ABSTRACT
Afrofuturism has emerged as a vitally important global cultural movement, evident in the sonic technologies and creative expressions of such black musicians as Sun Ra, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, George Clinton and his bands Funkadelic and Parliament, and, more recently, Janelle Monáe and clipping., the photographic artwork of Alun Be and Kiluanji Kia Henda, and the glorious Afrofuturist fashion depicted in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther film, to name only a few examples. Afrofuturism has therefore become a central part of our cultural fabric with a veritable eruption of speculative art produced by people of color worldwide envisioning themselves as active agents in the future. As this chapter demonstrates, however, Afrofuturism is often threaded and infused with cyberpunk motifs and visual aesthetics—i.e., Afrocyberpunk—as it considers hacking, remixing, augmentation, and the posthuman as central conceits, all the while allowing for other modes of storytelling in black speculative fictions.
