During February and March 2022, Carnegie Hall hosted a two-month citywide festival titled Afrofuturism, reconsidering the critical lens of Black science fiction and technoculture as a philosophical movement in transition, striving to imagine and build new realities. Afrofuturism was organised as a part of a cycle of canonical programmes at the legendary concert hall beginning with Jessye Norman’s HONOR! A Celebration Of The African American Cultural Legacy in 2009 – a “journey of exploration, impression, and expression” of the 400 year political and social revolution and evolution of the Black musical continuum that she termed a “cultural mosaic”.

“Carnegie Hall has been doing citywide festivals since about 2006,” says Adriaan Fuchs, Carnegie’s director of festivals and special projects. “When we were starting to plan the festival we knew that we wanted to continue an exploration into African-American culture, and Afrofuturism kind of came to the fore as an idea that really brings together various different strands for us musically in terms of an artistic community that is cutting edge and contemporary.” Alongside the cultural events, a “Timeline Of African American Music” collects decades of scholarship conducted by Dr Portia K Maultsby charting the evolution of sacred and secular African-American musical traditions from the 1600s to 2022. The timeline’s latest entry “Afrofuturism In Black Music”, by Dr Tony Bolden, surveys the growing pattern of cosmic technological thinking that would appear in Black literature, music, and the struggle for civil rights throughout the twentieth century.

In the early stages of the festival, the Carnegie staff consulted scholars including Dr Alondra Nelson and cultural critic Mark Dery, who coined the term in the 1993 essay “Black To The Future” in which he discussed the tropes of Black science fiction and approaches to technology with Samuel Delany, Greg Tate and Tricia Rose. Dery conceived of Afrofuturism as an “African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future in the service of African-American visions of things to come and a future that includes Black folk”. He writes further that “The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?”

In the late 90s, while a graduate student at New York University, Nelson made use of the term when she established an online community and symposium that explored what Afrofuturism could mean as “a critical perspective that opens up inquiry into the many overlaps between technoculture and Black diasporic histories”.”In 2002, she wrote the essay “Future Texts” as an introduction to an Afrofuturism themed issue of Social Text, an academic journal published by Duke University Press. The issue explored Black experience in contrast to the mythological, as Nelson put it, “rags-to-riches stories of dot-com millionaires and the promise of a placeless, raceless, bodiless near future enabled by technological progress”. By the mid-2010s, Afrofuturism would surface in popular culture, with the arrival of the film Black Panther and the aesthetic exploration by Janelle Monae, Beyonce, Solange Knowles, and others. In 2021, Nelson was selected by President-elect Joe Biden to be the deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Acknowledging the “Americentricity” of the scope of Afrofuturism, Dery found its mainstream interpretation to be more superficial than where he and Nelson started. “This is what capitalism does,” Dery remarks. “It takes sort of transgressive phenomena and cultural insurgencies and it skins their hides and leaves the meat of the matter to rot and then turns it into pret-à-porter, off-the-rack fashion/lifestyle choices.”

The festival comes at a crucial time when the United States is lapsing into a recurring nadir of American race relations, backlash, and ‘culture war’ in tandem with more than a dozen Historically Black College or Universities reporting bomb threats on the first day of Black History Month (February in the US). Carnegie Hall’s infrastructural exploration of modern African-American culture throughout the 2010s laid the groundwork for programming that could showcase Afrofuturism as a way ahead. “Afrofuturism is so vibrant and creative, and relies on so many different disciplines,” says Fuchs. “We as a society in America have gone through a lot over the last two to three years, and Afrofuturism is such an incredible vehicle to actually think about how we can imagine a future that creates a place for Black identity to be celebrated.”

To answer this question, Carnegie Hall invited Reynaldo Anderson, Ytasha L Womack, Sheree Renée Thomas, King James Britt and Louis Chude-Sokei to have curatorial oversight of the festival and maintain the intellectual rigour that underpins Afrofuturism. Carnegie also commissioned their first ever visual artwork for a festival, tapping Quentin VerCetty, an award-winning visual griot, to create the digital sculpture AstroSankofa with a face created in the likeness of opera singer Sissieretta Jones, the first African American woman to headline Carnegie Hall, wearing a wardrobe inspired by the vocal group Labelle and Sun Ra’s headdress worn at The Arkestra’s debut at Carnegie Hall in 1968. With its raised arms in reference to vocalist and high priestess June Tyson of The Sun Ra Arkestra, the visual fiction of AstroSankofa burst through the roof of Carnegie Hall.

The Black Angel Of History, an art exhibition curated by Dr Reynaldo Anderson, guides the timeline of the festival while also offering an analysis of visual culture and philosophical thought embedded within Afrofuturism. The last in a trilogy of multimedia projects by Anderson’s Black Speculative Art Movement, the exhibition illustrates the theoretical concepts of a rebooting Afrofuturism with an expanded cosmology of Astro-Blackness, a Black consciousness that “interrogates the past, present and future in the humanities, sciences, and challenges Eurocentric motifs of identity, technology, time and space, and religion”. Considering Black vernacular culture within the scope of speculative fiction, the exhibition establishes an overarching myth-science around the festival. “For us, Afrofuturism is a politics of the stomach,” Anderson says, discussing the need for economic freedom fighters and the limits of the American experiment “where we’re still dealing with racism and police brutality and so forth”. He explains that “there’s tension between Afropessimism and Afrofuturism where one represents social death and the other offers a way out”. This tension was also observed by the late Greg Tate, an influential Black cultural critic and Wire contributor whose commentary provided the building blocks for defining Afrofuturism. “Afropessimism is all the rage among millennial Black academics and activists – most notably among Black feminist critical race theorists, who themselves are now the prime targets of the MAGA crowd,” he wrote. “Black intellectuals haven’t enjoyed this much pop currency among the right wing since Black Power took over buildings to demand Black studies in state universities and the Ivies 50 years ago.”

Post Black: How A New Generation Is Redefining African American Identity, published by Afrofuturism curator Ytasha L Womack in 2010, studies “emerging groups, both vibrant and forceful, whose voices and issues are entrenched in communities but are not a part of the social agenda, public discussion, national politics, or collective Black identity”. An award-winning author, film maker and dance therapist, Womack wrote Post Black to address shifts in identity, multi-ethnic heritage and lifestyle during the 2000s. “I was working in a lot of Black institutional spaces, and there wasn’t a recognition of these shifts in identity, technology and career opportunities.” She adds, “There wasn’t this more nuanced understanding of either a shifting geopolitics or shifting identity or a recognition of change that was happening and part of us.” In 2013, Womack published Afrofuturism: The World Of Black Sci-Fi And Fantasy Culture as “a way of looking at a future or an alternate reality while pulling from the lived experiences and wisdom systems of Black people and cultures.”

Womack’s work responds to moments of societal uncertainty and considers the political nature of large entities and companies that operate on a scale beyond public knowledge. “I always saw that when there are moments when you have these heights of change, you also have this radical technology shift, right? Then you have these kinds of broad shifts in terms of access within the culture, and if people have been somewhat in a bubble it looks like, well, ‘what is happening?’, ‘How can this person make this much money with that job and have this level of access?’, ‘Or what do these technologies mean?’” These speculative questions for Womack can be an entry point to Afrofuturism, similarly to the way that the colloquial term woke was able to spread from a conversation between Georgia Anne Muldrow and Erykah Badu to a broader way to describe a Black awakening in capitalist America. “In one sense, we're living in someone’s idea of a future, and we’re in a dialogue around that,” she says. “You know, we step into a world where there are artefacts, geographies, architecture and fashion that are a part of a lineage of something else, certainly outgrowth of someone else’s imagination.” In search of these cracks in time, Womack encourages live action role play (LARP) and reenactments as a way to construct imagined scenarios and environments that can help progress one’s contemplations and understanding of the macro-structures of technocracy and the future.

Womack’s Rayla Universe is an intergalactic, intergenerational tale that charts a course further along the timeline of her previous books. Her Rayla Universe LARP experience brings this journey through time to the present day in the form of an augmented reality game that combines theatre, music and dance that has been partially inspired by parties in Chicago where house music is DJed with the same soulful fervour as in the 1980s. “Art in Black communities has always been considered niche or alternative to the mainstream,” Womack reflects. “[Chicago House and footwork] weren’t considered that by the people enjoying it, right? But that’s how it was perceived by the American mainstream, and right away the genres live whole lives over in Europe in clubs, museums and gallery spaces. It lives this whole life in these curated spaces that have a community, but disconnected from the communities where it originated from.”

Upon being invited to join the Afrofuturism curatorial council, Womack immediately contacted educator, DJ and composer King Britt after being a part of his event series Moondance: A Night In The Afrofuture at MoMA PS1 in 2014. As an assistant professor at the University of California San Diego, Britt teaches Blacktronika: Afrofuturism In Electronic Music, a course and on campus club experience. In a 2003 interview with Groove magazine, Britt spoke about his involvement in the early-2000s Blacktronica monthly event series hosted in London by DJ and poet Charlie Dark. Back then, the movement was “about fighting major labels”, and “covers the entire history of Black music, early jazz, house, broken beat, African stuff, from Coltrane to Carl Craig. Everything that comes from the diaspora.” Blacktronika is a platform to research and develop a greater understanding of technology’s impact on the Black musical continuum, which he plans to compile into a book. Afrofuturism brings Britt and Black electronic music to the concert hall. “[The Carnegie staff] has been extremely open and just absolutely in tune with us and letting us really do what we do,” he says, “The only time I heard the word no was when we wanted the full Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry dub experience in Carnegie Hall, and they said we can’t because the foundation of the building would collapse.”

As a young teen in the early 1980s, Britt was featured on StarStuff, a space-themed television show set in the year 2010 where he voiced his interest in astronomy supplemented with other sci-fi TV shows Star Trek, Ultraman and Johnny Sokko And His Flying Robot. The elements of Afrofuturism came to King Britt and other Black youth during the late 1980s just as electronic instruments became more accessible. Following the death of Greg Tate in December 2021, Britt published a discussion between the two of them and Womack on the roots of Afrofuturism. “You know, Greg didn’t even think about the word Afrofuturism. He was like, we were talking about Black science fiction,” Britt says, explaining that the original essay from Dery pulled together many different thinkers who had their own terms for describing these loose patterns in the Black perception of modern technology and possible futures. “I feel Greg was being nice, he could have been a little bit more aggressive on that subject, but [Afrofuturism] is a powerful word. It really sticks with you and it rolls off the tongue. It’s just it’s fantastic word now, it’s just overused, maybe.”

As Dr Alondra Nelson was conducting communal research on Afrofuturism in the late 1990s, Sheree Renee Thomas was at work collecting and editing the anthology Dark Matter: A Century Of Speculative Fiction From The African Diaspora, published in 2000. “When I started researching, I knew there was more than what was often discussed and being written about because a lot of the works were already on my shelves and they were already on other people’s shelves, too,” Thomas explains. “The nature of the conversation has changed. I think it’s way less centred in literary theory and scholarship, even though that's extremely important, but there’s also a grassroots element to it that’s very different from the work, the conversations that I think we were having under the wonderful leadership of Alondra Nelson, and so many others.” Through 2022, her home state of Tennessee has seen an explosion of representatives in the state legislature on a political crusade, introducing bills that restrict the teaching of “critical race theory in public schools”, advance gerrymandering, and even designate some gun owners as law enforcement. “Basically, the attempt is to dilute your voice, dilute your votes, and wrangle your resources or appropriate them for purposes that do not benefit you or your community,” Thomas says matter of factly. Her latest books Trouble The Waters: Tales From The Deep Blue and Africa Risen: A New Era Of Speculative Fiction as well as her contributions to Janelle Monae’s The Memory Librarian And Other Stories From Dirty Computer and Marvel’s anthology Black Panther: Tales Of Wakanda engage directly with the mainstream manifestations of Afrofuturism as an aesthetic.

Nine Bar Blues: Stories From An Ancient Future, Thomas’s first collection of fiction, evokes the sonic rituals at the core of the rural blues music that emerged in the Mississippi Delta in the 1880s. “The stories cover a range of science fiction, fantasy and horror, or the magical realism that is looking at the legacy of Black innovation in terms of music,” Thomas explains. “In particular, the kinds of forms that we created have become synonymous with American music and have been exported around the world, but sometimes the origin of [Black music] gets erased.”

Thomas also factors in the long term effects of social media and the intersections of global societies, praising visual artist Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum’s work on Afro-mythology and Africanfuturism. “I’m having two conversations with myself because there are visibly more African writers who are being published now in Afrofuturism or Black Speculative arts or Africanfuturism,” she says, noting the legacy of on the ground political and labour work being done in African-American communities that stretch back for generations. “We want liberation, to be free, and have actual full citizenship in this country, full American citizenship in this country, and to have it feel like you have full citizenship.” To this end, the festival at Carnegie Hall offers an opportunity to solidify the burgeoning vernacular culture of Afrofuturism in the 21st century.

Black American traditional music composer and multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid and pioneering jazz flutist Nicole Mitchell performed at Carnegie Hall on 24 February. Both embody the philosophies of Afrofuturism as a means of imagining a future for the African-American nation within a nation. A former chairwoman of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Mitchell helped foster Black creativity in Chicago, and pursued Afrocentric music far beyond genre forms with her Black Earth Ensemble. Continuing in the lineage of the AACM, Angel Bat Dawid considers herself to be a product of music education. Her improvisatory performances manoeuvre seamlessly through Black music genre forms while transitioning between moments of ecstatic joy and raw emotion on a dime. “The effects of being a Black artist is you kind of just don't give a fuck,” says Dawid, asserting that she is completely comfortable when performing because of her love of the music and traditions. “I’ve never had a problem with getting a job, and I could just do music and no one knows who I am, you know what I mean?” Her kaleidoscopic vision for music and the performing arts comes with a sense of a divine purpose. Alongside Detroit guitarist and composer LuFuki and multi-instrumentalist and ethnomusicologist Dr Adam Zanolini, Dawid performs as the ensemble Autophysiopsychic Millennium, which explores “the breadth of the deepness of Dr Yusef Lateef” and his performance methodology of “Afrofuturist Participatory Sonic Convocation”.

On 17 February, poet, musician and activist Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother accompanied the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra led by Marshall Allen alongside singer and cellist Kelsey Lu in a multi-formatted performance displaying the flexibility and range of The Arkestra. Afrofuturism was never just a buzzword for Moor Mother. When writing the first Black Quantum Futurism book with her partner Rasheedah Phillips, they were exploring theory and practice. “It’s not just us thinking in a room,” she asserts. “We’re not talking about going into communities where they are really successful, we’re talking about going into communities that are shut off from these kinds of things.” She asks, “How does your theory or practice or workshop fare there in that environment?” Moor Mother has always been interested in experimentation, and recalls when Sun Ra came to Philadelphia. “He said, ‘This is the devil’s playground now,’” she remembers. “Being in the devil’s playground, you would think that you would stay at home. No, he went outside to the park, and they played free concerts for the people. It’s not about this kind of concert where people can come and see jazz instruments and know it’s actually a whole chemistry.”

The alchemy that’s taking place is where Moor Mother draws her inspiration. “He has a theory and practice that he is tuned into, and it makes me so mad because people are not listening to the words that came out his mouth. That’s part of the music. They”re just talking about the costumes. They”re just talking about what albums they have. Like you collect, like a consumer.” Looking forward to the future, Moor Mother recalls her experiences of connecting with jazz musician and composer Joseph Jarman and being raised by the words and music of Sun Ra, who she says already foretold that the end of the world has already happened.

Steven Ellison, also known as Flying Lotus, performed at the festival as both a legacy act in contemporary Afrofuturism, accompanied by his longtime collaborator Miguel Atwood-Ferguson playing violin and harpist Brandee Younger. Ellison grew up in a musical family that included his aunt Alice Coltrane, who he describes as a “master musician”, and his songwriter grandmother. He remembers his grandmother writing demos for songs, and meeting up with her friends on the weekend with a tape recorder, drum machine and keyboard. “At some point, I started messing with her drum machine and thought that it looked like a robot,” he jokes. “I wasn”t thinking about making hiphop or anything. I’ve always approached this stuff from a very experimental and kind of free place.”

Though he did not consider himself to be an Afrofuturist before the festival, Ellison has embraced its history and context as the myth-science of the event series shapes around him. “We’re in a different time, and I personally feel like more of a Carnegie Hall vibe, musically. I feel more aligned with that than a rave right now, personally.” He offers that the performance is meant to be cinematic and reflective of his anime Yasuke, which updates the tale of an African samurai in 1579 Japan, and his next album too. “A glimpse into what I”m about to get into, a little preview as to what that’s going to feel like.” Approaching Afrofuturism with a broad stroke, Ellison imagines that “it’s nice to just consider that Black people would have a different vision of science fiction considering that we don’t really see ourselves in it”. Though he wants to avoid labels, the intention of Afrofuturism is the most important part of his involvement in the festival and movement. “It gives us some type of freedom to create new worlds and new ideas.”

From his bedroom studio to international dancefloors and concert halls, Carl Craig’s debut of his synthesizer ensemble at Carnegie Hall demonstrates the latest evolution of Detroit’s technological music. He explains that the synthesizer ensemble brings together “elements of the orchestra along with arrangements that are specifically designed for the synthesizer”. Craig has engineered a hi-tech symphony, positioning Kelvin Sholar as a lead soloist on a concert grand piano, surrounded by Jon Dixon, the bandleader of Underground Resistance’s Timeline, and Ian Fink. “We’ve been using Dave Smith synthesizers, so I’ll be using Prophet 6s, the Matrixbrute – we're still in that Dave Smith world while using a computer for the backbeat with the main core coming from Ableton.” Craig suggests that the advent of samplers in the mid-80s possibly contributed to a digital divide in music composition. “Hopefully, I’m taking it a couple of steps forward.” He also cites Detroit’s rich musical history as a primary source of inspiration for his electronic symphonies. “As far as Afrofuturism is concerned, I think the synthesizer has been integral in the possibilities of bringing a sense of futurism to the people,” he says. “The synthesizer made it possible for you to take music to the next level.”

Writer and scholar Louis Chude-Sokei engages with sonic interventions of race and technology through his concept of technopoetics, which he describes as “the poetics of synthesis genesis blending of Black responses to technology”. As a part of the Afrofuturism festival, Chude-Sokei contributes technopoetics as a way to explore the Black Atlantic sound and “to map the history of race and technology as parallel and mutually constituting each other”. The term enabled him to deliberately place himself among a cluster of research and concepts that underpin Afrofuturism as a critical analysis of Black life in a postwar global technocracy. “America is the space where we have to negotiate mass numbers of people in ways that we've never encountered before. So how do you address them, and you kind of need the political language of pop, which involves a lot of compromises,” Chude-Sokei states. “But Afrofuturism is not fully pop yet, but it is, in my opinion, sort of on the cusp of it, but it's also fragmenting into multiple spheres.” His own reading of magazines like The Wire, encountering the writings of Kodwo Eshun and Mark Sinker that sought to interpret the meaning and modes of Black science fiction. “In Afrofuturism, we have this rich history of record album covers with science fiction tropes and themes from Herbie Hancock, but even going back to Duke Ellington and his flying saucers; but before that, I encountered it in dub music, you know, in the sound system.”

The distribution of music in the 1980s as well as having family in the UK led him to techno first as the British hardcore continuum absorbed and built upon the formats from Detroit and Chicago, then hiphop as it gained popularity. “Sound produces the possibility of solidarity, but the step after distribution for me is anti-identitarian,” Chude-Sokei says in reference to Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s Africa In Stereo: Modernism, Music, And Pan-African Solidarity. Somewhat unsettled by the prospects of cybernetics and posthumanism, Chude-Sokei looks away from manmade machines as a means of building possible futures beyond the mass distribution of technology. “Understand that in science fiction, race has always been coded as machine, alien, or other, and Greg Tate acknowledges that as a metaphor.” Towards the end of his 2015 book The Sound Of Culture: Diaspora And Black Technopoetics, Chude-Sokei is in search of what lies beyond solidarity and identity. “For example, I critique Greg Tate’s critique of Samuel Delany saying, ‘Well, you know, there’s no future for Black people.’ Looking at Delany’s work, I didn’t see a future for Black people, which is one of the things that a lot of Afrofuturism is predicated upon,” Chude-Sokei says. “We’re trying to create a future with Black people because we don’t see one, but if you look at science fiction it is always already a narrative about otherness, alienness, suppression, marginalisation and oppression projected onto different kinds of others. It”s always been about Black people. That’s where I begin.”

Afrofuturism at Carnegie Hall continues through March 2022

DeForrest Brown, Jr is an Alabama raised Ex-American rhythmanalyst, lecturer and representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. His first book, Assembling A Black Counter Culture, will be published by Primary Information later this year.