October 12, 2004
Introduction
"Flame wars," in compu-slang, are vitriolic on-line exchanges. Often, they are conducted publicly, in discussion groups clustered under thematic headings on electronic bulletin boards, or — less frequently — in the form of poison pen letters sent via E-mail to private mailboxes. John A. Barry's definition of "flame" (n., v.) as "a (usually) electronic diatribe"1 suggests that such exchanges occasionally take place offline, although denizens of computer networks are putatively PC junkies and hence likely to prefer virtual invective to FTF (on-line shorthand for "face to face") tongue-lashings.
Then, too, the wraithlike nature of electronic communication — the flesh becomes word, the sender reincarnated as letters floating on a terminal screen — accelerates the escalation of hostilities when tempers flare; disembodied, sometimes pseudonymous combatants tend to feel that they can hurl insults with impunity (or at least without fear of bodily harm). Moreover, E-mail missives or "posts" in topics seem to encourage misinterpretation in the same way that written correspondence sometimes does. Like "snailmail" (compu-slang for conventional letters), electronic messages must be interpreted without the aid of nonverbal cues or what sociolinguist Peter Farb called "paralanguage" — expressive vocal phenomena such as pitch, intensity, stress, tempo, and volume. The importance of body language is universally conceded, of course; books on the subject are staples of the supermarket checkout stand. Paralanguage, Farb informs, is no less essential to accurate reading: "No protestation by a speaker that he is uttering the truth is equal to the nonverbal confirmation of his credibility contained in the way he says it."2 Both, significantly, are missing from on-line, text-based interaction, which may account for the umbrage frequently taken at innocently intended remarks. It accounts, too, for the cute use of punctuation to telegraph facial expressions. Here is a key for some commonly-used "emoticons," defined in The New Hacker's Dictionary as "glyph[s]...used to indicate an emotional state" (read them sideways):
:-) = smiley face; used to underscore a user's good intentions.
:) or, less frequently, :} = variations on the same theme.
;-) = wink; used to indicate sardonic humor or a tongue-in-cheek quip ("nudge, nudge; wink, wink").:( = sadness, sometimes used facetiously.
Of course, no signalling system, as one "net surfer" observes, is fool-proof:
Shit happens, especially on the Net, where everyone speaks with flattened affect. I think the attempt to signal authorial intent with little smileys is interesting but futile. They're subject to slippage like any other kind of sign. The bottom line is, anyone who plans to spend time on-line has to grow a few psychic calluses.3
Electronic notes, posted in group discussions, differ from hand- or typewritten letters in several significant ways. Like public bathroom graffiti, their authors are sometimes anonymous, often pseudonymous, and almost always strangers. Which is the upside of incorporeal interaction: a technologically-enabled, post-multicultural vision of identity disengaged from gender, ethnicity, and other problematic constructions. On-line, users can float free of biological and sociocultural determinants, as least to the degree that their idiosyncratic language usage does not mark them as white, black, college-educated, a high-school drop-out, and so on. "There is no visual contact, no hearing of accents," said Wayne Gregori, a 35-year-old computer consultant who runs SFNet. "People are judged on the content of what they say."4
Posts are read and responded to by computer users scattered across the Internet, the global meta-network that comprises information services such as BITNET; the private, academic and government laboratories interwoven by NSFNET (the National Science Foundation Network); mainstream networks such as America Online and CompuServe; and smaller, more esoteric bulletin boards like San Francisco's WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) and New York's MindVOX. (Mitch Kapor, founder of the Lotus Development Corporation, once compared the Internet to a "library where all of the books are dumped on the floor in no particular order.")5 But unlike profundities scrawled on restroom stalls (which always seem, somehow, as if they belong on the walls of Pompeiian ruins), on-line conversations exhibit a curious half-life; as the reader scrolls downscreen, scanning the lively back-and-forth of a discussion that may go back weeks, months or even years, he experiences the puns, philippics, true confessions, rambling dissertations, and Generation X-er one-liners as if they were taking place in real time — which, for the reader watching them flow past on his screen, they are.
On occasion, one might stumble onto a flame war, although verbal brawling lowers the tone of colloquia and is therefore frowned upon. On the WELL, users take their disputes outside the topic, into the virtual version of the back alley — a topic-cum-boxing ring called "Flame Box," where they may roll up their sleeves and pummel each other witless. Witlessness, in fact, was the order of the day in the flame war I witnessed, where squabblers seemed to specialize in a baroque slackerbabble related to the mock-Shakespearean put-downs used by Alex on his droogies in A Clockwork Orange: "Look, you syphilitic bovine harpy," "You heaving purulent mammoth," "Get thine swampy effluvia away from me, you twitching gelatinous yolk of rancid smegma," and on, and on. "This standoff will probably end in Koreshian glory," predicted one user, with thinly-disguised relish.
In some ways, flame wars are a less ritualized, Generation X-er counterpart to the African-American phenomenon known as "the dozens," in which duelists one-up each other with elaborate, sometimes rhyming gibes involving the sexual exploits of each other's mothers. At their best, flame wars give way to tour-de-force jeremiads called "rants" — demented soliloquies that elevate soapbox demagoguery to a guerrilla art form. Characterized by fist-banging punctuation, emphatic capitals, and the kill-'em-all-and-let-God-sort-'em-out rhetoric patented by Hunter S. Thompson, rants are spiritual kin to Antonin Artaud's blasphemous screeds and the Vorticist harangues in Wyndham Lewis's Blast. Here is a classic, written by a female user who calls herself "outrider":
Never give in, never submit. Or just never go out of your house anymore. In twenty years this will be Life: stay home all the time because it's too dangerous to go out/you can't eat red meat in public/or sugar either/or grease/and you damn sure can't smoke; get all stimuli, info, human contact, groceries, money, etc. on your computer. All materials will be delivered by heavily armed people in tanks: they must cross the moat filled with piranha, crocodiles, and weird water-borne disease organisms, and also pass the security check that keeps them from getting Swiss-cheesed by the remote control firepower in the gun turrets at the razorwire perimeter, then they have to pass the dna identity scanner at the last portal—and they absolutely refuse ALL TIPS AND GRATUITIES. After a pleasant meal of micronuked frozen blah, you can jump onto the Net and read the Daily Horros in the form of movingpicto-news; go to the library and download the original French version of Madame Bovary AND a decent French dictionary. Read in the comfort of your cozy warm bed, safe behind triple-wall steel constructed building. Pet your cat/dog. Clean your arsenal. Sleep. Dream of a more lifelike life....remember the olden days when you could walk outside in the Night and go places, when you could drive safely from here to there...go back to sleep.6
This issue's title is intentionally ironic. The tone, as in most intellectual discourse, is decorous; there are no flame wars here, and no rants in the proper sense (although Tricia Rose's inspired peroration on feminist mothers as "the most dangerous muthafuckahs out there," with its call for "feminist women to have as much power and as many babies as they want to, creating universes of feminist children," comes close). Even so, the compu-slang title, framed by the sociocultural context provided by this essay, reminds us that our interaction with the world around us is increasingly mediated by computer technology, and that, bit by digital bit, we are being "Borged," as devotees of Star Trek: The Next Generation would have it — transformed into cyborgian hybrids of technology and biology through our ever more frequent interaction with machines, or with one another through technological interfaces.
(According to Clark Fife, who works at New York's Forbidden Planet sci-fi bookstore and memorabilia shop, a cap-and-T-shirt set produced by a merchandiser to capitalize on the inexplicable appeal of the Borg — implacable Star Trek villains who function as a "hive mind," or collective entity, and whose bleached flesh is interpenetrated by fetishistic high-tech prostheses — have proven wildly popular. According to Fife, the Borg are popular because they resonate with the cyberpunk sensibility and because "they're symbols of technological victimization that appeal to people." Simultaneously, their cultish following bespeaks a pervasive desire among sci-fi readers, Star Trek fans, and other members of fringe technoculture to sheathe the body in an impenetrable carapace, render it invincible through mechatronic7 augmentation — a hypostatization, perhaps, of a creeping body loathing congruent with the growing awareness that wires are twined through all of our lives, that our collective future is written on confetti-sized flakes of silicon.)
Jejune though they may seem, "flame wars" merit serious consideration; offering ample evidence of the subtle ways in which on-line group psychology is shaped by the medium itself, these subcultural practices offer a precognitive glimpse of mainstream culture a few years from now, when ever greater numbers of Americans will be part-time residents in virtual communities. As Gareth Branwyn notes in "Compu-Sex: Erotica for Cybernauts," "the rate of growth for new computer networks joining the Internet is 25% every three months," an astonishing statistic that attests to the explosion of interest in electronic interconnectedness. Approximately 10 million people frequent electronic bulletin boards,8 and their ranks are growing by the score. A WELL employee told me, shortly after the appearance of Time magazine's February 8, 1993 cover story on cyberpunk, that the bulletin board's population — already 3,000 strong — had swollen by several thousand more. "People call and ask, 'Is this the cyberspace?,'" he said. Indeed, it is — "the desert of the real," where the shreds of the territory, to invoke Baudrillard, "are slowly rotting across the map."9 Those who spend an inordinate amount of time connected by modem via telephone lines to virtual spaces often report a peculiar sensation of "thereness"; prowling from one conference to another, eavesdropping on discussions in progress, bears an uncanny resemblance to wandering the hallways of some labyrinthine mansion, poking one's head into room after room. "One of the most striking features of the WELL," observed a user named loca, "is that it actually creates a feeling of 'place.' I'm staring at a computer screen. But the feeling really is that I'm 'in' something; I'm some 'where.'"10
Virtual reality interfaces, facilitated by high-bandwidth information highways of the sort proposed by the Clinton administration, will concretize loca's "feeling of 'place'"; at last, there will be a "there" there. Using current developments as a springboard, one might imagine users in head-tracking 3-D goggles, a quadraphonic sound system imbedded in the goggle's earpieces. As the user looks up, down, or from side to side, the computer's high-speed sound-and-graphics program animates the world — and its soundscape — accordingly, creating the illusion of a 360-degree, real-time hyperreality. Howard Rheingold completes the sensorium with the sense of touch, imagining high-tech bodystockings that "know" where their wearer's limbs are in space. The inner surfaces of these suits would be covered with
an array of intelligent sensor-effectors — a mesh of tiny tactile detectors coupled to vibrators of varying degrees of hardness, hundreds of them per square inch, that can receive and transmit a realistic sense of tactile presence.11
Plugging into the global telephone network, the user connects with similarly equipped individuals or groups. All appear to each other as believable fictions: lifelike characters inhabiting a three-dimensional environment. (Reality, here, is mutable, evoking Greg Tate's mock-serious vision of the defaced, re-faced Michael Jackson as "harbinger of a transracial tomorrow where genetic deconstruction has become the norm and Narcissism wears the face of all human Desire"; gender, ethnicity, age and other variables can be altered with a keystroke or two.)12 "You run your hand over your partner's clavicle," imagines Rheingold, "and 6,000 miles away, an array of effectors [is] triggered, in just the right sequence, at just the right frequency, to convey the touch exactly the way you wish it to be conveyed."13
Unfortunately, virtual embodiment of the Rheingoldian sort is "an early-to-mid-twenty-first-century technology." It would require a global fiberoptic network in concert with massively parallel supercomputers capable of monitoring and controlling the numberless sensors and effectors fitted to every hill and dale, plane and protuberance of the body's topography. Then, too, a reticulated fabric of safe, high-speed micro-vibrators is only a mirage, given the state of the art in current technologies.
Nonetheless, there is more to cyberculture than cyberspace. Cyberculture, as I defined it in my SAQ essay of the same name, is
a farflung, loosely-knit complex of sublegitimate, alternative, marginal, and oppositional subcultures [whose common project is the subversive use of technocommodities, often framed by radical body politics]...[Cyberculture is] divisible into several major territories: visionary technology, fringe science, avant-garde art, and pop culture.14
Fredric Jameson has noted the correspondence between cyberpunk novelist William Gibson's cyberspace — the sci-fi reification of what Jameson calls "the world space of multinational capital," where vast sums are blipped through fiberoptic bundles a world away — and has called for a cognitive cartography, "a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system."15 A map of the increasingly virtual geography in which we find ourselves, suggests Jameson, is essential in "grasp[ing] our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain[ing] a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion."16 Compasses and sextants in hand, the writers in this collection embark on Jameson's project, mindful (if intuitively) of one WELL-dweller's corrective:
This medium gives us the possibility (illusory as it may be) that we can build a world unmediated by authorities and experts. The role of reader, writer, and critic are so quickly interchangeable that they become increasingly irrelevant in a community of co-creation such as the WELL. (cf. Benjamin's "revolutionary literature;" on-line far supersedes the newspaper as a medium in which the reader is likely to also be the writer.) I really have no objection to someone who has come into our community, lived here and participated, analyzing [his] experience and trying to put it into perspective. I think the objection to the "critics" who are now fawning over cyberthis and cyberthat is that they are perceived as intellectual carpetbaggers who don't bother to learn the terrain before they create the map.17
—Mark Dery. © Mark Dery; all rights reserved.
Acknowledgements:
I am greatly indebted to Gareth Branwyn, a longtime resident of virtual communities and serious thinker about cyberculture. His many insights, articulated in lengthy conversations on- and offline, proved invaluable in the writing of this essay, as did his willingness to fact-check the finished work, sparing me the fate of the "intellectual carpetbagger."
Endnotes:
1 John A. Barry, Technobabble (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 243.
2 Peter Farb, Word Play (New York, 1975), 69.
3 Anonymous correspondent, in a private E-mail letter to the author, April 17, 1993.
4 Katherine Bishop, "The Electronic Coffeehouse," The New York Times, August 2, 1992, V3.
5 Robert E. Calem, "The Network of All Networks," The New York Times, December 6, 1992, F12.
6 WELL user known as "outrider," in the topic "Flame Box," in the Mondo 2000 conference, March 29, 1993.
7 The mirror image of "electromechanical," mechatronic is a Japanese coinage; meaning "the fusion of machinery and electronics," it stresses the importance of the former in the equation. See Frederik L. Schodt, Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics, and the Coming Robotopia (New York, 1988), 42-43, 49.
8 Judith Berck, "All About Electronic Bulletin Boards," The New York Times, July 19, 1992, F12.
9 Jean Baudrillard, "The Precession of Simulacra," in Simulations (New York, 1983), 2.
10 Judith Moore, "The Way of the WELL," in The Monthly, 1990.
11 Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality (New York, 1991), 346.
12 Greg Tate, "I'm White!: What's Wrong with Michael Jackson," in Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (New York, 1992), 95.
13 Rheingold, ibid.
14 Mark Dery, "Cyberculture," in The South Atlantic Quarterly, Summer 1992, Volume 91, Number 3, 509.
15 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, excerpted in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, ed. Larry McCaffery (Durham, NC, 1991), 228.
16 loc. cit.
17 William Rolf Knutson, a computer programmer, fiction writer, and occasional Mondo 2000 contributor, in a private E-mail letter to the author, March 25, 1993.
Mark Dery [markdery at optonline dot net] is a cultural critic. He edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke University Press, 1995) and wrote Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (Grove Press, 1996). His collection of essays, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink was published by Grove Press in February, 1999. He is an occasional writer for The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice Literary Supplement, Suck, and Feed, and a frequent lecturer in the U.S. and Europe on new media, fringe thought, and unpopular culture.
Posted by Mark Dery at 03:33 PM | TrackBackBlack to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0
[I]f all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. "Who controls the past," ran the Party slogan, "controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."
—George Orwell
There is nothing more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past.
—Alain Locke
Yo, bust this, Black
To the Future
Back to the past
History is a mystery 'cause it has
All the info
You need to know
Where you're from
Why'd you come and
That'll tell you where you're going
—Def Jef
Hack this: Why do so few African-Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other—the stranger in a strange land—would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African-American novelists? Yet, to this writer's knowledge, only Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, and Charles Saunders have chosen to write within the genre conventions of SF. This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African-Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendants of alien abductees. They inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done to them; and technology, be it branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, or tasers, is too often brought to bear on black bodies.
Moreover, the sublegitimate status of science fiction as a pulp genre in Western literature mirrors the subaltern position to which blacks have been relegated throughout American history. In which context, William Gibson's observation that SF is widely known as "the golden ghetto," in recognition of the negative correlation between the genre's market share and its critical legitimation, takes on a curious significance. So, too, does Norman Spinrad's glib use of the phrase "token nigger" to describe "any science fiction writer of merit who is adopted...in the grand salons of literary power."
Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20th century technoculture—and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future—might, for want of a better term, be called Afrofuturism. The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to a troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, don't the technocrats, SF writers, futurologists, set designers, and streamliners—white to a man—who have engineered our collective fantasies already have a lock on that unreal estate? The African-American SF writer Samuel R. Delany has suggested that "the flashing lights, the dials, and the rest of the imagistic paraphernalia of science fiction" have historically functioned as "social signs—signs people learned to read very quickly. They signaled technology. And technology was like a placard on the door saying, 'Boys' Club! Girls, keep out. Black and Hispanics and the poor in general, go away!" What Gibson has termed the "semiotic ghosts" of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Frank R. Paul's illustrations for Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, the chromium-skinned, teardrop-shaped household appliances dreamed up by Raymond Loewy and Henry Dreyfuss, Norman Bel Geddes's Futurama at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and Disney's Tomorrowland still haunt the public mind, in one guise or another.
But African-American voices have other stories to tell about culture, technology, and things to come. If there is an Afrofuturism, it must be sought in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points. We catch a glimpse of it in the opening pages of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, where the proto-cyberpunk protagonist—a techno-bricoleur "in the great American tradition of tinkerers"—taps illegal juice from a line owned by the rapacious Monopolated Light & Power, gloating, "Oh, they suspect that their power is being drained off, but they don't know where." One day, perhaps, he'll indulge his fantasy of playing five recordings of Louis Armstrong's version of "What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue" at once, in a sonic Romare Bearden collage (an unwittingly prescient vision, on Ellison's part, of that 1981 masterpiece of deconstructionist deejaying, "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel"). Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings such as Molasses, which features a pie-eyed, snaggletoothed robot, adequately earn the term "Afrofuturist," as do movies like John Sayles's The Brother From Another Planet and Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames. Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland is Afrofuturist; so, too, is the techno-tribal global village music of Miles Davis's On the Corner and Herbie Hancock's Headhunters, as well as the fusion-jazz cyberfunk of Hancock's Future Shock and Bernie Worrell's Blacktronic Science, whose liner notes herald "reports and manifestoes from the nether regions of the modern Afrikan American music/speculative fiction universe." Afrofuturism manifests itself, too, in early '80s electro-boogie releases such as Planet Patrol's "Play at Your Own Risk," Warp 9's "Nunk," George Clinton's Computer Games, and of course Afrika Bambaataa's classic "Planet Rock," records steeped in "imagery drawn from computer games, video, cartoons, sci-fi and hip-hop slanguage," notes David Toop, who calls them "a soundtrack for vidkids to live out fantasies born of a science-fiction revival courtesy of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind)."
Techno, whose name was purportedly inspired by a reference to "techno rebels" in Alvin Toffler's Third Wave, is a quintessential example of Afrofuturism. The genre was jump-started in the Orwellian year of 1984 in Detroit, appropriately enough, a city equally famous for Motown and the mechanical ballets of its spot-welding robots. The Ur-tune, "Techno City," was hacked together by Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May, a band of button-pushers who went by the name Cybotron. Matthew Collin notes that their world-view was "shaped by playing video games, by watching Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, and by the idea of a new computer world replacing industrial society as framed in both Kraftwerk's records and futurologist Alvin Toffler's book The Third Wave." According to Collin, the portentous chords and robotic clangor of their music reflected Motor City's moribund economy, its dark passage from the birthplace of the auto industry to its burial ground. Atkins, Saunderson, and May appropriated "industrial detritus to create sparse, kinetic funk with drums like thunderbolts, yet mournful and deeply romantic, as if the machines were whispering a lament about what it was like to be young and black in post-industrial America." At the same time, they were young enough to be perversely fascinated by the very technologies that had downsized the American dream for factory workers in black Detroit. "'Berry Gordy built the Motown sound on the same principles as the conveyor belt system at Ford's,' explained Atkins. 'Today, they use robots and computers to make the cars. I'm probably more interested in Ford's robots than Berry Gordy's music.'" But Afrofuturism bubbles up from the deepest, darkest wellsprings in the intergalactic big band jazz churned out by Sun Ra's Omniverse Arkestra, in Parliament-Funkadelic's Dr. Seuss-ian astrofunk, and in dub reggae, especially the bush doctor's brew cooked up by Lee "Scratch" Perry, which at its eeriest sounds as if it were made out of dark matter and recorded in the crushing gravity field of a black hole ("Angel Gabriel and the Space Boots" is a typical title).
The Rastafarian cosmology, like the Nation of Islam's, with its genetically engineered white devils and its apocalyptic vision of Elijah Muhammad returning on a celestial mothership, is a syncretic crossweave of black nationalism, African and American religious beliefs, and plot devices worthy of a late-night rocket opera. Perry——arguably the preeminent practitioner of the audio juju known as dub—incarnates the Afrofuturist sensibility. Erik Davis asserts that "what is most important about Perry and his astounding musical legacy is how they highlight an often ignored strain of New World African culture: a techno-visionary tradition that looks as much toward science-fiction futurism as toward magical African roots." Writes Davis, "This loosely gnostic strain of Afro-diasporic science fiction emerges from the improvised confrontation between modern technology and the prophetic imagination, a confrontation rooted in the alienated conditions of black life in the New World." He quotes the African-American critic Greg Tate: "Black people," says Tate, "live the estrangement that science-fiction writers imagine."
Which explains the seemingly counterintuitive conjunction of black dance music and SF imagery in hip-hop. The cultural critic Tricia Rose argues that South Bronx hip-hoppers like Afrika Bambaataa embraced the robotic synth-pop of Kraftwerk because what they saw reflected in the German band's android imagery was "an understanding of themselves as already having been robots." Says Rose, "Adopting 'the robot' reflected a response to an existing condition: namely, that they were labor for capitalism, that they had very little value as people in this society. By taking on the robotic stance, one is 'playing with the robot.' It's like wearing body armor that identifies you as an alien: if it's always on anyway, in some symbolic sense, perhaps you could master the wearing of this guise in order to use it against your interpolation."
Afrofuturism percolates, as well, through black-written, black-drawn comics such as Milestone Media's Hardware ("A cog in the corporate machine is about to strip some gears..."), about a black scientist who dons forearm-mounted cannons and a "smart" battle suit to wage guerrilla war on his Orwellian, multinational employer. Milestone's press releases for its four titles—Hardware, Blood Syndicate, Static, and Icon—make the Manhattan-based company's political impulses explicit: a fictional metropolis, Dakota, provides a backdrop for "authentic, multicultural" superheroes "linked in their struggle to defeat the S.Y.S.T.E.M." The city is a battlefield in "the clash of two worlds: a low-income urban caldron and the highest level of privileged society."
Icon, an exemplar of Afrofuturism that sweeps antebellum memories, hip-hop culture, and cyberpunk into its compass, warrants detailed exegesis. The story begins in 1839, when an escape pod jettisoned from an exploding alien starliner lands, fortuitously, in the middle of a cotton field on Earth. A slave woman named Miriam stumbles on "a perfect little black baby"—in fact, an extraterrestrial whose morphogenetic technology has altered it to resemble the first lifeform it encounters—in the smoldering wreckage of the pod and raises it as her own. The orphan, christened Augustus, is male, and echoes of the Old Testament account of Moses in the bullrushes, the fay changelings of European folklore, and the infant Superman's fiery fall from the heavens reverberate in the narrative's opening passages.
Like his Roman namesake, Augustus is a "man of the future"; the man who fell to Earth is seemingly deathless, outliving several generations of his adopted family and eventually posing as his own great-grandson—Augustus Freeman IV—in present-day Dakota. A rock-ribbed conservative who preaches the gospel of Horatio Alger and inveighs against the welfare state, Freeman is a highly successful attorney, the only African-American living in the city's exclusive Prospect Hills neighborhood. His unshakable belief in bootstrapping is challenged, however, when he takes a homegirl from the projects, Rachel "Rocket" Ervin, under his wing. A juvenile delinquent and Toni Morrison (!) fan, the streetwise teenager opens Augustus's eyes to "a world of misery and failed expectations that he didn't believe still existed in this country." She calls on him to use his otherworldly powers to help the downtrodden. When he does, in the guise of a mountain of bulging abs and pecs called Icon, she joins him as his sidekick. "As the series progresses," we are told, "Rocket will become the world's first superheroine who is also a teenage, unwed mother."
The New York graffiti artist and B-boy theoretician Rammellzee constitutes yet another incarnation of Afrofuturism. Greg Tate holds that Rammellzee's "formulations on the juncture between black and Western sign systems make the extrapolations of [Houston] Baker and [Henry Louis] Gates seem elementary by comparison." As evidence, he submits the artist's "Ikonoklast Panzerism," a heavily armored descendant of late '70s "wild style" graffiti (those bulbous letters that look as if they were twisted out of balloons). A 1979 drawing depicts a Panzerized letter "S": it is a jumble of sharp angles that suggests the Nude Descending a Staircase bestriding a Jet Ski. "The Romans stole the alphabeta system from the Greeks through war," explains Rammellzee. "Then, in medieval times, monks ornamented letters to hide their meaning from the people. Now, the letter is armored against further manipulation."
In like fashion, the artist encases himself during gallery performances in Gasholeer, a 148-pound, gadgetry-encrusted exoskeleton inspired by an android he painted on a subway train in 1981. Four years in the making, Rammellzee's exuberantly low-tech costume bristles with rocket launchers, nozzles that gush gouts of flame, and an all-important sound system.
From both wrists, I can shoot seven flames, nine flames from each sneaker's heel, and colored flames from the throat. Two girl doll heads hanging from my waist and in front of my balls spit fire and vomit smoke...The sound system consists of a Computator, which is a system of screws with wires. These screws can be depressed when the keyboard gun is locked into it. The sound travels through the keyboard and screws, then through the Computator, then the belt, and on up to the four mid-range speakers (with tweeters). This is all balanced by a forward wheel from a jet fighter plane. I also use an echo chamber, Vocoder, and system of strobe lights. A coolant device keeps my head and chest at normal temperature. A 100-watt amp and batteries give me power.
The B-boy bricolage bodied forth in Rammellzee's "bulletproof arsenal," with its dangling, fetish-like doll heads and its Computator cobbled together from screws and wires, speaks to dreams of coherence in a fractured world, and to the alchemy of poverty that transmutes sneakers into high style, turntables into musical instruments, and spray-painted tableaux on subway cars into hit-and-run art.
Rammellzee's Afrofuturist appropriation of the castoff oddments of technoculture is semiotic guerrilla warfare, just as his "slanguage"—a heavily encrypted hip-hop argot—is the linguistic equivalent of graffiti "tags" all over the mother tongue. In an essay on English as the imperial language of the Internet, the cultural critic McKenzie Wark argues for the willful, viral corruption of the lingua franca of global corporate monoculture as a political act. "I'm reminded of Caliban and Prospero," he writes. "Prospero, the Western man of the book, teaches Caliban, the colonial other, how to speak his language. And Caliban says, 'You give me words, that I might curse you with them.' Which is what happens to imperial languages. The imperial others learn it all too well. Make it something else. Make it proliferate, differentiate. Like Rammellzee, and his project for a Black English that nobody else could understand. Hiding in the master tongue. Waiting. Biting the master tongue." Wark's analysis resonates with Tricia Rose's notion of hip-hop countersignage as "master[ing] the wearing of this guise in order to use it against your interpolation."
African-American culture is Afrofuturist at its heart, literalizing Gibson's cyberpunk axiom, "The street finds its own uses for things." With trickster élan, it retrofits, refunctions, and willfully misuses the technocommodities and science fictions generated by a dominant culture that has always been not only white but a wielder, as well, of instrumental technologies. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. reminds us that
Black people have always been masters of the figurative: saying one thing to mean something quite other has been basic to black survival in oppressive Western cultures..."Reading," in this sense, was not play; it was an essential aspect of the "literacy" training of a child. This sort of metaphorical literacy, the learning to decipher complex codes, is just about the blackest aspect of the black tradition.
Here at the end of the 20th century, there's another name for the survival skill Gates argues is quintessentially black. What he describes as a deconstructionist ability to crack complex cultural codes goes by a better-known name, these days. They call it hacking.
—Mark Dery © Mark Dery; all rights reserved.
(Endnotes available in print version only.)
Author's Postscript:
"Black to the Future" first appeared in the November 1994 issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly, an academic journal published by Duke University and overseen, at that time, by Frank Lentricchia). Arguably, this essay, which in Flame Wars serves as an introduction to my interviews with Samuel Delany and Tricia Rose, launched the discourse of Afrofuturism at a time when Wired magazine was lambasted for featuring nothing but white guys on its covers. As Mark Rockeymoore notes in his essay on the subject, "Mark Dery was the first to use the term 'afrofuturism' in his edited collection Flame Wars." Likewise, the cultural critic Kodwo Eshun, who has written extensively about race and technology, credits me as the originator of the term, although he traces the dscourse back to the British journalist Mark Sinker.
Intellectual genealogies aside, none will debate that Afrofuturism—the buzzword and the discourse—has grown legs. At last count, a Google search for the term racked up 1900 hits. A burgeoning field of study, it has inspired a website, a members-only Yahoo discussion group, a Hypertext project, and critical anthologies such as Race in Cyberspace, Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life, and a special issue of the journal, Social Text, titled, simply, Afrofuturism.
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