IN 1993, MARK DERY coined the term “Afrofuturism” to describe a subgenre of speculative fiction that “appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” as it “addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture.” Since then, Afrofuturism has come to be considered a broader artistic movement: the term has been retroactively applied to artists and musical groups such as Sun Ra and Funkadelic. Nominated for eight Grammy awards in the last decade, Janelle Monáe has famously embraced the Afrofuturist label. As Isiah Lavender III points out in his introduction to Extrapolation’s 2021 special edition on Afrofuturism, a Google search of the term proves its increasing visibility in recent years, yielding over a quarter billion results. And in literary and cultural studies today, Afrofuturism is hot. Rightfully so, as the true credit for Afrofuturism’s popularity in this realm belongs to a cadre of Black scholars such as Ytasha Womack, Kodwo Eshun, Alondra Nelson, De Witt Douglas Kilgore, and Lavender, who have fruitfully expanded its parameters not only as a genre designation but also as a hermeneutic, a praxis. Afrofuturism is the underground railroad’s engine, linking the revolutionary spirit and utopian dreaming of Black peoples across time.
The immensely productive explorations of racial landscapes in Black-authored science fiction serviced by this critical lens have inspired scholars to codify other futurisms, such as Grace Dillon’s Indigenous futurisms, Catherine Sue Ramírez’s Chicanafuturism, and Cathryn Josefina Merla-Watson’s Latin@futurism. Joy Sanchez-Taylor’s 2021 monograph, Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color, puts these scholars (and many more) into conversation, taking up the subject of ethnic futurisms in a comparative approach unmatched in its scope. Sanchez-Taylor’s ambitious work spotlights a score of science fiction texts by American and Canadian…
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