Read Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture for Free Online

writes about Afrofuturism. Anderson is one of many theorists who view the alien metaphor as one that explains the looming space of otherness perpetuated by the idea of race. “We’re among the first alien abductees,kidnapped by strange people who take us over by ships and conduct scientific experiments on us. They bred us. They came up with a taxonomy of the people they bred: mulatto, octoroon, quadroon.”
    He adds that the scientific experimentations conducted in the name of race mimic sci-fi horror flicks. Henrietta Lacks was a 1950s Virginia tobacco farmer whose cells were taken without her permission and used to create immortal cell lines sold for research around the world. Named HeLa, these cell lines lived past Lacks’s own death and were essential to the development of the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization. They were even sent in the first space missions to see what would happen to cells in zero gravity.
    The alien concept has been expanded to explain isolation as well, with studies of “the black geek” in literature and an array of self-created modalities that infer a discomfort in one’s own skin. In summer 2012, Emory University’s African-American Studies Collective issued a call for papers for their 2013 conference, titled “Alien Bodies: Race, Space, and Sex in the African Diaspora.” Held February 8 and 9, 2013, the conference examined the alien-as-race idea and looked at transformative tools to empower those who are alienated. It explored how “we begin to understand the ways in which race, space and sex configure ‘the alien’ within spaces allegedly ‘beyond’ markers of difference” and asked, “What are some ways in which the ‘alien from within as well as without’ can be overcome, and how do we make them sustainable?”
    Afrofuturist academics are looking at alien motifs as a progressive framework to examine how those who are alienated adopt modes of resistance and transformation.
Stranger Than Science Fiction
    Truth is stranger than fiction, but is truth stranger than science fiction too? Talk about real-time: science fiction has introduced a flash of technologies that our world is catching up to—the Internet, commercial space flights, smartphones, and the discovery of the Higgs boson, or “God Particle”—to name a few. In some ways we’ve surpassed the sci-fi canon.
    Afrofuturism is concerned with both the impact of these technologies on social conditions and with the power of such technologies to end the “-isms” for good and safeguard humanity. Historically, new technologies have emerged with a double-edged sword, deepening as many divides as they build social bridges. Gunpowder was a technology that empowered colonizers and gave them the undeniable edge in creating color-based caste systems. Early forays into genetics were created to link ethnic physical traits with intelligence, thus falsely justifying dehumanization, slavery, and holocausts across the globe.
    The Tuskegee experiment, in which innocent black men were injected with syphilis for scientific study, or the use of the immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks are evidence of how profit and the race to discovery must be tempered with strong ethics. “HeLa cells were the first human biological materials ever bought and sold, which helped launch a multibillion-dollar industry,” says Rebecca Skloot, author of a book on Lack’s immortal cells. “When [Lack’s family] found out that people were selling vials of their mother’s cells, and that the family didn’t get any of the resulting money, they got very angry.” 4
    Dorothy Roberts writes about how race is inappropriately used in medical research and to market products. “There are studiesto explain racial divisions in health that are actually caused by social inequalities,” Roberts said in her interview with me for my