In a pessimistic, lamentable Middle Eastern reading, one can find some
comforting nostalgia in the despair from the fact that really, there isn’t
any such possible return But for Afrodiasporic culture, specifically in the
form of Afrofuturism, such despair has evolved into a reinvention of
narratives that attend to the “cultural and historical void left behind by the
Middle Passage”.
More recent manifestations of Afrofuturism deal with matters not solely
defined by a direct relationship to colonial violence, such as hip-hop,
feminist sci-fi, holographic popular culture, augmented space, and more
classical forms of art. For example, in another chapter in the book, Kenya-
born and Brooklyn-based artist, Wangechi Mutu’s painting Non je ne
regrette rien (2007), is examined as a form of “cyborg grammar.”
Using collage as a technique of deconstruction and reconstruction, Mutu
assembles a mutilated and disfigured human-machine-animal cyborg from
anatomies of a scorpion’s tail, a motorcycle wheel, an animal’s hoof, a
serpent, and blooming flowers. By employing Afrofuturism as a cultural-
historical practice, Mutu’s work assists those who might wish to step
outside representations of gendered objectifications and discourses of
victimization:
Mutu revises spaces of capital and commerce that have
historically figured black female subjects as objects for
consumption – from beauty magazines to science
pamphlets to anatomy textbooks…Non je ne regrette rien
unhinges the black female body as a locus upon and
within which normative racial, gender, and sex codes
materialize…it demands that we rethink what it means to
be black, woman, and human in the twenty-first century.
Taken from a wider perspective, Afrofuturism, as the book seeks to assert,
can be moulded into a vibrant, analytical framework for exploring notions
and practices of temporality in African cultural production. Indeed, the
numerous studies and examples that unfold across the different parts of
the book point to the rising instrumentalization of futurist and sci-fi
aesthetics as important politically charged practices within contemporary
Afrodiasporic culture.