In honor of African-American History Month, and as part of our FUTURE TENSE:  IMAGINED WORLDS FROM THE MARGINS programming, we are celebrating Afrofuturist art, music, and writing this month with zine nights, book displays, and a brand new resource guide.

Afrofuturism, coined in Mark Dery’s “Black to the Future” essay in 1993, sought to encapsulate and explore commonalities and confluences among music, visual art, and writing by black creators.  Melding the African diaspora with technology and science fiction themes, Afrofuturism has earlier roots in mid-20^th century music, most notably Sun-Ra, whose mix of African culture and space age inspired sound influenced later musicians and artists, as well as writings from the Black Speculative Arts movement and mid-century science fiction.   Re-imagining a future flush with art, science and technology through a black lens, Afrofuturism often explores themes of alien or “otherness”, utopian ideologies, the digital divide, feminism, the grotesque, and reclamation of culture.