with pride without any need to utilise words historically used in hate against them
both during and in the wake of Armageddon.

Conclusion
We are experiencing a surge of energy for Afrofuturism in the present moment,
especially due to an increasing need to fill the void of white supremacy with hope, and the
clear acknowledgment that black lives exist in the future. Thanks to artists like Sun Ra,
Kendrick Lamar, and many others across boundaries of geography, discipline, gender,
sexuality, and timeline, an Afrofuturist lens is more applicable than ever to examine
contemporary artistic activity.

Once we open our eyes to the the artists working their way from the margins to the
mainstream, we are able to recognize a profusion of Afrofuturism at every corner of popular
34
"Kendrick Lamar – i (Album Version)." Genius. March 15, 2015.

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culture. Afrodiasporic artists across the planet are consulting what they know about their
blackness, their history, their projections for the future, and what is missing therein, leading
us all to experience our place in the present a new way. With this new territory comes both
bursts of excitement, inspiration and movement, and the flooding of dread, and
disappointment at the amount of work there is left to be done. Both of these responses are
part of the journey towards liberation. “Hope, much like imagination, comes at a premium.
The cost is a life where more is expected.”35

35
Womack 42.

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Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. "Jazzmen: Diz & Sun Ra." African American Review 29, no. 2 (1995): 249-
55. Accessed June 19, 2020. doi:10.2307/3042302.

Dery, Mark. Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1994.

Lee, Dorothy. "Lineal and Nonlineal Codifications of Reality." ETC: A Review of General
Semantics 8, no. 1 (1950): 13-26. Accessed June 18, 2020.
www.jstor.org/stable/42581333.

Jenkins, Craig. "We Are Not 'Alright'." Vulture. June 18, 2020. Accessed June 20, 2020.
https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/kendrick-lamar-alright-protest-music.html.

"Kendrick Lamar – i (Album Version)." Genius. March 15, 2015. Accessed June 21, 2020.
https://genius.com/Kendrick-lamar-i-album-version-lyrics.

"Kepler's Supernova." Wikipedia. April 12, 2020. Accessed June 18, 2020.
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