Throughout the 1970s , Afrofuturistic expression was taken up by Funk musician George Clinton , becoming a notable musical genre . Then a more pronounced artistic framework through the sci-fi literature of Octavia Butler and Samuel R . Delany , it did not become a recognised discourse until the critical and scholarly attempts of the 1990s ( Mark Dery , Kudwo Eshun , Mark Sinker , and Paul Gilroy , for example ). In 1993 , the term Afrofuturism was coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in an attempt to address the scarcity of Black sci-fi productions in the face of the total lack of representation of African Americans in popular science fiction . Since then , Afrofuturism has been evolving into a wider Pan-African cultural propinquity , by navigating the future , present , and past through the use of advanced technologies .
While it may seem ( and is sometimes criticized as ) a recent appropriation of science fiction , the idea and progression of Afrofuturism has had everdeepening roots in African diasporic history and Black culture . In one of the most analytically rich chapters , The Armageddon Effect : Afrofuturism and the Chronopolitics of Alien Nation , Canadian scholar tobias c . van Veen shows that “ a number of Afrodiasporic cultural productions embraced alien , outerspace , and off-world tropes . Central to these science fictional tropes was an account of the Atlantic slave trade , narrativized and reimagined as the armageddon of alien abduction ” ( Anderson and Jones , 2016:68 ). Whether it is in metaphors of alien abductions or robot slavery , for Afrofuturism - unlike Western dystopian sci-fi - the apocalypse has already happened ; it is the very genesis from which it develops . In the words of British writer Mark Sinker , quoted in the book ’ s 4th chapter ( 1992 ):
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 America – and so by extension Europe and Asia – are already in their various ways Alien Nation . No return to normal is possible : what “ normal ” is there to return to ?