Alternative futurisms

Afrofuturism 2.0 is the next wave of an art movement, cultural aesthetic, and philosophy that explores the African diaspora via technoculture, science, history, and fiction. The phrase was reintroduced in 2015 by Dr. Reynaldo Anderson, professor of Africology and African American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, who co-founded the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM), which encompasses a global constellation of creatives, intellectuals, and artists. As diverse and limitless as the African diasporic worldviews themselves, the BSAM “seeks to interpret, engage, design, or alter reality for the re-imagination of the past, the contested present, and to act as a catalyst for the future” and the movement now includes: Astro Blackness, Afro-Surrealism, Ethno Gothic, Black Digital Humanities, Black (Afro-future female or African Centered) Science Fiction, The Black Fantastic, Magical Realism, and The Esoteric.” 

“The first definition [of Afrofuturism] was from a white person’s perspective as a response to oppression,” explained Quentin VerCetty, co-founder of the Canadian chapter of BSAM, “whereas Afrofuturism 2.0 says, ‘this is a future despite our oppression.’” A tipping point for Afrofuturism hasn’t happened in Canada yet, he said, since people are still learning about it and “haven’t yet stumbled on Afrofuturism 2.0.”

Even still, racialized groups in Canada are staking a claim in creative fields, finding new audiences, and forging new directions for themselves. And they say the scene is expanding.

Operating under the Toronto-based non-profit Oddside Arts, Afrofuturists, activists and artists Queen Kukoyi and Nicole “Nico” Taylor foster a space for Afro-descendants to theorize, create, and contribute to the development of the equitable future. 

“Anybody that’s dreaming about the future, even if they’re not using art, can be considered a Black futurist,” says Kukoyi. Via sci-fi, fantasy, technology, digital design, and immersive experiences, Oddside Arts is “looking at how [Afrofuturism] can be used to heal, to transform the narratives of pain that are so steeped in the reality of Blackness.” 

Rahyne (2021), the duo’s animated short film in partnership with Indigenous filmmaker Kahstoserakwathe Paulette Moore, is about a non-binary Afro-Indigenous (Mohawk and Bajan) youth who turns to water for guidance. “The film became a way to express and explore that grief and talk about what ties [the two communities] together culturally, spiritually, and historically,” Taylor says. 

Calgary-based, Afro-Venezuelan Artist Will Selviz is director of operations and partner at RENDRD Media, a Black-led 3D animation studio. He says there is a growing mainstream audience interest in the Black experience and in diverse creatives more generally — evidenced by the continued blockbuster success of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Disney’s Grammy-nominated animation Encanto. 

“There needs to be more focus [in Canada] on independent projects that support creatives within those cultures,” he says, noting that access to tools and software is a constraint for Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour, as well as new or recently settled immigrants to Canada. “Small creators and studios have unique stories to tell in the Black experience. I dream of a future where our cultures and communities directly benefit from financial success on the big screen and streaming platforms.”

In his own work, Selviz creates futuristic worlds in virtual and augmented reality to explore his Venezuelan roots through the lens of Protopia — a term coined by Kevin Kelly in WIRED that means “a state that is better than today” — as a way of reclaiming memories of a country he hasn’t seen in over a decade due to political instability. 

“[Protopia is] a more sober look at what’s happening today and [using that] to project what’s happening in 100 years,” he explains. “It’s about proactively looking toward a future that you want to see [and] fills an important gap between utopia and dystopia.”

A term inspired by Afrofuturisms and conceived by Anishinaabe Academic and Author Grace Dillon in 2012, Indigenous futurisms is a movement of artistic work that centres Indigenous peoples. “[It] became a political pushing-forward of decolonization,” she explained in a 2021 interview with e-flux Journal. “Indigenous Futurisms introduce, to my mind, a rupture not only in the conceptualization of time but also within the very topic of science fiction itself.” Dillon characterizes Indigenous Futurisms “through different categories or concerns” that include Native slipstream, Contact, Indigenous sciences and sustainability, Native apocalypse, and Biskaabiiyang, which means “returning to ourselves.”

Writer and Educator Chelsea Vowel, a Métis from manitow-sâkahikan (Lac Ste. Anne) Alberta, adapted the concept further through Métis futurisms. Her work explores Indigenous feminist speculative sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, notably through a podcast co-hosted with PhD Student and Researcher Molly Swain called Métis in Space. “Science fiction is really all about imagining futures [and] other ways of being,” Swain explained in a 2021 interview. “What we’re interested in doing with the podcast is in part to intervene in these narratives and to offer alternatives by doing world building ourselves.… Indigenous futurism has this radical idea that Indigenous people will exist in the future, and that our futures can look Indigenous. We’re not going to be assimilated [and] radical transformation is possible.” 

While Afrofuturism 2.0 and Indigenous futurisms are two prominent speculative genres in North America, visions of the future and media makers span the globe. 

Tropical Futures Institute, for example, is a design strategy studio founded in 2015 by the Cebu-based Chinese-Filipino designer Chris Fussnern. It started as a critique of the lack of discussion about the future in the tropics, “even though there are a lot of different visions or scenarios that occur within tropics that hold certain views of the future in them,” he explained to MOLD magazine in 2022. Sometimes using the term “neotropical” to describe this work, it addresses structural, climatic, and ecological issues, visuals, and historical and post-colonial perspectives. “It was important that the people in the tropics who are doing work about the tropics define those movements for ourselves.” 

Fussnern was also deeply inspired by filmmaker Lawrence Lek’s 2016 video essay on Sinofuturism, which Lek describes as an “invisible movement” often mistaken for contemporary China. “A spectre already embedded into a trillion industrial products, a billion individuals and a million veiled narratives … it is a science fiction that already exists.” In Alternative Sinofuturisms (中华未来主义), scholar Gabriele de Seta explained that the term, first used in 2003 by cultural theorist Steve Goodman, responds to “pervasive discourse about China’s future-oriented temporality (or about the global futures’ unavoidable Chinese imprint).” In parallel, compared to, and juxtaposed with other genres like Gulf Futurism (Dubai and Doha), Shanghai futurism, and ethnofuturisms, it “highlight[s] the novel emergence of future-oriented imaginaries from non-Western contexts.”

Articulated futures by and from racialized communities have entered mainstream imagination. 

Nonwhite authors, perspectives, creators, and genres are defying dominant cultural narratives, confronting the fields of science, fiction, art, and entertainment. “We saw an intense transformation [with] a wave of Indigenous, Black, Asian, women, and queer writers being published and offering some of the decade’s most challenging stories,” said Dillon. 

Professor Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, from the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo, uses the term Alternative Futurisms or CoFUTURES to describe the different global contemporary movements (and also produced Kalpavigyan - a speculative journey(2021), the first documentary film on Indian science fiction.) 

In Canada, Kukoyi believes there is a “divine” possibility for the industry to work with a unique talent pool of artists, researchers, and collaborators to bring these stories to light, tap into these worlds, and reimagine our own future. “There’s this kind of fallacy of multiculturalism,” she says. “Yes, we’re diverse, but structurally we’re not … [there is] an opportunity to fix things.”

Selviz notes hopefully that Canada welcomed a record number of new immigrants in 2021. “Just imagine [the] narratives and talent arriving every day from all corners of the world,” he says. “Our strength lies in the unique perspectives [within] the immigrant experience. These stories not only promote empathy and compassion but also empower us to own our narrative and document our culture and ancestry for generations to come.”