Overview

In the past few decades, Western studies of Afrofuturism have grown to encompass examples deriving from multiple sites across the diaspora, as well as from the African continent. However, an increasing number of Africans and Africanists have voiced their concerns about grouping African work under the larger umbrella of Afrofuturism without distinction and have emphasized the need to investigate the differences between African American and African production. This book offers an introduction to Africanfuturism—a body of African speculative works that is distinguishable from, albeit related to, US-based Afrofuturism. Kimberly Cleveland uses Africanfuturism as an intellectual lens to explore works that embody combinations of possibilities, challenges, and concerns related to what lies ahead for the continent and its peoples. This book highlights twenty-first-century film, video, painting, sculpture, photography, tapestry, novels, short stories, comic books, song lyrics, and architecture by African creatives of different nationalities, races, ethnicities, genders, and generations. Cleveland analyzes the ideas and opinions of African intellectuals and cultural producers, combining interviews with historical research. Each chapter features one of Africanfuturism’s most common themes: space and time exploration, creation of worlds, technology and the digital divide, Sankofa and remix, and mythmaking. This investigation of Africanfuturism is geared toward students, academics, and Afrofuturism enthusiasts, and its included discussion questions facilitate classroom use. The book illuminates Africa’s place in the worlds of science fiction and fantasy and how Africanfuturist work builds on the continent’s own traditions of speculative expression. Because these creative works disrupt the history of Western domination in Africa, Cleveland also connects Africanfuturism with the process of decolonization and addresses specific ways in which African creatives (re)center indigenous beliefs, strategies, and approaches in their production. Africanfuturism encourages both imaginative possibilities and potential real-world outcomes, highlighting the rich contributions of Africans to the vision of future worlds.

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Reviews

Across Africa—in fiction, film, comics, games, painting, photography, sculpture, digital arts, even architecture —artists have long been creating decolonial visions of their world, its alternatives, and possible futures. It’s well past time for the rest of us to sit up and pay attention—and Kimberly Cleveland’s wide-ranging exploration of twenty-first-century Africanfuturism is the ideal place to start. -- Mark Bould, University of the West of England

Author Information

Kimberly Cleveland is an associate professor of art history at Georgia State University. A specialist in both contemporary African and Afro-Brazilian art history, she explores questions of identity, ethnicity, and race in her teaching and research. Cleveland is the author of Black Art in Brazil: Expressions of Identity and Black Women Slaves Who Nourished a Nation: Artistic Renderings of Wet Nurses in Brazil.

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