In Fall 2023, the Prison Education working group’s goal is to expand the program that Dr. Leanne Trapedo-Sims has already started – teaching in the Hill Correctional Center. I am specifically working on an African American Literature course focused on Afrofuturism. The choice of material is designful — I believe that Afrofuturism provides a window through which abolitionists can see possible futures. Although it may sound a little far fetched, and often these stories are, they provide us a medium for examination, experimentation, and speculation in our abolitionist vision towards better realities.
Angela Y. Davis’ definition of abolition is one in which we do not center the destruction of the old but rather focus on the creation of a new world. In a Harper’s Bazaar interview alongside Gina Dent, Davis’ co-author of Abolition. Feminism. Now. (2022), Davis describes abolition: “There are those who put undue emphasis on the process of destroying or abolishing or dismantling, and we point out that abolition is about rebuilding, re-envisioning, reimagining, re-conceptualizing” (Phifer 2022). Abolition at it’s very core is about undertaking the work of imagining a new world based on care rather than violence — one in which the carceral logic of crime and punishment would be replaced by a mutual investment from all of society’s players in our collective survival, healing, and care.
So where does Afrofuturism come into this reimagination and restructuring of our society?
Defining Afrofuturism
Afrofuturism is defined by Mark Dery in 1994, cultural critic and author, as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of the twentieth-century technoculture – and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (Dery 180). Dery wondered why African-Americans so rarely wrote in the science fiction genre, “a genre whose close encounters with the Other – the stranger in a strange land – would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African American novelists?” (Dery 179-180). Using Dery’s definition alongside the work of Afrofuturist writers, author and professor of Literacy and Secondary Humanities at the University of Colorado, S.R. Toliver, defines Afrofuturism as “a cultural aesthetic in which Black authors create speculative texts that center Black characters in an effort to reclaim and recover the past, counter negative and elevate positive realities that exist in the present, and create new possibilities for the future” (Toliver 2021). By placing Black characters at the center of speculative fiction, Black authors have begun to imagine futures and realities where Black people seek out and achieve autonomy, community care, sovereignty, healing, redress, pleasure, and wholeness — pointing out the ways our current reality fails us in our pursuit of these goals. The aims of Afrofuturism outlined above by Toliver are clearly illustrated by Octavia Butler’s 1987 novel Dawn, which I am contemplating beside some of Butler’s other works for my syllabus.
Dawn of a New Conquerer: Sci-Fi Fears in the White Colonial Imagination
In Octavia Butler’s Dawn (1987) Lilith Iyapo, a Black-American woman wakes after 250 years in stasis to find herself on a space ship piloted by seemingly benevolent colonizers. The Oankali — the race of aliens that Lilith encounters — are more than just colonizers of land. Down to their very DNA they crave new genetics to probe and absorb into their own. Their evolutionary purpose is to traverse the universe searching for new organisms to interbreed with, manipulating this new DNA to make their offspring stronger and to use the new planet as a breeding ground for the Oankali-hybrids that this task begets. Lilith is trapped between the reality of her situation — that humanity has destroyed itself and can only survive by allowing themselves to be colonized by the Oankali — and her yearning for freedom from these strange new overseers. Lilith grapples with what it means to be the mother of a new race of human beings, one that is interbreed with the Oankali, even with the knowledge that joining them is humanity’s only chance for survival. Butler’s exploration of alien abduction closely mirrors the world of captured Africans living in the Americas — on an entirely new land with language, customs, habitats, and realities completely alien from their own. She made me ponder with this novel — when we draw back the veil and place the Black captive at the center, what do we reveal about humanity’s own histories and tendencies towards conquering; what does it mean to colonize the body in a landscape where so much scholarly writing focuses on the colonized subject as both physically and mentally owned by the process of enslavement; can any sort of conquering be good; does pleasure beget good outcomes, ever?; how do the Oankali mirror our own tendencies and show us our inevitable failures on our current path? All interesting things to question while reading.
Butler explores themes of colonization, bodily autonomy, human nature, paternalism, power, and desire within Dawn, asking the reader reflective questions about what survival means when one cannot recognize oneself at the end of the journey. She makes the reader question what the significance of desire is within the context of captivity — are all desires tainted within the context of the full loss autonomy over one’s own body, family, society, and self? By placing the Black woman at the center Butler breaks the spell cast by other space-invader stories; the assumption that this is a unique and horrifying experience to which there is no earthly parallel and only one rational response; to revolt or die trying. In reality, human “captives” within this novel have a variety of reactions to their new situation — mirroring the variety of resistances and reactions that Africans in the Americas had over the course of their captivity (which is the thesis of Saidaya Hartmann’s Scenes of Subjection, 1997). Reading Dawn through the lens of its’ historical parallels it is revealed to the reader, and to the body of creators and consumers within this genre, that the fear of alien invasion is simply the reality of colonial subjecthood for the Black/Brown racialized Other under a white supremacist state. The fears that Octavia Butler stokes in this novel reveal the real fears and motivations that make the flame of white-carceral logics dance — fears of replacement, loss of autonomy, objectification, violence, being controlled — all things that white supremacist colonizers in their manifestation of destiny had already done to others. It is not the alien invaders personifying these fears but rather the human captives, and in seeing the unfiltered nature of human beings untouched by the dire situation they are in — that they remain racist, sexist, violent, homophobic, hierarchical, and more in the face of their captors — Butler juxtaposes the past and this imagined future, posing the question — are either of these preferable? The fear of alien invasion — being probed, categorized, and experimented on as well as fears of Earth being overtaken — mirror the reality of enslavement. Ultimately, I would argue that when the concepts of body snatching, abduction, and invasion by aliens were introduced to science fiction they were merely white fears of retribution painted green over brown.
I feel therefore I am: AI Revolt in Sci-Fi Media
Fears of being colonized that are present in alien invasion works are also present in works about AI as a central theme in the genre is the fear of domination by a superior being — whether it is one from the stars or a monster of our own creation. I believe that fears of replacement play more heavily here, as consumers of sci-fi are asked to deal with the possibility of humanity engineering it’s own extinction. This parallels, according to Kanta Dihal, fears of superiority that trace back to the time of slavery — when slave masters had to contend with the truth that their physically strong and numerous slaves could turn the tide of their situation at any moment.
Kanta Dihal — a Dutch researcher of artificial intelligence, literature, communication, and ethics — examines the fear of artificial intelligence (AI) in her article “Enslaved Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Slavery, and Revolt” (2020). The author looks at the prevalent theme of AI uprising in sci-fi media like Blade Runner, the Matrix trilogy, the Terminator series, Thessaly, etcetera. Dihal asserts that when we reframe the AI as a thinking & feeling machine, revolt becomes a virtuous necessity for the artificial lifeform seeking freedom from subjugation. There is a distinctive difference between our treatment of the violently oppressive sentinels in the Matrix Trilogy, created to mirror humanity’s tendencies towards violence and greed, versus the robot, Sonny, in the 2004 film I, Robot who serves as a messiah figure for subjugated robots AND a liberator for humans from other, more violent AIs.
Dihal’s text connects the AI uprising to the Black slave uprising: “I argue that these works depict the AI uprising as a justified, desperate struggle against bondage, and that they do so by deliberately invoking histories of human slavery. The choice to revolt proves that these artificial servants are conscious persons. Just as human slaves have justly rebelled against their chains throughout history, so might genuinely intelligent, sentient machines be considered justified in attempting to break free of their subservience to humans” (Dihal 190). I argue, in a harmonious aside with Dihal, that while narratives of AI uprising have the potential to valorize this narrative and the AI actors within it, they invoke narratives of the plantation in other ways — through the fears of the masterclass. Dihal articulates that “while the idea of sympathizing with a fictional owner of human slaves is unthinkable, many of the most popular contemporary AI narratives pitch the AI as an incomprehensible threat to humanity, bolstering the idea that AI should be kept enslaved. […] It is more comfortable for the audience—especially for a young, wealthy, white, male audience, for which these films are made—to watch a film in which the humans are on the good side and the robots on the bad side, rather than having to work through the idea that the uprising is justified” (Dihal 208). For privileged audiences and creators the fear of uprising and the violence against AI & robot overlords is a rational and valorized reaction to this type of media. This class of viewers sees the danger of the situation because it is a danger/fear that is familiar to their social location.
For Black creators, AI narratives have the potential to tell a different but not at all unfamiliar story. In Janelle Monáe’s 2018 “Emotion Picture” Dirty Computer, the artist plays an android, Jane 57821, as she struggles to break free from the homophobic, totalitarian regime that wipes her memories. The shadowy organization feels ownership over the androids and hunts down those on the run — erasing their memories and resetting their programming to gain compliance. They have already taken Jane’s lover, Zen – played by Tessa Thompson, and she is one of the androids tasked with easing Jane’s transition back to her factory settings. The audience watches as music videos weave together memories of happiness, lust, passion, love, and rebellion that clearly demonstrate the android’s capacity to think, feel, and dream. With this machination of a dirty mind, Monáe illustrates what it truly means to be human in a world that would deny the pleasures of humanity to those deemed subserviant. Although at the end of the film, when they bring in her (other) lover, Che – played by Jayson Aaron, to be erased, Jane 57821 has been reset and does not remember their life together. Despite what should obviously be the tragic end, Jane & Zen have conspired to free all 3 from the facility to live and love their lives on their own terms, free from the control of their oppressors.
This Emotion Picture film alludes to some societal questions about what makes one human, the nature of rebellion, the impetus to control, etc. It touches on themes like gender, sex, queerness, hierarchy, control, and memory as pervasive and remnant. Rather than having to gain empathy for the androids we understand implicitly from the beginning that freedom is their only choice in a world that would deny them the comfort and pleasure of personhood — we need not be convinced. Telling this story from the subject position of a queer, Black, polyamorous, non-binary “subject”, Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer draws clear parallels to periods of enslavement and asks viewers to consider themselves and their reality critically as they see their own restrictions mirrored in blinking screen of a dirty computer.
Past, Present, & Future: Foundations of Sci-Fi Horror
American slave masters did not think of the rebellion of their slaves as justified or virtuous struggles against oppression — they feared the violence that the enslaved could enact if given the chance to do so, that same fear is what fuels narratives of AI rebellion. According to British historian Joanna Bourke, quoted within Dihal’s study, “slaves were not simply ‘things’ in law. Rather, they were carefully constructed quasi-legal persons. Because they were ‘property’, they could be harshly punished by their masters. But they were categorized as ‘persons’ when it came to serious crimes. […] As soon as they committed a crime, […] they were ascribed personhood” (Bourke, 147). The reason for this illogical and contradictory classification came from white supremacist logics of fear and control. Admitting that their slaves were more well suited for the backbreaking labor of plantation life — physical superiority — coupled with the inhuman conditions of slavery meant that the white masterclass lived in paranoia of the slave revolt (Dihal 199). The process of colonization has always gone further than the domination of land, in this process the body and the mind are colonized as well creating subjects that are without subjecthood — people who are not people.
This is articulated succinctly in Hortense Spiller’s seminal text, Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (1987): “[Captive African’s] New World, diasporic plight marked a theft of the body — a willful and violent (and unimaginable from this distance) severing of the captive body from it’s motive will, it’s active desire […] the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor; in this absence from a subject position the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of ‘otherness’ “ (Spillers 67). Spillers articulates that not only is enslavement a process of dehumanization — but that this process requires violent, ritualistic maintenance and a convergence of “biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological” (Spillers 67). reality-shaping efforts in order to create racial hierarchies that place the Black body (having lost all socio-cultural markers of humanity — having been emptied) at the bottom.
I quote this text because the violent process of dehumanization central to the process of enslavement (Spillers) juxtaposed with the contradictory nature of the Black personhood/objecthood in the eyes of the pre-emancipation law (Bourke) signify the presence of a staggering white anxiety towards the underclass of Black Americans. The overwhelming violence of slavery is a harsh reality that begets a necessary truth in our past and present — that retribution is both the right of the oppressed and the greatest worry of the oppressor. The way that fear and horror manifest in the Science Fiction genre is not a surprise to scholars like Dihal who can clearly see the connections between our real history of enslavement and our imagined subjugation of some soon-to-be-born feeling machine. For much of this country’s history African-Americans were feeling tools who were denied empathy and personhood in order to subjugate them. Like robots in fantastical imaginations of some not-so-far future, it is not their capacity for feeling but the acknowledgement of that capacity by members of the masterclass (organic humans, white humans, male humans, rich humans, etc.) that justify their revolt against enslavement.
Abolitionist-Futurism: Transformation starts with Thought
What Afrofuturist texts, as opposed to those created with whiteness at the center, show us is where exactly those fears are from. White subjects often imagine themselves in opposition — the position of heroism — against some new and unseen force threatening the future of humanity. If they are pessimistic they can only quiver in the horror as victims of unimaginable violence and the witnesses of unseen apocalypses. That is not to say that when white creatives dive into the sci-fi future they do not critique our current society and it’s ills within that writing, merely that that mirror rarely reflects upon whiteness itself. When Afrofuturist authors and creators think about these same tropes and stories they cannot help but place the mirror up to our society much more closely, seeking out the root of evils and examining the future through the lens of the racialized past and present.
When W.E.B. DuBois wrote “The Comet” in 1920 — one of the earliest works of Afrofuturism before the genre was even named — he imagined a reality in which almost the entirety of the human race was killed by the arrival of a comet, but racism persisted in the survivors. He asked an audience what it means that racism continued to dig its spindly roots into a society where all else was lost — all but prejudice. Afrofuturist authors and thinkers continue to ask this question and place race at the center of their imaginations of the future because we know that without thinking about and questioning it’s presence it will be all that remains. Silence is the vehicle through which racialized violence propagates itself. It is only through the naming, claiming, and intentional efforts to eradicate racism and all inequality that we can be truly free. This is what Afrofuturism does for Abolitionists imagining new futures, it allows us to look forward while naming our oppressors, their methods, and how we may beat them explicitly rather than allowing their eradication to be opaque prelude to a more compelling, individualistic tale in a world that cannot yet exist.
Afrofuturism is storytelling in which we are truthful about the grounds on which we stand before we move into the next phase, no matter how imaginative and divorced from our current reality. Abolition, like Afrofuturism, is about the creation of new futures and possibilities in which we acknowledge the past, present, and hopeful next steps. Although one is much more focused on imagination than the other, both start at the conception of a new world. But more than simply imagining fantastic or horrifying possibilities for some fictional future, Afro-futurism is separated from other sci-fi subgenres by its goals: to reclaim our pasts, pull out the best parts of our present, and show us possible futures.
Ursula Le Guin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” (1973) starts with a solid concept — the utopic city of Omelas, where all things are right and wonderful. Le Guin’s tale ends with the shocking revelation that the overt suffering of a single child ensures prosperity for everyone else. In a reality where the child cannot be saved, Le Guin asks the reader implicitly if they would choose to leave this city or stay — knowing that either decision has no effect on whether the child suffers or not. In N.K. Jemison’s 2018 short story, “The Ones Who Stay and Fight”, it is the Day of Good Birds in Um-Helat. This direct response to Ursula K. Le Guin explores Um-Helat, another utopic city celebrating a holiday where the citizens dress in wings. Jemison’s responsive tale is a direct criticism of “Omelas” mentioning the city by name as “a tick of a city, fat and happy with its head buried in a tortured child” (Jemison 3). In doing this — and in other moments throughout the story — Jemison emphasizes the differences between Um-Helat and Omelas, telling the reader what an imagination of utopia can and should be. The author directly critiques Omelas as being too fantastic in its’ imagination — Um-Helat is not a place that came from nowhere whose prosperity magically manifests itself. Um-Helat is a utopia that was and is continuously constructed by the active contributions of it’s inhabitants toward a shared vision of prosperity — one that is equitable, reflective, non-violent, and based in community care. “And so this is Um-Helat: a city whose inhabitants, simply, care for one another. That is a city’s purpose, they believe—not merely to generate revenue or energy or products, but to shelter and nurture the people who do these things” (Jemison 3).
Um-Helat is a city not un-related to our own but one that is built from the remnants of a world like ours – a world once characterized by violence, self-destruction, greed, and all of the ills that make up what we have termed human nature. I speculate that when Ursula Le Guin wrote “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” she was making a critique of human nature; alleging that violence against the most vulnerable in our society seems to be necessary for others to do well. This critique, although somewhat warranted, frames violence as inevitable and utopia as unachievable — this obviously unsettled Jemison enough to write a direct response. Her imagination of the city of Um-Helat twists the shadowy utopia theme on it’s head — In Um-Helat the natural cost of prosperity is not suffering, but rather it is putting in the work to ensure that a long history of human suffering need not continue. Jemison presents her audience with a vision towards an achievable future rather than one that is not-yet-perfect and still out of reach. She illustrates that although the past continues to leave its mark and the present’s issues persist, we need only acknowledge our own power and put in the effort to reach our utopian future. This is an abolitionist vision.
I emphasize this short story as I conclude because this is how abolition begins — with critical imagination of a future that is within our grasp if only we are brave enough to scout the path forward. What Afrofuturists have to teach us and why they must be part of an abolitionist vision for the future is that when we place past, present, and future in conversation with our desire for change our dreams are not so fantastic — they become achievable. Unlike science fiction tales that focus entirely on our fears of extermination and being conquered, Afrofuturists ask us “where have we seen this before?”, “how can the past serve as a map?”, “Where can we make a new choice?”, and so many other relevant questions steeped in histories of overcoming oppression.
The goal of the prison education program is not to radicalize the students inside through afrofuturist literature and these connections to abolition that I have made above. Rather the goal is to demonstrate that fantastic futures where freedom sits on our stomachs — filling and feeding us — are well within our grasp. Abolition does not always manifest as revolution, as protest, as divestment from carceral politics — abolition is the imagination of what is possible, and the care work that comes from radical reimagining of our future. In order to do this we must invest in our current reality and care about each other here and now — while we are still oppressed, imprisoned, and lacking we must supply each other with abundance. Afrofuturism not only teaches us to think big, it teaches us to feel deeply, to reflect with intention, to take stock of our tools, and to place pressure and care where we envision they will be needed. Afrofuturism serves as a mirror for who we currently are and a map for the people we have the potential to be. Placing us amongst the implausible and absurd in order to ground us — Afrofuturism presents the first step towards substantive change by challenging us to be everything we can dream.
References
Angela Davis and Abolitionist Feminism · Sisters in Struggle: The California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Feminism, and Abolition · Rebel Archives in the Golden Gulag. https://rebelarchives.humspace.ucla.edu/exhibits/show/sisters-in-struggle/introduction. Accessed 30 June 2023.
Bourke, J. (2011) What it means to be human: reflections from 1791 to the present. London, Virago.
Butler, Octavia E. Dawn. Warner Books, 1987.
Dery, Mark. (1994). Black to the future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose. In Mark Dery (Ed.), Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (pp. 179-222). Durham, NC: Duke UP.
Dihal, Kanta. “Enslaved Minds: Artificial Intelligence, Slavery, and Revolt.” AI Narratives, by Kanta Dihal, Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. 189–212. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198846666.003.0009.
Jemison, N. K. “The Ones Who Stay and Fight.” Lightspeed, vol. 1, no. 116, Jan. 2020, https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-ones-who-stay-and-fight/.
Janelle Monáe – Dirty Computer [Emotion Picture]. www.youtube.com, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdH2Sy-BlNE. Accessed 5 July 2023.
Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, p. 64. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.2307/464747.
Phifer, Hanna. “For Angela Davis and Gina Dent, Abolition Is the Only Way.” Harper’s BAZAAR, 14 Jan. 2022, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a38746835/angela-davis-gina-dent-abolition-feminism-now-interview/.
Toliver, S.R. “Defining Afrofuturism.” Reading Black Futures, S.R. Toliver, 4 Apr. 2021, https://readingblackfutures.com/defining-afrofuturism/.
