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Chapter 6 explores the politics of trend forecasting. Deepening the focus from the previous chapter, it explores how trends can inadvertently import the biases of the present into future imaginaries. As a counterexample, the chapter highlights Afrofuturism, a genre of futures thinking that is both radical in its visions for the future and deeply connected to the historical legacies of blackness.

This coda briefly addresses the election of Donald Trump and the implications of an increasingly visible white nationalist movement on the arguments of the book. The coda also analyzes elements of the Black Lives Matter movement to argue that while much of the optimism of the post era has been mitigated, several of its major theoretical strains—the emphasis on individual agency over racial identity, the turn towards racial identity as performance—remain critical to understanding current activism. It also explains the influence of theoretical frameworks such as intersectionality and Afropessimism on current movements. The coda also looks briefly towards growing and ongoing trends in African American literature, like Afrofuturism.

Part 2 (A Now that Can Breed Futures: Queerness and Pleasure in Black Science Fiction) turns to black diasporic speculative imagining as it has been used to create futures for those rendered futureless by global white supremacy. Chapter 3 focuses on how speculative fiction, racialized reproduction, and queer possibility converge to articulate processes that breed futures, and how these connections underlie the emergence in the 2000s of a canon of literary black science fiction. It introduces pleasure as a central term, tracing figurations of a radical future for black female sexuality that emerge from narrative foreclosures in W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1920 “The Comet” and following their trail into the queer speculations of two black feminist vampire novels: Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories (1991) and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005). Du Bois’s text highlights the persistence of reproductive Afrofuturisms that have sometimes overlapped with eugenic discourses. Gomez and Butler pick up this thread to demand we think reproductive futures outside the logics of heteronormativity and white supremacy, using the figure of the vampire to envision a decolonial lesbian future and a speculative reconsideration of eugenic science respectively.

This chapter enlists Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the “dark precursor”—the manner in which the past prefigures its future without determining or representing it—to give a different account of the role antinormativity plays in the past, present, and future of queer theory. By reading Samuel R. Delany’s early fictions as a pos-thumanist problematization of norms of race, gender, sexuality, and species being, and by understanding the problematic split between “afrofuturism” and “queer theory” in the 1990s, we regain a sense of how central blackness has been to the genesis of queer theorizing.

Posthuman Rap leads to a posthuman vestibule, connected to and aware of neoliberal humanism but situated just outside of it, in a place where we might imagine other ways of being human. Big K.R.I.T.’s car, quaking with sub-bass blasting from his woofer, is exactly this kind of vestibule. K.R.I.T., working with AfroFuturist materials, uses it to create big bangs and new worlds beyond our own. But before he can call entire planets into being, he must first tune his vestibule to receive and transmit vibrations from beyond the edge of human perception. It’s from this vantage point, staring through the vibrating glass of his car, that he can imagine other ways of being human.

This chapter shifts away from geographical landscapes to focus on technology during the period. Not only does the chapter examine debates over the “technological sublime” at the 1939/40 New York World’s Fair, it examines ways that science fiction authors use the “sf grotesque” to highlight the potentially devastating environmental and social consequences of uncritical forms of technological progress. The early work of Ray Bradbury and Judith Merril calls attention to the apocalyptic threat of the atom bomb by exposing its effects on the natural world as well as on human communities and bodies. Merril and George Schuyler also call attention to ways that ideologies associated with Western notions of science and progress have been used to support gender and racial inequality. In Black Empire (1938), Schuyler envisions innovative forms of renewable energy created by Black scientists that allow them to establish independence from Euro-American control.

With his introduction, “Coloring Race in Science Fiction,” Isiah Lavender, III provides answers to why he and others study race and racism in SF, that invoking race and racism in an outwardly white genre is necessary. Coloring science fiction is an absolute and radical commitment because skin color matters in visions of the future. SF has charted a few of the alternatives for this unknown territory, and the change presents both opportunities and challenges for society to establish new values.

De Witt Kilgore, in “The Best is Yet to Come”: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Reform Afrofuturism,” dissects Star Trek’s projection of an endless white future by directly challenging the intent of Star Trek’s racial politics with its practice of reinstating customary racial traditions. Kilgore argues that the DS9 episode “Far Beyond the Stars” allows the series to confront African American history as a root of the Federation’s utopian future as a reform afrofuturism.

Throughout world oral traditions, literature, pop culture, and the visual arts, numerous stories, ancient and new, feature a solution to social and environmental crisis that takes shape in a calling and a calling upon the “Mutha’,” resulting in a return of a departed life force-source and a renewal of the world. Examples come from Hopi, Greek, and Japanese traditions, as well as contemporary culture. A call to the mother particularly characterizes Afrofuturism, including the poetry of June Jordan, the art of John Thomas Biggers, Kevin Sampson, and Wangechi Mutu, the novels of Octavia Butler, and the musical compositions and poetry of Nicole Mitchell. These stories offer wisdom and direction for spiritual-political activism to bring about a world other than the Anthropocene.

This chapter takes the refrain from Sun Ra’s film Space Is the Place as an opening for a discussion about how the temporalities of particular Afrofuturist cultural productions participate in reorienting speculative imaginations toward the presently impossible, thereby emphasizing the salience of Gilbert Simondon’s theory of “transindividuation” as an intervention into Western conceptualizations of Being.

This chapter turns to a consideration of Glissant’s broader concept of “Relation.” Here, Alice Coltrane’s errant sonic experiments with Asian musical forms offer a way to think about a different constellation of Afrofuturism, one that turns not toward outer space, as in the case of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place, but toward an exploration of inner worlds as harbingers of another organization of things within the present. From Alice Coltrane’s Afro-Asian imagination, I turn to Nnedi Okorafor’s and Wanuri Kahui’s recent speculations on Africa, in particular Okorafor’s 2010 novel,Who Fears Death, and Kahui’s short film,Pumzi, from 2009. These fictional texts offer errantry, myths, and stories as generative strategies through which the dystopian speculations of Africa on which corporate scenarios rely might be resisted and the worlds those dystopian imaginations work to suppress can be felt.

The concluding section Ex machina outlines the tensions and trajectories that mark the transition of the futurist machine from the machine age to the current virtual reality and digital age. Borrowing from Munari’s ‘useless’ machine, the contemporary machine is dematerialised and abstracted. As such it both stems from and mirrors a radically altered technological paradigm: post-mechanical, post-industrial and digital. In a final twist, the machine of our own age is no longer the object of aesthetic or ideological worship or the demon of Taylorist dystopias. Rather, AIs and robots act with their own agency, supplying the subjectivity to compose and visualise art in sophisticated, if increasingly worrisome, entanglements with us humans. Taking over from Chapter 1, this section outlines the contemporary debate over machine technology and explores some of its most creative manifestations (e.g. afrofuturism).

The final chapter examines post-War American fiction and the imaginative connection forged, in theory and in fiction, between hieroglyphs and code, computers, and electronic writing. It contends that the association of hieroglyphs with universal languages and mixtures of media gets passed down to the newest of new media, digital code. From the postmodern novels of Thomas Pynchon through the literary-inflected sci-fi of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, from the Afro-Futurist works of Ishmael Reed to the mass market novels of Dan Brown, this pairing of hieroglyphs and digital code recurs across genre and style. By linking code with Egyptian writing, these writers emphasize the performativity of their language; just as code can create a simulation of reality, so words can call characters and settings into being.

This introduction to Sun Ra’s Chicago provides an overview of the key themes of the book. In recent decades, the once-obscure bandleader and outer-space traveler Sun Ra has become much better recognized, not only as a jazz innovator but as a foundational figure in the cultural development of Afrofuturism. Yet how did Sun Ra’s own music and cosmology emerge? And why did they flourish in 1950s Chicago? Sun Ra’s Chicago addresses these questions by tracing the musician’s early life and career, first in Birmingham, Alabama (1914-1946) and then in Chicago (1946-1961), in order to examine the influence of cities on his creative imagination. Drawing on insights from African American studies, urban geography, musicology and religious studies, the book takes an urban historical approach to Sun Ra’s passages through his early cities, seeking to provide fresh insights not only into his music and philosophy but also into the relation between everyday urban experience and the development of Afrofuturism as a cultural ideal.

By 2014—the centenary of a birth he had often denied—Sun Ra’s musical and cultural significance was being celebrated in cities throughout the world. Amid all this attention it was tempting to imagine Sun Ra as ethereal, a free-floating cultural phenomenon, abstract and self-defining. This concluding chapter of Sun Ra’s Chicago reasserts the argument that his own history, and that of his earliest cities, were central to the development of his music and his mythology. Like Martin Delany and W.E.B. Du Bois, Sun Ra’s dreams took inspiration from his urban surroundings, which also connected him—through the hidden and not-so-hidden cultural resources around him—to past histories and visions of the future, enlarging his utopian sensibilities as well as his music. His cultural legacy, in turn, points up the urban foundations of contemporary Afrofuturism, with utopian space given shape by particular cities while also being redefined by the historical imaginations of those who give it meaning.

Posthumanism is most often theorized as a technological/human hybridity, but here I consider a posthumanism that follows Sylvia Wynter’s insistence on a humanism that “exists outside the present conception of what it is to be human.” That present conception is neoliberal humanism, which constructs the human in the image of a hyper-capitalist marketplace that favors whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and fixed gender identities. Here, I turn toward a posthumanism that uses critical race and queer theories to find ways of being that are less violent to those who are black, queer, and feminine. What I’m interested in here is the kind of posthumanity that actively reconstructs what has long been a violently restrictive category: human.