IN HONOR OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH 2026
Many Black artists and students create music and prose through the discipline of Afro-futurism, a form of storytelling and an escape from current realities. This art form is used to imagine futures where an individual can simply exist without having to worry about being censored or excluded. The term was first coined by artists such as Sun Ra with ‘Space Jazz’ and Janelle Monáe with ‘Dirty Computer’, but it persists in contemporary art and academia.
What is Afro-futurism?
Afro-futurism originated in response to the intersection of cultural aesthetics and Critical Race Theory. Ytasha Womack, the author of “Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture,” describes the term as “a way of viewing futures and alternate realities,” through a lens of Black culture. It was a way for Black culture to enter privileged spaces where Black people were excluded. Instead of accepting this discrimination, many pioneers of Afro-futurism, such as the renowned science fiction writer Octavia Butler, rejected it entirely and positioned themselves within what is described as the “past, present and future.” This meant writing themselves into spaces that criminalized them or never considered their existence.
How was it applied within the creation of music and art?
Specifically, Sun Ra took the idea of Afrofuturism and incorporated it into his music. He created mystical personas for himself that drew both on ancient history and speculative fiction to uniquely depict a reality of resistance. His goal was to create and exist within an identity entirely outside of the oppressive binaries created by the legacy of Jim Crow laws and slavery. His music was centered around the fact that Black people were denied all basic rights on Earth, so they should leave and create Afrocentric civilizations on other lands within space.
Soon after, many artists came to build on his aesthetic to create new forms of art as a form of resistance. Artists such as Beyoncé, Erykah Badu, FKA Twigs and Missy Elliott use futuristic aesthetics within their songs as a way to protest police brutality and highlight the unique struggles of Black women.
In her song “home with you,” FKA Twigs relays her experience with fibroid tumors on her uterus, a condition that disproportionately affects Black women. Over a dark piano, her distorted vocals crescendo into ethereal ones, conveying her desire to separate herself from past physical suffering by creating a space within her music to, in a way, transcend and fly away.
By incorporating these aesthetics, these artists create tools to help them escape exclusion and discrimination. They use numerous art forms, such as music and spoken word, to process and engage with the struggles they face in everyday life, creating futures where they are able to rise above oppression and instead create spaces for them to thrive.
This form of art has become a practice widely adopted and experimented with. It allows anyone to express themselves in ways that avoid any sort of worldly limitations contingent on society’s norms. Anyone can, in a sense, create their own realities, enabling everyone to be seen, protected, appreciated and understood.
For me personally, I have experimented with my feelings in a way that allowed me to express the exclusion I felt within the debate community as a Black woman. I found myself feeling as if I could not truly be myself in that academic space because of the way it is structured for a Eurocentric point of view that prioritizes conventional, above creative, lived experiences of marginalized groups. Afrofuturist ways of expression allowed me to express myself in the debate space that broke those traditional norms, forcefully including my identity in a space that did not typically allow me to.
I imagine a place, a space
Where I don’t have to shrink my essence
I wonder, is there still a space for me
To fly, to create, to occupy, to stretch
Where I once existed carefree, my inner thoughts blossoming at my every turn
Will there be that space again?
I’ve lost my courage, adrift in the void of displacement
I remember this space where my thoughts occupied
Making me dream of the future, of what before comforted my being
The one that allowed me to illuminate, to ascend, to express what I harbor within me
Here, there is no space, for all of me
I do not fit into this space.
My soul, faster, quicker than light, is losing the means to express itself
My mind is growing blank, and I am weary. How do I get back to the space, the space where I shine?
To tell my story
Inspired by and sampling the poem ‘Repetition’ by Staceyann Chin. Written and compiled by Michelle Ohajekwe.
