The Infinite Possibilities of Afrofuturism

This article appears in the Summer 2023 print issue of FP. Read more from the issue. 

This is not the first time a visitor to the NMAAHC is confronted with the feeling of boarding a spaceship. Known by many as the “Blacksonian,” the museum itself, located in the heart of Washington, D.C., is a significant work of Afrofuturist art, politics, design, and engineering, with its structure mirroring a Yoruba-design crown that looks ready for liftoff. Every time the museum comes into view while walking down 14th Street NW, I have the thought that it is like a phoenix rising from the ashes. I have often asked myself: Why this particular association? And I have come to realize that it is because Black humanity is itself a phoenix: No matter how many times colonizers and white supremacists have tried to destroy our communities, languages, and interior worlds, we have been resilient. Black livingness, as Black Canadian scholar Katherine McKittrick has called it, is an Afrofuturist endeavor. 

Afrofuturism is difficult to define, and for me, this is actually one of its pleasures. It is a kaleidoscope that offers multiple readings depending on the viewer’s perspective. Writer and cultural critic Mark Dery, who has the unique role of being the only white person we see in the entire exhibition, coined the term “Afrofuturism” in the introduction to a series of interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose that he published in 1993 as an essay under the title “Black to the Future.” In the museum’s own definition, “Afrofuturism expresses notions of Black identity, agency and freedom through art, creative works and activism that envision liberated futures for Black life.” Broadly speaking, it is a set of cultural practices that, as my friend, author Ytasha L. Womack, writes in the exhibition’s companion book, connect “to us through radiating lines of liberation, mysticism, imagination, and technology.” Womack talks of “Afrofuturist sensibilities,” while the exhibition’s subtitle urges us to receive Afrofuturism as a history of Black futures. 

The exterior of the NMAAHC is juxtaposed with the Washington Monument, situated at the center of the National Mall in the U.S. capital.Alan Karchmer/Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Described by the exhibition as a “Colonial Afrofuturist” (a strange modifier at best to choose for “Afrofuturism”), Banneker fought colonial articulations of what researchers in science studies sometimes call “racist science” in an exchange of letters with none other than Thomas Jefferson. Banneker was himself empirical evidence that being melanated was not a barrier to having a thriving and successful intellect. A biography by historian Charles A. Cerami claims that Banneker was likely of Dogon heritage, though I do not find the argument convincing. The curators seemingly chose to emphasize this idea as fact to suggest that doing astronomical work was his specific cultural inheritance, since the Dogon, an ethnic group indigenous to areas of contemporary Mali and part of Burkina Faso, are known to be—and are presented in the exhibition as—people with a history of scientific engagement with the night sky.

Black scientists are too often treated like a figment of the Afrofuturist artistic and literary imagination. 

I have some concerns about the way that the Dogon are invoked to point to evidence of African scientific intellect. Ghanaian philosopher Kwasi Wiredu spent part of his career arguing against this desire to assert the science-ness of Africans, rather than acknowledging that Africans, like any other large and diverse population of humans, including Europeans, have engaged in mysticisms as well as rational knowledge production. 

My misgivings aside, there was something spiritually fulfilling about having Banneker feature in the discussion videos that draw the visitor’s attention before anything else in the room. Seeing a scientist front and center in the Afrofuturist story is long overdue. Black scientists are too often treated like a figment of the Afrofuturist artistic and literary imagination, when in reality we’ve been here engaging in the Afrofuturist practice of imagining ourselves as scientists and constructing ourselves into scientific lives. Presenting Banneker, as well as poet Phillis Wheatley, as technologists and futurists is a powerful reframing that sets the stage for the rooms that follow. They envisioned us, and that makes them Afrofuturists. 

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Also featured on screen in Zone 1 is George Clinton, the storied leader of the band Parliament Funkadelic, who speaks about the importance of Afrofuturism to him, arguably one of its most important avatars. “Afrofuturism is something I’ve been waiting on for a long time,” Clinton says. He discusses his famous Mothership—a 1,500-pound model space lander complete with mirrored panels and red and blue lights that often appeared on stage at Parliament Funkadelic concerts and which, for unfortunate structural reasons, could not be included in the exhibition but is available to viewers just a few floors up. As Clinton shares, “We decided to get a spaceship and drive it through the galaxy, and that was our concept of the next place you hadn’t seen Blacks.”

We as Black people are able to construct our own sense of peoplehood.

In this context, it was also important to see social scientist Alondra Nelson—one of the early interlocutors of Afrofuturist discourse, who was formerly acting director and principal deputy director for science and society at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—appear alongside Womack, Dery, and Clinton discussing the legacy of Afrofuturism. 

The exit from Zone 1 takes us into a portal that precedes Zone 2. The portal is a small corridor that was perhaps my favorite location in the entire exhibition. With speakers placed on every single wall, adjacent to works of art portraying Black astronauts, visitors are treated to a surround-sound audio clip of American experimental jazz musician Sun Ra explaining that he is an “ambassador from the intergalactic regions of the council of outer space. I do not come to you as a reality. I come to you as a myth because that is what Black people are.” The immersion experience of the portal’s surround sound felt like the perfect homage to Sun Ra and his message that we as Black people are able to construct our own sense of peoplehood, that we are mythological in the best possible way, and that we are very much “of” the cosmos. 

The “Music and Afrofuturism” portion of the exhibition at the NMAAHC.Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and culture

This zone, the largest room in the exhibition, features two screens at the center of the room showing clips and photos of music videos and performances by Black artists who were influenced by and who helped define Afrofuturism, including Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child,” Lee “Scratch” Perry’s “I Am a Madman,” Sun Ra’s “Space Is the Place,” Nona Hendryx’s “I Need Love,” Outkast’s “Prototype,” and Parliament Funkadelic’s “Mothership Connection.” The screens hang in the center of the room, and beneath them are valuable artifacts: Monáe’s ArchAndroid costume; Outkast member André 3000’s notebook paired with an explanation for how he came by his Afrofuturist name; Sun Ra’s space harp; Hendryx’s spacesuit; and Bernie Worrell’s cosmic-themed costume from Parliament Funkadelic’s 1996 Mothership Reconnection Tour. 

The wall to the left houses facsimiles of albums whose visual artwork and content exhibit futurist themes, including Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Big K.R.I.T.’s Cadillactica. The albums on display show that Afrofuturism’s influence cannot be isolated to a single genre but instead appears across the wide spectrum of Black musical production. 

Afrofuturism’s influence cannot be isolated to a single genre but instead appears across the wide spectrum of Black musical production.

The specific emphasis on the importance of hip-hop duo Outkast’s work and the inclusion of artists such as Big K.R.I.T. called to mind André 3000’s famous 1995 Source Awards statement: “The South’s got something to say.” And I wish that everything it had to say specifically in the context of Afrofuturism had been given more room to breathe in this exhibition, which was bursting out of the space that it had to be confined to. Regina Bradley’s Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip-Hop South has forcefully made the case that where American cultural production is concerned, the Black South is a crucial part of the story, not just yesterday but also today.

On the wall adjacent to the album display are three screens featuring slideshows of Afrofuturist visual art, including paintings, fashion, and design. I was tantalized by an Alma Thomas painting, and I experienced a bit of heartache when I realized that this was the only way I would see one in this exhibition. In her marvelous book Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art, scholar Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton describes Thomas’s work as an exemplar of “the Black female fantastic”—representations of Black women that offer possibilities that “exist in the realm of imagination and fantasy.” I was hoping to see Thomas’s work up close, to spend time looking at the movement of color in her painting. But in a slideshow, we only get a few seconds with each work of art.

The rest of Zone 2 is composed of costumes and images from Afrofuturist television shows, though the presentation is somewhat checkered. Despite multiple photos and videos of Black actors from Star Trek: Discovery—including gay Afro-Latinx barrier-breaker Wilson Cruz—there were no physical items from the show, such as one of Black costume designer Gersha Phillips’s innovative designs. I didn’t spend too much time fretting about this, since I knew that I would soon be treated to the uniform that Black actress Nichelle Nichols wore as the character of Uhura from the original Star Trek series. 

In Zone 3, we are treated to the Uhura uniform—which, yes, made me emotional. Here was the uniform of “the first Negro astronaut,” as Ebony magazine declared her in 1967. For me, a Black Trekkie and space geek, this was royal attire. It stood between the flight suit that Trayvon Martin—the Black Florida teenager who once dreamed of working in aviation before he was fatally shot in 2012 while walking home from a convenience store—wore while participating in an aviation education program and Obama-era NASA Administrator Charles Bolden’s actual space flight suit. We are also treated to a display featuring the still very few Black NASA astronauts and what feels like an abortive mention of the “first person of African descent in space,” Cuban revolutionary Arnaldo Tamayo Mendéz. 

What is missing, however, is any critique of the militarism that has so often underpinned U.S. interest in visiting space. The problem isn’t the cost of the journeys—despite the comments in the portal, which if they were complete might have reflected Martin Luther King Jr.’s late-stage stance that the Vietnam War was a theft not just from Vietnamese but also from the American social safety net. 

The Afrofuturism exhibition chooses not to engage with critics of certain elements of Afrofuturism. There is, for example, no reflection on the 2013 Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto, which notes, “This dream of utopia can encourage us to forget that outer space will not save us from injustice.” Zone 3 does link Afrofuturism to the Black Lives Matter movement, and Martin’s flight suit is in some sense the gateway to that aspect. But the zone feels small, the opposite of Zone 1 and Zone 2’s capacious engagement with the question of what Afrofuturism can teach us. 

It is here, as with elsewhere in the exhibition, that I also noted the decision to uncritically include men who have been accused of sexual misconduct, including Afrika Bambaataa, Michael Jackson, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I wondered what other figures might have deserved attention instead, especially when, with the space limitations, hard choices had to be made. It is here also that there is any serious acknowledgement of Afrofuturism beyond the United States’ colonial borders, and the engagement is not substantial.

The 3D-printed costume that Chadwick Boseman wore as Black Panther is displayed at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and culture

Yet at the end I was reminded of the power and importance of an exhibition like this one. As I gazed at the Uhura costume, I thought about how I had to wait until I was 40 years old to see this. I wondered what it would be like for a 10-year-old to experience an exhibition like this, how transformative it could be to their sense of self, to their spirit. In the end, this didn’t remain hypothetical for long. 

I realized that I was living in an Afrofuturist dream come to life.

As I stood in front of the 3D-printed costume that Chadwick Boseman wore as the titular character in the Black Panther film—which takes place in the fictional African nation of Wakanda, envisioned as an Afrofuturistic sanctuary of Black excellence and scientific achievement—a class of Black children who were probably around 8 years old came through. They were noisy and boisterous and getting on their teacher’s nerves. I loved it. Many of them touched the glass surrounding the costume, maybe slapped it a little harder than they should have. One boy, his hair in dreadlocks, ran up to it, shouting that it was the Black Panther’s costume. “I must kneel before it!” he said, and he got down on his knees and looked up. 

His generation has something that mine did not because our ancestors had the vision to dream up a museum—a political and cultural project—that might contain exhibitions like this one. As I watched him kneel, I realized that I was living in an Afrofuturist dream come to life. 

This article appears in the Summer 2023 issue of Foreign Policy. Subscribe now to support our journalism.

Correction, June 20, 2023: A previous version of this article misstated Alondra Nelson’s affiliation at the time her interview that is featured in the exhibit was filmed.