Afrofuturist projects traverse antiblackness through radical world making and speculative futures.

​​One of the sociocultural functions of speculative fiction in popular culture is to reflect on actual intersubjective dynamics through the relocation of world/subject constellations onto remote spaciotemporal planes. Particularly when the fictional worlding of alternate possible worlds combines the free play of speculation with references to or analogies for past and present human conditions, it fosters the expression of cultural critique and the promotion of social change. Afrofuturism, in particular, reinscribes lived experiences of othering and exclusion by associating these with science fiction tropes of extraterrestrial, alien lives. As the Afrofuturist cultural theorist, Kodwo Eshun, writes, “Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision. Black existence and science fiction are one and the same” (289). Black diasporic experience resonates with outer space imaginaries because these display similar imbalances in power relations along disenfranchising dichotomies of racialization, gender, and class while telling stories about the crossing of thresholds, the exploration of new frontiers, or the multifarious assemblages1 of hybrid and liminal identities. Science fiction situates itself at the interstices of the social and thrives on the challenges and opportunities inherent to an in-between that bears a striking resemblance with the spaciotemporal networks of the black diaspora. The imaginary intermediate formations of science fiction in Afrofuturism recuperate the prerogative of interpretation and, therewith, the agency over black diasporic pasts, presents, and futures. Eshun describes the Afrofuturist political agenda “as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken” (301). The critical and aspirational interventions of Afrofuturism target the here and now of contemporary social formations and, therefore, ultimately seek to make sense of diasporic human experiences on earth in their excursions into digital, virtual realms as well as in their accounts of space and time travel. Womack also understands Afrofuturism as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation” (9). According to her, the constitutive elements of this “artistic aesthetic and . . . framework for critical theory . . . [are] science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western beliefs. In some cases, it’s a total reenvisioning of the past and speculation about the future rife with cultural critiques” (9). In this artistic and cultural nexus, the liberation of hegemonic constraints is achieved through the transversal shift to utopian ideals and projections because the resulting what-if scenarios facilitate the recovery of the power of the subject in light of oppressive pasts of colonisation and slavery.