Through associations with technoscience and digital culture, science fiction, space travel and extra-terrestrial life, we tend to think of “futurism” in terms that are light years away from the present, as a time to come that will have no relation with the past (critical or otherwise). Contrary to this linear sense of historical development however, Afro-futurism has emerged, over the past thirty years, as an alternative critical practice that time travels, journeying from the past to present in order to use the history of black diasporic culture in the aim of thinking the present as well as imagining new futures that have yet to arrive. Taking our cue from Samuel Delaney, for whom science fiction, if anything, functions as a “means through which to re-program the present,” in this course we will go in search of the radical visions and anticipatory political imaginaries of a range of afrofuturists (Samuel Delany, John Akomfrah, Octavia Butler, Harriet Jacobs, among others) who, through their aesthetic practice, open up new ways of seeing and imagining new futures for black liberation.

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