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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.

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.

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.

Cyberpunk science fiction broke new ground in terms of AI representation; William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the ur-text of cyberpunk, introduced the term ‘cyberspace’, and this spatialized metaphor for data creates an environment that can be inhabited by AIs, rather than an idea of the AI being located in one ‘body’, or in one static place. This chapter explores the possibilities opened by this innovation and by cyberpunk’s continued interrogation of AI as a phenomenon that is dispersed throughout networks, particularly focusing on William Gibson, in the Afrofuturist movement through a reading of Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), and on the work of writers who have been characterized as ‘post-cyberpunk’, such as Cory Doctorow, who shows how algorithms and artificial intelligences can have unexpected, international, and economic consequences.

This chapter explores how sound systems place electronic sounds in a social context, eliciting powerful affective experiences that are framed by conceptual meaning. The chapter begins by tracing the origins of the sound system culture and dub-reggae of Jamaica. This approach, which prioritizes DJ performances over ‘live’ musicians, would prefigure the electronic dance music culture of the 1980s and 1990s. Exploring this area, this chapter examines how the design of Chicago house and Detroit techno provided high-energy dance experiences that reflected the ethos of the respective sub-cultures. Later, in the UK rave scene, breakbeat hardcore, drum & bass, and ambient house each used sound design to support an accelerated youth-culture fuelled by ecstasy, delivering trance-like experiences framed by conceptual meaning. In the global Goa trance and psy-trance scenes, this capability is explicitly characterized as ‘technoshamanic’, and the DJ as a ‘master of ecstasies’.

Between 1972 and 1984, Hollywood produced several lavish jazz-related films. The failure of Lady Sings the Blues to do justice to the life or music of Billie Holiday is detailed. Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York is a swing-era musical about a clash of artistic temperaments and of musical styles, reinforced by a disjunction between stylized sets and naturalistic acting. Gangsters and musicians mix in Francis Ford Coppola’s film about Harlem’s historic Cotton Club. In the 1970s, low-budget features are also produced: TV biopics of Louis Armstrong (with Ben Vereen) and Scott Joplin (Billy Dee Williams), and the Afrofuturist spectacle Space Is the Place, starring bandleader Sun Ra as an interstellar traveler come to rescue Earth’s black people.

The book’s final chapter turns to the twenty-first-century historical present to examine the resurgence of pious warnings about the dangers of presentism in current debates over historical monuments and other forms of historical commemoration. After linking, by way of Afrofuturism, the recent political slogan #StayWoke to the political disposition identified in the book’s previous chapters, I turn to debates about the renaming of college buildings in order to challenge the ideas about history promoted by antipresentists, whose claims are themselves often ahistorical. The historiographical injunction against presentism, I claim, has unwittingly sustained white supremacy in the United States. I feel strongly that we’re not yet done with history—but not done precisely because of, not despite, the history that we inhabit.