Fairies also aren’t black. Fairies aren’t Latino. Fairies aren’t Asian. Fairies aren’t men. Fairies aren’t overweight. Fairies aren’t bald. Despite the fact that stories of fairies can be found throughout the world, from Africa to Southeast Asia, of fairies of different sizes, sexes, hair textures, and personalities, fairies in the larger media world have one uniform look and accepted set of qualities: She’s a she, she’s petite, she’s white. If she doesn’t look like Thumbelina or Tinker Bell and can’t fit in a size-negative taffeta skirt, she’s not a fairy.
Disney wrestled with how to tell a modern story of a black princess, finally putting out The Princess and the Frog in 2009. Although I didn’t see any official statements saying this, I’d guess that one of the greatest problems when trying to develop the project was that the image of the princess with the sashaying Cinderella hoopskirt and Rapunzelesque hair derived from European folktales is not associated with the image of black women. Although we’re talking about a cartoon and playing in the world of fiction, the challenge, I’m sure, was to make the image of a black princess connect with audiences. To make the fantasy work, creators had to work with preconceived images and twentieth-century realities. And yet, there have been black princesses (not as many with hoopskirts and Rapunzelesque hair, of course) in real life since the beginning of time.
Remote Control
Historically, those who fight for equal rights are also fighting for control over their image as well as the development and depiction of their culture. Photos, films, drawings, and visual media at large have both intentionally and unintentionally perpetuated class, sex, and ethnic stereotypes. For decades traditional media and the gallery world were visual-media gatekeepers. If your work didn’t filter through their lens of approval, it fought for survival anywhere.
Visual media is the medium of choice for widespread propaganda. The Birth of a Nation is recognized for being the first large-scale Hollywood picture, but the story—a propagandist tale of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction—also embedded the stereotypes of blacks in cinema for nearly a century. The relationship between media, the visual arts, and the dangerous stereotypes so many work to unravel is a serious one. I committed to working in media one day during my junior year in high school when I realized that the books, TV shows, films, and art I soaked in were the only windows to the larger world beyond my day-to-day teen life. Although I was a kid steeped in well-rounded black images, history, and a big heap of positive thinking, not everyone else was.
Images are powerful.
That is why the NAACP, long a forerunner in advocating for diversity in Hollywood, hosts its annual Image Awards show. It’s the reason that every time a reality show, film, or sitcom with black characters hits the screen, people debate the merit of the image of blacks in media via message boards, Twitter, and in cafes. It’s the reason that, at one point, leaders and fans hoped that hip-hop stars who had the glare of the spotlight upon them might take up the banner for equal rights. It’s the reason that art shows are often heralded for untold views of black life. Unfortunately, in the black American experience, images have often been used to frame our lives, how we come to understand ourselves, and how others relate to us. No one’s life should be dictated by a flashing photograph or a cartoon.
When DJ Spooky remixed the footage in The Birth of a Nation, the music-backed multimedia presentation traveled to museums throughout the world. While many were horrified by the film’s depictions, DJ Spooky’s exhibit underscored that technology is the ultimate power tool for defining and redefining the image. In the hands of a remixer and with a hint of low-cost editing, the flashing images that had been seared into the nation’s lexicon of black stereotypes could be rewound, inverted, chopped, and screwed—or erased. The power of this looming, larger-than-life screen is in the hands of anyone who wants to change it.
Today technology enables a greater ability to create and share images across the world. Social media, websites, music downloads, digital cameras, low-cost sound engineering, at-home studios, editing equipment, and on and on. Upgrades to animation and illustration software happen so quickly that by the time a student is trained on one platform, new illustration software debuts. A decade ago, an up-and-coming kid with an over-the-shoulder video camera needed a heavy light kit, tripod, and reflectors to shoot a good scene. Today they can survive with a near-weightless camera or pop an adjustable lens on a camera phone. Two years ago, a still photographer shot my family reunion photo. A few months ago, a cousin shot the whole bunch (more than a hundred) with her iPad.
Traditional media isn’t the information gatekeeper it was in the past. A combination of the Internet, inexpensive digital media, and the proliferation of mobile devices and blogs has allowed artists to create art, write about it, and share their work on a world stage. These artists are bound by a conviction to reshape black images past and present. Meshing the limits of time and space, today’s Afrofuturistic artists provide another lens to view the world. While Afrofuturism rippled through a Listserv in the past, today the dialogue has spread through blogs, online newspapers, and Instagram.
A Brand-New World
“People so did not expect a science fiction film out of Africa,” Pumzi director Wanuri Kahiu told Bitch magazine. “Let alone East Africa. People would ask me things like, ‘With so many other films to make, why would you make a science fiction film? What does that mean?’ Does that mean that because I’m from a certain region, I have a limited capacity of imagination?”1
Born and raised in Kenya, Kahiu came to the United States to study film at UCLA and returned to her hometown, Nairobi, to direct films. Pumzi is the region’s first sci-fi film, and the groundbreaking work picked up awards at festivals across the world. Pumzi means “air” in Kiswahili. Raising questions about sustainability and hope, Kahiu provides a never-before-seen image of high-tech Africans in the future.
Pumzi may mark the beginning of a new era in African Afrofuturistic cinema. It’s a twenty-one-minute short that follows Asha, an African scientist who lives in the Maitu community, an underground, high-tech futuristic city in East Africa. Some thirty-five years after World War III and the water wars, humans are forced to live underground. Water is rare, and citizens purify their sweat and urine for drinking water. Asha studies soil samples and soon finds one that can bear life. She’s awakened by dreams of a sole tree that stands rooted aboveground, but dreaming is so discouraged that when she has one, a talking cyborg instructs her to take a dream suppressant.
Asha is imprisoned for dreaming, and after a friend escapes, she goes aboveground into toxic environments determined to find the source of the life-supporting soil and plant a seed. She ultimately sacrifices herself, using sweat from her body to plant the seed, and in her death, her body provides the nourishment that nurtures the seed into a tree. The images in the film are striking, from the futuristic fashions worn by actress Kudzani Moswela to her bold trek through the sands.
Although the story is pretty straightforward, one critic feared that her own Western feminist sentiments prevented her from understanding the story and writing an insightful critique. Very little about this short was rooted in Western culture, other than the film medium itself, a reality that completely disoriented the writer. Even the universalism of the story and the fact that the lead character was a woman still didn’t forge a connection. Was the depiction of tech-savvy futuristic Africans with a desire to connect with nature too different for the writer to analyze? “Maybe I’m Othering Kahiu by equivocating,” she concluded, adding that she’d rather the beauty of the film speak for itself.2
A Star Is a Seed
“I want to create images no one has seen,” said Cauleen Smith, experimental filmmaker and multimedia artist. We were swapping tea in Chicago’s Hyde Park, a place now famous for being the home of President Barack Obama, just blocks away from Washington Park and Bronzeville, both of which were Sun Ra’s stomping grounds. “It’s rare that I see an image in a black film tha
t I want to use or that I think is viable in liberating the imagination,” Smith said, noting that the filmmakers from the L.A. Rebellion, a collective of black filmmakers from the UCLA film school, were “masters” of creating the new images that were the antithesis of Hollywood.
Smith has worked as an Afrofuturist artist for twenty years. Like many Afrofuturistic artists, she began working in the aesthetic before Afrofuturism was named. A sci-fi fan, Smith learned how to make experimental films and connected with French structuralist theories, although she didn’t like the structuralist aversion to politics.
“I took these structural concepts and merged it with memory and culture. I didn’t realize that’s what Afrofuturism was—speculating about the past and speculating on the future while reconfiguring the present tense.” Smith, at that time a part of a collective called the Carbonist School in Austin, was immediately taken with the idea of blackness as a technology. “We were all into sci-fi,” she said, adding, “We came up with this idea that all these artists were using blackness as a technology. It’s been used as a technology against us—being marked with a certain race determines your race, your movement, access, and privileges.”
She read Greg Tate’s work and was intrigued by Samuel Delany, George Clinton, Sun Ra, and other black artists for their use of cognitive estrangement. “Clinton would take all these sci-fi tropes we were familiar with and totally freak it out. But funk was familiar,” she said. “The use of cognitive estrangement, shifting perceptions of the images we’re all familiar with, that defines the Afrofuturistic artist…. Put simply, I would describe Afrofuturism as the experience of cognitive estrangement as manifested through sound, image, language, and form that so often defines or frames the mundane conditions and movements and generative thought in the African diaspora,” she recorded in the Chicago Arts Archive. She added, “[Afrofuturism] is not a moniker of identity or geography but a musical, literary, and art-historical movement—like creative music, postmodernism, or conceptual art.”3
Smith came to Chicago in the summer of 2011 to study Sun Ra’s relationship to the city. She’s inspired by the relationship between space and art, cities and artists. “Experimentation is very well understood here with the working class. In other cities, the elite class decides that. In Chicago it’s the working class who do, and the middle class has to respond. I can see that here.”
Digging through the archives at the University of Chicago and interviewing AACM members, Smith wanted to know what role Chicago culture played in Sun Ra’s evolution. Her insights were the backdrop for A Star Is a Seed, a multimedia show she unveiled at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in May 2012.
The show was an ode to improvisation as mastery. “You can only improvise when you totally know what you are doing,” Smith said. Although other cultures have invoked the beauties of improvisation, Smith believes it was key to the survival of the black diaspora.
A Star Is a Seed was a total challenge to the visual senses. Visitors were first greeted by a collection of old DVD player boxes stacked to the ceiling like blocks. Next attendees saw The Ark After the Flood, a single room featuring video clips from the film The Secret Life of Plants projected from a metallic DVD player tilted like the flower on a stem into an aquarium and reflected onto the ceiling. Oddly, The Secret Life of Plants is also known for its unique soundtrack by Stevie Wonder, which features a song in tribute to the Dogon’s relationship to the star Sirius. In addition to the visual elements, the room also featured variations of the Wizard of Oz song “Over the Rainbow” spilling from surround-sound speakers. Played by an array of jazz artists, from Sun Ra to Art Tatum, the song reflects “the fragility and tenuousness of human life, hopes and dreams,” Smith said in her artist statement.
A posted statement asked visitors to abandon their notions of time and space as they entered The Inhfinity Vortex, a corridor reminiscent of the mirror scene in Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon. Once visitors saw their way through the mass of reflections, they were in a screening room with a bench and two giant fuzzballs fit for sitting. Here, visitors watched a series of short films.
These films featured images Chicagoans would recognize, such as the Bean, officially named Cloud Gate at Millennium Park; the lakefront; the cylinder-shaped Hilliard Homes on Twenty-Second and State; and the Statue of the Republic, or Golden Lady, a commemorative relic from the Chicago World’s Fair that sits on Sixty-Third Street near Hayes Park. But Smith’s depictions of the images maximized her love affair with cognitive estrangement with her verite-style shooting capturing an oddly sci-fi landscape. Even a shot of a manhole on a South Side street suddenly looked like an Egyptian sundial.
There was a film of black kids riding their bikes along the lake, donning glitter capes and bike helmets. There was a shot of the Rich Central Marching Band, a mostly black high school marching band, playing Sun Ra’s song “Space Is the Place” in Chinatown. There was a single-shot video of Mwata Bowden, former president of the AACM, playing a six-foot-tall brass instrument that resembled a band of trumpets wrapped together and sounded like a didgeridoo, the popular indigenous instrument commonly played by Australian Aborigines.
Another video featured violinist Renee Baker shocking conventional wisdom by evoking sounds from the violin that were off the chromatic scale. Part percussive, part Jimi Hendrix, part wah-wah pedal, the music she played was fabulous and out of this world. From hypnotizing microphones to toy pyramids, these experimental films were the ultimate in cognitive estrangement, with hometown images morphing into magic emblems and everyday people whipped into musical shamanism. Not a single special effect was used. Oddly, the red-wigged dancing space visitors in one shot, with their Sun Ra quotes written on paper, seemed normal in light of all I’d seen before. Black girls with colorful wigs and bright hairstreaks were part of the fashion of the day.
Space of Resistance
John Jennings is a Jack Kirby fan.
I think it’s fair to say that most real comic book fans are Kirby enthusiasts. Kirby, one of the titans in the comic world, is the illustrator and cocreator behind Captain America, the Incredible Hulk, the Avengers, and a host of iconic figures for DC and Marvel Comics. “A lot of Kirby’s work was about mythology and heritage,” says Jennings, an artist and visual arts professor at SUNY in Rochester. However, Kirby holds a special place in the hearts of many black comic fans because he is also the cocreator of Black Panther, the first black superhero in mainstream American comics.
In tribute to Kirby’s foray into black identity and his influence on the comic world, Jennings, along with Stacey “Blackstar” Robinson, created Black Kirby, a showcase of a series of candid illustrations recreating classic Kirby covers with an Afrofuturistic motif. “Black Kirby is an Afrofuturistic black power fantasy,” says Jennings, who says the duo blended Kirbyisms, Afrofuturism, and black pop art to create the show. As creators, he and Robinson took on Jack Kirby’s outlook and imagined the kinds of comics he’d have created if he were black. Jennings debuted the show in September 2012 at his alma mater, Jackson State University.
The visuals are compelling. Xavier, head of the X-Men, is depicted as Martin Luther King on trial as a mutant. “We used that image to depict otherness,” says Jennings. Spoken-word poet Gil Scott-Heron appears as superhero Gil Scott-Free, a retake on the comic hero and escape artist Scott Free aka Mister Miracle. “It’s about breaking free of how people view us,” says Jennings. The classic Thor is redesigned as the Mighty Shango, in honor of the Yoruba god. In one illustration, a black power fist emerges in conjunction with the lines “We’re not just conscious, we’re double conscious,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to W. E. B. Du Bois, who coined the philosophy of double consciousness, which argues that African Americans are forever juggling their African and American identities.
But the show also merged black and Jewish experiences. “Jack Kirby and a lot of the comic creators were Jewish. We’re looking at the shared experiences between Jewish creators and black creators,” says J
ennings, noting that both groups wrestle with identity, cultural responsibility, and bias. He adds, “We’re looking at the comic space as a space of resistance.”
Space is a frequent theme in Afrofuturist art. Whether it’s outer space, the cosmos, virtual space, creative space, or physical space, there’s this often-understated agreement that to think freely and creatively, particularly as a black person, one has to not just create a work of art, but literally or figuratively create the space to think it up in the first place. The world, it seems, is jam-packed with bought-and-sold rotated images, some as stereotypes and others as counterimages that become stereotypes mounting into watershed debates about “positive” and “negative” images in the media.
The Black Age in Comix
John Jennings is an advocate of using comics to shape black identity and Afrofuturism. In fact, he and Damian Duffy edited the anthology Black Comix, an art book featuring the works of dozens of black independent comic artists. “We wanted to look at these types of books done by African American creators and the diversity of things that were offered,” Jennings says. But he, like many artists, is charged to add more black images to the visual lexicon. “If you’re not white and you’re in this country, you’re starving for images of yourself.”
At the Chicago Comic Con in April 2012, the Institute for Comics Studies hosted a panel on black comic book creators, which I moderated. Panelists included Stanford Carpenter, the cofounder of the Institute for Comics Studies and creator of Brother-Story; Mshindo Kuumba, illustrator for Jaycen Wise and The Batman Chronicles; Ashley Woods, creator of Millennia Wars; and Black Age of Comics founder Turtel Onli. Dressed in my Rayla Illmatic costume, I navigated questions for the hundred or so comic fans in the audience. While the questions focused largely on where we are now, I was struck by how happy everyone was to have a space to share their comic bonds and detailed knowledge. They weren’t isolated artists carving out a space to exist in an environment that’s hostile to black images. For the first time, the attendees seemed to relish the fact that they were a blossoming community with new possibilities.
Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture Page 11
