But the renaissance of black comics is credited largely to artist Turtel Onli. Onli, a Chicago native, began his career as a commercial illustrator and fine artist in the late 1960s. “I was always looking to the future, because I was never content with the things around me,” said Onli. “From the time I started my professional career, I coined a term called rhythmism, which incorporates Afrofuturism. I talked about one part sci-fi, one part mysticism, and one part an advanced environment, derived from an Africanized thought pattern. It was about projecting what things could be, through incantation, mysticism, or magic. It was about aesthetically working to have a visual vocabulary for things to come, instead of things that were established.”
While working in Paris, Onli was introduced to comics as a sophisticated art form and released a series of comics, even lending his talents to a Parliament/Funkadelic album cover. Onli eventually coined the phrase “Black Age of Comics” and in 1998 launched a convention of the same name to support independent black comic artists. Today, Black Age of Comics is held annually in Chicago, but there’s also a Motor City Black Age of Comics and an East Coast Black Age of Comics, with other affiliates across the country.
However, Onli says that today’s visuals in Afrofuturism are rooted in the art of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and ’70s. The Black Arts movement was the artistic wing of the black power movement and provided the iconic images in posters, flyers, album covers, and fine arts that defined black. The movement, coupled with the civil rights movement at large, sparked a black consciousness in America, Africa, and the Caribbean, according to Onli. “We wanted to create a black cultural movement that embraced Africa,” he says. “A big part of the Black Arts movement was moving from being Negro to black. It was a revolution. The times didn’t change, but we the people changed. We refused to be contained.”
The evolution to black marked a new era in consciousness in art. It was the first time that black American culture at large named itself and sought to visually celebrate African aesthetics in the pop art styles changing the art scene.
Onli says, “Prior to the black power revolution, anything African was viewed as inferior and was not to be talked about. The black power movement in America changed their thoughts. It was quite liberating, and you can’t have creativity without a liberated mind-set.” He continues, “I see Afrofuturism as a byproduct of how successful the Black Arts movement was,” noting that many efforts were made to suppress that movement.
Although artists aren’t always excited about labeling their work, Onli feels that naming movements and styles is incredibly important. “If you don’t create jazz as a musical form, then it’s hard to reach your heights as a jazz genius. But when it comes to visual arts, we’re hesitant to speak genre. We speak passion. But there’s a difference between Elizabeth Catlett and Vincent van Gogh, and the difference isn’t just passion. Catlett is doing many things in her work, it just hasn’t been given a name.”
Starships, Outkasts, and Dreamin’
When Northwestern University professor Alexander Weheliye thinks back on the early days of the Afrofuturism Listserv and their assemblage of ideas, he says he’s most surprised by the explosion of Afrofuturism in the visual arts. “I thought it would be more popular in music videos,” he says. However, images that shift from the underground to the mainstream don’t always retain their symbolism. A black fist on a T-shirt today, for example, does not necessarily retain the vigor and meaning it held when raised by marchers in the ’60s.
“Visual culture can easily be co-opted, without any connection to the source,” says D. Denenge Akpem. She stresses, “With black people in particular, we have a long history of amazing stuff that we do being co-opted in piece or whole and making a lot of money for others.”
Music videos are the main visuals for today’s music. Eclipsing the power of the album and CD covers of old, the music video is the standard marketing vehicle to tell the musical story. When it comes to the synergy between the imagination, technology, and liberation, the video is the ideal musical storytelling format. Music artists incorporate Afrofuturism, cyberculture, and robot aesthetics as well as a healthy dose of Hollywood sci-fi movies into their music videos. While marketing and sales are factors, artists have pulled on the Afrofuturistic aesthetic to underscore aspiration, with some using it as a primary theme in their branding or approach to music.
Lupe Fiasco, who is accompanied by a dancing robot in the video for “Daydreamin’,” credits his dad’s love of Chicago architecture for his robot adoration. “If you put all the buildings in the city together, they will make a robot!” his father once told him. The image sparked a boyhood fantasy. “I was given a new lens to view my surroundings with, a valuable tool to help me literally transform the normal into the extraordinary,” says Fiasco, who’s known for his conscious lyrics and verbal dexterity. “It was an exotic and exciting new perspective that has helped build a career and constantly inspires. To this day, I still ponder how it all fits together and which buildings would be arms and which the legs.”4
Erykah Badu, queen of neo-soul, plays ethereal earth mother, revolutionary, and space cadet. She emerged during Afrofuturism’s formation and frequently drops imagery and references to quantum physics, motherships, and revolution in her music and videos. In her music video for the song “Next Lifetime,” she follows soul mates from precolonial Africa, to small-town America with the Black Panthers, to a post-year-3000 Africa. Futuristic Africa is utopia, a re-creation of ancient Africa with nature-based practices and universalism all accented with glow-in-the-dark ceremonial paint and traditional head wraps. In the kaleidoscope-infused video for “Jump Up in the Air (Stay There),” images of a meditating Badu floating in time warps through space are juxtaposed with rapper Lil Wayne in smoke clouds. Badu duplicates the glowing finger tap made famous by E.T. with Young Money’s Wayne, a bond between two artists often viewed as residing on opposite ends of the hip-hop spectrum.
Andre 3000, one half of Outkast, channels Parliament with his colorful costumes. In the song “Prototype,” Andre is a white-haired “extra, extra”-terrestrial who lands on Earth with his multiethnic family and falls in love with an earthling and becomes human.
Janelle Monáe’s song “Many Moons” depicts android action on her fictional Metropolis. A call to end fascism, Monáe plays each android, and the scene is part fashion show, part slave auction, and part frenetic concert. R&B singer Bilal’s song “Robots” is a warning to society to wake up. The video, directed by Mikael Colombu cuts 3-D images of the moon and a manufactured Bilal critiquing a cookie-cutter society.
Pop sentiments have room for Afrofuturism too. Lil Wayne, who has called himself an alien in his songs, recreated scenes from the dream thriller Inception and kicks off with a wake-up slap. Nicki Minaj’s techno hip-hop song “Starships” has a spacecraft zip over her futuristic, Polynesian-inspired dance party. And the Black Eyed Peas’ “Imma Be Rocking That Body” shows the foursome as a digitized version of themselves through a dream sequence of computer-generated music, dancing giant robots, and break dancers.
Sock It to Me: The Rise of Missy Elliott
Entrepreneur Missy Elliott is known for her creative videos, particularly from 2002 to 2008. Both a producer and artist, she defied the glam standards expected of women singers and joined the lineage of women artists who redefined pop-star beauty and didn’t rely on trumped-up sex appeal. Elliott didn’t sing about space or sci-fi, nor was her music about liberation per se, but she adopted an abstract rap style that used cognitive dissonance in her music videos.
Elliott made her solo music-video debut with a syncopated gamer track version of Ann Peebles’s “I Can’t Stand the Rain.” Hype Williams directed the star-studded project and decked out Elliott in an abstract, black, trash bag–inspired combo. Her rise set the stage for a new era in music videos. Most of her classic videos were directed by Dave Meyers and contain a mix of horror, classic film imagery, sci-fi, historical fantasy, and 1980s hip-hop
in surrealist backdrops with the hottest choreographed routines of the day. She mimicked The Wiz with dancing hip-hop scarecrows shaking in the glow of a UFO’s light in “Pass That Dutch.” And she was a rapping astronaut in a Method Man–inspired video game space world with rapper Da Brat in “Sock It 2 Me.” In “Lose Control,” Elliott established a time-bending alternative history with steampunk-era dancers in overalls and floor-length white skirts grooving to her twenty-first-century hit. The video intercut the sepia-tinged footage with twenty-first-century hiphop dancers. But Elliott says she was just aiming for the creative heights established by her hero, the King of Pop.
Moonwalker’s Rise
No artist has captured the world’s imagination like Michael Jackson. Jackson, now regarded as the greatest entertainer of modern times and the quintessential superstar, set a new standard for pop music, broke black music into the global pop sphere, and did so in part with a new media device that revolutionized the industry: the music video. The video for “Thriller,” a highly choreographed mini horror flick with popping-and-locking, groove-loving zombies elevated what was once a simple music promo tool into a bona fide art form. Although Jackson is not regarded as Afrofuturistic in the vein of Sun Ra or Parliament, largely because he didn’t sing about space or use his lyrics to invert reality, he did sing music of inspiration, universal love, humanity, earth consciousness, and innocence. His videos are science-and-magic hybrids with fantastic optical illusions.
His mix of dance, music, and showmanship revolutionized the music video, and he frequently integrated fantasy, horror, science fiction, and space themes in his eye-popping all-ages work. Simply put, his videos and television appearances were global events.
And he used dreams to inform his songwriting. “I wake up from dreams and go, ‘Wow, put this down on paper,’ ” he once told Rolling Stone. “The whole thing is strange. You hear the words, everything is right there in front of your face.”5
Motown 25, an anniversary celebration honoring the biggest names in music, is remembered most for Jackson’s debut of the Moonwalk, a backward-gliding dance that has minds boggled to this day. The dance became his staple, and millions of people around the world tried, with varying degrees of success, to replicate it. A decade before, he recorded “Dancing Machine” with the Jackson 5 and debuted a kinetic version of the dance the Robot on Soul Train. No one can dance like Michael Jackson, and no one championed appropriately named space-era sci-fi dances like him either.
Jackson was always larger than life, and throughout his career he revved up fantastical futuristic possibilities. “I believe in wishes and in a person’s ability to make a wish come true. I really do. And a wish is more than a wish, it’s a goal that your conscious and subconscious can help make a reality,” he said.
Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, a ninety-minute musical movie, is a wonderland fantasy that follows Jackson dancing as a “smooth criminal” figure and later exploding Transformers-style into a gigantic spaceship. “Scream,” his popular duet with sister Janet, was inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. The twosome danced and played video games in a minimalistic space station that resembled a mini CD player. The grandiosity and timelessness of his music and videos make him feel immortal. In Sega’s video game Space Channel 5, he appears as Space Michael, a character whose dance moves “transcend time and space.” How fitting that on his posthumous Michael album the symbolic collage includes a hovering spacecraft.
There’s something about African American culture in particular that dictates that all cultural hallmarks and personal evolutions are recast in a historical lineage. Whether it’s the concept of prophesy and speaking into the future or tropes of the past shadowing the present, whether by need or by narrative, many speak as if the future, past, and present are one. The threads that bind can be as divergent as a tersely worded tweet, musical chord, fiery speech, ancient Kemetic symbol, Bible quote, starry night, or string theory, but there’s an idea that the power of thought, word, and the imagination can somehow transcend time. Just as the right words and actions can speak the future into existence, the same can recast the past, too. This cyclical nature of time and the contemplation of it all is a favorite theme and conversation point for Afrofuturists.
Time travel is a popular theme in science fiction. From H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine to the classic film Back to the Future, the ideas of rewinding the clock or fast-forwarding into the future have piqued the curiosity of the world’s best minds, creators, and scientists. In fact, the ideas are so ingrained in pop culture that the common time-zapping themes are nearly cliche. How many characters have leapfrogged into the past to “fix” some wrong only to screw up the future and be forced to DeLorean their way back again? How many times has a well-meaning attempt to alter time trapped the main character in a series of parallel universes? The morals and ethics have been tossed about by sci-fi fans and pop culture lovers alike. Even the new-school fields of quantum physics and quantum mechanics are based on the likely premise that time is relative. The popularity of documentaries like What the Bleep Do We Know!?, about quantum physics and new discoveries about space and time, provides more proof of the abundant probabilities of jetting through the here and now.
“What physicists are discovering right now is so bizarre it almost sounds like science fiction, like we’re not talking about science anymore,” said Fred Alan Wolf—aka Dr. Quantum—physicist and author.1
Time travel, parallel universes, the multiverse, and the Higgs boson are on a fast-track collision with the best in sci-fi. Time travel dominates Afrofuturism as well. Whether it’s a lighthearted comic book about a time-traveling family or Sun Ra using time travel as a musical device as revealed in the film Space Is the Place, time travel is a broadly accepted tool in most Afrofuturistic works.
But for Afrofuturists, the notion of bending time erases the prism of race-based limitations that all too often lace the present and define the recent past. “I think we feel held hostage to time,” says D. Denenge Akpem, professor and artist. “There’s this idea that if you can control time and your place in it, you can control the course of history and your own history. Afrofuturists create new visions. If you can create a new vision of the future, you can create a new vision of the past.” Time travel also alleviates regret, she adds: “It’s about empowerment; you’re reshaping yourself, reshaping reality.”
Parallel dimensions that can be channeled through music, desire, and thought are common themes among Afrofuturist artists. “A lot of people feel trapped in time and look at it as linear,” says Rasheedah Phillips, founder of the AfroFuturist Affair, a nonprofit arts collective in Philadelphia. “They feel like they have no control over the future or the past. The main thing with me doing Afrofuturism is helping to look at time as a cycle and use that and the past for change. How can I use those cycles in a way that is more powerful for me to change my future?”
Time-Warped Wonders
Jaycen Wise is one of the most popular African American characters in independent comics. He defies limitations of time and space with his gift of immortality. Wise, a scholar and warrior, is the “hero’s hero” and the “last son of the African Empire of Kush.” He must battle ignorance while preserving light and knowledge. He can be in a battle in ancient Egypt or rescuing prized diamonds in modern-day Manhattan; Wise has the ability to be anywhere. “I have a passion for developing cutting edge material that pushes the boundaries of the imagination,” says Uraeus, the creator of Jaycen Wise, in the book Black Comix.2
One of the great dilemmas in the development of black characters in sci-fi is the question of handling race in the modern context. Time travel, immortality, reincarnation, and parallel universes create wormholes to supersede limitations of history while restoring power to both the narrative and its readers. The gaping hole of history and knowledge that Afrofuturism fills with fantasy and the multiverse embraces the greatest power a story can hold by reinstituting the ultimate hero’s journey.
When Dr. Quantum
was asked about the lessons of possible time travel and his scientific discoveries, he said, “The past is being created as much as the future. Once you get yourself into the position of creating the past, present, and future, rather than just being a victim of the past you become a magician.”3 Sun Ra would feel vindicated. He’s not alone.
“Time is not linear,” says graphic novelist Radi Lewis. “I think it folds in on itself. You can close your eyes and go back to a memory of when you’re a kid; who’s to say you’re not going back in time?” Lewis wrote the graphic novel Children of the Phoenix. “I based it around my family, wife, and dog,” says the New York native, who recently relocated to Arizona. Children of the Phoenix follows the Phoenix family, a reincarnated version of Adam and Eve who are deemed the protectors of their five children. “It sounds corny, but I kind of feel that way about my wife. I’ve known my wife since I was fourteen years old,” says Lewis. They aren’t immortal, says Lewis of his characters, but much like energy, “you can’t destroy them, and they’ll just reappear in another form. A secret race tracks the family down each incarnation and they sacrifice themselves for humanity.”
A Time to Heal
No one wants to revisit the atrocities of slavery in the antebellum South. Forget the scariness of a dystopian future; the transatlantic slave trade is a reminder of where collective memories don’t want to go, even if the trip is in their imagination. But Octavia Butler defied time-travel norms by sending her heroine into American slavery in her epic work Kindred. “The immediate effect of reading Octavia Butler’s Kindred is to make every other time travel book in the world look as if it’s wimping out,” writes Jo Walton on Tor.com.4
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