First coined by Mark Dery in 1993, Afrofuturism addresses themes and concerns of the African Diaspora through a technoculture and science fiction lens.
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The representation and treatment of black female bodies is deconstructed by Afrofuturist contemporaries and amplified to alien and gruesome dimensions by artists such as Wangechi Mutu, Kara Walker, and Shoshanna Weinberger.
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Afrofuturist ideas have further been expanded by scholars like Alondra Nelson, Greg Tate, Tricia Rose, Kodwo Eshun, and others.
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All Black Everything, a song in Lupe Fiasco's Lasers (album), All Black Everything, also brings Afrofuturism to the front.
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In the early 1990s, a number of cultural critics, notably Mark Dery in his 1994 essay Black to the Future, began to write about the features they saw as common in African-American science fiction, music and art.
The lyrics were written in less than two weeks and are characterized by extravagant allusions to futuristic outer-space themes in the tradition of Afrofuturist works by Sun Ra and George Clinton.
In it, he interviews three African-American thinkers—science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, writer and musician Greg Tate, and cultural critic Tricia Rose—about different critical dimensions of Afrofuturism in an attempt to define the aesthetic.
In Further Considerations on Afrofuturism, Kodwo Eshun explains that modernity has caused the growth of a new kind of esteem for the future, as the avant-garde’s playground.
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Mark Dery states that afrofuturism within speculative fiction, “treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century techno-culture”.