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This essay explores the hope impulse expressed in the writings of enslaved Black people as a core concept of Afrofuturism in antebellum America. This desire for a better life, for a better future, and for freedom itself provides the essential psychic drive seeding resistance, rebellion, and subversive writing in early America while disrupting the white intellectual geographies of economics, politics, and history such as those represented in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). In that book, Jefferson draws upon Enlightenment-era pseudoscientific beliefs about the biological basis of race to create the technological fantasy upon which slavery hinges, where reading Black bodies as objects rather than subjects configures them as natural machines. Among other preposterous claims, Jefferson contends that Blacks "require less sleep...after hard labour through the day" and suggests the Black imagination is "dull, tasteless, and anomalous" (146). Jefferson completes the machine analogy in noting how "slaves [are] distributable...as other moveables" when based "on a principle of economy" being sold like "old wagons, old tools" (144; 148). As natural machines, with race operating as a labor-based technology, Blacks are figured as artificial persons such as robots, cyborgs, and clones. For example, Harriet Jacobs refers to slaves as "God-breathing machines" in her 1861 slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (11). But while Jefferson used this equation between machines and Black bodies to justify slavery, Black generational experience encoded in the folklore, native scientific practices, and spiritual beliefs that survived the Middle Passage and reverberated through American history create a networked Black consciousness,1 the basis of the freedom technologies that help Blacks withstand the horrors of slavery. In short, then, I argue that mapping the evolution of the hope impulse and the "webbed network" it formed amongst slaves and free Blacks allows us to see how Black people survived the science-fictional reality of early America (Eshun 00-06]).
Consequently, slave narratives highlight the hope impulse in action through the sometimes daring flights of these fugitives and also demonstrate an operational networked Black consciousness since we still read them well over one hundred fifty years later. I discuss how Solomon Northrup, Henry "Box" Brown, and Harriet Jacobs attest to Afrofuturism's validity as each one lays bare a science-fictional American existence. Each of...