Honoring Our Elders and Seeking the Visions of the Youth
Time : Doors open @5:00 PM – Film Starts @5:30 PM
Location: UDC Student Center
(Directed by Ryan Coogler) This film tells the story of the nation of Wakanda, an isolated futuristic African nation. The leader of Wakanda is T’Challa, the King of Wakanda, who is also the Black Panther, the defender of the Wakandan people. T’Challa’s royal lineage faces challenges from it’s ancestral roots and modern political developments as he rises to the throne. His claim is challenged by an outsider who was a childhood victim of T’Challa’s father’s error. The movie explores themes of national and individual excellence and women’s empowerment through science and technology and as warriors. It also wrestles with issues of cultural preservation vs. engagement and familial abandonment. Black Panther has become the third-highest-grossing film ever in the United States, and the ninth-highest-grossing film of all time.
Afrofuturism is an African American literary and artistic movement addressing the transatlantic issues of displacement, home, and belonging. In speculative fiction, some of the major recurring themes have included alien intrusion and subjugation, forced displacement, and the quest to return to the native land and to regain a lost sense of cultural location. All of these themes would have a very natural appeal to African American writers and readers, and yet until the last few decades of the twentieth century, there was little African American visibility in the genres of science fiction and science fantasy.
At the literary forefront of the Afrofuturist movement has been the Jamaican-Canadian novelist Nalo Hopkinson. She is best known for her novels Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) and Midnight Robber(2000), in which she focuses on Afro-Caribbean women dealing with the dislocation that they experience in other settings. Beyond their inventive narratives and compelling themes, the novels are notable for their use of Afro-Caribbean dialect.
Hopkinson’s African American forerunners in the genre have included, most prominently, the American novelists Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler, both of whom have won major awards. Delany has earned a reputation as a novelist interested in intellectual movements and cultural theories. In almost all of his novels, he has treated the intersections of language, myth, and artistic expression. His most acclaimed novels have included Babel-17 (1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967). Butler is best known for her five-volume Patternists series (1976-1984), which focuses on a group of telepaths who are obsessed with creating a race of super-humans. More recently, she has written the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-1989), which treats a postapocalyptic world in which aliens conduct genetic experiments with human beings. Afrofuturism is not just a literary movement. It has drawn adherents from across the whole spectrum of the arts. Some of the more prominent of these artists have included George Clinton, Kodwo Eshun, McLean Greaves, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Keith Piper, Sun Ra, and Fatimah Tuggar.
Kich, M. (2008). Afrofuturism. In R. M. Juang, & N. A. Morrissette (Eds.), Africa and the Americas: culture, politics, and history. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO
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