ABSTRACT
In her reading of globalization’s impact on ‘‘the self-imagining of nation-
states,’’ Emily Apter argues that Afrofuturism – an African-American
movement that sought to reclaim ‘‘race aliens’’ – had ‘‘strategic reasons for
appropriating and remotivating the visual vocabulary of elsewhere, up, out,
and beyond.’’2 Attuned to anxieties about identities produced by conditions
of oppression, Afrofuturists, ranging from Sun Ra to George Clinton, construct post-nation-states ‘‘populated by citizens whose tribal loyalties and
patriotic memories are subjectively intact but continentally adrift.’’3 Theirs
is a world of ‘‘alien nomads,’’ whose encounters dislocate national uni-
versalism and set citizens adrift in a matrix of becoming-other.4
