Afrofuturism requires support from traditional capitalism to succeed, and it’s too deeply rooted in the west

Making the utopian vision come to fruition will require a few things. Lisa Lucas, publisher of the art and politics magazine , and a woman of color, says, “There is this ever-growing, snowballing movement of people who are interested in alternate storytelling forms for writers of color and for readers of color.” But she says the movement requires growth outside the creative spotlight, among what she calls “administrators of color.” These are the expediters who drive the business decisions surrounding entertainment—the producers, editors, and owners. Administrators of color would look to cultivate new audiences instead of relying on sales metrics that tend to exclude marginalized voices. The notion could be extended to the boardrooms of major publishing houses and studios, neglected spaces for advancing progressive causes. Afrofuturism will also thrive when writers immerse themselves in technology in their studies or in their work. Speculative fiction can succeed through narrative discipline and intellectual curiosity alone, while sci-fi subgenres like space opera tend to be written by engineers. It helps to know some physics when you’re writing about a spaceship that is five kilometers long. Only about of engineers at Facebook and Google are black Americans. And this has been my experience working in tech, too—meeting a black employee is like happening upon a crocus peeking through the snowmelt. A truly transformative Afrofuturism would find creators confronting prejudices within black culture. They would question laws that force LGBTQ writers , or fight gender discrimination couched under arguments of tradition. It could become a liberation movement of the imagination for all people. This utopian vision of Afrofuturism is enticing, but it hasn’t arrived yet. Right now there are a number of very real challenges for Afrofuturism to overcome in order to take hold in mainstream culture. In the dystopian vision, no one on the business end of creative industries—the agents, marketers, publishers, producers—takes risks on creators of color. Artists might be forced to revert to addressing explicitly black themes. “We have to write a slave narrative,” Lisa Lucas said, “or a story about civil rights, a retelling of Rosa Parks, some kind of better understanding of what it was like in 1960 or 1830, or what it was like on a slave boat.” It’s a mistake, too, to think that crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Patreon can solve the problem of structural exclusion. The impressive speculative fiction collection was created from a Kickstarter campaign. The volunteer-run Tumblr blog , which is named for the fictional African kingdom in Marvel’s Black Panther series, publishes an incredible volume of content about black comics and science. Founder Lionel Queen recently to support underrepresented creators. It’s a great idea, well worth supporting, but an Afrofuturism that relies upon crowdfunding to survive is dystopian. It means there’s no sustainable investment. Afrofuturism also needs to overcome its geographic myopia. Nnedi Okarafor, one of the most prominent science fiction writers working today, said: “My issue with Afrofuturism is that it has traditionally been based and rooted far too much in American culture.” She champions what she calls “Africa-based sci-fi.” Authors such as , , and are writing engaging fiction set on the continent. But it’s dangerous to oversimplify this trend. To my knowledge, not a single black sci-fi writer has been published by a major publishing house in Africa, and most writers working in Africa-based sci-fi hail from South Africa or Nigeria—not coincidentally, the largest economies on the continent.