Contemporary Notes on the Black Speculative Arts Movement

Abstract

Contemporary Notes on the Black Speculative Arts Movement Reynaldo Anderson (bio) There is an energy abroad in the world today that is influenced by financialization, digitalization, commodification and globalization that seeks to marginalize presence, erase our memories, and quiet our voices. Yet we persist, we refuse to die, and our persistence has yielded fruit. The Black Speculative Arts Movement is a product of memories that survive in our cultural DNA that remind us of the need for safe harbors to imagine Black utopias for the beautiful unborn and honor the best of our past. More specifically, the Black Speculative tradition gave birth to what we now refer to as Afrofuturism with its roots in 19th century discourses around anti-slavery revolutionary practices, science, and early pan-Africanist sentiment. The cultural critic Greg Tate asserted that a people without visionaries is a people without an inspirational path to the future. Black speculative literatures genesis lies in the 19th century with the work of men and women like Martin Delany, Sutton Griggs and Pauline Hopkins. Their work grappled with the intersection of the oppression of African people, scientific racism, esotericism, and politics. Their work and other Black writers paralleled the emergence of the European science fiction tradition. The origins of the Black Speculative Arts Movement lie in the planning and execution of the Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination cocurated by John Jennings and I in a 2015 exhibition at the Schomburg library in Harlem, New York. The conceptual and speculative design for the exhibition were heavily influenced by the vision and scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois and the ideas and material culture produced by artists and intellectuals that contribute to Black speculative culture. However, the social movement dynamism of the Black Speculative Arts Movement reflects historical processes, global in scope, that have historical currents in societal changes that have emerged the last 50 years. Although the movement is indebted to earlier Black diasporic art formations that date back to the early 20th century, it has been heavily influenced by the social changes described as Future Shock, Megatrends, and Acceleration. For example, what can be described as the Future Shock era of social change of the 60s and 70s aptly described by writer Alvin Toffler and singer Curtis Mayfield. Future Shock, or the social disorientation that accompanied rapid social change in technology and social values shaped the artistic work and production of creatives like Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed and other artists and [End Page 5] thinkers of the period producing work that was in conversation with the global Black liberation struggle and Black Arts movement of the period in question. Moreover, the work of these artists would sow the seeds of creative thought and praxis later generations of creatives would refer to as Afrofuturism. However, the work of these creatives was only the beginning of forecasting the currents of social change that would be referred to by some as the era of megatrends of the late 20th century. The megatrends of the late 20th century reflected changes in capitalism that were tied to the end of the Cold War and an intensification of the spread of neoliberalism and globalization whose ideas and conceptual origins were reflected in the policies and ideas of Margaret Thatcher, Pierre Trudeau, and Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, during this period of the late 80s and early 90s scholars like Cornel West, Molefi Asante, Henry Louis Gates, bell hooks and others would produce intellectual works that would increasingly reflect a post-civil rights era sentiment among Black scholars. Black feminist scholar Barbara Christian characterized the environment best when she wrote an essay “The Race for Theory” in 1987 that described the environment surrounding the attempt to frame the new environment. During the period in question, Black Studies scholars like Molefi Kete Asante and C.T. Keto at Temple University, wrote about the destiny of African people in relation to time and space, and the need to be futurologists, and comic creators like Dwane McDuffie illustrated futuristic Black sensibilities. During this social milieu cultural critic Mark Dery wrote an article “Black to the Future” that observed the nexus between black speculative...