| |
The "Robot Voodoo Power" Thesis:
Afrofuturism and Anti-Anti-Essentialism
from Sun Ra to Kool Keith
J.
Griffith Rollefson
In 1999 Alondra Nelson, then a graduate student in American studies at
New York University, launched an online community dedicated to the study
of what might be best described to the uninitiated as black science fiction.
Nelson named the forum the "AfroFuturism" listserv after a term coined
by Mark Dery in his set of interviews about black artists whose works
displayed a uniquely African-American take on futuristic narratives of
scientific and technological progress (Dery 1993). As Nelson explains,
Dery and his interviewees—scholars Tricia Rose and Greg Tate and
novelist Samuel Delany:
claimed that these works simultaneously referenced a past of abduction, displacement
and alien-nation, and inspired technical and creative innovations
in the work of such artists as Lee "Scratch" Perry, George Clinton and Sun Ra.
Science fiction was a recurring motif in the music of these artists, they argued,
because it was an apt metaphor for black life and history" (Nelson 2007).
|
|
| |
Content in Black Music Research Journal (ISSN 0276-3605) is intended for personal, noncommercial use only.
You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the
transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in
any way exploit the Black Music Research Journal database in whole
or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|
|
