The Afrofuturist Evolution

The spaces revealed through the practice of time manipulation in Black cultures lend themselves to storytelling, a time-hopping process that integrates memory and community. Drawing on disparate philosophies and science behind electronic beat-making, lyricism, dance, memory, myth, and cosmology in the African and African Disaporic traditions, this book seeks to demonstrate relationships between rhythm, space, and ways of being as an articulation of futures and alternate realities made present. Infused with author and Afrofuturist educator Ytasha Womack’s own practice and contemplations, this book, rich in anecdotes, will interrogate Afrofuturism as an experience that unfolds through combinations of being a maker and theorist. Readers will take a creative journey that allows them to bring Afrofuturist practices into their own lives. The goal is to expand imagination, rootedness, and possibility. From Senegalese poet, political theorist, and politician Leopold Sedar Senghor’s ideas on the plastic arts and Negritude to writer Malidoma Patrese Some’s articulation of water symbolism in Burkina Faso; from tap dance exercises to composer, DJ, and recording artist King Britt’s Blacktronica, The Afrofuturist Evolution aims to demonstrate Afrofuturism as embodied theory in practice. This book—in simple, straightforward, but powerful ways—invites readers to bring these practices into their own lives. “The Afrofuturist Evolution is an incredibly fantastic body of work that charges not just through Afrofuturism but into Afropantheology, cosmology, and other schools of thought. … A must-read for anyone looking to understand Black scapes, cultures, knowledge, living, and being.”—OGHENECHOVWE DONALD EKPEKI, Nebula-winning speculative fiction writer/editor and founder of Afropantheology