Southern Futurism
by Rodneyna Hart for South Summit 2024: Southern Futurism
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Futurist History
Our nows are permanently etched into tomorrows, where the art of perception meets the science of time.
Because life is cyclical, we live in a world immersed in new technological advancements, global urbanization, speed, excessive sensory input, second-skin connectivity, and rampant change. The Italian Futurists of the early 20th century created manifestos espousing their revolutionary perspectives through literature, dance, architecture, film, and other art forms. They emphasized universal dynamism, speed, technology, youth, and violence with lofty ideals anchored in the struggle to maintain a dynamic Italian intellectual class. This worldview gave way to performative bravery, idealism, and fascism and romanticized the need for war as a cultural purification that gave vitality to the human spirit. True to form, the dawn of a new century brings a revolutionary cosmology of thought, information, speed, and an urgency to create the future. As time passed, these Futurist’s philosophies evolved with cutting-edge scientific discoveries to shift their mindset away from distraction to universal dynamism and quantum entanglement. They started to create art with the new knowledge that we are in no way separate but particles that all are part of an inseparable whole. We are all vibrating molecules that imperceptibly intertwine. Visual representation of dynamic movement is easily observed in the Italian and Russian Cubo-Futurism paintings and sculptures from 1912 into the 1940s.
American Futurists
Futurism hurriedly spread through Europe but was slow-moving in America. Broadly speaking, aesthetic movements die on the vine in American capitalist societies unless we can comfortably commodify them. Business owners leaped at automation from the Industrial Revolution to the cybernetic one, reinforcing that those with the money have the power. Capitalism is an economic and political system in which private owners control a country’s trade and industry for profit. All motivation and future success are assessed by an annual increase in shareholders’ wealth — all processes emphasizing that narratives are cosplaying power as set by the wealthy white male American who created the power dynamics. The ideal American Futurist vision uses automation, mechanization, and cyberization of the world to perpetuate extractive processes that build for the top.
It may sound extreme, yet American development always asks for a ‘blood oath,’ often with a thin veneer of racism, classism, and destruction. American historian Gina Plumey argues that Futurism in America was a tool to promote consumerism, promote American industrialization, and maintain nationalism. By the dawn of the Atomic Age of the mid-1940s, Futurism stimulated interest in science, grew enterprise, and sustained financial support to beat other countries in the cold war of mutual destruction that was “fought” through developing national space and defense programs.
A wealth and power line is drawn, tracing the evolution of Wall Street’s shareholders from the antebellum South’s wealthy white male land-owning and Northern business-owning classes. All economic values derived from America are based on capitalism; maintaining a suppressed class of the working poor is essential to its sustainability. Northern industries were often just as culpable in their extractive profit from enslaved people, poor white workers, and other minorities. “Slavery-once removed” or profiting from the ill-gotten gains of refining the raw materials from the enslaved southern poor, manufacturing products from these materials, accumulating wealth as a byproduct, and exporting nationwide the mastered skills of urban enslaved people and the working class.
This new country had a 246-year head start on the accumulation of wealth by extracting slave labor and has never been comfortable with losing that moneymaker. There is still a caveat etched into the 13th Amendment to allow imprisonment to remain as the last holdout for slavery and maintaining a large class of the working poor; viewing Futurism through a Southern lens, tinted by tradition, can result in the trafficking of modern dissonance of how the “lazy slaves” carried America’s wealth on their backs. America’s industrial age left many southern farms barren. For many the narrative of the American South will always be informed and confined by its history. To lift the veil, if one looks up American Futurist online today, it is a site dedicated to neo-nazi propaganda and racialized hatred.
Afrofuturism
As a museum professional and student of anthropology, I can attest that there have ALWAYS been revolts by enslaved individuals. Most were not recorded in the history books; individuals were tortured and killed, dissenting voices were silenced, and education was denied, all to maintain some semblance of dominance. There may be a mention of a significant organized revolution, but there were many more. Humankind has never given their life, liberty, or dignity without a fight. Although the term Afrofuturism was not coined until 1993, visionaries and world-builders of the African Diaspora have always existed. American Futurism takes where Afrofuturism shares. There are different ways of exercising power, and there is a clear difference from American waste, extraction, and destruction.
In contrast, Afrofuturists are creating new pathways and connections. The great migration showed that innovators and industrialists of different backgrounds had a chance at better financial mobility. Many of these brave travelers were forward-thinking, keeping history in mind while taking a distressing past and passable present yet making way for a thriving future.
Mark Dery, in 1993, coined the term Afrofuturism as a cross-section of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation — authentic acts of free people. His essay in “Black to the Future,” a collection of essays written by Black scholars, encompassed past inspirations and present revolutionaries and gave latitude for contemporary future builders through literature, film, music, and all of the arts. African Americans pieced together the Pan-Afrofutirist world to connect discordant threads and make whole a people severed from their history. Afrofuturism is sharing and supporting the creatives, doers, and builders for the empowering benefit of all.
Many Black people pushed the needle forward in perception, innovation, understanding, and expectation of Black excellence. Perhaps the most impactful Afrofuturist representative in popular culture is Lt. Uhura, a polyglot, translator, and communications officer who specializes in linguistics, cryptography, and philology on the USS Enterprise starship, played by the multitalented performer Nichelle Nichols. She was representative of Earth from the United States of Africa, often speaking Swahili on the 1960s original Start Trek series. This very intentional character’s name comes from the Swahili word Uhuru, meaning “freedom.” Uhura represented belonging in a future world where, as far as contemporary popular literature presented, Black people were extinct.
Central to the concept of Afrofuturism are the science-fiction writers Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Nancy Farmer, who combined the technoculture and science fiction indicative of the genre today. Jazz musician Sun Ra combined Egyptian mysticism and science fiction to form a new world and mythology. Musicians and artists George Clinton, Ellen Gallagher, and Wanuri Kahiu created a physical culture and evolution in film in the 1970s. Due to these cultural forebears contemporary artists such as Solange Noles, Beyonce, Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott, FKA Twigs, Janelle Monae, and Kenyan visual artist Wangechi Mutu have expanded themes incorporating cyborg, metallic, and manufactured visuals in their styles.
[Science fiction films such as 1973’s Touki Bouki, Space Is the Place with music by Sun Ra, 1983 Born in Flames, The Brother from Another Planet (1984), The Meteor Man (1993), Sankofa (1993), Blade (1998), Black Panther (2018), A Wrinkle in Time (2018), Sorry to Bother You (2018), Cosmic Slop (1994), Afronauts (2014), Get Out (2017), Us (2019), Blacula (1972), I,Robot (2004), The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Candyman (1992), Hancock (2008), Rain the Color of Blue with a Little Red in It (2015), Star Wars, De Javu (2006), Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), and so much more. Even when it is a short-lived television show, the world notices: Love Craft Country (2020), Bright (2017), Cleverman (2016), Raising Dion (2019), Afro Samurai (2007), Star Trek, and various episodes of What If…?. Other media like comic books and graphic novels such as Bitter Root, Wild Seed, Nubia, Dawn, Harriette Tubman Demon Hunter, Blood and Bone!, Love Bites, Patient Zero, The Talented Ribkins, Republica: Temple of Color and Sound, Midnight Arcade, Not So Super by Jacques Nyemb, Lashawn Colvin’s Beautiful Soldiers, and one I am excited about, Children of Blood.]
Southern Futurism
The American South propaganda machine perpetuates, “First, the South is portrayed as a region inhabited by an ignorant, economically depressed populace. Second, the South is portrayed as an almost magical realm of mint juleps and hoop skirts.” The sleepy South has never celebrated future innovation, especially that which could come from free people of color thinking, creating, and thriving.
Not only did many formerly enslaved people liberate themselves, as soon as the Civil War was won Black leaders emerged as government officials, teachers, and thought leaders to give a voice during Reconstruction.
Southern Futurism is a worldview, a thought experiment, and a manifestation of radical forward-thinking and intentional world-building.
Rarely in the history of human slavery has there been such an insidious campaign so intentional as to break down the human psyche and rebuild a class of dehumanized automation and unflinching servitude. Because of these stolen names, traditions, culture, and history, a future had to be made on a bedrock of unshakable faith in a manifested future. Being a descendant member of the African American enslaved diaspora means understanding separation and ‘skinship.’ The detachment from our origin story has been purposely stolen, blotted, and blurred.
Southern Futurism is creating community, language, folklore, and, for many, the tools of education, liberation, and abundance, as the only grand savior of Southern Life.
Southern Futurism unveils profound truths, such as the understanding that Europeans did not import slaves, they abducted a portion of the geniuses and strength of Africa. For generations, African Americans could not hold patents. Their slaveholders also claimed their innovation for themselves, as ownership of a person also meant ownership of that person’s intellectual property. It is not until our modern world that we discover lesser-known connections to innovation and African American contribution.
Southern Futurism is indigenous technology and innovation that have been developing out of necessity, leading to a better quality of life, herbal remedies, and life-sustaining solutions. The African American power model is abundance-based. It is built on a cultural perspective of “making something from nothing.”
Southern Futurism is an updated view of the responsibility of our cultural institutions. We are no longer the keepers of all knowledge; in this information age where all things are accessible, we have to be the trusted source that has sought and verified the stories and retells them not from the view of the victor but that of the truth; chips fall as they may. To modernize and find new relevance for our growing audience, museums must be flexible and responsive to the changing world, continue developing non-traditional partnerships and collaborations, be willing to try innovative technology, and rapidly respond to developing interests. Preservation of our material culture is critical.
A portion of Southern Futurist thought has to look at the past and factor contingencies. “The Middle Passage” is the path that human traffickers took when abducting humans from Africa and then submitting them to an inhumane life of every abuse imaginable. The exact path hurricanes born in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa follow to wreak havoc on America’s land south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Climate volatility due to human-aided climate change disproportionately affects the coastal South. If a ground can be cursed, a path can be haunted, and cosmic prices are paid in a magical-realistic way, could hurricanes wreak energetic tragedy as a cosmic comeuppance? Likely not; those with the most to lose continue to lose the most. Our present is the outcome of past privileged decision-making, neglecting the benefits of future labor. When we take away the consequences of other people’s choices, we live the unconsidered and dismissed future.
This is the end of the world, but the panic is manufactured. The people who create the propaganda are losing their grip on the world. Nature will reclaim it, or we will do right by our home. Either way, the planet will be here, and this rock will spin. We conjure gravity in our creative process if we are alive, plugged in, and gain meaningful insight. As creators our call to action is to create compelling narratives, powerful stories, whole characters, and meaningful art. These are the future characters your fans will cosplay, fall in love with, disdain, and feel seen by. If we are not architects of our future, the world will happen to us rather than develop for and with us!
Reference:
Hamilton, K. C. (2009). Y\u27all Think We\u27re Stupid: Deconstructing Media Stereotypes of The American South. https://core.ac.uk/download/229060045.pdf
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rodneyna Hart, MBA. In January 2019, Hart accepted the position of Museum Division Director for Louisiana State Museum, overseeing four museums spanning the state. She has been strategic in the growth of the local cultural community as a director, an exhibitions manager, and a curator for various galleries and museums. She volunteers her time with various cultural boards of directors and was a Governor appointed a Louisiana State Arts Council member. Upon completing an MBA in March 2023, Hart has set her sights on broadening life experiences.
This piece was commissioned by the New Orleans Film Society for South Summit 2024. South Summit received critical support from JustFilms Ford Foundation, which is part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program and is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arts Council New Orleans.
