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AFROFUTURISM: PAST-FUTURE VISIONS
Visions of the future abound, celebrating progress, speed, and the empowering presence of technology in our lives, often accompanied by pronouncements about a brave new world coming into being -- a world free from race, class, and gender conflicts. But how utopian are visions of new gizmos and gadgets fueled by commercial imperatives? And to whom do these futures belong?
They say you can't see race in cyberspace, but it is certainly not a coincidence that post-identity sentiments thrive in a climate intolerant to appeals for social and racial justice. Cyber-libertarian ideology holds that assertions of race, class, or gender difference in technologically enabled environments are like broaching politics at a dinner party -- the epitome of bad taste. As a result, a false opposition is created, placing women and people of color on one side of the utopian equation, and technoculture on the other.
This split is partly a function of the "digital divide" -- a gap that, not surprisingly, falls along race and class lines. Even in the midst of a digital revolution, the social conditions produced by the new information order have much in common with those that shaped the old industrial order. So the digital divide has become a call-to-arms for many African Americans, activists and entrepreneurs alike. But while it speaks to very material concerns that require real solutions, the digital divide is also ideological. This gap has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, reinforcing stereotypes of black technophobia; it confirms that African Americans can't keep pace in a hi-tech world that threatens to outstrip them. Focusing on the digital divide has paralyzed the thinking even of those who seek to bridge it.
Why don't we look at the innovations in technique and communication that can be found throughout black diasporic culture? Technology speaks to identity, but identity also speaks to technology. While identifying the class, race, and gender inequities that structure the so-called digital divide, we can also identify glimpses of creative possibility in the application of African diasporic cultural traditions to technology.
AfroFuturism has emerged as a term of convenience to describe the analysis, criticism, and cultural production that addresses the intersections between race and technology. Neither a mantra nor a movement, AfroFuturism is a critical perspective...