Drexciya and the Tied Down Voices

1AC
We begin with the story of the Zong, one of the many slave ships that sailed the
Middle Passage during the Golden Age of Atlantic exploration and development.
Though its story is exemplary of the brutal, actuarial logic of exchange that allowed
each slaves personal apocalypse to be made fully fungible, it is also the story of
something singular and exceptional, a specter of the past staring blankly into the
present moment.
Baucom 01 (Ian Baucom, Ph.D. in English, M.Phil. in English, M.A.in African Studies from Yale
University, B.A. in Political Science from Wake Forest University, Professor and Director of the Franklin
Humanities Institute, The South Atlantic Quarterly 100:1, Specters of the Atlantic, Duke University
Press, Winter 2001, pg. 62-80)//NVG
The sea is slavery. . . . Sea receives a body as if that body has come to rest on a cushion, one that gives way
to the bodys weight and folds round it like an envelope. Over three days 131 such bodies, no, 132, are flung at this
sea. Each lands with a sound that the sea absorbs and silences. . . . Those bodies have their lives written
on salt water. The sea current turns pages of memory. One hundred and thirty one souls roam the Atlantic
with countless others. When the wind is heard it is their breath, their speech. The sea is therefore home. The
Zong is on the high seas. Men, women and children are thrown overboard by the Captain and his crew. There is no
fear or shame in this piece of information. There is only the fact of the Zong and its unending voyage and those
deaths that cannot be unfinished because it recurs. Where there is only the record of the sea. . . . Those
spirits feed on the story of themselves. The past is laid to rest when it is told. Fred DAguiar, Feeding the
Ghosts So begins and ends the Guyanese writer Fred DAguiars Feeding the Ghosts, a novelistic account of the
1781 massacre by drowning of 132 slaves aboard the slave ship Zong, a murder ordered by the ships
captain, Luke Collingwood, when he became aware that he had steered his ship off course, that his supplies of
water and food were running out, that his cargo would perish before he could steer it to port, and that
the only way for him to guarantee a profit to himself and the vessels Liverpool owners was to jettison all
those sickly slaves who, by continuing to consume water, were threatening the welfare of their fellows
and then to claim compensation for these jettisoned goods under the salvage clause of the Zongs
marine insurance policy. Collingwood ordered the murders, and on his return to London, when the insurers
would not pay, he and the ships owners sued. A bizarre series of court cases followed. Collingwood died before
the suit could reach court, but the owners pursued the case, whose successful outcome, from their point of
view, depended on their need to prove that the slaves had indeed existed, that their agent had had them
murdered, and that such a massacre was not only necessary but, under the operating laws of property,
had conferred on each of the slaves bodies a measurable and recoverable quantity of valuethat, indeed,
the only question of justice pertinent to this case was the question of the insurance companys obligation to
compensate the ship owners for their loss.1On which point, let me pause for just a moment, for it is precisely with
regard to questions of justice and value that the case of the Zong has a bearing upon that contemporary
discourse of memory that I want to discuss, a discourse in which the theory of value upon which a politics of
diasporic remembrance founds itself originates in a refusal to identify either value or justice with that
law of exchange which was the true law governing the outcome of the Zong trials. For if it was a
commercial triumph of the exchange principle that permitted the courts to find, as they did, that
Collingwood had produced something of value in each of those moments in which a slaves body hit the
surface of the sea, that each such mini apocalypse was not only an apocalypse of death but an apocalypse
of money, an apocalypse in which, through the metaphoric imagination of capital, death and the money
form name one another as literal equivalents, then it was also a conceptualization of justice as exchange,
the triumph of a classical thinking of justice codified for Enlightenment modernity in Hegels Philosophy of Right,
that permitted what were to become a series of court inquiries into the eighteenth-century laws of marine
insurance to confirm those fundamental and complementary laws of capital which dictate that justice is
done and value produced when one thing is exchanged for another. By such think- ing, justice is little
more than a means of measuring the fungibility of all things, a way, in Hegels terms, of discovering, even
in cases where the damage done amounts to destruction and is irreparable that damage is, indeed,
reversible, that something can be substituted for the lost thing, something that will take the place of its specific
qualitative character, something, in this case, called money.2 If such conceptions of justice, value, and
insurance emerge from the Zong trials as capitals contribution to the history of mourning, then the
notions of justice and value that emerge from a contemporary politics of black Atlantic remembrance, a
politics in which the case of the Zong has once more become a central event, articulate a far more complex
understanding of what it means to exchange one thing for another: an understanding that is at once
recognizably melancholic and countermelancholic, equally devoted to the singular and to the notion of
exchange but devoted, in that case, to a reconceptualization of the protocols of exchange fundamentally
consonant with that implied by a hauntological rethinking of justice.
But the story does not necessarily end there. It is whispered underground that a secret
civilization exists beneath the waters of the Atlantic, made up of the children of
drowned slaves. These Drexciyans are the surviving descendants of the Zong, here
either to teach or terrorize us no one can be sure.
Unknown Author 97 (The Otolith Group 11; A group founded in London in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar
and Kodwo Eshun, that presents a reflection on perception and the nature of human memory
through films, in article Occluded Oceans, Optical Waters: Notes on the Drexciya Mythos II, in INDEX
magazine, Published by the Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona, retrieved 18 Jul 2014 from
http://www.macba.cat/uploads/20111122/01_eng.pdf)
Could it be possible for humans to breathe underwater? A foetus in its mothers womb is certainly alive
in an aquatic environment. During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-
bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and
disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?
Recent experiments have shown mice able to breathe liquid oxygen. Even more shocking and conclusive
was a recent instance of a premature infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid oxygen
through its undeveloped lungs. These facts combined with reported sightings of Gillmen and swamp
monsters in the coastal swamps of the South-Eastern United States make the slave trade theory
startlingly feasible. Are Drexciyans water breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those
unfortunate victims of human greed? Have they been spared by God to teach us or terrorise us? Did
they migrate from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi river basin and on to the great lakes of
Michigan? Do they walk among us? Are they more advanced than us and why do they make their
strange music? What is their Quest? These are many of the questions that you dont know and never
will. The end of one thingand the beginning of another. OutThe Unknown Writer
The Drexciyans are shrouded in an air of mystery remaining hidden from the world
for 200 years, they revealed themselves at last in the 90s underground techno scene
of Detroit.
Robinson 2013 (Ben, Artist and writer from MDes University. Black Atlantis, the Artist of Drexciya
Mythos. http://www.yucknyum.com/zine/autumn-2013/5/)
*Everything that is unknown is part of the myth, and Im sure that the myth could do more for humanity than
anything they ever dreamed possible. Sun Ra. From deep within the dystopian underground of 90s
Detroit, the enigmatic electro act Drexciya released a series of limited EPs whose harsh, uncompromising
sounds held a generation of electronic music fans in their thrall. Each transmission of aquatic assault
programming came shrouded in an air of mystery, with the Drexciyan project fitting firmly to the
faceless techno archetype: no photos, no interviews, anonymous artwork. And what to make of this
consistent aquatic theme? Wavejumper, Hydro Theory, Digital Tsunami... tracks all based around the Roland TR-
808 drum machine with syncopated kick drum patterns and electronic emulations of breakbeats. All were
reputedly played live, and every record evoked an underwater army laying siege to the worlds dancefloors.
1994s Aquatic Invasion carried the following text on the inlay: "The dreaded Drexciya stingray and
barracuda battalions were dispatched from the Bermuda Triangle. Their search and destroy mission to
be carried out during the Winter Equinox of 1995 against the programmer strongholds. During their
return journey home to the invisible city one final mighty blow will be dealt to the programmers.
Aquatic knowledge for those who know." With little other communication save the sounds and the song
titles, Drexciyas mystique looked to have achieved a perfect impenetrability. Their 1997 concept album
The Quest, released on the Detroit techno label Submerge, then duly arrived with some remarkable
sleevenotes: During the greatest Holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves
were thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they
could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air? This origin story would have provided a way in for
any listeners daunted by the musics hostility. By [created] a narrative around the traumas of history,
Drexciya turned social reality into science fiction, adding another layer of meaning to what may just have
been considered purely functional sounds. The British-Ghanaian writer and theorist Kodwo Eshun saw this as being
of a piece with Black American musics space fixation: By inventing another outcome for the Middle Passage, this
sonic fiction opens a bifurcation in time which alters the present by feeding back through its audience - you, the
landlocked mutant descendent of the Slave Trade... If the dominant strain in Afrodiasporic pop culture stresses the
human, the soul, then the post-soul, post-human tendency Drexciya belong to rejects the human species by
identifying with the alien.
The future feeds forward into the past The sonic fiction of Drexciya opens a
bifurcation of time that casts us as the landlocked mutants of the African Holocaust,
left to wander through our temporal mutations and discontinuities.
Eshun 11 (Kodwo Eshun, Drexciya: Fear of a Wet Planet, originally The enigmatic Detroit duo
Drexciya disperse the African-American diaspora from the depths of the Atlantic into outer space, The
Wire, October 2011, http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/drexciya_fear-ofa-wet-planet)//NVG
The Future feeds forward into the Past The sleeve notes to The Quest CD are an origin story, a prequel that
links genetic mutation to recent breakthroughs in liquid oxygen technology and retroacts both back to
the Slave Trade. "During the greatest Holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African
slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible
that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air? Are Drexciyans water-breathing aquatically
mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Recent experiments have shown a premature
human infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid oxygen through its underdeveloped lungs." By
inventing another outcome for the Middle Passage, this sonic fiction opens a bifurcation in time which
alters the present by feeding back through its audience - you, the landlocked mutant descendent of the
Slave Trade. The sustained cruelty of Drexciya's project is not so much justified as it is distributed and
intensified. If the dominant strain in Afrodiasporic pop culture stresses the human, the soul, then the post-soul,
post-human tendency Drexciya belong to rejects the human species by identifying with the alien. From
Sun Ra's instruction to the peoples of Earth to Parliament's greetings to the citizens of the universe, from The
Martian's astro disco Red Planet series to Dr Octagon's address to Earth people, becoming alien allows an
extraterrestrial perspective. The ET discontuum generates a new emotional spectrum towards the
human: attraction, indifference, hostility, medical curiosity. Drexciya bring this extraterritorial
discontinuum down to earth and under the water. Instead of ground reality, their sonic fiction sinks
through the streets with the invisible force of an intensified magnetron. It derealises the solid facts that
Hardcore music insists upon, deforming reality through a systematic confusion of technology with rumour,
information with mystery. Drexciya are esoterrorists. "Mommy, what's an esoterrorist?" Something, or
someone who terrorises through esoteric myth systems. Infiltrating the world, the esoterrorist plants
logic bombs and then vanishes, detonating conceptual explosions, multiplying perceptual holes through
which the entire universe drains out. So the sleeve notes report "sightings of Gillmen and Swamp Monsters in
the Coastal Swamps of the South Eastern United States" that make the Slave Trade theory startlingly feasible. Did
they migrate from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississipi River Basin to the Great Lakes of Michigan? Have they been
spared by God to teach us or terrorise us? Alternating currents Taken together, the EPs and the CD form a Black
Atlantic cycle which is electronic music's most ambitious sonic fiction since Parliament's 1975-79 Mothership
Connection cycle. The Drexciyan cycle plumbs the remotest depths of the Black Atlantic, pursuing its
"processes of cultural mutation and restless discontinuity" to extreme ends. As theorised by British
cultural critic Paul Gilroy, the Black Atlantic is the "webbed network" between the US and Africa, Latin
America and Europe, the UK and the Caribbean along which information, people, records, and enforced
dematerialisation systems have been routing, rerouting and criss-crossing since slavery. When you prise
open The Quest CD, you see four maps of migration routes. The first shows 'The Slave Trade (1655-1867)'. The
second: 'Migration Route of Rural Blacks to Northern Cities (1930s-1940s)'. The third: 'Techno leaves Detroit,
spreads worldwide (1988)'. Gilroy and Drexciya both agree that modernity starts here, with the alien abduction
of slavery. Fast-forward 342 years: America is deaf to Atlantic electronic culture; still hears HipHop as
the defining expression of black pop culture. But Drexciya know better. For them, Techno's electrification
of consciousness is a world historical event in the machinic mutation of modern life. As imperceptible as
the Net once was, Techno is an evolutionary phase shift in African-American history and therefore in the
coevolution of humans and machines. Back in 1993, Gilroy heard the Atlantic network in Soul II Soul's need to
"Keep On Movin". In 1997, Drexciyan tonal communication is worlds away from this nice 'n' easy lyrical message.
Electronics volatises the soul at the push of a button: there's no singer, no redemption, no human touch. Far
from rehumanising electronics, Drexciyan fiction exacerbates this dehumanisation, populating the world
with impalpable hallucinations that get on your nerves. According to mainstream media folklore, the UK and
the US - ie New York and London - take turns to innovate music while the rest of the world worshipfully tunes in.
But the digital diaspora of the late 90s import culture multiplies this alternating current into an unaccountable
network that redraws the globe along ex-centred time zones: Chicago becomes a fourth world transmitting to
Cologne; Detroit becomes an internal empire which seceded from America long ago; Glasgow becomes the 53rd
State; Tokyo kids run barefoot through a London of the head. Twelve-inch records ship across the ocean,
arriving as hordes of import aliens. Import culture has scrambled the maps in everyone's mind. Drexciya
hears this new world and their records chart this aqua incognita. Like SimWorld programmers, they have become
cartographers of the Information Age, mapping out unknown states of mind in track titles that extend from
"Positron Island" through your nervous system, from "Bubble Metropolis" to Vienna via the "Red Hills Of
Lardossa". Submerged beneath information oceans, their obsessive continental drift reconfigures the
placeless space of the Net across which bytes transmit. Each track title draws you further into their Unknown
Aquazone, functions as a component in an electronic mythology which the listener assembles. The Quest CD's
fourth map is titled 'The Journey Home (Future)'. Destination lines point from Latin and North America towards the
South Western Coast of Africa. Unlike the other maps, no arrow indicates which way the information current
flows. Neither repatriation or dispersal, but a process that won't show up on the old maps. A new
geography of morals. "Do they walk among us? Are they more advanced than us? How and why do they make
their strange music? These are many of the questions that you don't know and never will" - 'The Unknown Writer',
from The Quest sleevenotes Participation mystique At Love Parade and Tribal Gathering, you can still hear DJs
saying electronic music is a universal music. The frequencies can unite us all in a tonal consensus. After listening to
Drexciya, it's audible that if electronics ever unites us, then it does so through obfuscation. It communicates
through mystification. To buy The Quest CD is to participate in the mystery Marshall McLuhan heard in which
"electronic circuitry confers a mythic dimension on our ordinary individual and group actions". This "mythic
dimension" is visualised on the CD by and illustration of a Drexciyan hand whose fingers grasp at air.
Strangely unwebbed, the hand is suspended in water, severed from its body. You can see a similar hand on
the back of A Guy Called Gerald's Black Secret Technology and on the inside sleeve of Jeru The Damaja's Wrath Of
The Math, where his hand has an eye in its palm. That's the giveaway. The hand is there to take your mind.
The hand touches you, sees through you. It's the mark of the esoterrorist. You can hear parallels to
Drexciya's systematic perplexity throughout 90s music: in Teknotika's "Gigi Galaxy" EP series; in Jeff Mills's Axis
EPs; in the autistic Electro of Ectomorph and Dopplereffect; in the bleak aharmonic terrain of Terrence Dixon; in
the echomazes of Monolake, Helical Scan and Various Artists on Berlin's Chain Reaction imprint. No one knows
where or what the Epsilon Aquazone is. The listener never solves the mystery, never cracks the codes.
You pass it on.

The subaltern speaks from within a submarine space, whispering secrets that will
always haunt us. This topic offers an opportunity to plumb the depths of the Black
Atlantic, exploring it both physically and metaphorically. Our exploration of this topic
blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, metaphor and reality, past, present and
future.
Tinsley 8 (Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage, Duke University Press, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 14, Number 2-3,
2008, pp. 191-215)//NVG
In what follows, I explore such queer black Atlantic oceanographies by comparing two narrative spaces. One
is a site where an imagination of this Atlantic struggles to emerge: in academic theorizing, specifically in water
metaphors of African diaspora and queer theory. The second is a site where such imaginations emerge
through struggle: in Caribbean creative writing, specifically in Ana- Maurine Laras tale of queer migration in Erzulies Skirt
(2006) and Dionne Brands reflections on the Middle Passage in A Map to the Door of No Return (2001). I turn to these literary texts
as a queer, unconventional, and imaginative archive of the black Atlantic.5 And the literary texts turn to ocean
waters themselves as an archive, an ever-present, ever-reformulating record of the unimaginable. Lara
and Brand plumb the archival ocean materially, as space that churns with physical remnants,
dis(re)membered bodies of the Middle Passage, and they plumb it metaphorically, as opaque space to
convey the drowned, disremembered, ebbing and flowing histories of violence and healing in the African
diaspora. Water overflows with memory, writes M. Jacqui Alexander, delving into the Middle Passage in Pedagogies of
Crossing. Emotional memory. Bodily memory. Sacred memory.6 Developing a black feminist epistemology to
uncover submerged histories particularly those stories of Africans forced ocean crossings that traditional
historiography cannot validate Alexander eloquently argues that searchers must explore outside narrow
conceptions of the factual to get there. Such explorations would involve muddying divisions between
documented and intuited, material and metaphoric, past and present so that who is remembered
and how is continually being transformed through a web of interpretive systems . . . collapsing,
ultimately, the demarcation of the prescriptive past, present, and future of linear time.7 While Alexander
searches out such crossings in Afro-Atlantic ceremony, Lara and Brand explore similarly fluid embodied-imaginary,
historical-contemporary spaces through the literal and figurative passages of their historical fictions. The
subaltern can speak in submarine space, but it is hard to hear her or his underwater voice, whispering (as
Brand writes) a thousand secrets that at once wash closer and remain opaque, resisting closure.
This Afro-futurist chronopolitics calls attention to the relegation of black subjects to
pre-history, and challenges the very framework of linear time.
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[Thus Afrofuturism (for Public Enemy) begins with the End Times. Time is the accumulation of the
apocalypse and its aftershocks. Lisa Yaszek also draws attention to how Afrofuturism interprets the
present as already science fictional in its accumulation of past futurisms and their aftermaths: a post-
Armageddon wasteland of exile and Alien Nation following from the abduction experience of Atlantic
slavery (2006). Thus, like Mone, Sinker suggests a more complex allegorical operation at work, in which
representation exceeds its symbolic correlative to a referent and becomes a Weltanschauunga
worldview of cyclic perception and interpretation, a way of being/becoming in the world that
accelerates the reality of the irreal, drawing the cycles of the future into the present in the same
moment that it unearths the pasts futurisms, the effect of which is an abandonment of consensual
reality and its norms: The ships landed long ago: they already laid waste whole societies, abducted
and genetically altered swathes of citizenry, imposed without surcease their values. Africa and
Americaand so by extension Europe and Asiaare already in their various ways Alien Nation. No
return to normal is possible: what normal is there to return to? (Sinker 1992) Sinkers text
provocatively demonstrates how Afro-futurology, inclusive of its cyclic reinterpretations of the past,
alters the coordinates of the present: the contemporaneous as-is is revealed by Afrofuturism in its
constitutive temporal abnormality. Such temporal revelations are thus transformed by Afrofuturism to
un-earthings. Both Sinker and Mark Dery (1994) recognised how the Afrofuturist undertaking is
disruptive to white-washed visions of the future, just as it likewise exposes the colonization of the past,
what Sun Ra called the real fictions and manufactured memories that make up the all-but-erased
deep history of the Afrodiaspora (Ra 2005). If the Afrodiaspora rarely saw itself represented in mid
twentieth century futurologynotable in the absence of Africanist representations in the 1964 New
York Worlds Fair (Samuel 2007)today the past of Atlantic slavery is at stake, with recent educational
reforms in the Lone Star state attempting to erase its traumatic history through underhanded semiotics,
as Atlantic slavery is abstracted into the Atlantic Triangular Trade.15 In all these cases, and as Gilroy
reminds us, we need to be alert to the politics of temporalization (2004: 339). Kodwo Eshun, in his
2003 essay on chronopolitics, outlines the dynamics of one of Afrofuturisms signature operations, its
temporal politics: By creating temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that disturb the linear
time of progress, these [Afro]futurisms adjust the temporal logics that condemned black subjects to
prehistory. Chronopolitically speaking, these revisionist historicities may be understood as a series of
powerful competing futures that infiltrate the present at different rates (Eshun 2003: 297).]
Magical realism facilitates the simultaneous existence of a plurality of worlds which
erase, transgress, blur, and refashion boundaries
Zamora 95 (Lois Parkinson, Professor and Chair of the Department Comparative Literature Ph.D.,
University of California at Berkeley, Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community, Magical
Romance/ Magical Realism: Ghosts in the US, 1995, pg 5-6)
[Magical realism is a mode suited to exploringand transgressingboundaries, whether the boundaries
are ontological, political, geographical, or generic. Magical realism often facilitates the fusion, or
coexistence, of possible worlds, spaces, systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes of fiction. The
propensity of magical realist texts to admit a plurality of worlds means that they often situate themselves
on liminal territory between or among those worldsin phenomenal and spiritual regions where
transformation, metamorphosis dissolution are common, where magic is a branch of naturalism, or
pragmatism. So magical realism may be considered an extension of realism in its concern with the nature
of reality and its representation, at the same time that it resists the basic assumptions of post-
enlightenment rationalism and literary realism. Mind and body, spirit and matter, life and death, real and
imaginary, self and other, male and female: these are boundaries to be erased, transgressed, blurred,
brought together, or otherwise fundamentally refashioned in magical realist texts. . . . Magical realist texts
are subversive: their in-betweenness, their all-at-onceness encourages resistance to monologic political
and cultural structures.
The affirmative strives to inhabit a space of heterochronic time where ghosts
simultaneously inform our past and haunt our present. This presents a fundamental
paradox though we are impelled to speak, to act, to relate, by the blank stare of the
specters of the past, we must do so with the knowledge that our speech and actions
are never enough, that the work of relation is never complete. The Zong is both past
and present, then and now, something new and also something we feel as though
weve seen before. This temporal dj vu lets us encounter the Zong as a singular,
exceptional apocalypse, and also as exemplary of a modernity that recurs and repeats
itself across the globe.
Baucom 1 (Ian, The South Atlantic Quarterly 100:1, Winter 2001, Duke University Press, p. 74, nd)
The singular first appears in Spivaks Critique in a footnote on Derridas comments on the signature:
The interest here, she notes, is not merely speculative. It has something to do with the fact that,
appears in a cluster of passages surrounding a reading of Coetzees Foe before metastasizing, through
that reading, into the variant forms of the withheld and the cryptic and then reappearing in its
original form in the subsequent chapters of the text: The named marginal is as much a concealment as a
disclosure of the margin, and where s/he discloses, s/he is singular. . . . To meditate on the figure of the

singular and unverifiable margin, the refracting barrier over against the wholly other that one assumes
withholding in the text. For every territorial space that is value coded by colonialism and every
command of metropolitan anticolonialism for the native to yield his voice, there is a space of
withholding, marked by a secret that may not be a secret but cannot be unlocked. The native,
whatever that might mean, is not only a victim but also an agent. The curious guardian at the margin
shorthand thus. The singular, as that first footnote suggests, while not precisely an antispeculative
device (the interest here is not merely speculative ), is something that exists at a remove from pure
speculation (read abstraction, as at once a capital and an epistemological protocol: speculation
thus as a pun on financial and theoretical forms of value creation). A reinscription of Derrida, the
singular thus also reworks Gilles Deleuze, as something whose value has not been coded, as,
indeed, one of those decoded *i.e., not-yet or no-longer coded+ flows, which, in her Deleuzian
moments, is one of Spivaks alternate terms for the native informant foreclosed within a system
the extent to which he or she discloses a space of withholding within the territorialized ambits of
Enlightenment reason, imperial civilizing mission, multinational financialization of the globe, and
metropolitan speculative theory; singular to the extent to which he or she marks off a cryptic, secretive
space (a sort of internalized margin), discloses the presence of that withheld space, but guards its
secret. The singular is thus, in Spivaks example, the withheld secret of Fridays missing tongue, the
cryptic silence that occupies that space, withholds it from coding, refuses to subject this Kantian raw
man to that Enlightenment project of cultural education which will not so much civilize him or render
him receptive to the categorical imperative as erase him. That the singular, thus understood, is also in
the terms of two of Spivaks key sources (Nicolas Abraham andMaria Torok) a species of melancholy is
not an element of her stated argument, though the ghost of melancholy certainly haunts that argument.
[It is not the problem of melancholy, however, but another problem that I want to consider, the
problem of the singular as, precisely, a form of example, the problem exemplified here by Fridays
exemplification of the sin- gular. The example is a notably ambivalent, double-coded thing. It is at
once a specificity, a singleness, a referent, and a specification of something else, a doubleness, a
reference to and beyond itself. The example names itself as itself and it names itself as not-itself but a
mere instance of what it exists to render manifest. There is another way of putting this: what does it
mean for Fridayor indeed for the Zongto exemplify the singular, or what becomes of such
singularity when its withheld secret marks something other than itself, something other than its cryptic
situation, something other than its space of withholding, something it merely represents? The interest
here is precisely speculative, for what such questions suggest is that in its life as an example the
exemplary singular exists as two apparently opposed things: as something that is both in-itself and
for-another, as an exchangeable singular. And it is this indirect return of the speculative, the abstract,
and the conceptual that, I believe, accounts for that palpable uneasiness present in all those moments in
which Spivak attempts to dissociate the singular from the nostalgic by exemplifying it. For if the reading
of the cryptic, withheld singular contains (as one of its secrets) Spivaks answer to the many critics who
have denounced her the subaltern cannot speak, if what it suggests is that she really meant the
subaltern will not speak (in code), then the moment in which that withheld speech licenses its abstract
conceptualization, the moment in which it insists on its exemplary value, is the moment in which it
indeed becomes codable: for speculation (and speculative enrichment).] Why then make the move to
exemplify the singular, to render it exemplary? My sense is that Spivak does this less from a concern
that if she does not, the singular will, in the end, prove too singular, too restricted to its own cryptic
place of withholding, to prove to be of sufficient use than that it is by making this move that she can
demonstrate (exemplify, if you will) that to speak of the singular is to speak not of a state or a
condition but of an undecidability and of the imperative of decision; that it is precisely by troping
its double life that she can pose the singular not as a once lost but now recovered thing but as the
invitation to a decision. And it is as such an exemplary event that I believe the Zong massacre articulates
its exceptionality, its twin life as an irreducible and a representative event. Viewed thus, the decision it
requests reveals the falsity of that choice I earlier indicated it asks us to make, it demonstrates that
there is, finally, no single right way of seeing this scene of murder. Rather, what I want to suggest is that
to look back at this scene is to experience a sort of temporal double consciousness, a recoding along the
axis of time of that knowledge of undecidability and that imperative of decision implicit within the
experience of the impossible. To witness this event is to regard something that appears both in the
guise of the event and in the form of the series, to see what we see as if we are seeing again what we
are seeing for the first time, to encounter history as dj vu. This is, as the title of DAguiars text
suggests, a ghost scene, an apparitional scene, a scene, as Derrida has it, in which the initial appearance
is the appearance of that which reappears, a scene in DAguiars words in which the eye grows
accustomed to rehearsal, to repeats and returns, a scene in which the event is serialized not only in
relation to a roughly synchronic set of like events but in a diachronic relation to itself.17 Even if we
regard nothing but the massacre in its moment, in isolation from its return as image and text and
memory, the event is serialized because the unity of the slaughter breaks down into, and is composed
different plays out before our eyes over and over and over again, so that to speak of the Zong, or the
case of the Zong, is already to speak of the identity of the nonidentical. The recursive, repetitive form of
DAguiars novela novel that finds itself obliged to tell its tale not once but serially: first in a synoptic
preface, then in a set of harrowing chap
the other, then again in an account of the ensuing trials, once more through the memory of a solitary
survivor, and, finally, again in the texts epilogueis, in many respects, a response to this collapsing of
the series into the event and the refraction of the event through the series: a response one might say to
the violence of actuarial reason.
attempts to account for an event t
mutually familiar images onto a single screen, a screen on whose surface we see, as if we were seeing it
again, something we are seeing for the first time. And if this is so, then the visual disturbance
occasioned by such a sight is, as we know from our experiences of dj vu, also a temporal disturbance,
an experience of inhabiting a contemporaneity that is not contemporary with itself, an experience of
inhabiting what we might think of as a heterochronic order of time. Heterochronicity, in this sense, is
that which inhabits the uneasy interregnum between the time of melancholy and the time of mourning,
the time of singularity and the time of exchange, the moment of the exceptional and the reiterative
instant of the recurrently and paradigmatically modern. Heterochronic time, thus, is very much like the
time of dj vu. It is a time of uncertainty, of bewilderment, of not being able to determine the status of
that which lies before our eyes, and of being unable to decide whether the thing has or has not been
seen before, whether it is exceptional or serial, and whether it belongs to a now or a then, as we
manage, fail, or refuse to encounter in the afterimages of the Zong massacre images of an exceptional
or a serial event, images of a brutally singular or a brutally exemplary violation, images of an isolable
atrocity in the history of the transatlantic slave trade or images of a punishing modernity recurrently
replaying itself in every corner of the globe. However we might choose to see this massacre, it is, I want
to conclude by suggesting, precisely within such an order of time that, over the centuries, the Zong has
appeared, most famously in its canonical visual incarnation in , a canvas that
manages to concentrate virtually every aspect of the problems of memory, justice, value, and time I
was displayed as a sort of visual equivalent (if I can permit myself that word) of Wilberforces speech
before the House of Commons. Turner had been reading the recently republished edition of Thomas
Clarksons Essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, where he had come across an
account of the Zong murders and discovered in that massacre the epitome of all that was wrong with
the slave trade. Three decades after Wilberforces address, and nearly sixty years after the massacre
took place, Turner sensed that the event retained its didactic value, though like Wilberforce, that that
value was independent of the named particularities of the case. Thus, perhaps the most significant
feature of the canvas is its name or, indeed, the name that is missing from it, the name of the ship and
the event that inspired its painting, the name that haunts the canvas but is not accommodated by it. In
this setting, the painting, once again, enlists the Zong in a classical discourse on justice as it asks its
viewers once more to recall and to choose, but to choose on the basis of an act of recollection that has
made foreign to itself the peculiar, exceptional, singular qualities of the event it serves to recollect. But
the painting also requests another choice, a form of choice that would have been familiar to Turner
from something else he was reading while working on the canvas: Walter Scotts Waverley novels, which
Robert Cadell, Scotts publisher, had commissioned Turner to illustrate. Indeed, the canvas manages not
only to depict the massacre as though it were a scene from a historical novel but to make it an allegory
of that romantic and Scottish Enlightenment philosophy of history which, as James Chandler and Homer
Brown have suggested, Scotts historical novels, in their turn, served to illustrate. 18 Central to that
philosophy of history, and to Scotts novels, was a sense that the experience of modernity was not, as
the Continental Enlightenment suggested, one of the synchronization of experience, the reduction of
historical time to a single, dominant base time, the homogenizing, leveling, everywhere-available time of
modernity, but the experience of a contemporaneity that was not contemporaneous with itself, an
experience of time as that which was fractured, broken, constellated by a heterogeneous array of local
regimes of time. Scotts novels work by tracing the wanderings of a character across such an uneven
geography of timetypically the Highlands and the Lowlands, territories that he treats, in Raymond
Williamss terms, as the geographies of the residual and the emergent, the customary and the
cosmopolitan19and obliging that character to make a choice for one order of time or another. That
choice is, however, always predetermined, because Scott figures any time but the time of cosmopolitan
capital as wounded, dying, and worthy, finally, of no more than sympathy and an honorable burial. The
typical posture of Scotts protagonists is thus, as Ian Duncan suggests, the posture of a belated but
sympathetic spectator, the posture of one who looks on at scenes of suffering and death, sympathizes
with the dying and the dead, and then moves on to inhabit a modernity cleansed, in Saree Makdisis
terms, of the ghosts issuing forth from the past.20 Turners canvas, with its ship of the dying and the
dead, its mute appeal for its spectators sympathy, captures this paradigmatic scene exactly, not least
because opposite the canvas Turner hung another, Rockets and Blue Light, an image of the coming of
steam power, of the mechanization of the sea, of the modernization of Britains imperium. With that
painting in place opposite Turners tis sixty years since canvas (the subtitle, we will recall, of Scotts
Waverley), the image of the Zong massacre as a scene in a historical novel is complete. Not only
complete but completed, for what Turner effects by locating the case of the Zong within these generic
conventions is both to acknowledge the unevenness of time, the uncanny, repetitive presentness of the
past within the present, and to smooth out that unevenness: by containing the massacre within past
time, by appearing to enjoin a choice between that past and the emergent, modernized present but
indicating that there really is no choice, only an occasion for sympathy and a decent burial (of the dead,
of the slave trade) that the living might live on unhaunted by these specters of the Atlantic. Turners
solution to the questions that the Zong puts to the problems of justice and memory, a solution
borrowed from the progressive romance of Scotts historical novel, is, at first glance, not unique. It also
appears to be Glissants solution, the solution of Poetics of Relation, which also begins by enjoining us to
look on at just such a scene of suffering and death, demands our sympathy, and then lays those dead
to rest. And it is the solution that DAguiar seems to desire in the final sentence of his novel. But it is
also, as the melancholy reiterativity of that novel knows, as Glissant demonstrates through his persistent
return to this singular scene of loss, and as I have attempted to argue here, a false solution. Time does
not pass, it accumulates, most densely, perhaps, within the wake of those modernity-forming spaces
of flow that have governed and driven our long twentieth centurys cycles of capital accumulation. And
the dead, whose ghosts provide us with the figures by which we recognize and deny the cumulative
burdens of history, the dead, whose apparitions weigh as lightly and as heavily upon the present as that
phantasmagoric nightmare of all past generations which, in Marxs fable, deposits its strange weight
upon the minds of the living, the dead do not precede but inhabit the split scenes of Turners exhibition
hall, the globes relational, creolizing spaces of flow, and the historical imaginary of a cross-Atlantic
world that in the terms I have used is a world in which the best elements of exchange are the endless
temporal exchanges of a heterochronic modernity, a modernity, in Benjamins words, in which our now
being is charged to the bursting point with time, a modernity in which, as Gilroy has it, one of the
greatest challenges available to us is the challenge of learning what it means to live
nonsynchronously.21 When the American painter George Inness saw Turners canvas in Boston, he
dismissed it as a trivial piece of work, sniffing that it has as much to do with human affections and
thoughts as a ghost. 22 To which I can only respond: exactly. That is its value.
Drexciya

Pregnant African slaves were thrown into the sea and their babies transferred from
amniotic fluid to the water we are the landlocked mutants of the Slave Trade left to
explore our cultural mutations and discontinuities.
Eshun 11 (Kodwo Eshun, Drexciya: Fear of a Wet Planet, originally The enigmatic Detroit duo
Drexciya disperse the African-American diaspora from the depths of the Atlantic into outer space, The
Wire, October 2011, http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/drexciya_fear-ofa-wet-planet)//NVG
The Future feeds forward into the Past The sleeve notes to The Quest CD are an origin story, a prequel that links
genetic mutation to recent breakthroughs in liquid oxygen technology and retroacts both back to the
Slave Trade. "During the greatest Holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African
slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it
possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air? Are Drexciyans water-
breathing aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed? Recent
experiments have shown a premature human infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid
oxygen through its underdeveloped lungs." By inventing another outcome for the Middle Passage, this
sonic fiction opens a bifurcation in time which alters the present by feeding back through its audience -
you, the landlocked mutant descendent of the Slave Trade. The sustained cruelty of Drexciya's project is
not so much justified as it is distributed and intensified. If the dominant strain in Afrodiasporic pop culture stresses the
human, the soul, then the post-soul, post-human tendency Drexciya belong to rejects the human species by
identifying with the alien. From Sun Ra's instruction to the peoples of Earth to Parliament's greetings to the citizens of the universe,
from The Martian's astro disco Red Planet series to Dr Octagon's address to Earth people, becoming alien allows an
extraterrestrial perspective. The ET discontuum generates a new emotional spectrum towards the
human: attraction, indifference, hostility, medical curiosity. Drexciya bring this extraterritorial
discontinuum down to earth and under the water. Instead of ground reality, their sonic fiction sinks through the
streets with the invisible force of an intensified magnetron. It derealises the solid facts that Hardcore music
insists upon, deforming reality through a systematic confusion of technology with rumour, information with
mystery. Drexciya are esoterrorists. "Mommy, what's an esoterrorist?" Something, or someone who terrorises
through esoteric myth systems. Infiltrating the world, the esoterrorist plants logic bombs and then
vanishes, detonating conceptual explosions, multiplying perceptual holes through which the entire
universe drains out. So the sleeve notes report "sightings of Gillmen and Swamp Monsters in the Coastal
Swamps of the South Eastern United States" that make the Slave Trade theory startlingly feasible. Did
they migrate from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississipi River Basin to the Great Lakes of Michigan? Have
they been spared by God to teach us or terrorise us? Alternating currents Taken together, the EPs and the CD form a Black
Atlantic cycle which is electronic music's most ambitious sonic fiction since Parliament's 1975-79 Mothership Connection cycle. The
Drexciyan cycle plumbs the remotest depths of the Black Atlantic, pursuing its "processes of cultural
mutation and restless discontinuity" to extreme ends. As theorised by British cultural critic Paul Gilroy, the Black
Atlantic is the "webbed network" between the US and Africa, Latin America and Europe, the UK and the
Caribbean along which information, people, records, and enforced dematerialisation systems have been
routing, rerouting and criss-crossing since slavery. When you prise open The Quest CD, you see four maps of migration
routes. The first shows 'The Slave Trade (1655-1867)'. The second: 'Migration Route of Rural Blacks to Northern Cities (1930s-1940s)'. The third:
'Techno leaves Detroit, spreads worldwide (1988)'. Gilroy and Drexciya both agree that modernity starts here, with the alien
abduction of slavery. Fast-forward 342 years: America is deaf to Atlantic electronic culture; still hears
HipHop as the defining expression of black pop culture. But Drexciya know better. For them, Techno's
electrification of consciousness is a world historical event in the machinic mutation of modern life. As
imperceptible as the Net once was, Techno is an evolutionary phase shift in African-American history and therefore in the
coevolution of humans and machines. Back in 1993, Gilroy heard the Atlantic network in Soul II Soul's need to "Keep On Movin".
In 1997, Drexciyan tonal communication is worlds away from this nice 'n' easy lyrical message. Electronics volatises the soul at the push of a
button: there's no singer, no redemption, no human touch. Far from rehumanising electronics, Drexciyan fiction
exacerbates this dehumanisation, populating the world with impalpable hallucinations that get on your
nerves. According to mainstream media folklore, the UK and the US - ie New York and London - take turns to innovate music while the rest of
the world worshipfully tunes in. But the digital diaspora of the late 90s import culture multiplies this alternating current into an unaccountable
network that redraws the globe along ex-centred time zones: Chicago becomes a fourth world transmitting to Cologne; Detroit becomes an
internal empire which seceded from America long ago; Glasgow becomes the 53rd State; Tokyo kids run barefoot through a London of the
head. Twelve-inch records ship across the ocean, arriving as hordes of import aliens. Import culture has
scrambled the maps in everyone's mind. Drexciya hears this new world and their records chart this aqua incognita. Like
SimWorld programmers, they have become cartographers of the Information Age, mapping out unknown states of mind in track titles that
extend from "Positron Island" through your nervous system, from "Bubble Metropolis" to Vienna via the "Red Hills Of Lardossa".
Submerged beneath information oceans, their obsessive continental drift reconfigures the placeless
space of the Net across which bytes transmit. Each track title draws you further into their Unknown Aquazone, functions as a
component in an electronic mythology which the listener assembles. The Quest CD's fourth map is titled 'The Journey Home (Future)'.
Destination lines point from Latin and North America towards the South Western Coast of Africa. Unlike the other maps, no arrow
indicates which way the information current flows. Neither repatriation or dispersal, but a process that
won't show up on the old maps. A new geography of morals. "Do they walk among us? Are they more
advanced than us? How and why do they make their strange music? These are many of the questions
that you don't know and never will" - 'The Unknown Writer', from The Quest sleevenotes Participation mystique At Love Parade
and Tribal Gathering, you can still hear DJs saying electronic music is a universal music. The frequencies can unite us all in a tonal consensus.
After listening to Drexciya, it's audible that if electronics ever unites us, then it does so through obfuscation. It communicates through
mystification. To buy The Quest CD is to participate in the mystery Marshall McLuhan heard in which "electronic circuitry confers a mythic
dimension on our ordinary individual and group actions". This "mythic dimension" is visualised on the CD by and illustration of a
Drexciyan hand whose fingers grasp at air. Strangely unwebbed, the hand is suspended in water,
severed from its body. You can see a similar hand on the back of A Guy Called Gerald's Black Secret Technology and on the inside sleeve
of Jeru The Damaja's Wrath Of The Math, where his hand has an eye in its palm. That's the giveaway. The hand is there to
take your mind. The hand touches you, sees through you. It's the mark of the esoterrorist. You can hear
parallels to Drexciya's systematic perplexity throughout 90s music: in Teknotika's "Gigi Galaxy" EP series; in Jeff Mills's Axis EPs; in the autistic
Electro of Ectomorph and Dopplereffect; in the bleak aharmonic terrain of Terrence Dixon; in the echomazes of Monolake, Helical Scan and
Various Artists on Berlin's Chain Reaction imprint. No one knows where or what the Epsilon Aquazone is. The listener
never solves the mystery, never cracks the codes. You pass it on.

Drexciya contrasts reality and fiction by identifying with the alien and constructing
nonlinear yet still truthful relations between the African Holocaust and the present
social reality.
Robinson 2013 (Ben, Artist and writer from MDes University. Black Atlantis, the Artist of Drexciya
Mythos. http://www.yucknyum.com/zine/autumn-2013/5/)
*Everything that is unknown is part of the myth, and Im sure that the myth could do more for humanity than anything they ever dreamed
possible. Sun Ra. From deep within the dystopian underground of 90s Detroit, the enigmatic electro act
Drexciya released a series of limited EPs whose harsh, uncompromising sounds held a generation of electronic music fans in their
thrall. Each transmission of aquatic assault programming came shrouded in an air of mystery, with the
Drexciyan project fitting firmly to the faceless techno archetype: no photos, no interviews, anonymous
artwork. And what to make of this consistent aquatic theme? Wavejumper, Hydro Theory, Digital Tsunami... tracks all based around the
Roland TR-808 drum machine with syncopated kick drum patterns and electronic emulations of breakbeats. All were reputedly played live, and
every record evoked an underwater army laying siege to the worlds dancefloors. 1994s Aquatic Invasion carried the following text on the
inlay: "The dreaded Drexciya stingray and barracuda battalions were dispatched from the Bermuda Triangle. Their search and destroy mission
to be carried out during the Winter Equinox of 1995 against the programmer strongholds. During their return journey home to the invisible city
one final mighty blow will be dealt to the programmers. Aquatic knowledge for those who know." With little other
communication save the sounds and the song titles, Drexciyas mystique looked to have achieved a
perfect impenetrability. Their 1997 concept album The Quest, released on the Detroit techno label
Submerge, then duly arrived with some remarkable sleevenotes: During the greatest Holocaust the
world has ever known, pregnant America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the
thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given
birth at sea to babies that never needed air? This origin story would have provided a way in for any listeners daunted
by the musics hostility. By [created] a narrative around the traumas of history, Drexciya turned social reality
into science fiction, adding another layer of meaning to what may just have been considered purely functional sounds. The British-
Ghanaian writer and theorist Kodwo Eshun saw this as being of a piece with Black American musics space fixation: By inventing
another outcome for the Middle Passage, this sonic fiction opens a bifurcation in time which alters the
present by feeding back through its audience - you, the landlocked mutant descendent of the Slave
Trade... If the dominant strain in Afrodiasporic pop culture stresses the human, the soul, then the post-
soul, post-human tendency Drexciya belong to rejects the human species by identifying with the alien.
In 2002 the Drexciyan project came to an abrupt close when the groups James Stinson died suddenly aged 32 of a heart condition. That same
year, Eshun formed The Otolith Group with the filmmaker Anjalika Sagar, their film Hydra Decapita eventually being nominated for the 2010
Turner Prize. Hydra Decapita took as its point of departure the Drexciyan fabulation, turning this into a
meditation on dehumanisation in capitalist systems. Visually, the film depicts hypnotic high-contrast
close-ups of flickering water as a mysterious narrator imagines pan-galactic stretches of water-space.
Hydra Decapita also references JMW Turners 1840 painting The Slave Ship and John Ruskins 1845 defence of that painting, which the Otolith
Group sees as an inaugural moment for art criticism in England. Eshun described the filmmakers tracing of connections between seemingly
disparate narratives in an interview with the art podcast Bad at Sports: Visually, the film is extremely monochromatic. Its also based on
singing, so you get a film that has a desolate eeriness to it. And all of this is our way of trying to apprehend abstraction.
The idea is that financial capitalism works through abstract processes that nonetheless have real effects,
which means that our language, aesthetically speaking, has to become as abstract as reality itself. It also
relates to constructing nonlinear relations to the present. Also attempting to bring this mythos to a
contemporary art audience is the American painter Ellen Gallagher, whose Watery Ecstatic series, begun
in 1997, uses a variation on scrimshaw by carving images into the surface of thick sheets of watercolor paper and drawing with
ink, watercolor, and pencil. Speaking to the website Art21, Gallagher explained her method: In 2001 I started making a sequence of films called
Murmur, from the Watery Ecstatic drawings. The first filmalso titled Watery Ecstaticrefers most literally to the drawings, in terms of
the way the paper is cut and the drawing done over it. Its this moment of being submerged; theres a marine mountain
and these heads bobbing up and down in the waves. Its very crudely done. Its real and mythological at
the same time, this underwater black AtlantisDrexciya. Inspired by Eshuns theories, the filmmaker Akosua Adoma
Owusu shot the eerie 10 minute film Drexciya in an abandoned public swimming pool in Accra, Ghana in
2010. As villagers wander around the dilapidated hotel, an ambient watery soundtrack plays and failed capitalist fantasies are acted out.
Another short titled Drexciya was released in 2012 by the German director Simon Rittmeier, depicting a
shipwreck survivor wandering the deserts of Burkina Faso while carrying a fragment of light fence.
Joining with three young Africans, they try to reach the next megacity of Drexciya. Throughout all these
diverse projects, artists and filmmakers have worked to connect a tragic historical narrative with the radical discontinuities of the present.
The Drexciya sound is defiantly uncommercial and often willfully alienating, but then this was never
about entertainment. As The Unknown Writer of The Quest sleevenotes originally proclaimed: "Do they
walk among us? Are they more advanced than us? How and why do they make their strange music?
These are many of the questions that you don't know and never will."]

The subaltern speaks in submarine space, with their voices tied down exploring the
ocean plumbs the physical remnants of the disremembered bodies as well as the
metaphors in the drowned memories.
Tinsley 8 (Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage, Duke University Press, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 14, Number 2-3,
2008, pp. 191-215)//NVG
In what follows, I explore such queer black Atlantic oceanographies by comparing two narrative spaces. One
is a site where an imagination of this Atlantic struggles to emerge: in academic theorizing, specifically in water
metaphors of African diaspora and queer theory. The second is a site where such imaginations emerge
through struggle: in Caribbean creative writing, specifically in Ana- Maurine Laras tale of queer migration in Erzulies Skirt
(2006) and Dionne Brands reflections on the Middle Passage in A Map to the Door of No Return (2001). I turn to these literary texts
as a queer, unconventional, and imaginative archive of the black Atlantic.5 And the literary texts turn to ocean
waters themselves as an archive, an ever-present, ever-reformulating record of the unimaginable. Lara
and Brand plumb the archival ocean materially, as space that churns with physical remnants,
dis(re)membered bodies of the Middle Passage, and they plumb it metaphorically, as opaque space to
convey the drowned, disremembered, ebbing and flowing histories of violence and healing in the African
diaspora. Water overflows with memory, writes M. Jacqui Alexander, delving into the Middle Passage in Pedagogies of
Crossing. Emotional memory. Bodily memory. Sacred memory.6 Developing a black feminist epistemology to uncover
submerged histories particularly those stories of Africans forced ocean crossings that traditional historiography cannot validate Alexander
eloquently argues that searchers must explore outside narrow conceptions of the factual to get there. Such
explorations would involve muddying divisions between documented and intuited, material and
metaphoric, past and present so that who is remembered and how is continually being
transformed through a web of interpretive systems . . . collapsing, ultimately, the demarcation of the
prescriptive past, present, and future of linear time.7 While Alexander searches out such crossings in Afro-Atlantic
ceremony, Lara and Brand explore similarly fluid embodied-imaginary, historical-contemporary spaces through
the literal and figurative passages of their historical fictions. The subaltern can speak in submarine space,
but it is hard to hear her or his underwater voice, whispering (as Brand writes) a thousand secrets that at
once wash closer and remain opaque, resisting closure.
Drexciya is a spectre that invites the discussion of intersections, freeing us from
concepts of justice that equate bodies with profit, allowing us to prevent the
hauntological over time - modernity is understood through Drexciya
The Otolith Group 11 (A group founded in London in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun,
that presents a reflection on perception and the nature of human memory through films, in article
Occluded Oceans, Optical Waters: Notes on the Drexciya Mythos II, in INDEX magazine, Published by
the Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona, retrieved 18 Jul 2014 from
http://www.macba.cat/uploads/20111122/01_eng.pdf)
Living through the contemporary crisis of market fundamentalism and inhabiting the ideological rubble
of neo-liberalism foregrounds the understanding that practices of speculation were, and remain, as
much financial as they are fictional. Between the publication of Paul Gilroys The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness in 1993, Peter Linebaugh and
Marcus Redikers The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic in 2001 and Ian Baucoms Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital,
Slavery, and the Philosophy of History in 2005, a notion of Drexciya begins to emerge. Drexciya is thinkable as a spectre of the sub-Atlantic, a
revenant that resurfaces and resubmerges with each cycle of capital accumulation. Baucom explained
that what is at once obscene and vital to contemporary understanding of the full capital logic of the
slave trade is to come to terms with what it meant for this trade to have found a way to treat human
beings not only as if they were a type of commodity but as a flexible, negotiable, transactionable form of
money. Without this financial revolution in the business operations of the slave trade, there would have been no incentive
for Captain Luke Coliingwood to do what he did, that is, to confidently massacre 132 slaves aboard the Zong, secure in the conviction that in doing
so he was not destroying his employers commodities but hastening their transformation into money. Drexciya invites the
assemblage of a constellation of intersections between atrocity and insurance, servitude and credit,
and the ocean and mortality. Each of these intersections between atrocity and insurance, servitude and
credit, and the ocean and mortality. Each of these intersections has persisted into the present, inviting degrees
of chronological disturbance whose effects are difficult to calculate in advance. Impossible not to hear in Drexciya the murmurings of an
anthropological exodus from capitalism that continually converts futures into finance in order to put
bodies to death.

The Atlantic is full of these crosscurrents, with cultures, race, gender, class, and
sexuality the waves erode barriers and hold concrete, painful, and liberatory
experiences
Tinsley 8 (Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle
Passage, Duke University Press, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 14, Number 2-3,
2008, pp. 191-215)//NVG
And water, ocean water is the first thing in the unstable confluence of race, nationality, sexuality, and
gender I want to imagine here. This wateriness is metaphor, and history too. The brown-skinned, fluid-bodied
experiences now called blackness and queerness surfaced in intercontinental, maritime contacts hundreds
of years ago: in the seventeenth century, in the Atlantic Ocean. You see, the black Atlantic has always been the queer
Atlantic. What Paul Gilroy never told us is how queer relationships were forged on merchant and pirate ships, where Europe-ans and
Africans slept with fellow and I mean same-sex sailors. And, more powerfully and silently, how queer relationships emerged in the holds
of slave ships that crossed between West Africa and the Caribbean archipelago. I began to learn this black Atlantic when I was studying
relationships between women in Suriname and delved into the etymology of the word mati. This is the word Creole women use for
their female lovers: figuratively mi mati is my girl, but literally it means mate, as in shipmate she who survived the
Middle Passage with me. Sedimented layers of experience lodge in this small word. During the Middle Passage, as colonial chronicles,
oral tradition, and anthropological studies tell us, captive African women created erotic bonds with other women in the
sex-segregated holds, and captive African men created bonds with other men. In so doing, they resisted the
commodification of their bought and sold bodies by feeling and feeling for their co-occupants on these
ships. I evoke this history now not to claim the slave ship as the origin of the black queer Atlantic. The ocean obscures all origins,
and neither ship nor Atlantic can be a place of origin. Not of blackness, though perhaps Africans first became negros
and negers during involuntary sea transport; not of queerness, though perhaps some Africans were first intimate with same-sex
shipmates then. Instead, in relationship to blackness, queerness, and black queerness, the Atlantic is the site
of what the anthropologist Kale Fajardo calls crosscurrents. Oceans and seas are important sites for differently
situated people. Indigenous Peoples, fisherpeople, seafarers, sailors, tourists, workers, and athletes. Oceans and seas are sites
of inequality and exploitation resource extraction, pollution, militarization, atomic testing, and genocide. At the same time,
oceans and seas are sites of beauty and pleasure solitude, sensuality, desire, and resistance. Oceanic and
maritime realms are also spaces of transnational and diasporic communities, heterogeneous trajectories
of globalizations, and other racial, gender, class, and sexual formations.1 Conceptualizing the complex possibilities
and power dynamics of the maritime, Fajardo posits the necessity of thinking through transoceanic crosscurrents. These
are theoretical and ethnographic borderlands at sea, where elements or currents of historical, conceptual, and embodied
maritime experience come together to transform racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized selves. The queer black Atlantic I discuss here
navigates these crosscurrents as it brings together enslaved and African, brutality and desire, genocide and
resistance. Here, fluidity is not an easy metaphor for queer and racially hybrid identities but for
concrete, painful, and liberatory experience. It is the kind of queer of color space that Roderick Ferguson calls for
in Aberrations in Black, one that reflects the materiality of black queer experience while refusing its transparency.

The Middle Passage is an early example of how historical processes have imperfectly
shaped our human conditionDrexciya as magical realism secedes from the
ontological state of the human and revisits the biopolitics of the time, giving us a
chance to redefine human ontology
The Otolith Group 11 (A group founded in London in 2002 by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun,
that presents a reflection on perception and the nature of human memory through films, in article
Occluded Oceans, Optical Waters: Notes on the Drexciya Mythos II, in INDEX magazine, Published by
the Museu dArt Contemporani de Barcelona, retrieved 18 Jul 2014 from
http://www.macba.cat/uploads/20111122/01_eng.pdf)
Could it be possible for humans to breathe underwater? A foetus in its mothers womb is certainly
alive in an aquatic environment. During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant
America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick
and disruptive cargo. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed
air? Recent experiments have shown mice able to breathe liquid oxygen. Even more shocking and conclusive was a recent instance of a
premature infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid oxygen through its undeveloped lungs. These facts combined with reported
sightings of Gillmen and swamp monsters in the coastal swamps of the South-Eastern United States make the slave trade theory
startlingly feasible. Are Drexciyans water breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of those unfortunate victims of human greed?
Have they been spared by God to teach us or terrorise us? Did they migrate from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi river basin and on to the
great lakes of Michigan? Do they walk among us? Are they more advanced than us and why do they make their strange music? What is their
Quest? These are many of the questions that you dont know and never will. The end of one thingand the beginning of another. OutThe
Unknown Writer The Middle Passage becomes an incunabula for the ficiontalisation of the human species
via processes of forced adaptation, mutation, and evolution. The fantasy of origination is replaced here
with a fable of mutation. Drexciya operated as a hypothetical mythology, capable, on one hand, of registering the implications of a
non-reversible diaspora while simultaneously operating as a convergence between the organization of sound and the assemblage of fiction in
the guise of elaborately arranged escapism. What could be discerned in the Drexciya mythos was a fabulation that
pursued the implications of forced mutation. By seceding from the political category, the philosophical
claim and onotological condition of the human, Drexciya retroacted received ideas of the post-human as
a coming condition. The Drexciya myth was nothing less than a redreaming of the biopolictical atrocity
of the Middle Passage; a revisionist electronic song-cycle in which the implications of financial speculation of a tradewhose promise
to pay was insured by cargoes of bodieswere carried over into a fictional speculation on death, marine evolution, terracentricity and post-
humanity.

Afro Futurism

Imagination outside of this spectre produces an escape by utilizing a right to refuse
conditions.
Moten 07 (Fred Moten, Duke University, professor of black studies, where he works at the intersection
of performance, poetry and critical theory., author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical
Tradition, Black Optimism = Black Operation, University of Chicago, 10/19/07,
http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/politicalfeeling/files/2007/12/moten-black-optimism.doc)//NVG
My field is black studies. In that field, Im trying to hoe the hard row of beautiful things. I try to study them and I also try to make them.
Elizabeth Alexander says look for color everywhere. For me, color + beauty = blackness which is not but nothing
other than who, and deeper still, where I am. This shell, this inhabitation, this space, this garmentthat I carry
with me on the various stages of my flight from the conditions of its makingis a zone of chromatic saturation troubling any
ascription of impoverishment of any kind however much it is of, which is to say in emergence from, poverty (which is, in turn, to say
in emergence from or as an aesthetics or a poetics of poverty). The highly cultivated nature of this situated volatility, this
emergent poetics of the emergency, is the open secret that has been the preoccupation of black studies. But it must be
said nowand Ill do so by way of a cool kind of accident that has been afforded us by the danger and saving power that is power pointthat
there is a strain of black studies that strains against black studies and its object, the critique of western civilization,
precisely insofar as it disavows its aim (blackness or the thinking of blackness, which must be understood in what some
not so strange combination of Nahum Chandler and Martin Heidegger might call its paraontological distinction from black people). There was a
moment in Rebeccas presentation when the image of a black saxophonist (I think, but am not sure, that it was the great Chicago musician Fred
Anderson) is given to us as a representative, or better yet a denizen (as opposed to citizen), of the space of the imagination.
Whats cool here, and what is also precisely the kind of thing that makes practitioners of what might be called the new
black studies really mad, is this racialization of the imagination which only comes fully into its own when
it is seen in opposition, say, to that set of faces or folks who constituted what I know is just a part of Laurens tradition of Marxist
historiographical critique. That racialization has a long history and begins to get codified in a certain Kantian
discourse, one in which the imagination is understood to produce nothing but nonsense, a condition
that requires that its wings be severely clipped by the imagination. What Im interested in, but which I can only give
a bare outline of, is a two-fold black operationone in which Kant moves toward something like a thinking of the
imagination as blackness that fully recognizes the irreducible desire for this formative and deformative,
necessarily supplemental necessity; one in which black studies ends up being unable to avoid a certain sense of itself as a Kantian, which is
to say anti-Kantian and ante-Kantian, endeavor. The new black studies, or to be more precise, the old-new black studies, since every
iteration has had this ambivalence at its heart, cant help but get pissed at the terrible irony of its irreducible Kantianness precisely because it
works so justifiably hard at critiquing that racialization of the imagination and the racialized opposition of
imagination (in its lawless, nonsense producing freedom) and critique that turns out to be the condition of possibility
of the critical philosophical project. There is a voraciously instrumental anti-essentialism, powered in an
intense and terrible way by good intentions, that is the intellectual platform from which black studies
disavowal of its object and aim is launched, even when that disavowal comes in something which also thinks itself to be moving
in the direction of that object and aim. Im trying to move by way of a kind of resistance to that anti-essentialism, one that
requires a paleonymic relation to blackness; Im trying to own a certain dispossession, the underprivilege of being-
sentenced to this gift of constantly escaping and to standing in for the fugitivity (to echo Natahaniel Mackey,
Daphne Brooks and Michel Foucault) (of the imagination) that is an irreducible property of life, persisting in and
against every disciplinary technique while constituting and instantiating not just the thought but that
actuality of the outside that is what/where blackness isas space or spacing of the imagination, as condition
of possibility and constant troubling of critique. Its annoying to perform what you oppose, but I just want you to know that I
aint mad. I loved these presentations, partly because I think they loved me or at least my space, but mostly because they were beautiful. I love
Kant, too, by the way, though he doesnt love me, because I think hes beautiful too and, as you know, a thing of beauty is a joy
forever. But even though Im not mad, Im not disavowing that strain of black studies that strains against the weight or
burden, the refrain, the strain of being-imaginative and not-being-critical that is called blackness and that black
people have had to carry. Black Studies strains against a burden that, even when it is thought musically, is inseparable from constraint. But my
optimism, black optimism, is bound up with what it is to claim blackness and the appositional, runaway black
operations that have been thrust upon it. The burden, the constraint, is the aim, the paradoxically aleatory
goal that animates escape in and the possibility of escape from. Here is one such black opa specific, a capella
instantiation of strain, of resistance to constraint and instrumentalization, of the propelling and constraining force of the
refrain, that will allow me to get to a little something concerning the temporal paradox of, and the irruption of ecstatic
temporality in, optimism, which is to say black optimism, which is to say blackness. I play this in appreciation for being in Chicago, which is
everybodys sweet home, everybodys land of California, as Robert Johnson puts it. This is music from a Head Start program in Mississippi in the
mid-sixties and as you all know Chicago is a city in Mississippi, Mississippi a (fugue) state of mind in Chicago. The temporal paradox of
optimismthat it is, on the one hand, necessarily futurial so that optimism is an attitude we take towards that
which is to come; but that it is, on the other hand, in its proper Leibnizian formulation, an assertion not only of the
necessity but also of the rightness and the essential timelessness of the always already existing, resonates in
this recording. It is infused with that same impetus that drives a certain movement, in Monadology, from the immutability of monads to that
enveloping of the moral world in the natural world that Leibniz calls, in Augustinian echo/revision, the City of God. With respect to C. L. R.
James and Jos (Muoz), and a little respectful disrespect to Lee Edelman, these children are the voices of the future in the
past, the voices of the future in our present. In this recording, this remainder, their fugitivity, remains, for me, in the
intensity of their refrain, of their straining against constraint, cause for the optimism they perform. That
optimism always lives, which is to say escapes, in the assertion of a right to refuse, which is, as Gayatri Spivak says,
the first right: an instantiation of a collective negative tendency to differ, to resist the regulative powers
that resistance, that differing, call into being. To think resistance as originary is to say, in a sense, that we have what we need,
that we can get there from here, that theres nothing wrong with us or even, in this regard, with here, even as it requires us still to
think about why it is that difference calls the same, that resistance calls regulative power, into existence, thereby securing
the vast, empty brutality that characterizes here and now. Nevertheless, however much I keep trouble in
mind, and therefore, in the interest of making as much trouble as possible, I remain hopeful insofar as I will have been in this
very collective negative tendency, this little school within and beneath school that we gather together to be. For a bunch of little
whiles, this is our field (i.e., black studies), our commons or undercommons or underground or outskirts and it will remain
so as long as it claims its fugitive proximity to blackness, which I will claim, with ridiculousness boldness, is the
condition of possibility of politics. Feel me?

Black optimism illuminates the junction of possibility with the end of politics
Moten 07 (Fred Moten, Duke University, professor of black studies, where he works at the intersection
of performance, poetry and critical theory., author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical
Tradition, Black Optimism = Black Operation, University of Chicago, 10/19/07,
http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/politicalfeeling/files/2007/12/moten-black-optimism.doc)//NVG
NOTES FOR BLACK OPS I am gonna do something called "Black Ops." In addition to the notion of a black operation I am also interested in
something I would like to call black optimism, something that will illuminate the convergence of the condition of
possibility and the end of politics (something james would think as "the future in the present," something King
would discuss under the rubric of the "fierce urgency of now" where fierce urgency denotes not only pain
but also pleasure--I'm talking about an exigency that, above all, inheres in and radiates from, The Music). Eventually, and
it's too much to go into here, this will open up some ways to link up some questions emerging out of Leibniz and extended by Russell and
Deleuze and my old teacher Ann Banfield that will allow me to consider some interplay between blackness and the baroque and will, therefore,
link up to the essay on Glenn Gould, Beethoven and filmic practice. Ultimately, there are some things I want to say about Gould and Cecil Taylor
that will, I hope, allow an articulation of something, in relation each to the other, regarding the political history of the present. Obviously, what
I'm contemplating will either be one hundred pages or ten very dense and poetic ones. Some aphorisms, some variations or, perhaps more
precisely, some rhythmic figures, some heads invoking arrangement, as it were, or anarrangement. Black ops. Back Sites. What is it that now
one has to forge a paleonymic (r)elation to black, to blackness? The word persists, now, under erasure or
eclipse, ceded to the state of law/exception. The word is begrudged, grungy, dingy, encased in a low tinge, always
understood as being in need of a highlight it already has or that chromatic saturation that it already is.
Resistance and (the auto-poetics of) organization (flight + inhabitation). optimism/monad/baroque/blackness Nomad
and monad. N gets a letter from M. Whats the relationship between saying, utopia is submerged in or in the interstices or on the
outskirts of the present and saying, this is the best of all possible worlds (a Leibnizian optimism) and saying, the history of
abolitionism is not the history of a set of wholly rhetorical exhortations, whether rational or ecstatic, but is,
rather, the history of an infinite set or line of quotidian escape acts (as Daphne Brooks might say) which operate at the
level of rhetoric as well as the aesthetic and which, therefore, might include but need not be reduced to this or that particular
instance of abolitionist rhetoric? Laid back, spread out, stretched out, laid out. Part of whats necessary is the realization of
an analytic that moves through the opposition of voluntary secrecy and forced exposure. Whats needed is
some way to understand how the underground operates out in the open and, perhaps deeper still, as the open in something like the ways
Agamben/Rilke/Santner have tried to approach. Whats the relation between the border/limit and the open?
Between blackness and the limit/edge? Between a quite specific and materially redoubled finitude or being-limited and the
open? What a certain discourse on the relation between blackness and death seems to try to get toin the
best (which is to say least tragically neurotic) instances of that discourselies, at least, in vicinity of this question.

Afrofuturism recovers black history and reclaims the history of future instead of
seeing black as dystopia it gives double, triple, or quadruple consciousness about
what it means to be black in relation to society, science, and the future.
Yaszek 13 (Lisa Yaszek , Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, School of
Literature, Communication and Culture, Georgia Tech, Race in Science Fiction: The Case of
Afrofuturism, August 2013, A Virtual Introduction to Science Fiction, http://virtual-sf.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/Yaszek.pdf)//NVG
One of the most interesting things that scholars are talking about now is the fact that science fiction has actually been a global
phenomenon since its inception. We see science fiction coming out of Brazil as early as the 1830s and coming out of China and
Japan by the 1860s. So in short, it seems that any time a nation or an ethnic group begins to participate in industrial culture, its authors
naturally turn to science fiction as the premiere story form of technoscientific modernity; as an ideal means by which to critically assess new
ways of doing economics and politics and science and technology. More specifically, what we find is that authors of all color and I
would certainly include white authors in this use science fiction to explore the necessary relations of science,
society, and race and to stake claim for themselves and for their communities in the global future
imaginary. As we're going to see, that is especially important in the case of Afrofuturism. And so that's exactly what
we're going to look at today: the 150 years old tradi-tion of speculative fiction written by black people called
Afrofuturism. First, let me give you a working definition of the term. Afrofuturism is speculative fiction or science fiction
written by both Afrodiasporic and African authors. It's a global aesthetic movement that encompasses
art, film, literature, music, and scholarship. Mark Dery talks about it as a process of "signification that
appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically-enhanced future" (180) to explore the hopes and
fears that people of color face in a high tech world. As I see it, there are three basic goals for Afrofuturism. The main thing
that Afrofuturist artists want to do is tell good science fiction stories and I think that if you speak with any black science fiction author from
anywhere around the globe, they'll tell you that's first and foremost what they're interested in. But there are two other political
goals associated with Afrofuturism as well. Afrofuturist artists are inter-ested in recovering lost black
histories and thinking about how those histories inform a whole range of black cultures today. They also
want to think about how these histories and cultures might inspire new visions of tomorrow. Let's think a
little bit more about these last two goals. A lot of scholars think about Afofuturism as an extension of the historical
recovery projects that black Atlantic intellectuals have engaged in for well over two hundred years now.
As Tony Morrison has written and spoken about eloquently, these kinds of historic recovery projects show how African
slaves and their descendants experienced conditions of homelessness, alienation, and dislocation that
very much anticipate what Nietzsche described as the founding conditions of modernity (cf. Gilroy). And so,
you can start to see why it is that science fiction appeals to Afrodiasporic artists. If you want think about black people as the
primary subjects of modernity, those who have the most intense engagements with it, science fiction
has the grammar that allows us to narrate those engagements. Stories about travel through time and
space and stories about encounters with the alien other are ideal ways to bring those historical
experiences to life for new audiences. Just to jump ahead of myself here for a moment, if you think about Derrick Bell's story
"The Space Traders", you can see how the lead character, Professor Golightly, is always engaging African American history in his attempt make
sense of an uncertain future, and that's what allows him to realize that the United States deal with the aliens may not end all that well. That
attempt to connect the past with the present and the future is central to the Afrofuturist project. The next goal for Afofuturists is a
more positive one: not just to remember the bad past, but to use stories about the past and the present
to reclaim the history of the future. That is what African-British music critic Kodwo Eshun talks about in his really great work on
Afofuturism. He talks about how histories of the fu-ture have been hijacked by what he calls "the futures
industries" (290). "The fu-tures industries" is his term for the place where technoscience, fictional media, and
market prediction meet especially as the ideas generated by those indus-tries are conveyed across the globe by the mass media.
What you tend to see in the mainstream media, again and again and again, is the sense that blackness is a
catastrophe. Black spaces are zones of absolute dystopias where either capitalism hasn't had a chance
to intervene yet or where capitalism has failed. We see this again and again in the news: black cities are always depicted in
dystopic ways. Africa is a gigantic continent, with lots of different ecosystems and cultures and nations and people and events and histories,
and yet its always treated somehow as THE place of dystopia, plagued by drought, AIDS, and famine, and we
rarely hear positive things about progress in African unless it is in terms of capitalist intervention. For Eshun, Afrofuturism is important
because it is a kind of storytelling that gives authors a public means by which to intervene into those bad
futures that are written by the futures industry and to challenge them, change them, write al-together
new ones. Interestingly, Eshun riffs a bit on W.E.B. Dubois when he talks about this. As some of you might know, Dubois was an African
American sociologist who wrote science fiction and who coined the term "double con-sciousness," (Souls 8) which means that black people
always live under the con-sciousness of being both African and American. What Eshun sees as valuable about Afrofuturism is that it has
the ability to enhance double consciousness and even to triple or quadruple or quintuple consciousness,
to give us a sense that there are a lot of different ways to think about being black and to think about the
relations of the science, society, and race. This allows authors to create complex futures in full color
rather than ones that are either simply white washed utopias or black dystopias.

Afrofuturism gives hope that black futures will be better by examining technoscientific
genius with respect to black perspectives
Yaszek 13 (Lisa Yaszek , Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies, School of
Literature, Communication and Culture, Georgia Tech, Race in Science Fiction: The Case of
Afrofuturism, August 2013, A Virtual Introduction to Science Fiction, http://virtual-sf.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/08/Yaszek.pdf)//NVG
Science fiction is, in essence, a global language that enables people to communicate their experience of
science, technology, and society across centuries, continents, and cultures. This is certainly true of the
Afrodiasporic and African speculative storytelling traditions that I've group together under the name
'Afrofuturism.' There is a tendency in the mainstream media to treat black people as the victims of a wholly
dystopic technoscientific modernity. In this version of history, Afro-diasporic people are the unlucky
descendants of slaves upon whose backs modern Western nations were built, and Africans are the
victims of colonization practices that have wrought nothing but disease and famine. However, as I hope to have shown you
today, Afrofuturists insist that the past, present, and future are more complicated than that. In early
Afrofuturist stories, slavery produces misery, but it also produces technoscientific genius. In later stories, the
stories of slavery and colonization the story of modernity's bad past becomes the source of inspiration for
imagining what might be truly new and at least slightly better futures. And that is what I find so compelling about
Afrofuturism: Like all the best science fiction, it gives us hope that there are different ways be citizens of the
modern global world.

Afro-modernism opens the way to claim a new metaphorical space for colored
identity
Kriess 12 (David, Performing the Past to Claim the Future: Sun Ra and theAfro-Future Underground,
1954-1968, African American Review, Volume 45, Numbers 1-2, Spring/Summer 2012, pp. 197-203,
Published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, DOI:10.1353/afa.2012.0006)
On the South Side of Chicago in the early 1950s, jazz musician Sun Ra began a lifelong project to re-envision the
relationship between music, technology, society, and African American identity. While the popular image of Sun
Ra during much of his career was that of an offbeat, creative character at the margins of both mainstream and avant-garde jazz, a significant
number of scholars in our time andplace now see Sun Ra as a central figure in the eras African American
embrace of science and technology. Sun Ras art, in this view, looked to both the past and future to re-
imagine and claim new metaphorical and material spaces for the diaspora.

Afrofuturism uses black Atlantic imaginations and shared identities to broadcast a
cultural message that destabilizes colonialized thoughts and territorialized identities
by imaginatively challenging histories.
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
The performances, music and subjectivities of Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone are infused with the black Atlantic
imaginary of Afrofuturism. Mills, a founding member of Detroit techno outfit Underground Resistance, innovative turntablist and pioneer of
minimalist techno production, has performed worldwide since the early 1990s; Mone, in her guise as android Cindi Mayweatherand with the blessings of Prince
and Big Boi of Outkast2has risen to become the heir apparent to a futurist and freaky Afropop tradition. Their respective global reach demonstrates Paul Gilroys
observation that the black AtlanticGilroys term for the non-traditional tradition, an irreducibly modern, excentric,
unstable, and asymmetrical cultural ensemble of the Afrodiaspora (1993: 198) communicates and
establishes shared identities and nodal points of history through call and- response forms of music even
as its subjects are separated in space and time or divided by the technologies of sound reproduction
and the commodity form (indeed since the development of the internet, such imaginary effects of
dispersed identification and history are all the more powerful; see Gilroy 1993: 102). We might understand Mills and Mone as
continuing the black Atlantic ex-centric tradition by disseminating an Afrofuturist cultural broadcast that
feeds a new metaphysics of blackness that becomes enacted within the underground, alternative,
public spaces constituted around an expressive culture . . . dominated by music (Gilroy 1993: 83). Yet what precisely is
meant by blackness in a context which is Afrofuturist? In which Mones Cindi Mayweather is an android on the run from human
authorities, and in which Mills has become the Messenger, a time-and space traveller returning from the
future to forewarn us of the catastrophic results of first contact with extraterrestrials? Such identities
which I here adopt as fluid and performativeoften lend themselves to a movement that exceeds their
characterization as stage personae, suggesting a becoming that transforms the coordinates of
subjectivity.3 Thus we need ask whether such identities Afrofuturist androids, aliens, cyborgs, etc.represent, in an
allegorical mode, conditions of Afrodiasporic experience (blackness) or whether Afrofuturism is
capable of unhinging allegorical referents to humanist bodies and terrestrial markers of difference,
thereby developing autonomous forms of becoming and thought: rather than a a new metaphysics of
blackness, do we not encounter a MythScience that challenges our previously held conceptions of blackness and of metaphysics? Prelude I. The
Messenger Jeff Mills is crouched over his equipment: his fingers gracefully flying over the DJ mixer, silver headphones cocked on his head, his intense gaze taking in
the five glowing Pioneer CD decks that surround him in a semi-circle. A heavy black cloth drapes the stage like a ceremonial shroud. Mills is a lone figure on stage,
intense and focused, as if manning a solo soundship, the navigator of a relentless barrage of intergalactic techno (see fig. 1). The outer space symbolism of Mills
multimedia composition is not accidental: the sights and sounds of Afrofuturism pervade the haunting, minimalist
performance. A science fictional array of bleeps, squelches and synthesizers crack audibly like solar flares, punctuating the intensive polyrhythms and driving
bass; behind Mills, a photograph of Earths moon fills the massive projection screen (see fig. 2 below). Among the scattered scenes of planetary electronic dance
music culture (EDMC), Mills performance is emblematic of Afrofuturisma term more complex than it first appears, Afrofuturism delineates a
tradition of Afrodiasporic media production, thought and performance that engages science fictional
practices and themes to envision alternate identities, timelines and counterrealities. Such envisioning
operations create startling, creative and uncanny effectsoften, by imaginatively challenging whitewashed
futures and colonialist histories with Africentric and futurist revisioningswhile crucially offering ways to
subversively transform Afrodiasporic subjectivities. Afrofuturism invokes multiple strategies. On one level, its narratological
and fictive operations seeks to represent black subjects in futurist timelines. On other levels, it utilises
alternate timelines and other worlds as allegories capable of representing but also transforming the
coordinates of the presentsuch as becoming alien or android subjectivities that challenge the meaning of
race in post-humanist timelines.5 Afrofuturism also provides a framework for deciphering its
MythSciences and AlterDestinies. Its reflexivity produces its own tools of interpretation. As Nabeel
Zuberi writes, Afrofuturism codifies, organises and maps an alternative cultural history and critical
framework for [Afrodiasporic] media production (2004: 79).6 This includes the entry of Afrofuturism into
scholarship, where since the early 1990s a nascent field of Afrofuturist studies has begun to appear in a number of disparate publications,
undertaking genealogies of Afrofuturist motifs in literature, film, music, and other media.7

Afro-futurist reimagining of metaphors can reconceive concepts in terms of colored
history to shape afro-futurist culture
Kriess 12 (David, Performing the Past to Claim the Future: Sun Ra and theAfro-Future
Underground, 1954-1968, African American Review, Volume 45, Numbers 1-2,
Spring/Summer 2012, pp. 197-203, Published by the Johns Hopkins University Press,
DOI:10.1353/afa.2012.0006) [Pathways is an avant-jazz album by Sun Ra]
Pathways offers a singular opportunity to see the metaphorical and material interventions developed by Sun
Ra and members of his variously renamed band, the Arkestra. It is, perhaps, the closest experience to which anthropologist John Szwed, Sun
Ras comprehensive and insightful biographer, had access. Viewing this collection through the lens of sociotechnical and
Afro-Futurist theory, Sun Ra redeployed, reconceived, and re-created (Fouch 642) the materials and
metaphors of cold-war science in his artistic practice. There are a number of examples in the exhibition and guide, from
DIY instrumentation to experiments with electronic costumes and multimedia performances. In Fouchs terms, these are spectacular
examples of black vernacular technological creativity (639), or the embrace of science and technology in ways that go
beyond aesthetic form to engage with materiality itself. Pathways ,then, helps us reposition Sun Ra as not only a
musician that aestheticized technological forms (Dinerstein 20-28) through his outer-space sounds, but actively
reengineered them in the service of his art. On the level of metaphor, Sun Ra constructed and performed a
black knowledge society (Kreiss 60-62) grounded both in Egypt, an ancient black technical civilization, and outer space. In doing
so, he reconceived cold-war science in terms of black history and social narratives in order to foster black
technical agency as a path towards building alternative societies on outer-space landscapes.

Afrofuturism carries the past into the future through a cyclical conception of time.
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[Baucoms underlying temporal thesis in Specters of the Atlantic (drawn from Walter Benjamin) is that
of an eternal return that marks the long contemporaneity of capitalism, the idea that oscillating
forms of capital [which we here read as embodied allegories of commodified subjectivity] inform and
are informed by the shifting phenomenologies and recycled generic protocols of cultural practice
(2005: 23). The effect of cyclicity as a historical form means that each cycle contains within itself the
ghostly aftereffect of a past cycle, in the manner of Fredric Jamesons theory of sedimented genre in
The Political Unconscious, whereby the ideology of form itself, thus sedimented, persists into the later,
more complex structure (1981: 141). This also means that each cyclic sedimentation faces the uncanny
return of its repressed. The point I wish to make here is that temporal cyclicity is a signature or form
that Afrofuturism carries into our own future from its past. Cyclicity itself is a historical form, and there
are different forms of it. Thus temporal cyclicity, the looping return and its insistent repetition, is itself
an insistent occupation, or motif, of Afrofuturism that changes over time, just as each one of its cycles is
haunted by a repressed/ sedimented form of the cyclesuch shifts in cyclicity perhaps explaining the
appeal of repetitious electronic music.14 Jeff Mills focus on change and cyclicity in his texts and techno
productions (which I will turn to below) is echoed by Mone, who summarizes the above discussion
when she says I love speaking about the future because it gives us all a chance to rewrite history.+

Afrofuturism challenges the commodification of Black bodies by transforming the past
beyond a human experience and recognizing the alien identity through the future
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[The coordinates of the present at stake here, as Paul Gilroy outlines, is the Romantic and sentimental
distaste for the racial capitalism that, at an earlier point, had made blacks themselves into commodities,
[and that] is a profound factor that influences the moral conditions in which black political cultures take
shape (2004: 333). At stake in Afrofuturist temporal operationswhat we will explicate shortly as its
chronopolitics (Eshun 2003)is a symbolic combat that challenges what Gilroy outlines as militant
vindicative [black] nationalism, and its historical revisionism that seeks to establish an essential
blackness as original or superior (2004: 3389). In this respect, the Afrofuturist appropriation of
Kemetian motifs, for example in Earth, Wind, and Fires pyramidal and Pharoahnic fantasies, or Killah
Priests pharoahnic headdress on The Psychic World of Walter Reed (2013), expands rather than
contracts such mythos: it elevates it to a MythScience, in which the future reveals a past transformed,
and in which blackness, and black identity, is likewise unshackled from its restraintsincluding the
programmatic referral to blackness as the central marker of difference. By exploring alternate forms
of becoming that unbind the confines of race, Afrofuturism implicitly affirms a widely shared sense of
race consciousness as earthbound and anachronistic just as it explicitly pursues another mode of
recognition in the most alien identity that carries it beyond the human altogether (Gilroy 2004: 344;
3489).]

Afrofuturism can produce a transformation to perform chronopolitics
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[Afrofuturism suggests a technology of the self that undertakes a transformative becoming. Sun Ra, the
ancient black alien deity from Saturn, is perhaps exemplary in this respect, turning to a legal change in name and
erasure of his human records in the lifelong dedication to becoming alien (see Szwed 1998). Ra exceeds the allegorical role of
performative identity: he becomes, in his own words, a Living Myth, a title whose inherent
contradiction accentuates the mythical operations of Afrofuturist revisionist history, in which Ra becomes the
embodiment of the ancient black pharaoh, alien ruler of Kemet. Ras becoming embodies a chronopolitical gesture that
flees Earthly raciology precisely to transform it: to seek an alien alterity to racialized otherness. But if Mills
has become the Messengera designation that likewise has resonance within 20th century Africentric history, as the title of Elijah
Muhammed, founder of the Nation of Islam, Messenger of Allahwho was he before?]
Afrofuturism effectively contradicts the attempt to erase a future for blackness thats
prevalent in White supremacy now and during the Middle Passage ghettos,
plantations, and slave ships deny the right to a linear future that cyclical time
disregards.
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[My turn to chronopolitics and cyclicity here is in part a response to Gilroys call, at the end of Between
Camps, in which he argues: we need self-consciously to become more futureoriented. We need to look
toward the future and to find political languages in which it can be discussed (2004: 335). Gilroy hints
at such a language in a passage on Afrofuturology, and in particular his focus on music and musicians
of the black vernacular who have turned to extraterrestriality, futurology, and fictions of techno-
science, precisely because denying the future and the right to be future-oriented became an integral
part of the way white supremacism functioned during and after the slave system (2004: 337). Yet
black appeals to the future, or at least Gilroys invocation of such appeals, already has a past, a
particular signature of futurism. Gilroy laments the passing futurology of antiracism, just as he laments
the loss of 1970s-styled Afrofuturism and how people no longer play with the possibility of departure
from the planet in the same spirit with which their predecessors had entertained the idea of return to
Africa (2004: 341; 350). I would like to suggest a few points at this time: first, that the future is not
just (in) the future, but a particular sedimentation of past signatures whose future is yet to-come. And
second, that such sedimentation has cycled past Gilroys focus on mid-20th century Afrofuturism (which,
according to Gilroy, in-itself resurrected the spirit of Marcus Garvey and his Back to Africa campaigns).
Mones contemporaneity, as it references the Afrofunk of the 60s to 70s, but also Weimar modernism
and 80s electro-funk, suggests a novel unfolding of futurist cyclicity in our own time. A pervasive
futurity-to-come propels Jeff Mills and techno music, as well as electronic musics futurology in
generalthe latter unfortunately absent from Gilroys repertoire of Afrofuturology.+

Afrofuturism upsets the Western distinction between real and imaginary by
presenting impossibilities as truths and questioning the fiction of biological inferiority
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[Afrofuturism confronts the participant with these mythical figures that nonetheless walk the Earth.
Such fantastical becomingswhat Sun Ra called the Living Myth of his own impossibilityconfront the scholar with a choice, or
rather, upset the divide in Western thought between myth and science, fact and fiction, the real and the imaginary.
In the close to his interview Motion Capture in More Brilliant Than The Sun (1999), Kodwo Eshun argues that either one begins
by accepting the interesting effects of the impossibility, for example, that Sun Ra was born on Saturn,
and is the return (from the future) of an ancient alien deity who once ruled Kemetthe Afrocentrist name for
the revisionist history/myth of black Pharoahnic Egyptor one dismisses Ras extravagance as merely fiction, his
thought as merely poetic, his jazz as merely music, his entire strategy here on Earth as merely that of an intriguing but
irreverent artist, who nonetheless isnt as serious or politically effective compared to his fellow travellers
of the era, such as Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam, or the Black Panthers. To bow to the latter dismissal, which would
eschew all that strays from the gravity of the supposedly serious path of outright political action,
however, is to leave the greatest fiction of allconsensual reality and its imperial history
unquestioned. It is also to ignore the equally fantastical elements of the Black Panthers (who housed Sun
Ra when he taught at Berkeley in 1971; see Kreiss 2008), and the Yacub/Mother Plane mythotheology of the Nation of Islam.10 To
sidestep the tricky dynamics by which myth informs reality, in which fiction builds fact, is to not only enact a
puritanical division that in-itself is fictive, but it is to close the door upon creative strategies of
manifesting other worlds and AlterDestinieswhich is to say, transformed Afrofutures, futures otherwise for us alljust as
it is to leave unquestioned the reality that, apparently, we are all humanjust some more human than
others. It is also to decisively ignore the fact that for hundreds of years, Africanist peoples were
subjected to the fiction of biological inferiority and thus, the fact of slavery. This constitutively
contaminated relation between fact/fiction is known in the work of Sun Ra as MythScience. Thus Afrofuturism
challenges the invisible paradigm of unquestioned realitythe reality that in the past has proclaimed the
inferiority of blackness and the de jure privilege of white supremacy, that has denied certain peoples the status of human
and cast them as alien slaves, the invisibly white reality where blackness is alienatedthrough the
construction of MythSciences and the intervention of chronopolitics (Eshun 2003). In what follows I will seek to provide provisional encounters
with these concepts, thereby aiding in the development of a shared lexicon for Afrofuturist studies that, at the same time, complicates what are
becoming a set of assumptions concerning the role of allegory in Afrofuturism. I seek to articulate these conceptshinge them to practices, or
better, demonstrate how such (technological) practices demonstrate the operational force of a concept (in Eshuns language,
conceptechnics)by way of an immersion in two contemporary Afrofuturists, both of whom engage with electronic music and are deeply
invested in dance cultures: the techno releases and DJ performances of Jeff Mills; and the android Afrofunk of Janelle Mone. But first I begin
with allegory.]

Afrofuturism provides subjectivity to the Afrodiasporic identity outside of a humanist
future
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[The development and imaginative embrace of alien, machinic, astral, and cyborg subjectivities in
Afrofuturism, all of which abandon or modify the archetypal, Enlightenment form of the humanfrom
Janelle Mones ArchAndroid to Jeff Mills Messengeroffer an escape hatch from paradigms for
Afrodiasporic identity that are all too often restricted to the violence and capitalist bling of ghetto
realism, confined to post-slavery resonances of subalternity, or entrapped within the lingering effects of
the Civil Rights era, in which African-American subjects had to struggle, over the course of a long century
since the Emancipation Proclamation, for the right to be considered Enlightenment subjects. To this end,
as Kodwo Eshun argues, Its in music that you get the sense that most African- Americans owe nothing
to the status of the human. African-Americans still had to protest, still had to riot, to be judged
Enlightenment humans in the 1960s (1999: A*193+). Hence the transformative capacity of the alien, and
of Afrofuturist science fictional approaches, that explore unEarthly universes, timelines, and identities.
When the human is nothing but the historical entitlement of white supremacy, signifying an embodied
technology of exclusion, there is little reason to invest within the very same paradigm that was once
deployed to systemically oppress and enslave ones ancestors.8]

Afrofuturism has the power to redress the digital divide, moving towards
technoscientific genius that imagines a better black future to make it so.
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[To this end, Afrofuturist scholarship has focused on science fiction produced by Afrodiasporic authors
and artists, wherein the authorial body is grounded as the real from which the work is read as
allegory. This approach lends itself to sociological accounts of Afrodiasporic engagements with
technologies (see Nelson, Thuy and Hines 2001). Scholars have likewise positioned Afrofuturism as a
way to redress the problematic of the digital divide wherein, as Nelson writes blackness gets
constructed as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress (2002: 1).
Afrofuturism thus presents an imaginative realm capable of redressing the digital divide, insofar as it
gestures toward a corpus of authorial Afrodiasporic bodies involved with various technological practices,
as well as media that allegorize blackness in technoscientific narratives. Yet important and necessary as
such analyses are, they approach their limitations when facing the unhinged force of Afrofuturist
allegory, and its potential to transform the parameters of its real referents. What if Mones other
isnt just a question of mapping its meaning back onto her (African-American, female) authorial body,
and of mapping the androidal cold war onto existing conditions of racism, but of thinking through, at the
same timeas she says new forms of the other?]

The lack of body parts in art when we remember the Middle passage fetishizes the
black woman as weak when in fact they challenge conventional standards of black
body by being self-made women
Richardson 12, (Jared, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at Northwestern
University specializing in Modern and Contemporary Art with an emphasis on Afrofuturism and visual
culture in Attack of the Boogeywoman: Visualizing Black Women's Grotesquerie in Afrofuturism, Art
Papers, November/December 2012 Issue, retrieved 18 Jul 2014 from
http://www.artpapers.org/feature_articles/feature1_2012_1112.htm) [Shoshanna Weinberger is an
artist that focuses on Afrofuturism and black female representations, and Nicki Minaj is a rapper, whose
work exemplifies sadomasochism that evokes the erotically violent struggle of a bifurcated black
femininity]
Weinberger's artworks depict how the black female body troubles representation within the Western
imaginary. The recurrent absence of faces and limbs in her images underscores the dehumanization of
black women and illustrates the fetishization of select body parts and organs. The caricatured
corpulence of Weinberger's women suggests that black female corporeality appears as extravagant and
irrational. Yet the difficulty in representing black women's bodies highlights the cultural contingency of
beauty, which can be a powerful element. Within the Afrofuture, the representation of black women's
grotesquerie affronts issues of propriety by negotiating between several extremes: hypervisiblity versus
unsightliness and essentialism versus fluidity. Minaj, Walker, Mutu, and Weinberger have visualized monstrosity each in their
own unique ways. All of their representations wed the discriminatory discourses of bygone eras to the ever-mounting tensions of a present-day
society that simultaneously values liminal identity and relies on essentialisms. The work of these four black women
visionaries presents scenes of self-making that challenge and offend bourgeois aestheticsnamely
those of the black middle class. With that said, Thomas Mann said it best when he described the
grotesque as a "genuine antibourgeois style."9 Indeed, maws and paws have been substituted for politeness within these
fantasies. The coexistence of post-racial dialogue with persistent acts of racism constitutes the climate for
a field of speculative fiction that explores the uncertain future of black identity, and its ever-challenged
accessibility to humanity. In fact, the desire for a post-race discourse underscores fear in its attempt to forget
ethnicity, dismissing it as a once-material nightmare. Such a dichotomy, nevertheless, provides an ideal
opportunity for the boogeywomen to attack our cozy notions of race and representation.

Using Afrofuturism in concordance with the power of imaginative mythos directly
engages race and gender conventions to change our knowledge production, using
stories that have been impossible to imagine.
Barr 08 (Marleen Barr, pioneering work in feminist sci-ence fiction theory, teaches in the Department of Communication and Media
Studies at Fordham University. She has won the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in sci-ence fiction
criticism. Barr is the author of Alien to Femininity: Specula-tive Fiction and Feminist Theory; Lost In Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and
Beyond; Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction; Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies; and Oy Pioneer!: A
Novel. She has edited many anthologies and coedited the special science fiction issue of PMLA. Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart
Science Fictions Newest, New-Wave Trajectory, 2008, Ohio State University, Library of Congress)//NVG
The central point of Afro-Future Females is that black women impact upon science fiction as authors,
protagonists, actresses, and editors. I wish to create a dialogue with existing theories of Afro-Futurism in order to gen-
erate fresh ideas about how to apply race to science fiction studies in terms of gender. Afro-Future
Females at once applies Afro-Futurism to written and visual texts and offers something very different from
existing scholar-ship. The volumes contributors expand Mark Derys masculinist foundation for our understanding of Afro-Futurism by
explaining how to formulate a woman-centered Afro-Futurism. Their essays and stories present a valu-
able argument concerned with repositioning previously excluded fiction to redefine science fiction as a
broader fantastic endeavor. These texts can be used as a platform for scholars to mount a vigorous
argument in favor of redefining science fiction to encompass varieties of fantastic writing and, therefore, to
include a range of black womens writing that would otherwise be excluded.4 The anthologys umbrella approach is
not new in that it has for a long time been reflected by speculative fiction and by Eric S. Rabkins notion of a super genre.5 While presenting
a complex method to redefine science fiction is certainly beyond the purview of this preface, I note that my term feminist
fabulation6 encompasses black womens science fiction. The big-tent rubric figures in this collections central argument
which goes beyond the point that marginalized texts and authors have been excluded from the itself-marginalized
science fiction genre. Instead, I emphasize that it is necessary to revise the very nature of a genre that has been
constructed in such a way as to exclude its new black participants. It is necessary to rethink science fiction
in light of Afro-Futurist fiction. For example, the stories by Octavia E. Butler, Andrea Hairston, Nisi Shawl, Sheree R. Thomas, and
Nalo Hopkinson which I have included col-lectively indicate the ways in which science fiction should be reconceptual-ized.
Traditional constructions of science fiction have divided the genre into a fantastic continuum that often
excludes fantasy, women, and people of color. The claim that black people do not write science fiction is
depen-dent upon defining science fiction as texts that black people do not write. Expanding science
fiction to include written and visual Afro-Futuristic imaginative visions changes the dynamic in which
science fiction is always defined as inferior to mainstream realistic literature.7 For this change to occurin
order to end the marginalization of sci-ence fiction which relentlessly relegates the genre to subliterary statusit is
necessary to define the broad fantastic tendency in Afro-Futurist texts as science fiction. In their contributions
to this volume, Madhu Dubey and DeWitt Douglas Kilgore describe a new enlarged fantastic tendency. Kilgore points to the intermingling of
fantasy, time, and history: I see their work [stories written by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Nisi Shawl, and Jarla Tangh] as part of a
feminist tradition in African-American lit-erature that imaginatively engages mythic and historical
pasts in order to describe livable futures. These pasts have been visible but marginal in rela-tion to
Anglo-American science fiction and fantasy. I argue that Okorafor, Shawl, and Tangh bring these pasts into contact with the
conventions and expectations fantastic literature fosters. Having no desire to erase the read-ing pleasures associated with speculative fiction,
these authors use story telling conventions inherited from the Anglo-American literary tradition in unintended ways. The writers venture
beyond merely moving black female characters and their histories into previously white and male pre-cincts to create diverse versions of
familiar tales. Instead, they directly engage genre conventions to change what and how we read. Thus, fantastic
literatures resources are used to tell stories that have been impossible to imagine. Black science fiction
writers alter genre conventions to change how we read and define science fiction itself.

Allegory functions only to describe the divide between real and fiction NOT symbolism
there is no traditional allegory for the fiction of racism or for Afrofuturism
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[Allegories of Afrofuturism As Afrofuturist Kodwo Eshun explains, in a passage that picks up on several themes that will occupy us
below, Its in music that you get this sense that most African-Americans owe nothing to the status of the
human. African-Americans still had to protest, still had to riot, to be judged Enlightenment humans in
the 1960sits quite incredible. And in music, if you listen to guys like Sun RaI call them despots, Ra, Rammellzee, and Mad Mike [of
Underground Resistance]part of the whole thing about being an African- American alien musician, is that
theres this sense of the human as being a really pointless and treacherous category, a category which
has never meant anything to African-Americans. This is particularly true with Sun Rajust because Ra
pushes it by saying that he comes from Saturn. I always accept the impossibility of this. I always start with that,
where most people would try and claim it was an allegory. But it isnt an allegory: he really did come from Saturn. I try to
exaggerate this impossibility . . . (Eshun 1998: A[193]). Eshun performs a double-move that at once demonstrates the inadequacy and yet the
necessity of reading Afrofuturism as allegoryprecisely because he does the latter himself. On the one channel, Eshun advocates
an approach to Afrofuturism that urges us to embrace Afrofuturisms impossible claims of alien
embodiment, thereby unhinging the figure of the alien from being nothing other than an allegory of the
historical experience of slavery, structural racism and persistent discrimination. This crucial move allows
us to think through Afrofuturisms temporal effectshow it challenges the reality of certain histories, and the history of
certain realitiesand thus to conceptualize its discourse as autonomous. There is no need, once allegory is unhinged, to
continuously read Afrofuturism as standing in for a reality elsewhere. Yet, even as Eshun refuses the allegorical
role of Sun Ras alien identity, for example, he nonetheless derives the Afrofuturist critique of the human from the historical experiences of
African-Americans. On the other channel, Eshun refuses the allegorical role of Sun Ra precisely because we
can understand him as saying that African-American experience remains, in reality, an unhuman
condition: thus African-Americans still had to protest, still had to riot, to be judged Enlightenment humans in the 1960s. The reality
of this fictionthat African- Americans are unhumanis the constitutive paradox at work, for now it is
the historical conditions themselves that are already irreal, as it were, and as they remain, wherever the real fiction of
racist formations take place. It is that racist fictions become realities, and thus inscribe real histories, with real
laws and real effects, that shapes the constitutive and intractable paradox at work in considering the
role of allegory in Afrofuturism: for what allegory is there for the fiction of racism, for experience lived
as inhuman, when it is already a fiction? Thus the standard definition of allegoryas a fiction that represents the
real, a literalization technique that symbolizes a referent, be it a concept, thing, event, or person is upset. In Afrofuturism,
allegory itself is the epistemological condition of possibility for the real/fiction divide. Afrofuturism itself arises
from a set of historical conditionsthe trauma of slavery, that in Public Enemys phrase, Armageddon bin in effect (1988), but also through a
shared set of non-Western belief systems and occult beliefsthat question the supposed impermeability between reality and fiction, precisely
from irreal conditions. I will explicate this below with Janelle Mone.]

Black-centered fantasy catechizes normal science, using systems of knowledge and
belief to confuse scientific reason and strike back against being marked as crap.

Barr 08 (Marleen Barr, pioneering work in feminist sci-ence fiction theory, teaches in the Department of Communication and Media
Studies at Fordham University. She has won the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in sci-ence fiction
criticism. Barr is the author of Alien to Femininity: Specula-tive Fiction and Feminist Theory; Lost In Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and
Beyond; Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction; Genre Fission: A New Discourse Practice for Cultural Studies; and Oy Pioneer!: A
Novel. She has edited many anthologies and coedited the special science fiction issue of PMLA. Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart
Science Fictions Newest, New-Wave Trajectory, 2008, Ohio State University, Library of Congress)//NVG
Dubey explains why previously impossible-to-imagine female Afro-Futurist stories emerge when black-
centered fantasy interrogates normalscience fiction premises. She discusses magical modes of knowing
and being that supplement and often override the principles of reason. Dubey continues: The critique of scientific
rationality forms such a strong impelling force in the fledgling field of black-authored science fiction as
to almost warrant the term black antiscience fiction. In science fiction novels by black men and women writers . . .
scientific practice is relentlessly indicted for its predatory exploitation of black bodies and scientific
theory for validating claims of black racial inferiority. Afro-diasporic systems of knowledge and belief, such
as vodun, obeah, or Santeria, are consistently shown to confound and triumph over scientific reason. Dubey
describes juxtaposing fantasies involving Afro-diasporic knowledge and belief sys-tems with antiscience fiction. Antiscience fiction is
science fiction imbued with black diasporic versions of fantasy, that is, fantasy-centered science fiction
which includes such despised unrealistic tropes as dreams and magic. Antiscience fiction is black science
fiction/fantasywriting that falls under the auspices of feminist fabulation. Beloved is written in this vein. Recognizing that black science fiction
writers combine science fiction with fantasy once and for all ends the tiresome debates about the differences between the definitions of
science fiction and fantasy that once pervaded science fiction critical discourse. Black science fiction/fantasy is a new new-
wave trajectory effective force. This force is with the science fic-tion critical empire when it strikes back
against being relentlessly branded with the C wordand what I mean by the C word will become imme-diately clear. It
is thankfully socially impossible currently to use racial epi-thets publicly and formally in American society. I wish the same for the C word as it
is routinely used in the following pervasive elitist sentiment: science fiction is crap.
A color-blind future was concocted by Whiteness to exclude colored people -
questions of race remain marginalized, assuming were over our racial
misunderstandings.
Bould 07 (Mark Bould, The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF, Science Fiction
Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, Afrofuturism (Jul., 2007), pp. 177-186, SF-TH Inc,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241520)//NVG
From the 1950s onwards, sf in the US magazine and paperback tradition postulated and presumed a color-blind future,
generally depicting humankind as one race, which has emerged from an unhappy past of racial
misunderstandings and conicts (James 47; see also Kilgore). This shared assumption accounts for the relative
absence of people of color from such sf: if race was going to prove unimportant, why even bother
thinking about it, when energies could instead be devoted to more pressing matters, such as how to
colonize the solar system or build a better robot? And so questions of race remained as marginalized as
black characters--at best, it seemed, Chewbaccas Jim to Hans Huck. A year after Star Wars, DC Comics put Superman in the ring with
Muhammad Ali and then concocted a convoluted narrative that culminated in the speedy declaration of Alis victory by a technical knockout as,
stripped of his superpowers, the well-whupped Man of Steel refused to hit the canvas (until a split second after the referee announced the
result). The exclusion of people of color from sfs future had already been noted by, among others, Gil Scott~Heron,
whose 1970 track Whitey on the Moon (1970) contrasts the corporate proteering of the US space program (so close, ideologically, to much
of the Campbell-Heinlein tradition) with the impoverishment of black urban communities: I cant pay no doctor bill (but Whiteys on the
moon)/Ten years from now Ill be payin still (while Whiteys on the moon). The space race showed us which race space was
for. This sense of exclusion even registered in white-authored sf. For example, in Survival, a 1971 episode of UFO (1970-73), Commander
Straker (Ed Bishop)-the white, American head of SHADO, a secret military organization charged with defending Earth from alien invaders-
believes white Colonel Paul Foster (Michael Billington) to be dead and so offers command of the vital moonbase to Lieutenant Mark Bradley
(Harry Baird). Initially, this West-Indian turns down the promotion, saying that Straker has done his duty by offering the job to the next most
senior man, even though he is black, and that he himself has done his duty by refusing it. When Straker demands an explanation, Bradley
indicates his skin color. Straker-perhaps forgetting that the series is set in 1980, less than a decade in the future-responds, Dont give me
that. Racial prejudice burned itself out ve years ago. How would you know? Bradley demands. Whatever their intentions, color-blind
future was concocted by whites and excluded people of color as full subjects; and because of the
particularities of US history, the most obvious omission was that significant proportion of the population
descended from the survivors of the West-African genocide, the Middle Passage, and slavery. This is not to
say that the dominant US sf tradition did not occasionally attempt, with varying degrees of equivocation, to consider issues of race and
prejudice in contemporary and future worlds. For example, Allen De Graeffs Human and Other Beings (1963) collects sixteen such stories,
published between 1949 and 1961, by Raymond E. Banks, Leigh Brackett, Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, Theodore R. Cogswell, C.M. Kombluth,
George P. Elliott, J.T. Mclntosh, Frederik Pohl, Mack Reynolds, Eric Frank Russell, Robert Sheckley, Evelyn E. Smith, William Tenn, and Richard
Wilson. It is not insignicant, though, that only one-third of these stories addressed the position of African Americans with anything like
directness; only two or three of them could be seen to have black viewpoint characters, despite the growth of the Civil Rights movement in the
1950s and such high-prole events as McLaurin vs. Oklahama State Regents (1951), Sweatt vs. Painter (1951), the announced desegregation of
the US Army (1951), Brown vs. the Board of Education (1954), the murder of Emmett Till (1955), the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56), and
the desegregation of Little Rock (1957). This problem, too, is perhaps best addressed by a marginal black sf character from the 1970s. In 1972,
Marvel Comics launched Luke Cage, Hero for Hire (later Luke Cage, Power Man). Long before Robert Morales and Kyle Bakers wonderful Truth:
Red, White and Black (2002) reworked the Captain America origin story (reasoning that if medical experiments had been conducted on US
soldiers in the 1940s they would have been on black soldiers), Luke Cage opened with Lucas, a black prisoner imprisoned for a crime he did not
commit, consenting to be the subject of an experimental treatment in order to help sway a parole board. When a racist guard sabotages the
procedure, Lucas undergoes a remarkable transformation. His already muscular physique becomes hypermuscular, his body mass increases in
density, and his skin becomes as hard as steel. He busts out of prison, punching his way through its walls. Back in New York, he tries to clear his
name while working as hired muscle, Shaft-like detective, and raging black Robin Hood. He nds himself embroiled with various white
superheroes: Iron Man, who, as billionaire Tony Stark, nanced the experiment that created him, and the Fantastic Four, whose skyscraper
headquarters belongs to an entirely different world from his run-down over a Times Square movie theater.
Consciousness and colonized subjectivity form an alienated identity multiculturalism
tries to respect this identity, pretending it believes the Other to be an authentic
culture yet maintains distance rendered possible by privilege.

Bould 07 (Mark Bould, The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF, Science Fiction
Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, Afrofuturism (Jul., 2007), pp. 177-186, SF-TH Inc,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241520)//NVG
In a comic whose unabashed linking of discrepancies of wealth, prestige, and access to technology with
skin color provides no more analysis of the situation than one would nd in most blaxploitation movies of
the period, it nonetheless powerfully articulates the alienated black identity that W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon
described in terms of double consciousness and colonized subjectivity. We never know Lucass surname, and the one he
adopts alludes to an imprisonment he feels even though no longer incarcerated. From the moment Lucas becomes Luke Cage he is always Luke
Cage. For all that he must conceal a past from which he cannot escape, he has no conventional off-duty secret identity to protect, no mask to
put on or take off. He is always visible in the role he must play to survive. Moreover, despite his superpowers, he does not feel that he is a
superhero. Rather, as he muses in issue 2 (1972), superheroing is one line work where powers like mine seem
natural, the one chance this big, black man has of passing. (Contemplating a change of sobriquet in issue l7 [I974], he
rejects Ace of Spades as too ethnic) As his superpowers consist of hitting things really hard, while withstanding
being hit really hard, he embraces this stereotype of black masculinity, occasionally chiding himself for
betraying his intelligence (although fortunately his performance of black male rage is so convincing that his
opponents, and perhaps his readers, rarely notice that he also outsmarts them). In issue 9 (1973), Cage makes his way to
Latveria, where Doctor Dooms robot slaves, led by the alien Faceless One, are in armed revolt. The Faceless One seeks Cages help: The plight
of these machines is heart-tending, Cage. Other countries have, in the past, imported slaves ... but Doctor Doom manufactures his! Surely you
can comprehend their feelings? Cage replies: Dont play that song for me, darlinI can dig it right enough!--But jivin dont hook Luke Cage,
an you couldnt care less American history! Just as Lieutenant Bradley points to white ignorance of black subjectivity,
the oppressors ignorance of the oppresseds life, so Luke Cage points to the problem of sf that uses the
indirection of metaphor or allegory to consider issues of race and prejudice. Just as the Faceless One elides
all experiences of slavery, thus stripping both ctional robots and real African Americans of specic
identities and histories, so the satirical sf tale in which the alien or the android is the subject of prejudice, whatever its merits, also
avoids direct engagement with the realities of racialized hierarchies and oppressions. This is evident in the brief discussion of race and sf
offered by Scholes and Rabkin in the 1970s: because of their orientation toward the future, science ction writers frequently assumed that
Americas major problem in this area-black/white relationswould improve or even wither away.... The presence of unhuman races, aliens,
and robots, certainly makes the differences between human races seem appropriately trivial, and one of the achievements of science ction
has been its emphasis on just this feature of human existence. *Its+ tacit attack on racial stereotyping has allowed science ction to get beyond
even liberal attitudes, to make stereotyping itself an obsolete device and the matter of race comparatively unimportant. Science ction, in
fact, has taken the question so spiritedly debated by the founding fathers of the United States-of whether the rights of man included black
slaves as well as white slaveownersand raised it to a higher power by asking whether the rights of being end at the boundaries of the
human race. (188-89, emphasis added) While Scholes and Rabkin are clearly involved in the important struggle to get sf recognized as being
worthy of academic study-their book was published by Oxford University Press-and thus might be merely over-egging the pudding in the
battle for acceptance, this passage is nonetheless redolent of the criticism of the genre that accepts the genres own self-image, promulgated in
the pulps and some fandoms, as somehow being in the vanguard of literature because of the supposedly more objective stance enabled by its
afliations to science, particularly the longer and broader perspectives opened up by the contemplation of cosmic space and time. The problem
with such a gesture, of course, is that rather than putting aside trivial and earthly things, it validates and normalizes very specic ideological and
material perspectives, enabling discussions of race and prejudice on a level of abstraction while stiing a more important discussion about real,
material conditions, both historical and contemporary. And by presenting racism as an insanity that burned itself out, or as the obvious folly of
the ignorant and impoverished who would be left behind by the genres brave new futures, sf avoids confronting the structures of racism and
its own complicity in them. Edward James, in his rather more nuanced essay quoted above, found the message that humanity is one race
perpetuated without any fuss or foregrounding in a sample of stories from 1990. We may mist, he concludes, this is a hopeful sign (47).
Slavoj Zizeks critique of multiculturalism suggests that this is unduly optimistic. Multiculturalism, he argues, is as a disavowed,
inverted, self-referential form of racism, a racism with a distance-it respects the Others identity,
conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed authentic community towards which he, the multiculturalist,
maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism
which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist, he doesnt oppose to the
Other the panicular values of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position as the privileged empty point of
universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures
~the multiculturalist respect for the Others specicity is the very form of asserting Ones own
superiority. (44, emphases in original) Sfs color-blind future is multiculturalist in this wayas is evident when Commander Straker, who
has profoundly missed the point, tells Lieutenant Bradley, I dont care if youre polka dot with red stripes, youre the best man for the job. The
term Afrofuturism is normally attributed to Mark Dery, coined in an interview with Samuel Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose that appeared
in South Atlantic Quarterly in 1993, but even without this term to hand, Mark Sinker was outlining a specically black sf in the pages of The
Wire the year before. To many readers of SFS, Sinkers pantheon of black sf--which included Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler, as well as Sun
Ra, Public Enemy, John Coltrane, Anthony Braxton, Miles Davis, Wayne Shorter, J irni Hendrix, Afrika Bambaataa, Ishmael Reed, and Earth Wind
and Firemight not sound much like the sf we know. But sf is a point of cultural departure for all of these writers and musicians,
because it allows for a series of worst-case futures--of hells-on-Earth and being in them--which are woven into every kind of
everyday present reality (Loving the Alien). The central fact of the black sf they produce is an
acknowledgement that Apocalypse already happened, that, in Public Enemys words, Armageddon been in effect. the
manly colonists do all they can to allow the white girl, Marilyn, an existence in their space, however briey, the native girl is utterly excluded.
Afrofuturism, described by Dery as speculative fiction that treats AfricanAmerican themes and addresses African-American concerns in the
context of 20"-century technoculture-and, more generally, African-American signication that appropriates images of technology and a
prosthetically enhanced future (736), is not restricted to images of exclusion from white technological progress, because only within a certain
ideological eld is black experience the opposite of technoculture. Just as the futures of The Cold Equations and UFO exclude
the experience of the subaltern from their self-perception, so Mark Bradley and Luke Cage-s resistances to
certain interpellations indicate-even if they struggle to imaginea much more varied and complex set of
relationships between domination and subordination, whiteness and color, ideology and reality,
technology and race. In this context, it is not insignicant that much Afrofuturist writing focuses on real-world black access to and use of
digitial technologies, or that the second @fr0GEEKS conference should shift its emphasis from 2004s From Technophobia to Technophilia to
2005s Global Blackness and the Digital Public Sphere. It is not the intention of this special issue to incorporate Afrofuturisrn into sf.
Afrofuturism is every bit as irreducible to sf as Bradley is to SHADOs white hierarchy, or black Americans to Latverian robot slaves, or Luke Cage
to the buck stereotype. Rather, it is the contention of this issue that sf and sf studies have much to learn from the experience of technoculture
that Afrofuturist texts register across a wide range of media; and that sf studies, if it is to be at all radical, must use its position of relative
privilege to provide a home for excluded voices without forcing assimilation upon them. Resistance, as the Borg never said, is utile. It would be
easy, in a postmodern multiculturalist age, to fall into the trap of merely celebrating Afrofuturisrn as resistance (and thus practicing the
disavowed, inverted, self-referential racism Ziiek describes). In the era of digital sampling-and the shift of emphasis from the diachronic to
the synchronic encouraged as much by late capitalism as by the linguistic turnit is easy to lose track of history. The future proposed by
Marinetti and the Italian Futurists was young and masculine, obsessed with speed and the foreclosure of the past. In its frequent emphasis on
bridging the digital divide, Afrofuturism tends towards the typical cyberpunk acceptance of capitalism as an unquestionable universe and
working for the assimilation of certain currently marginalized peoples into a global system that might, at best, tolerate some relatively minor
(although not unimportant) reforms, but within which the many will still have to poach, pilfer, and hide to sun/ive. It is the hope of this issue to
bring together Afroiturism and sf studies in anticipation of a transformation. Isiah Lavenders idea of the ethnoscape proposes a new way of
looking at sf. In producing an estranged world, the sf author can formulate an imaginary environment so as to foreground the intersection of
race, technology, and power; likewise, the reader of any text can transform its contours by a similar foregrounding of the texts treatment of
these discourses. Focusing on the ethnoscape transforms the perceived object. Afrofuturism can help sf
studies to recognize the ethnoscapes in both the texts and practices it studies, as well as in those it constructs
itself. Each of the articles in this issue performs a similar task. Darryl Smith considers short fiction by W.E.B. Du Bois, Amiri Baraka, and Derrick
Bell, signifying on the image of the singularity or spike, inverting it, so as not to contemplate the Tip of white, posthuman, post-historical
transcendence but the Pit of black, material, human, and historical being. Bould examines a group of African-American novels from the 1960s
and 1970s that postulate a now that cannot be gone beyond, and that respond by trying to imagine a black revolution against white power.
Inverting the utopian form, they bring the reader right up to the brink of historical rupture that makes
utopia possible from this side, but are stopped short by the immensity of the ontological cataclysm
their revolutionary action must provoke. While not always supercially resembling sf, these novels are in the vanguard of the
current tendency Jameson notes of nding visions of total destruction and of the extinction of life on Earth more plausible than the Utopian
vision of the new Jerusalem (199). Sherryl Vint considers two novels, Toni Morris0ns Beloved (1987) and Octavia Butlers Kindred (1979), that
initially retreat from the future so as to better understand how to approach it. Critical treatments of the neo-slave narrative have typically
neglected the signicant use made of fantastic devices so as to trouble and confront the history of slavery in the New World (which includes its
ongoing legacies). Kindred can perhaps be read as an early thirdwave feminist inversion of Marge Piercys late second-wave Woman on the
Edge of Time (1976). In broad terms, Piercys naturalist slumming with Connie Ramos tends to dematerialize difference through a future-
orientation that can reach no further into the past than Connies present, and makes all of future history hinge on her agency. Butler (whose
novel is set, in part, in 1976) insists that present and future are inextricably caught up with the past. As Vint demonstrates, Morrisons gothic
connements and hauntings suggest the importance of not being trapped by history, while Butlers time travel argues against any precipitate
ight from a history that has not yet been adequately resolved. While Butler is an author who has moved freely among fantastic genres, this
essay reconceptualizes her work as always-already neo-slave narratives. A similarly deep engagement with the history of imperialism and
colonialism is evident, Jillana Enteen reveals, in Nalo Hopkinsons Midnight Robber (2000), a novel that tells a cyberpunk story from the point of
view of the colonized even as the colonized play the colonizers in a planetary romance. Hacking and splicing genres as deftly as it does
language, telling its contradictory tale(s) in North American English and Trinidadian and Jamaican creoles, Midnight Robber activates both sides
of history, digging deep to imagine a future. Examining sonic Afrofuturism, Nabeel Zuberi reveals an even more tangled historical weave in the
refusal of Afrodiasporic culture, and music in particular, to dematerialize into nothing more than disembodied digital bits in the circulation of
globalized information capital. For William Gibson, dub might have been merely a sensuous mosaic cooked from vast libraries of digitalized
pop (104), but as Zuberi demonstrates, culture is emb0diedand history is bodies. And maybe that color-blind future can still be told so long
as it is motley, mottled without hierarchy, rather than blanketed in whiteness, and so long as it is told by those and for those who are propelled
towards the Pit rather than those who clamber over them to the Tip. The articles in this issue bring to our attention generally neglected texts,
some of which might conventionally be considered as of only marginal interest to sf, while also casting relatively familiar texts in a new light by
considering them alongside non- or marginally-sf texts. Collectively, they not only draw attention to the ways in which sf has traditionally been
constructed to privilege white American pulpand-paperback and European literary traditions but also, inextricably, to exclude black voices
and black experience. I would like to thank Raiford Guins, who set the ball rolling and later put me in touch with Rone Shavers at a crucial
juncture; the patient and sympathetic editors of SFS; and my anonymous reader, my hero for hire, whose reports were prompt, precise,
detailed, and insightful.
Bending reality and melding it with imagination can help people overcome fear,
restrain armed actors and captures non-rational motivations of how we cope with
reality while still holding on to our optimism.
Kaplan (Oliver, Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the
University of Denver, Garca Mrquez Magical Realism: Its Real, 5/16/14
http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2014/05/16/garcia-marquez-magical-realism-its-real/)
[MS]
Last month, the world lost literary giant Gabriel Garca Mrquez, whom Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos called the greatest Colombian of all
time. I cant speak to that, but will instead discuss what Garca Mrquez was famous for: his novels in the literary genre of Magical Realism. The thing
about his Magical Realism: Its real, and it also has a close relationship with armed conflict and political clashes. It
can shape conflict and can also be an adaptive response to conflict. For this reason, it is a mirror to Colombias history
and likely the histories of other conflict-ridden countries as well. It also offers lessons for how we understand the drivers of conflict and violence.
Magical Realism is characterized by the bending of reality and melding it with superstition, old wives
tales, and exaggeration to dramatic effect. On the pages of Garca Mrquez novels, the Magical Realism may seem
purely mythical, but beyond the purpose of entertainment and stretching the imagination, it also contains astute observations
of the social and political conflicts in Colombia and, more broadly, the social tensions shared across Latin America and the
developing world. Take Mrquez fantastical descriptions in One Hundred Years of Solitude of the tensions between Colombias historical elite political
parties, the Liberals and Conservatives: Don Apolinar Moscote (Aureliano Buendas father-in-law): The Liberals were Freemasons, bad people,
wanting to hang priests, to institute civil marriage and divorce The Conservatives, who had received their power directly from God, proposed the
establishment of public order and family morality. They were the defenders of the faith of Christ, of the principle of authority, and were not prepared to
permit the country to be broken down into autonomous entities (104). Did the Conservatives receive their power directly from God? Unclear.
Regardless, the passage neatly frames the battles over the centralization and decentralization of state institutions. Similarly, the life and times of
Buenda the protagonist and the Thousand Days War (1899-1902), which is dramatized in the novel, are often seen as parables for Colombias various
exclusion-based social conflicts. I had a personal encounter with some Magical Realism when I was conducting field research in 2009 in the
Colombian town of Pensilvania in the western department of Caldas on community cohesion and the towns peace movement, the Comunidad Viva
(Live Community). From the mid-1990s, the town faced pressure from guerrilla and paramilitary groups, as well as the state forces, and more than one
person I spoke with recalled that at one point, around 2001, the FARC guerrillas massed on the loma above the town center to take the town. The
mayor called a collective prayer and a man in white, an apparition, appeared before the guerrillas that of the towns heroic historical priest, Padre
Daniel Lpez, whom superstitious residents believe has continued to protect the town and cure the sick, even after his death in 1951. Lpez told the
guerrillas something to the effect of You will not harm this town, proceeded to inflict a bout of diarrhea upon them, and they turned around and
retreated. In accounting for why Lpez was able to stave off the guerrillas, one person said, Belief [faith] is a very powerful weapon. [So, true story or
not, Magical Realism is real, or at least people believe it is. Beliefs can help people unite and overcome
fear and can restrain armed actors and their use of violence, sometimes through invoking the
supernatural. A recent documentary on the Colombian Discovery channel, Paranormal War, displays just how widespread some of the magical
realist beliefs are. It features many of the occult practices among Colombias armed groups and those used by various religious leaders to exercise (or
exorcise?) spiritual control over these actors. In the era of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, motorcycle-riding assassins in Medelln would pray to the Virgin
Mary to bless their bullets and aim. Indigenous shamans have also been known to leverage the power of supernatural beliefs to guide their communities
through times of conflict. These mystical beliefs are of course also found in conflicts beyond Colombia. Rebels in Liberia and members of the mystical
Naprama movement in Mozambique used charms and spells to steel their nerves and become impervious to bullets. In these conflicts and others,
mysticism and magical realist beliefs and superstitions are pervasive. The larger point is this: observers
of conflicts often tend to view behavior surrounding violence as rational, especially because violence
entails high costs, but Magical Realism is a reminder that this is not always so. Violence and resilience to it
may not always be rational just as violence may also not simply be reduced to barbarism or opportunism.
Perceptions, beliefs, and norms may enter more frequently than we realize. Perhaps this is why Garca Mrquez work
speaks to us and has universal appeal: It captures the tensions we humans experience between our rational and non-
rational motivations and how we cope with hardship, conflict, and underdevelopment while still holding on
to our optimism and dreams. All with far too much accuracy.]
Magical Realism can be utilized to erase, transgress, blur, or refashion restraints to
gain a better future.
Zamora 95 (Lois Parkinson, Professor and Chair of the Department Comparative Literature Ph.D.,
University of California at Berkeley, Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community, Magical
Romance/ Magical Realism: Ghosts in the US, 1995, pg 5-6)
[Magical realism is a mode suited to exploringand transgressingboundaries, whether the boundaries
are ontological, political, geographical, or generic. Magical realism often facilitates the fusion, or coexistence,
of possible worlds, spaces, systems that would be irreconcilable in other modes of fiction. The propensity of
magical realist texts to admit a plurality of worlds means that they often situate themselves on liminal territory
between or among those worldsin phenomenal and spiritual regions where transformation, metamorphosis
dissolution are common, where magic is a branch of naturalism, or pragmatism. So magical realism may be considered
an extension of realism in its concern with the nature of reality and its representation, at the same time
that it resists the basic assumptions of post-enlightenment rationalism and literary realism. Mind and body,
spirit and matter, life and death, real and imaginary, self and other, male and female: these are boundaries to be erased,
transgressed, blurred, brought together, or otherwise fundamentally refashioned in magical realist texts. . . .
Magical realist texts are subversive: their in-betweenness, their all-at-onceness encourages resistance to
monologic political and cultural structures.

Allegory enables the commodification of subjectivity African slaves as the
commodified Other challenge Western concepts of modernity
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
*Mones strategic deployment of Cindi Mayweather is successful precisely because it unearths a straightforward allegorical reading of
Afrodiasporic conditions of othernessor, as I would like to suggest, because such otherness is already an allegory. The fictive reality of
the android folds back on itself, reaching an uncomfortable point where the allegory of the android to
blackness, and the real experience of becoming an android, have already met in the historical trauma of slavery. The android is a
product of the man: it has been engineered to undertake certain servile tasksmuch like how African
subjects were enslaved (and thus purchased, traded, and sold) as commodities. The commodification of
subjectivity is emphasized by Ian Baucom in his Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy
of History (2005). Baucom argues that it is because humans are already represented as commoditiesthe modernity of the Subject $that
modern commodity capitalism gets its jumpstart. Baucom goes on to demonstrate that it is to finance capital rather than to the French
Revolution [as argued by Hegel] . . . that we should look for the birthplace of the modern subject, the origins of a philosophical discourse on and
of the modern (Baucom 2005: 55). In short, modern subjectivity is not born in the fire of radical democracy and the
overthrow of the monarchy by the bourgeoisie: it is born in the advent of slavery as the complete
commodification of the subject. It is this complete commodification of the subject, argues Baucom, that
is an effect of the general structure of allegory. Baucom quotes Halpern: The commodity renders allegory
obsolete by perfecting and globalizing the latters logic of representation. Under mature capitalism,
allegory is no longer simply a literary technique but is rather the phenomenology of the entire social-
material world (Halpern 1997: 13; in Baucom 2005: 21). Allegory is thus not the effect of commodity capital, or to put it in crude
Marxian terms, the aesthetic form of superstructure to capitals commodity base. As Baucom writes, allegory is something closer to an
epistemological condition of possibility: a mode of representation which enables and clears the grounds for a form
of capital which is an intensification and a wider practice of it (2005: 21). The commoditythe human commodity qua slave, qua
androidis practical allegoryallegory in the sphere of social practice (Halpern, in Baucom 2005: 21). That the Afrodiasporic slave
marks the birth of modernity in the commodity form is a point already made by novelist Toni Morrison, as Kodwo Eshun remarks: In an
interview with critic Paul Gilroy in his 1991 anthology Small Acts, novelist Toni Morrison argued that the African subjects that
experienced capture, theft, abduction, mutilation, and slavery were the first moderns. They underwent real
conditions of existential homelessness, alienation, dislocation, and dehumanization that philosophers like
Nietzsche would later define as quintessentially modern. Instead of civilizing African subjects, the forced
dislocation and commodification that constituted the Middle Passage meant that modernity was rendered forever
suspect (Eshun 2003: 288). The new form of the other, in the form of the android, the cyborg, the alien, or the posthuman in
general, is thus the cyclic return of an old form that marks the birthplace of modernity: the enslaved-
commodified human. That the new form of the other resurrects a past is a central motif of Afrofuturism, where its futurological
operations tend to themeatize ancient Africanist MythSciences. On the cover of The ArchAndroid (2010), Janelle Mone appears in what
appears to be a gold, Pharoahnic headdress, though uncannily so as an android, the ancient Egyptian wear transformed into a technological
skyline of Metropolis itself. In doing so, Mone plays on the Afrofuturist trope of the ancient black alien or android Pharoah, as initiated by Sun
Ras playful (but altogether serious) deconstruction of Afrocentric historical revisioning, the latter exemplified in texts such as James Stolen
Legacy (2001 *1954+), and what Gilroy outlines as popular afrocentric assertions that the great discoveries of Western science and technology
were known to ancient Africa, stolen from their ancient sources, and then assigned by white supremacist historians to the Greeks (2004: 339).
While there is some effective reality to be gleaned from Afrocentrisms historically revisionist claimsa debate that rages around the more
careful work of Martin Bernals Black Athena (2002)I would suggest that when Afrocentric historical revisioning attempts
to establish monolithic historical claims that support an essentialist raciology, rather than challenge it,
the black political culture that results tends toward a confined, static elaboration of both race and
history that forecloses the imaginative unfolding of the future, and thus, is at odds with Afrofuturism.]
Chronopolitics call attention to the relegation of black history to pre-history. Linear
concepts of time must be challenged through a cyclical perception.
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[Thus Afrofuturism (for Public Enemy) begins with the End Times. Time is the accumulation of the
apocalypse and its aftershocks. Lisa Yaszek also draws attention to how Afrofuturism interprets the
present as already science fictional in its accumulation of past futurisms and their aftermaths: a post-
Armageddon wasteland of exile and Alien Nation following from the abduction experience of Atlantic
slavery (2006). Thus, like Mone, Sinker suggests a more complex allegorical operation at work, in which
representation exceeds its symbolic correlative to a referent and becomes a Weltanschauunga
worldview of cyclic perception and interpretation, a way of being/becoming in the world that
accelerates the reality of the irreal, drawing the cycles of the future into the present in the same
moment that it unearths the pasts futurisms, the effect of which is an abandonment of consensual
reality and its norms: The ships landed long ago: they already laid waste whole societies, abducted
and genetically altered swathes of citizenry, imposed without surcease their values. Africa and
Americaand so by extension Europe and Asiaare already in their various ways Alien Nation. No
return to normal is possible: what normal is there to return to? (Sinker 1992) Sinkers text
provocatively demonstrates how Afro-futurology, inclusive of its cyclic reinterpretations of the past,
alters the coordinates of the present: the contemporaneous as-is is revealed by Afrofuturism in its
constitutive temporal abnormality. Such temporal revelations are thus transformed by Afrofuturism to
un-earthings. Both Sinker and Mark Dery (1994) recognised how the Afrofuturist undertaking is
disruptive to white-washed visions of the future, just as it likewise exposes the colonization of the past,
what Sun Ra called the real fictions and manufactured memories that make up the all-but-erased
deep history of the Afrodiaspora (Ra 2005). If the Afrodiaspora rarely saw itself represented in mid
twentieth century futurologynotable in the absence of Africanist representations in the 1964 New
York Worlds Fair (Samuel 2007)today the past of Atlantic slavery is at stake, with recent educational
reforms in the Lone Star state attempting to erase its traumatic history through underhanded semiotics,
as Atlantic slavery is abstracted into the Atlantic Triangular Trade.15 In all these cases, and as Gilroy
reminds us, we need to be alert to the politics of temporalization (2004: 339). Kodwo Eshun, in his
2003 essay on chronopolitics, outlines the dynamics of one of Afrofuturisms signature operations, its
temporal politics: By creating temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that disturb the linear
time of progress, these [Afro]futurisms adjust the temporal logics that condemned black subjects to
prehistory. Chronopolitically speaking, these revisionist historicities may be understood as a series of
powerful competing futures that infiltrate the present at different rates (Eshun 2003: 297).]

Tokenization has defined the peoples of the Afrodiaspora. Taking back the right of
definition requires chronopolitics as a political language to imagine new pasts and
futures.
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[Sun Ra suspected that invented memory was placed in the minds of what is called man, in order to
keep same from looking backward into a void Because of what has happened (2005: 60). Throughout his poetic
philosophy, Ra often depicted how the Afrodiaspora has been systematically excluded from the privilege of
writing (its) historyor projecting its futures. Its conspicuous absence, however, often no better mirrors its tokenistic
representation. Etienne Balibar reminds us that the stereotype of the racialized community is a contradiction
which sees an identity as community ascribed to collectivities which are simultaneously denied the
right to define themselves (1991: 18). This right of definition, in history and toward the future, situates
chronopolitics as a political language. Strangely, chronopolitics remains a scarcely recognised field of
political intervention, even as Afrofuturist science fiction has sought to address absences of
Afrodiasporic futures. In the militarist and masculinist white visions of 20th century antiseptic science fictional futuresmore or less
leading up to Star Treks debut of Lt. Nyota Uhura in 1966there was nary a body of colour to be found.16 Robots and Russians were more
plentiful. The word robot, coined by Czech writer Karl apek in his 1920 story Rossums Universal Robots (R.U.R.)and as
Paul D. Miller reminds us17is a metaphor for slave. Keeping this in mind, we can begin to analyse how, in Golden Age
science fiction, the figure of the excluded and racialized other had nonetheless been insidiously
included: the other had just been sanitized as metallic robota, their troublesome attributes of
consciousness and demand for human rights quietly erased through deferential reprogramming. Isaac
Asimovs Three Laws of Robotics that command the preservation of humansfirst introduced in the short story Runaround in 1942are
equally at home on an antebellum plantation as on 22nd century Mars.18 The similitude of future robotica to past slavery
or of a future dystopia to its past hells on earthis not lost on Afrofuturist authors such as Octavia Butler,
who in Kindred (1979) deployed the sci-fi device of time-travel to revisit southern plantation slavery. We might interpret such a
literary device as precisely chronopolitical. Mones androidal incarnation as Cindi Mayweather likewise conducts an
Afrofuturist chronopolitics; we are reminded again that in the invention of the future, it is the manufacture of the past that
takes its form in the uncanny return of the repressed. The android, in this respect, marks the uncanny incarnate, as a robot
made to look as if humana point not lost on Fritz Lang. Afrofuturist interventions in chronology hold a purpose. By
imagining alternate futuresa process that requires a simultaneous revisioning of the past, but also its
unconscious returnthe coordinates of the present are shifted. New and hitherto impossible realities
come into effect. As well as past irrealities. Ras Afrofuturist take on Kemet, for example, sidesteps the claims of truth and
authenticity argued for by Afrocentric revisionist history, pursuing instead what he calls MythScience, or the impossible embodiment of a living
parable/parallel, an AlterDestiny that uses creative fictions of past and future to reorganise the present coordinates of fact so that he,
himself, may walk Earth as a Living Myth. Ra meditates upon rendering the impossible a reality: Wisdom on its abstract planes Uses myth as
medium to understanding Thus a living parable to the outward or inward truth Is every myth: And from the myth you can see the likeness of
the truth-out Sun Ra, excerpt of Living Parallel (1972) (69: 2005)+


The conception of human exists only by excluding the slave cosmospolitanism
provides a new universe to short-circuit the existence of human.
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[Between Camps, Paul Gilroy argues that modernity, qua the Enlightenment, is inextricably bound-up with raciology.
He writes that the consolidation of modern raciology required enlightenment and myth to be
intertwined (2004: 59). In short, MythScience is at the heart of modernity. I concur with his analysis of how the
Enlightenment defines the birth of Man only by excluding the racialized slaveand the female body. Like
Gilroy, I do not believe that these are grounds to reject its universalist promises (62), but rather to
transform them, precisely because of the latters foundational MythScience. For Gilroy, the way forward is through
planetary humanism, a discourse that seeks to abolish race in the establishment of a renewed cosmopolitanism. But is humanism
enough? Is the human species the only member of the planets cosmopolitan club? Is not the human just
another manifest of raciology, a race that, while celebrating its planetary solidarity, implicitly (if not explicitly) assumes a superior relationship
to the rest of Earth and its species? Afrofuturism speculates upon a third alternative for our third stone from the
sun: a cosmospolitanism that seeks to transform species-being in a universal becoming alien. A
universality that is no longer bound to the terrestial; a universality that affirms its alien ex-centricity to
Earth through a cosmospolitanism of species. Cosmospolitanism suggests that the human itself is a
contingent becoming, one that is well due for short-circuiting in light of the many species to which we
remain hostile aliens.38]

Afrofuturist Techno
Techno music illustrates cyclical change by incorporating repetition and
transformation
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[Throughout his twenty-five odd years of techno production and DJing, Mills has consistently pursued
the concept of cyclical change, a concept that techno music shapes into aesthetic discipline through its
compositional focus on mechanical, industrial, and otherwise alien forms of sonic repetition in electronic
music. Unlike lyrical music, techno presents added challenges for scholars. Its music must be
approached on at least two registers: that of its affect (the embodied impact of its soundwaves on the
dancefloor) and that of what Eshun calls its sonic fictions (1999), the textual, visual, and conceptual
productions that surround, but also inflect, its recording and performance: its Weltanschauung.
Operating in the register of affect, the signature style of Mills technomarked by its tight, four-bar
loops, accented with polyrhythmic percussion and the force of its synthesizers, whether exploring
realms of pounding distortion, sci-fi soundtracks, or Africanist and Latin patterningalways sounds as if
it is but an echo of a future music to-come. Yet once caught in its vortex, a body bound to the speaker
stacks, Mills warps the experience of time, and all feels timeless: hours are spent on the dancefloor as if
abducted to the moment of an ever-repeating, ever-unfolding cycle of what Amiri Baraka once called
the changing same. Then there are the sonic fictions of Jeff Mills, AXIS Records and Underground
Resistance. On the Sleeperwakes.com website, Mills first entry is a report from his travels to Mercury,
where he observes that the Planet does exercise a earthlike character in terms of its liquid deposits
(2009). He goes on to write: Im not sure Im the same person I was then after witnessing such a array
of occurances in my travels *sic+. Apparently, Mills has become the Messenger, the last surviving
member of a future Earth terraformed by invading aliens. Mills sonic fiction appears to hint at a further
step, one undertaken only by a few Afrofuturists: that of becoming, of a transformation of subjectivity,
toward the alien, android, cyborg, or other-worldly. Or even just a self-perception as already within the
future: the Messenger is a time traveller, here to warn Earth of future doom; a technochronoprophet.
The 2012 release of The Messenger explains the doomsday scenario, its liner notes reading: The
Messenger is the fourth chapter of a musical science fiction series. This chapter explores the recycling of
planet Earth and the end of all Earths life forms. Doomsday appears to be nothing more than an
agricultural reconditioning phase controlled by an alien life forms [sic], they reveal the explosive reality
of creating the Human animal for the production and harvesting of Dreams. Caught between secretive
human+alien relationship, The Messenger pleads the case for more time so that humans can evacuate
Earth and save innocent livesbut time has run out.]

Afrofuturist techno provides the capacity for travel to other worlds through sonic
fictions
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
*What is Afrofuturist techno? Techno is a music based in experimentation; it is music for the future of the
human race, states the Creed of Underground Resistance (UR). Techno is a means of interstellar
communication: alien transmissions from the Red Planet, as URs Martian label declaims. Techno is sonic shock
tactics in the language of UR and Mills: waveform transmissions and sonic landmines designed to smash the
wall between races erected by the programmers of the mediocre audio and visual programming that is being fed to the inhabitants
of Earth (Creed). According to Eshun, the effects of such sonic fictions are powerful: Concept feeds back into
sensation, acting as a subjectivity engine, a machine of subjectivity that peoples the world with audio
hallucinations (07[121]). The combination of sound+concept, argues Eshun, has the ability to transform
subjectivity. The timespace of such an encounter is the dance floor, where subjects are immersed in
auditory stimuli, hallucinating freely. During the dance floor trips, one travels: Afrofuturist technolike
Ras outerspace jazzabducts the listener to other worlds. It seduces the dancing body into alien and
machinic becomings through sonic fictions that depict its music as transmissions from alien planets or android
producers.]

Techno music, while not allegorically representative of the violence of slavery,
confronts these realities by phaseshifting and conducting astrologies of the streets
van Veen 13 (Tobias C., writer, sound-artist, tech arts curator, turntablist, editor of Other Planes of
There: Afrofuturism Collected, Postdoctoral Researcher in Communication at the Universit de Montral,
Vessels of Transfer: Allegories of Afrofuturism in Jeff Mills and Janelle Mone, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture 5(2): 741, nd)
[Admittedly more abstract than lyric-bound music and its verse-chorus structure, techno abstracts itself from Earth at greater
acceleration. Consequently it often deflects or refuses an allegorical role to Earthly concerns. But such
abstraction, I would argue, heightens the concrete encounter with sonic affect: with no lyricism to
interpret, the experience of techno is one of interpretingthrough danceits rhythmic affect to its sonic fictions. As
Eshun writes, Techno disappears from the street, the ghetto and the hood (1999: 07*102]). The alien and offworld nexus of
techno music doesnt represent Earthly concerns, geographies, or identities in the way that gangsta
hip-hop or West coast g-funk articulatesin a double-movement of critique and fetishization, celebration and mourningthe
violence of impoverishment, the confines of ghettoization, or the anger and frustration of structural
unemployment and systemic discrimination.24 This is not to say that Afrofuturist musicincluding its
hip-hopturns a blind eye to earthly conditions. Hip-hop in general deploys what Tricia Rose describes
as its primary properties of flow, layering, and rupture *that+ simultaneously reflect and contest the
social roles open to urban inner-city youths at the end of the twentieth century (1994: 22). The difference is that
Afrofuturist techno defers the contestation of urban paradigms through their (troubled) representation:
rather, it seeks exile, inhabiting alternate realities, projecting AlterDestinies, and representing an impossible yet enticing
unearthly becoming for the abducted: like Ras jazz, it travels the spaceways. Emcee Killah Priest of Wu-Tang Clan describes the
Afrofuturist relationship to the terrestrial ghetto as one of conducting astrologies of the streets (The
Pwowr (Problem Solver), 2013). With the lyrics of Priest in mind and, in respect to Mills, the otherworldly rhythms of The Jungle Planet, we can
imagine how the terrestrial is transformed into an uncanny topography. Mills and Priest elevate the listener to a position where Earth becomes
other, as if viewed from orbit, its strange behaviours witnessed with an extra-terrestrial perspective. Though such otherworldly
perspectives, Afrofuturist music conducts an AbWeltanschauung or offworlding of erstwhile humanist approaches. We
may imagine how Afrofuturist music off-worlds the listener by phaseshifting the mind and body with
futurist rhythms and science fictional sounds; rather than becoming grounded in ghetto life we are
unearthed from terrestrial points of reference and the grounds of representation. With Afrofuturist
sound, we are initiated into the imaginary of an other-spaceand space of-the-other-to-enforced-othernessthat seeks
(and thus unearths) elsewhere as well as elsewhen.]

Media
The current media pedagogically teaches whites to target and fear colored bodies
Kellner, Douglas 2001 (Phd in Philosophy at Columbia University, Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and
Radical Democracy at the Turn of the Millennium: Reflections on the Work of Henry Giroux
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)
IIn the light of the ongoing attack on youth and youth culture in the contemporary post Columbine conjuncture, it is interesting to read in
Giroux's 1996 Fugitive Cultures analyses of how media were then scapegoating youth, especially youth of color, as
the source of social problems and the escalation of violence in society. Giroux cites the disturbing statistic that "close
to 12 U.S. children aged 19 and under die from gun fire each day. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, 'Firearm homicide is the
leading cause of death of African-American teenage boys and the second-leading cause of death of high school age children in the United
States'" (cited in Giroux 1996: 28). Giroux correctly notes that the proliferating media stories about youth and violence at the time generally
avoid critical commentary on the connections between the escalation of violence in society and the role of poverty and social conditions in
promoting violence -- a blindspot that continues into the present. In addition, he astutely notes that the media scapegoating of youth also
neglect dissection of the roles of white men in generating violence and destruction, such as "the gruesome toll of the drunk driver who is
typically white" (1996: 37). At the same time, working class youth and youth of color are being represented in
the media and conservative discourses as predators, as threats to existing law, order, and morality. Most
disturbingly, at the very time that poverty and division between the haves and the have nots are
growing, a conservative-dominated neo-liberal policy is cutting back the very programs -- public
education, job training and programs, food stamps, health and welfare support that provide the
sustenance to create opportunities and hope for youth at risk. Giroux correctly rejects the family values and moralistic
critique of media culture of such conservatives who lead the assault on the state and welfare programs while supporting prisons, harsher
punishment, and a "zero tolerance" for youthful transgressions (Giroux, forthcoming). Instead, Giroux targets the corporations who circulate
problematic images of youth and the rightwing social forces that scapegoat youth for social programs at the same time they attack programs
and institutions that might actually help youth. Giroux is clearly aware of media culture as pedagogy and calls upon
cultural critics to see the pedagogical and political functions of such cultural forms that position youth as
objects of fear or desire. In a series of studies, Giroux notes how corporations exploit the bodies of
youth to sell products, manufacturing desires for certain products, and constructing youth as
consumers.
Girouxs analysis of film demonstrates a pedagogically constructed racism that
normalizes the White (thus otherizes bodies of color)
Kellner, Douglas 2001 (Phd in Philosophy at Columbia University, Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and
Radical Democracy at the Turn of the Millennium: Reflections on the Work of Henry Giroux
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)
[Giroux dissects as well the stereotyping and covert racism in recent Disney animation films. Arabs are
depicted in vile racist representations and many of the villains in Disney animation "speak through
racially coded language and accents" (106). The heros and heroines in these films, however, speak
standardized American and are portrayed in images modelled after idealized American youth. A Disney
cultural worker, for instance, admitted that the figure of Aladdin was modelled after Tom Cruise (106), and, as Giroux suggests, heroines
such as the little Mermaid or Pocahontas are modelled after Southern California nubile teen models.
Such representations normalize whiteness and American fashion and style as the ideal for youth,
fostering insecurities and feelings of inferiority in youth of color or other nationalities.
In addition, and notoriously, Disney films erase the scars and ugliness of colonial history, as in Pocahontas (1995)
which shows no trace of the displacement, suffering, and death inflicted indigenous peoples by the
European colonists. Moreover, Disney films like The Lion King display "deeply antidemocratic social relations"
(107), naturalizing authority, hierarchy, structural inequality, and royalty as part of a natural order. Class,
gender, and racial inequalities are presented as benign and justified in this world, displaying Disney nostalgia for a
simpler and more harmonious world that erases from cultural memory the turbulence and pain of history and the continuation of social inequalities, injustice, and
suffering in the present. Giroux thus critically dissects the sorts of pedagogy involved in the Disney world. He analyzes
what Disney teaches, the implications of a big corporate conglomerate playing such a major role in pedagogy and socialization, and the ways that this influences
education, politics, and our cultural and public life, here in the U.S. and globally. Girouxs book on Disney includes dissection of the
structure and power of the Disney corporation, and raises questions about the effects of the possession
of so much cultural power. Demonstrating the immense range of cultural sites occupied by the Disney corporation, Giroux discloses the diversity of
its products in critical analyses of Disney's films, its forays into education and community building, and its extensive marketing operations of toys and merchandise
spun-off from its films. Critically engaging such a cultural empire requires combining historical, social and political analysis, textual readings, and studies of cultural
effects of a wide range of artifacts. Giroux thus produces a cultural studies which deploys transdisciplinary perspectives, i ncluding analysis of political economy and
production, cultural artifacts and sites, and their reception and effects. Giroux thus offers a wide-ranging model of cultural
studies and greatly expands the domain of pedagogy, demonstrating the importance of critically
engaging the pedagogy of a broad spectrum of cultural artifacts, often ignored by educators. Since youth
today are the subjects of education, critical teachers must understand youth, their problems and prospects, hopes and fears, competencies and limitations.
Understanding and productively engaging youth in the context of their everyday lives is clearly one of the big issues for educators, parents, citizens, and those of us
concerned about the future. For youth are the future, and the quality of life and the 6 polity of the new millennium
depend on educating youth and helping produce generations who can themselves create a better, freer,
happier, and more just society. Hence, Giroux constantly argues that educators, parents, and citizens should be deeply concerned with youth. This
involves attempting to understand its culture and problems, combating the ways that youth are being misrepresented in the media and miseducated in the schools,
and developing pedagogical strategies and cultural politics that will reform and democratically transform media, education, and society.]
Girouxs critical cultural studies is key to shaping our perceptions of race
Kellner, Douglas 2001 (Phd in Philosophy at Columbia University, Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and
Radical Democracy at the Turn of the Millennium: Reflections on the Work of Henry Giroux
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)
Cultural studies is useful here because it provides access to youth culture, to the actual culture that socializes and
educates youth -- or in some cases miseducates it --, and thus potentially increases our understanding of the youth we
are teaching and working with. Clearly, Giroux demonstrates the importance of media education for a reconstruction of schooling
and the importance of cultural studies for a transformative critical pedagogy. He also consistently argues that key social phenomena such as the
situation of youth can only be grasped through their race, gender, and class configurations, that youth are articulated by these concrete social
determinants which must be addressed in any adequate analysis. The Intersection of Class, Race, and Gender For Giroux, culture
matters precisely because such constituents of everyday experience as youth, gender, race, class, sex-
uality, and so on are constructed in and through cultural representations. Often, these representations are
invisible and their effects are unperceived. Hence, a critical cultural studies must make visible how representations
construct a culture's normative views of such things as class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, place,
occupation, and the like, and how these representations are appropriated to produce subjectivities,
identities, and practices.]
Cinematic culture, seemingly playful, actually harmscritical cultural studies should discuss media
representations of gender, class, sexuality, etc. in a social context
Kellner, Douglas 2001 (Phd in Philosophy at Columbia University, Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and
Radical Democracy at the Turn of the Millennium: Reflections on the Work of Henry Giroux
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)
[Giroux insists that such cinematic transgression and irony is not innocent or merely playful, but has
harmful political and cultural effects. Yet Giroux does not himself stigmatize Hollywood films or the media for the alarming
escalation of violence in the U.S., calling attention instead to conditions of poverty, social injustice, and urban decline that contribute to the
larger problems of the contemporary era. Attacking Bob Dole's and other hypocritical assaults on Hollywood and the media, Giroux argues
that it is precisely conservative policies which cut back public institutions that would provide adequate
education, welfare, employment, public spaces, and life opportunities for youth that helped generate
the alienation, violence, and nihilism that is all too evident in contemporary American life -- and not only in
communities of color, as we are aware in the post-Columbine epoch. Hence, a critical cultural studies and pedagogy should
at once carry out critical discussion of the politics of representation in media culture, focusing on the
images and discourses of race, gender, class, and sexuality, but at the same time contextualize the
critique within broader social conditions, discourses, and struggles. While ethical and ideological critique of specific
forms and texts of media culture are certainly appropriate, the critical pedagogue avoids moralizing assaults on media culture per se. The
focus is instead on how racism, sexism, poverty, political discourses and policies, and the social context
as a whole produce phenomena like violence and suffering. Although media culture can be contributory, it is not the
origin of human suffering, and thus censoring media images is not the solution to problems like societal violence and injustice. Rather there are
a complex nexus of conditions that cause violence and youth nihilism, and while media culture can be criticized for its representations it should
not be scapegoated.]
Girouxs readings overemphasize political critiqueperhaps merely glossing over the
aesthetic and textual in favor of the political
Kellner, Douglas 2001 (Phd in Philosophy at Columbia University, Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and
Radical Democracy at the Turn of the Millennium: Reflections on the Work of Henry Giroux
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)
[The political contextualization, critique, and focus of Giroux's work, however, sometimes lead his
exercises in cultural studies and critical pedagogy to what might be called a political and ideological
overdetermination of his readings of specific cultural texts. While Giroux increasingly focuses on the
importance of cultivating the ethical dimensions of education and critical pedagogy, his readings of
specific cultural texts usually privilege political critique over valorization of positive ethical, aesthetic,
and philosophical dimensions to the text. There is in Giroux a perhaps too quick collapse of the aesthetic
and textual into the political in some of his readings. This procedure is arguably justified in discussions of films like the works
of Tarantino or Fight Club (Giroux, forthcoming-b), which aestheticize violence and indeed themselves collapse aesthetics into politics. This is
also the case with ad campaigns that Giroux criticizes for their aestheticizing and commodification of
youthful bodies, promoting "heroin chic" and other dubious ideals for youth. And Benetton ads or other images
that aestheticize urban deprivation and suffering in glossy images also merit sharp critique.] But certain cultural texts have an
aesthetic excess, a polysemic overdetermination of meaning, contradictory moments and aspects that
can be read against the ideological grain even of conservative texts and those that aestheticize
violence. For instance, although I agree with Giroux that Larry Clark's Kids is highly problematic and can be read as part of a set of
representations and discourses which demonize youth as nihilistic, decadent, and immoral (1997: 45), the film also provides a cautionary
morality tale warning of the consequences of causal drug use and unsafe sex. While visiting at Wake Forest University, I attended a showing of
the film in which afterwards a visibly shaken audience seriously discussed the danger of AIDS and unsafe sex. There was also a heated
discussion of race and representation provoked by the film. Thus while Kids does depict urban youth as "decadent and predatory," as Giroux
argues, it also allows for a diagnostic critique of children going astray without responsible parenting, or adequate mentoring. The film shows
adults as almost completely absent from children's life and society at large as negligent and failing to provide adequate parenting, supervision,
education, and spaces to provide youth the opportunity to develop agency, moral responsibility, and healthy communities. Thus, in addition to
political and ideological critique, films and other media texts can be read diagnostically to provide critical insight
into contemporary society (see Kellner 1995). Consequently, on one hand, one can agree with Giroux that in films such as "Boyz N the
Hood (1991), Menace II Society (1993), and Clockers (1995), black male youth are framed through narrow representations that fail to challenge
and in effect reiterate the dominant neoconservative image of blackness as menace and 'other'" (1997: 45). Yet a diagnostic critique
can also discern how these films provide insights into the constraints that black youth face and the need
to fight the injustice of racial oppression and inequality.5 Hence, in addition to enacting ideological and political critique, a
critical cultural studies can read texts to gain critical knowledge of their conjuncture and can valorize oppositional or utopian moments that can
work against the grain of their otherwise conservative or hegemonic problematics.


Black Ecology

Black ecology points out un-manifested objects environment is the relation between
externally related objects.
Bryant 11 (Levi R. Bryant, author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuzes Transcendental Empiricism
and the Ontology of Immanence, co-editor of the forthcoming The Speculative Turn with Nick Srnicek
and Graham Harman, and author of a number of articles on Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek, Lacan, and political
theory, Lacanian psychoanalyst and now a professor of philosophy at Collin College, Black Ecology and
the Ethical Real, June 29, 2011, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/black-ecology-and-
the-ethical-real/)//NVG
Ecology teaches us something similar. As Morton has argued (some of Mortons main features are summaried here), the more
ecologically aware we become the more we discover that nature is not something over there, some place
that we go to on the weekends, but that were in the thick of it, thoroughly entangled in it, in such a way that we ought
not claim it exists at all. We would like to clean our hands of the ecological catastrophe, to live a
righteous life, yet everywhere we find ourselves entangled in ethical riddles, ethical deadlocks, arising from the
ecological nature of being. Recognizing, for example, that nonhuman organisms such as cows have inherent ethical worth and that meat is one
of the central contributors to the ecological catastrophe through the methane released from livestock, the pollution that comes from
transporting them, the rise in planetary temperatures that takes place as a result of clearing forests and jungles for grazing land, etc., I now
resolve to no longer eat meat. Yet now I face the ecological problems that arise as a result of the monoculture and the problems it generates
in the clearing of ecologically complex fauna so as to only grow corn and other grains. I now take up a banner against monoculture, seeking to
diversify the plants that are grown, yet in doing this I dont produce enough food to sustain the massive world population. Do we allow these
people to die through starvation or destroy the environment and cause death as well through the promotion of monoculture? Recognizing that
petroleum and coal are extremely dirty pollutants, I now resolve to support natural gas, yet in doing so I destroy local ecologies through
fracking. Increasingly it seems that the cell phone has become a necessity of life, yet it drives away the bees that we rely on for the pollination
of food for ourselves and other organisms. Everywhere we find these sorts of deadlocks or what Lacan referred to
as the Real. The Real refers not to reality, but to fundamental deadlocks, paradoxes, and antagonisms that
haunt collectives. It is in this connection that we should understand the concept of black ecology.
According to Wikipedia, black is the color of objects that do not emit or reflect light in any part of the visible spectrum; they absorb all such
frequencies of light. Black turns out, under this definition, to be a nice metaphor for withdrawn objects as it
suggests objects that are never fully present, never fully manifest, in the world. Contrary to traditional ecology,
the first thesis of black ecology is that objects are external to their relations. Where bright ecology argues that
relations are internal to objects Arne Naess, for example, argues that a mouse is no longer a mouse in a vacuum because it has been severed
from its environment such that objects are constituted by their relations, black ecology begins from the premise that
ecology has something to teach us, that it is a genuine domain of research, activism, and investigation,
precisely because objects are external to their relations. In other words, what ecology investigates is what takes place when
entities are severed from existing relations (e.g., what happens when bees disappear?) or what happens when new entities are
introduced into existing regimes or networks of relations as in the case of the introduction of the pain-killer diclofenac into the Indian
ecosystem. In short, ecology investigates what takes place, what new local manifestations occur, when
entities enter into new relations with one another. Here the blackness of black ecology is to be found in
the fact that entities never fully manifest themselves, that there is always something withdrawn in
them, and that new manifestations can always take place with new relations. The second thesis of black
ecology is that ecology is not the study of nature, but the study of exo-relations between entities. Issues
pertaining to how a childs brain develops and what sorts of affectivity and cognition arise in relation to new media such as television, the
internet, computers, smart phones, etc., are no less ecological than questions of what takes place in Indias ecosystem when vulture
populations plummet. Ideas, practices, languages, plastics, religions, buildings, roads, power lines, smart phones, etc., are no less
topics for ecological analysis than the H1N1 virus, vultures, rising planetary temperatures, coral reefs, etc.
Indeed, in many cases we cant understand the latter without understanding the former. This is why Marxs mode of investigating society is no
less ecological than the naturalist that investigates the role of vultures in Indias ecosystem. Both are investigating relations among entities and
the difference those relations make. If relations were internal there would be nothing for ecology to investigate precisely because there would
never be any changes and shifts among relations leading us to wonder what effects, what differences, will be produced in black
or withdrawn objects. The third thesis of black ecology is that the environment does not exist. Our tendency
is to think of the environment as a container that is something other than the entities that populate the environment. The room I am now
sitting in is, under this model, an environment because it is a container, while my couch, chair, television, computer, my body, my cats, etc., are
all entities within this environment. Within the framework of black ecology, environment is just shorthand for
relations between externally related objects. There are only relations forever shifting and changing between
entities and never an environment as such. What ecology investigates is not the environment, but
relations among entities. Finally, the fourth thesis of black ecology is that the proper object of ethics is the
ethical real. As Adorno writes, *w+e can probably say that moral questions have always arisen when moral norms of behaviour have ceased
to be self-evident and unquestioned in the life of the community (16). Ethical meditation, normative meditation arises in
response to the ethical real, to fundamental deadlocks, antagonisms, paradoxes, and impossibilities where existing
norms no longer provide the means for deciding these issues. Genuine ethics becomes a domain of
invention, precisely because such thinking arises in response to problems where rules, norms, and
habits do not already guide us. The darkness of black ecology thus lies in confronting the ethical real
which is, as Lacan teaches us, something we generally strive to cover over through the symptom. And for us, the
question that both ecology and Marx presents us with is the question of how it is possible to live eudaimonistically and what eudaimonia
might even be in a world that seems to undermine the very possibility of eudaimonia.

Our social world currently makes it impossible to achieve true morals because of
social distortions.
Bryant 11 (Levi R. Bryant, author of Difference and Givenness: Deleuzes Transcendental Empiricism
and the Ontology of Immanence, co-editor of the forthcoming The Speculative Turn with Nick Srnicek
and Graham Harman, and author of a number of articles on Deleuze, Badiou, Zizek, Lacan, and political
theory, Lacanian psychoanalyst and now a professor of philosophy at Collin College, Black Ecology and
the Ethical Real, June 29, 2011, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/black-ecology-and-
the-ethical-real/)//NVG
The conception of ethics Adorno is here referring to is something like existentialism (as he understands it), where
being ethical simply consists in acting according to what one already is. By contrast, Adorno wishes to draw attention
to the sort of moral conflict between the world in which we live and our possibility of living a righteous life. What are we to do when
the world in which we live itself prevents something like a righteous life? From a eudaimonistic or virtue-ethics
perspective, this deadlock would arise in a variety of ways. From the standpoint of eudaimonism or human flourishing, this
realization would arise when we recognize that our social circumstances and conditions are such that 1) we are
constitutively unable to achieve something like flourishing or eudaimonia in this world, and 2) that because
of how we develop in our social world, because of how we our social world is put together, we a) dont
even know what flourishing would be, and b) have an incredibly distorted picture of flourishing. Here we
have the core thesis around which Marxs entire analysis of capitalism revolves. Conditions of production under capitalism are
such that flourishing is impossible by virtue of the manner in which we become mere gears in a value-
producing machine that undermines our own autonomy, that deskills and numbs us, and that where the commodity
gives us an incredibly distorted picture of what flourishing would be, endlessly suggesting that it is the
acquisition of this or that commodity that would provide us with the flourishing or actualization that I seek. If only I had the
iPad2, if only I had this or that exotic food, if only I had a McMansion, etc., I would achieve eudaimonia.

Mermaids

Western culture posits the ocean and its mermaid characters as feminine, pinning
their tails with patriarchy
Giroux 95 * Henry, * Professor of English and Cultural Studies and Global TV Network Chair in Communications+ Animating
Youth: the Disinification of Childrens Culture, Socialist Review 24:3 (1995), pp. 23-55,
http://www.henryagiroux.com/online_articles/animating_youth.htm,1995
The construction of gender identity for girls and women represents one of the most controversial issues
in Disney's animated films. In both The Little Mermaid and The Lion King, the female characters are constructed
within narrowly defined gender roles. All of the female characters in these films are ultimately subordinate
to males, and define their sense of power and desire almost exclusively in terms of dominant male
narratives. For instance, modeled after a slightly anorexic Barbie Doll, Ariel, the woman-mermaid in The Little Mermaid, at first
glance appears to be engaged in a struggle against parental control, motivated by the desire to explore the human world and willing to
take a risk in defining the subject and object of her desires. But in the end, the struggle to gain independence from her
father, Triton, and the sense of desperate striving that motivates her dissolves when Ariel makes a
Mephistophilean pact with the sea witch, Ursula. In this trade, Ariel gives away her voice to gain a pair of legs so that
she can pursue the handsome Prince Eric. While children might be delighted by Ariel's teenage rebelliousness, they
are strongly positioned to believe in the end that desire, choice, and empowerment are closely linked to
catching and loving handsome men. Bonnie Leadbeater and Gloria Lodato Wilson explore succinctly the
pedagogical message at work in the film with their comment: The 20th-century innocent and appealing video presents a
high-spirited role for adolescent girls, but an ultimately subservient role for adult women. Disney's "Little Mermaid" has been granted her wish
to be part of the new world of men, but she is still flipping her fins and is not going too far. She stands to explore the world of men. She
[Ariel] exhibits her new-found sexual desires. But the sexual ordering of women's roles is unchanged.
Ariel in this film becomes a metaphor for the traditional housewife-in-the-making narrative. When the sea-
witch Ursula tells Ariel that taking away her voice is not so bad because men don't like women who talk,
the message is dramatized when the Prince attempts to bestow the kiss of true love on Ariel even though she has
never spoken to him. Within this rigidly defined narrative, womanhood offers Ariel the reward of marrying the right man and
renouncing her former life under the sea as a telling cultural model for the universe of female choices and decision-making in Disney's world
view. The forging of rigid gender roles in The Little Mermaid does not represent an isolated moment in
Disney's filmic universe; on the contrary, the power that informs Disney's reproduction of negative
stereotypes about women and girls gains force, in part, through the consistent way in which similar messages
are circulated and reproduced, in varying degrees, in all of Disney's animated films.