Afrofuturism: Curating Futures through Imagination and Self-Determination

Black Panther, a Hollywood Marvel Comics movie released in 2018, marked a significant moment in Afrofuturism on the global stage. While novelists, artists, creatives, and musicians have long engaged the futuristic praxis in their work, critically acclaimed cinematic success such as Black Panther, and Wakanda Forever, can be defined as the crowning moment of these discourses. For instance, in addition to a symbolic and positive representation of African artistry, the socio-economic, political, and cultural capital it provided were unparalleled. These movies, novels and art contribute significantly to new/different conversations about Africa, its diasporas, and futures. While this genre primarily focuses on imagining futures and possibilities of the future, what is sometimes read as futuristic in the genre is in fact mundane, even if contextualized within the realm of spirituality and the cosmos in African culture. This poses an important question: is the future imagineering in this genre merely a project of reclamation? How might we read this genre through discourses of rights (to knowledge and self-determination) and reclamation of decolonial indigenous cosmology which transcends human-centredness in socio-ecological and political matters.