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?