Black science fiction
Related: African American - black - black music - literature - science fiction - USA - music
Musicians: Detroit techno - George Clinton - Lee Perry - Sun Ra
The afrofuturist approach to music was first propounded by the late Sun Ra. Born in Alabama, Sun Ra always claimed to be from Saturn. Ra's music coalesced in Chicago in the mid-1950s, when he and his Arkestra began recording music that drew from hard bop and modal sources, but created a new synthesis which also used afrocentric and space-themed titles to reflects Ra's linkage of ancient African culture, specifically Egypt, and the cutting edge of the Space Age. Ra's film Space Is the Place shows the Arkestra in Oakland in the mid-1970s in full space regalia, with a lot of science fiction imagery as well as other comedic and musical material.
The afrofuturist cause was taken up in 1976 by George Clinton and his bands Parliament and Funkadelic with his magnum opus Mothership Connection and the subsequent The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein and P-Funk Earth Tour. In the thematic underpinnings to P Funk mythology ("pure cloned funk"), Clinton in his alter ego Starchild speak of "certified Afronauts, capable of funkitizing galaxies." [Aug 2006]
Context
Black science fiction is an aesthetic concept in black music (music by African Americans) and African American science fiction.In music criticism, the concept is featured from the 1990s onwards in some of the writing of Greg Tate, Mark Sinker, Mark Dery, Erik Davis, David Toop and Kodwo Eshun. [Sept 2005]
Afrofuturism
Afrofuturism, or afro-futurism, is an African-American and African diaspora subculture whose thinkers and artists see technology and science-fiction as means of exploring the black experience and finding new strategies to overcome racism and classism. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism [Sept 2005]
More Brilliant than the Sun (1998) - Kodwo Eshun
In his book More Brilliant than the Sun Kodwo Eshun gives a concise summary of Afro-Futurism's history:"AfroFuturism comes from Mark Dery's '93 book [Flame Wars], but the trajectory starts with Mark Sinker. In 1992, Sinker starts writing on Black Science Fiction; that's because he's just been to the States and Greg Tate's been writing a lot about the interface between science fiction and Black Music. Tate wrote this review called 'Yo Hermeneutics' which was a review of David Toop's Rap Attack plus a Houston Baker book, and it was one of the first pieces to lay out this science fiction of black technological music right there. And so anyway Mark went over, spoke to Greg, came back, started writing on Black Science Fiction. He wrote a big piece in The Wire, a really early piece on Black Science Fiction in which he posed this question, asks "What does it mean to be human?" In other words, Mark made the correlation between Blade Runner and slavery, between the idea of alien abduction and the real events of slavery." -- (Kodwo Eshun, 1998)
Techno
Juan Atkins and 3070 called themselves Cybotron, a futuristic name in line with the ideas they had taken from science fiction, P-Funk, Kraftwerk, and Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave. "We had always been into futurism. We had a whole load of concepts for Cybotron: a whole techno-speak dictionary, an overall idea which we called the Grid. It was like a video game which you entered on different levels." By 1984-85, they had racked up some of the finest electronic records ever, produced in their home studio in Ypsilanti: tough, otherworldly yet warm cuts like "Clear," "R-9", and the song that launched the style, "Techno City." [...]
Mark Sinker
The triumph of black American culture is that, forcibly stripped by the Middle Passage and Slavery Days of any direct connection with African mother culture, it has nonetheless survived; by syncretism, by bricolage, by a day-to-day programme of appropriation and adaptation as resourcefully broad-minded as any in history. But still, the humane tradition - of warmth, community hope and aspiration - central to the gospel roots soul of the southern black tradition is, if treated as the principle that underlies all, a way of hiding from these facts in plain sight: that this tradition is no more uniquely "African" than the Nation of Islam is "Islamic", that this culture is still - in its constituent parts - very much a patchwork borrowing; necessary of course for physical and psychic survival, but not an unarguable continuity. (Mark Sinker, 1992) via http://www.thewire.co.uk/archive/essays/black_science_fiction.html [Sept 2005]Black electronic
[...] I am interested in one particular zone of electro-acoustic cyberspace, a zone I'm calling the Black Electronic. I've dubbed the term from the British cultural theorist Paul Gilroy, who uses the phrase the "Black Atlantic" to denote the "webbed network" of the African diasporic culture that penetrates the United States, the Caribbean, and, by the end of the twentieth century, the UK. Gilroy considers the Black Atlantic a modernist countercultural space, a space that, for all the claims of black cultural nationalists, is not organized by African roots but by a "rhizomorphic, routed" set of vectors and exchanges: ships, migrations, creoles, phonographs, European miscegenations, expatriot flights, dreams of repatriation. The image of the criss-crossed Atlantic ocean is essential for Gilroy's purpose, which is to erode the monolithic notion of roots and tradition by emphasizing the "restless, recombinant" qualities of Afrodiasporic culture as it simultaneously explores, exploits, and resists the spaces of modernity. -- (Erik Davis, 1996) http://www.techgnosis.com/cyberconf.html [Sept 2005]
The otherized zone
Like Sun Ra and Lee "Scratch" Perry, George Clinton grew up in a community where black people inhabited an otherized zone. As early as 1969, George Clinton and his "Parliament-Funkadelic Thang" took on the identities of funky aliens from outer space. Uncle Fester of Fast 'n BulbousThe central fact in Black Science Fiction - self-consciously so named or not - is an acknowledgement that Apocalypse already happened [...]. Black SF writers - Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler - write about worlds after catastrophic disaster; [...] ("Every brother ain't a brother cause a colour/Just as well could be undercover" raps Chuck D in "Terrordome"). -- Mark Sinker
White science fiction
At a science fiction workshop in 1976, the teacher assigned us to write a story that answered the question, "Why don't black people write science fiction?" White publishers, the white science fiction establishment, and white critics simply couldn't see African-American science fiction, just like the white guy who bumps into Ellison's Invisible Man can't see him, even as the Invisible Man beats the crap out of him. George Schuyler wrote science fiction back in the 1930s. Ellison wrote it in the 1950s. Sam Greenlee wrote it in the 1960s. Octavia Butler, Sam Delany, Toni Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Ishmael Reed have been writing it for the last couple of decades. The work is out there, but nobody talking about cyberspace pays attention. -- (Kali Tal, 1996) via http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.10/screen.html [Sept 2005]Aliens
Thinkers
Musicians
Links
Books
- Extended Play : Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein - John Corbett[1 Paperback, Amazon US]
The reasons for Corbett's increasing prominence among music writers become crystal-clear in his debut collection of articles. Although he writes authoritatively, he never loses a fan's sense of awe. He describes the impact of a wide variety of players, including P-Funk architect George Clinton, dub reggae maestro Lee ("Scratch") Perry, Dutch free-improv drummer Han Bennink, and Siberian overtone singer Sainkho Namtchylak. His profiles of such legendary musicians as Sun Ra (especially) are insightful, and several of his interview transcriptions--including one derived from a game Corbett invented for John Cage to randomly choose his own questions--are historically valuable. And in the theoretical chapters of the book's first part, Corbett often uses seemingly innocuous pop archetypes--such as the backup singer--to comment on the political and social forces that shape modern culture. For all listeners. Aaron Cohen
- More Brilliant Than the Sun : Adventures in Sonic Fiction - Kodwo Eshun
[Amazon US]
Less a critical survey than a manifesto for the neuron-altering powers of "breakbeat science," this ingenious book traces the development of sampladelia from the "jazz fission" era of '68-'75 (with excellent analyses of George Russell's and Herbie Hancock's sonic experiments), through the Parliament/Funkadelic groovescapes of the late '70s (including close scrutiny of Pedro Bell's subversive cover art), through Electro (early '80s synth oriented hip hop) and Detroit Techno, to the present Jungle milieu of time stretching and spatio-acoustics. Eschewing a traditional music-crit vocabulary in favor of a riffing, neologistic verbal poetics, Eshun perfectly captures the sci-fi convolutions of the music he describes, and makes an infectious case for the birth of a new audio-paradigm. -- Tom Moody for Amazon.com - The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness - Paul Gilroy[1 book, Amazon US]
In "The Black Atlantic" Paul Gilroy constructs an excellent text based on the black diasporic experience. His views of black culture as being a dynamic networked construct based on the idea of the diaspora derived from Jewish culture, is an illuminating concept that contains great substance. Gilroy's underlying transnational humanism (that can be read in his latest pseudo-utopian work "Against Race") and vital rethinking about the perils of cultural nationalism and the urgent benefits of a unique hybrid culture is a thoroughly needed breath in the stasis of linear monocultural thinking. The book functions in an excellent manner in addressing the complex dynamics of slavery, colonization, and their inherent residual effects on black political culture. In addition the method in which Gilroy weaves Adorno, Hendrix, hip-hop culture, Du Bois, Wright, Hegel and a host of others in a clear and eloquent manner is cause for reading in itself. In a nutshell, this is a valuable sociological and philosophical work that creates a rupture in linear, absolutist views of history, sexuality, identity and other various elements in relation to black particularity. In this book Gilroy composes the dynamics of intercultural exchange (whether artistic, political, social, moral etc.) as well as attributing to socialized historical memory through its brilliant text. - martin de leon for amazon.com - Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora - Sheree R. Thomas (Editor)[Amazon.com]
" Speculative fiction, fantasy, and science fiction are assumed to be the genres of alternative thought; however, too often these realms of imagination reflect only the Occidental vision and culture. Now an important new anthology, the first of its kind, explodes such preconceptions with more than a century of fantastic fiction by preeminent and emerging authors of the African diaspora, including recipients of literature's most prestigious awards. This richly vibrant collection of stories and essays displays the brilliance of writers ranging from the early pioneers, such as Charles W. Chestnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and George S. Schuyler, to Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler-whose classic sf became the springboards for their fame-to such renowned figures of the African American literary tradition as playwright-critic Amiri Baraka and satirist Ishmael Reed. DARK MATTER also highlights a wide spectrum of talents who have garnered both genre and mainstream acclaim, including Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Jewelle Gomez, Nalo Hopkinson, Walter Mosley, and Kalamu ya Salaam.
Octavia Butler (1947 - 2006)
Octavia Estelle Butler (June 22, 1947-February 24, 2006) was an American science fiction writer, one of very few African-American women in the field. She won both Hugo and Nebula awards, and was the first science fiction writer ever to be a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant". --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_Butler [Feb 2006]
Lilith's Brood (1987-1989) - Octavia E. Butler [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Xenogenesis is a science fiction trilogy written by Octavia Butler. It is also known as Lilith's Brood.
The first novel in the trilogy, Dawn, appeared in 1987. Set on a devasted Earth following the near-extinction of humanity, the plot follows the resurrection of a human woman as part of an alien plan to colonize the earth with alien-human hybrids. The book introduces the alien species, known as Oankali, who come in three sexes--male, female and ooloi, a gender that mixes and manipulates the genetic material produced by the other two.
In the trilogy's second book, Adulthood Rites (1988), an alien-human hybrid child is abducted by sterile human resisters.
In the final book of the series, Imago (1989), an ooloi human comes of age and integrates human and alien societies.
The three volumes of this series are also collected into two omnibus editions, Xenogenesis (out of print) and Lilith's Brood. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenogenesis [Feb 2006]
Pregnancy in science fiction
Numerous science fiction, utopian and dystopian novels revolve around sexual reproduction, pregnancy and infertility. Some examples:
[...]
Among themes regularly encountered in science fiction are inter-species reproduction (see Star Trek), artificial wombs, and male pregnancy. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pregnancy_in_science_fiction [Feb 2006]
See also: Lilith - pregnancy - black science fiction - American literature
The Jewels of Aptor (1962) - Samuel R. Delany
The Jewels of Aptor (1962) - Samuel R. Delany
Samuel Ray "Chip" Delany, Jr. (born April 1, 1942) is a popular science fiction author. He has written many works of critical acclaim, including Dhalgren and Hogg. He is a professor at Temple University, and is also known in the academic world as a literary critic.
Delany was born and raised in Harlem and attended the Bronx High School of Science. Delany and the poet Marilyn Hacker, who met in high school, were married for several years and have a daughter.
Delany spent 11 years teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half at the University at Buffalo, and moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001.
Delany vaulted onto the literary stage when he was included in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions. Harlan gave a short introduction that ironically pointed out how Delany was one of the last straight science fiction authors. Delany has since released several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a gay writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water. Most of his works deal with sexual themes. Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand are sexually explicit, and some books like Equinox, The Mad Man and Hogg can be considered outright pornographic. He has published several books of literary criticism, with an emphasis on issues in science fiction and other paraliterary genres, comparative literature, and queer theory. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_R._Delany [Sept 2005]
Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora - Sheree R. Thomas
" Speculative fiction, fantasy, and science fiction are assumed to be the genres of alternative thought; however, too often these realms of imagination reflect only the Occidental vision and culture. Now an important new anthology, the first of its kind, explodes such preconceptions with more than a century of fantastic fiction by preeminent and emerging authors of the African diaspora, including recipients of literature's most prestigious awards. This richly vibrant collection of stories and essays displays the brilliance of writers ranging from the early pioneers, such as Charles W. Chestnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and George S. Schuyler, to Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler-whose classic sf became the springboards for their fame-to such renowned figures of the African American literary tradition as playwright-critic Amiri Baraka and satirist Ishmael Reed. DARK MATTER also highlights a wide spectrum of talents who have garnered both genre and mainstream acclaim, including Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Jewelle Gomez, Nalo Hopkinson, Walter Mosley, and Kalamu ya Salaam.
See also:
African American -
black -
USA -
black science fiction