from “further considerations on afrofuturism” by kodwo eshun:
“Toni Morrison argued that the African subjects that experienced capture, theft, mutilation, and slavery were the first moderns. They underwent real conditions of existential homelessness, alienation, dislocation, and dehumanization that philosophers like Nietzsche would later define as quintessentially modern.”
“In the colonial era of the early to middle twentieth century, avant-gardists from Walter Benjamin to Frantz Fanon revolted in the name of the future against a power structure that relied on control and representation of the historical archive. Today, the situation is reversed. The powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past.”
“…science fiction was never concerned with the future, but rather with engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present.”
“The human-machine interface became both the condition and the subject of Afrofuturism… to feel at home in alienation…”
“Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision. Black existence and science fiction are one and the same.”
