Who's Who in Afrofuturism

Akomfrah, John

Armstrong, Newton

Ballard, J.G.

Baraka, Amiri

Bing, Carter

Bowen, Michael

Brakhage, Stan

Brown, Carlenhos

  • "An artist based in Salvador Bahia, who I consider to be the Brazilian Rammellzee, but he teaches kids about drum patterns, and yes, he wears weird costumes, and yes he has a whole "futuristic" angle to what he does: but it's based maybe on a more dynamic and intriguing engagement with Afro-Diasporic values of cultural reconstruction. " [Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky]

Burroughs, William

Butler, Octavia

CasSelle, Malcolm

Clayton, Jace (aka Jimmy Rupture)

Clinton, George

Collins, Bootsy

Coltrane, John

Cooper, Carol

Davis, Miles

Delany, Samuel

Digable Planets

Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy

DuBois, W.E.B.

Eglash, Ron

Ellington, David

Ellison, Ralph

Eshun, Kodwo

Fanon, Franz

Gibson, William

Goldberg, David (Mr. Bollweevil)

Greaves, McLean

Haraway, Donna

Harris, Wilson

  • "Wilson Harris states, and i'll find the cite, that: Black music acts as "figurative acts of memory...spectral and phantom rememberings of a dismembered past":

    It has taken us a couple of generations to begin-just begin-to perceive, in this phenomenon, an activation of subconscious and sleeping resources in the phantom limb of dis-remembered slave and god.

    Now I think he certainly was well ahead of Lacan and contemporary psychoanalysts in imagining the idea of trauma as a "foreign body" at the heart of the psyche (and he was speaking of the colonized psyche). And psychoanalysts always fall back on the linguistic to the detriment of affect.

    When Harris speaks of Yurokon, a protagonist in his novel Palace of the Peacock , he suggests that the "music of Yurokon's flute (was) a way of speaking a truth cannot be embodied." And Nathaniel Mackey points out that: "the phantom limb is a felt recovery, a felt advance beyond severance and limitation which contends with and questions conventional reality, that it's a feeling for what's not there and which reaches beyond as it calls into question what is. Music as phantom limb arises from a capacity for feeling which holds itself apart from numb contingency. The phantom limb haunts and critiques a condition in which feeling, consciousness itself, would seem to have been cut off."

    So this sort of leads to some notion of African diaporic musical technologies as potential places for renewal and the chance to begin again, while recognizing that the music has a homeopathic relationship to the black psyche in the new world rather than a more western role as 'pharmakon' i.e. treating that which hurts with a slightly different kind of hurt rather treating that which hurts with its opposite." [Tim Haslett]

Harward, Reid

Haslett, Tim

Himes, Chester

Hopkinson, Nalo

  • Toronto writer of science fiction and fantasy, originally from Jamaica via Trinidad and Guyana. Her first novel Brown Girl in the Ring came out last summer from Warner Aspect, and her second novel Midnight Robber will be out from Warner in March 2000. http://www.sff.net/people/nalo/

hooks, bell (aka Gloria Watkins)

Hudson, Peter

Hurston, Zora Neal

Jafa, Arthur

  • Arthur Jafa has worked with several filmmakers as Director of Photography, including Spike Lee (Crooklyn), John Akomfra (Seven Songs for Malcolm X), and Jacqueline Shearer (The 54th Regiment). Jafa attended Howard University, where he studied with Haile Gerima and began working with Charles Burnett, Julie Dash and Ben Caldwell. He was co-producer and Director of Photography for Dash's Daughters of the Dust, which won the Sundance Film Festival's Cinematography Award (1991). Jafa has lectured widely on black aesthetics, culture and cinema. Feature film scripts he is currently developing include Stainless, which has received Rockefeller and NYSCA funding.

Joans, Ted

Jones, Gayl

Julien, Isaac

Killah Priest

McGee, Art

McLuhan, Marshall

Mercer, Kobena

Miller, Paul (a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid)

  • " I write under the name "Paul D. Miller" for publications like Artforum, (formerly) the Village Voice, and a magazine where I'm a contributing Editor called Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Arts, and I create digital oriented music under the name of "Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid." I'm currently on tour with the infamous hip-hop M.C. Red Man, and a host of other people, to promote my album Riddim Warfare (an experimental hip-hop, "illbient," dub, and drum n bass album featuring the likes of Killah Priest from the Wu Tang set, Kool Keith of Ultra-Magnetic M.C.'s, Sir Menelik, the legendary Organized Konfusion, Julia Scher of MIT's media department, and Japanese conceptual artist, Mariko Mori) and basically, am travelling almost everyday for the next month or so. Playing a different every nite for a month can really make you realize how different we perceive things when we're "grounded" in the safety of our own homes. " [Paul Miller]

Mingus, Charlie

Monk, Thelonius Sphere

Morgan, Garret A.

  • "Many years ago, Garret A. Morgan, the inventor of the system of signals that controls the flow of movement through the urban landscape that we just call "traffic signals" posited that light and movement, code and control, were just parts of how the urban landscape spoke its words of existence to itself - just as in cybernetics where controls systems coordinate data in a flow of information there's a parable that would highlight some of the issues I'm talking about. Today, the new streets are on-line, the new places of code configure identity in a way that highlights how far technology has outstripped the social machinery of an American reality predicated on an industrial revolution many centuries ago.
  • One day Morgan saw an accident between a horse carriage and a then unfamiliar vehicle - an automobile. People were thrown from their vehicles and strewn throughout the intersection. Modernity had clashed with the past, and chaos was the only result. So Morgan went home and thought about the urban landscape and came up with a system for regulating movement. The rest, as people can see anywhere in the world, is history. " [Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky]

    • Mosely, Walter

    Muhammed, Elijah

    Murray, Albert

    Nelson, Alondra

    • Moderator of the Afrofutrism list, she's a grad student at NYU who is fascinated by how sci-fi and futurism have become increasingly present in the stories and cultural expression of the African diaspora. Futurism has a long relationship to the arts and the avant-garde in particular but AfroFuturism in many instances links visions of the future with older traditions

    O'Grady, Lorraine

    • "In an ongoing series involving both photography and performance, O'Grady maps out the correspondences between the women of her own family and the women in Egyptian Queen Nefertiti's dynastic line. Nerfertiti/Devonia Evangeline, first performed in 1980, uses her own family to trace the African American diaspora through both contemporary American culture and ancient Egyptian art and mythology. From this performance evolved the Miscegenated Family Album series of 1980-88. In this work are formed sisterhoods linking, not just generations, but centuries of mixed-race women. O'Grady juxtaposes images of her sister, Devonia Evangeline, with images of Queen Nerfertiti; images of herself with ones of Nerfetiti's younger sister, Mutnedjmet; and images of Devonia Evangeline's tow daughters, creating a sense of an ancient and ongoing sisterhood based upon uncanny physical resemblance as well as similarities in family history.
  • Lorraine O'Grady received a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She was a recipient of Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe College for 1995-96. Her Miscegenated Family Album was exhibited in 1996 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen. She lives and works in New York City." [http://www.hws.edu/aca/depts/art/laughter/l2na.html]
    • Grady is an artist shown by the Thomas Erben Gallery, in NYC. Images of her work and some of her writings may be found online at their website.

    Oguibe, Olu

    Organized Konfusion

    Perry, Lee "Scratch"

    Piper, Keith

    • "Keith Piper (UK) presented the installation 'INTERVENTIONS: a nigger in cyberspace'. Piper can be considered a representative of the Black Art movement which has caused quite a stir in the United Kingdom. The piece that Piper showed during the festival centered on the social aspects of the body as experienced by race and gender characteristics. He sees cyberspace (the electronic space) as a reflection of the social relations he knows from daily reality. His work consisted of computer animations that centered around images of the city and computer architecture. Images that show the city as a warzone; as a planning area where everything can be controlled and as such is comparable to the absolute control of the digital world." [from the V2 Organization conference program for 1993]

    Powell, Bob

    • "An extremely old African american physicist, philosopher, and architect who studied in west africa and who worked with NASA and still has really interesting ideas on physics, music, and African and African American art." [Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky)]

    Public Enemy

    • "Public Enemy risked severe legal repercussions when they attempted to release their last record exclusively in the MP3 musical format (one of CD quality that is easily distributed and archived across networks -- check VIBE for an excellent overview by Harry Allen, their "media assassin"). Columbia made them pull it from their website but not before it was rapidly proliferated by connected PE fans. Since digital distribution completely circumvents the intermediaries of the recording industry, large labels are afraid of this new technology. I emphasize that it was Public Enemy, not the Wu, not Master P, not Puffy and not even KRS-one who put out "Swindler's Lust" (http://www.public-enemy.com) and indicted the sharecropping relationship between black musicians and the music industry mafia. This is because PE has always understood the media... and the technology of its distribution." [David Goldberg (aka Mr. Bollweevil]

    Rammellzee

    • A picture in full regalia (1987). See his "Iconic Treatise on Gothic Futurism."
    • "I have a story about Ramm: I helped him sell some paintings to a label owner named "James Lavelle" who runs a record imprint called Mo' Wax. A little while later I had my first gallery show at Annina Nosei in NYC. Ramm had shown at Annina in the early 80's and was furious instead of being supportive. There was alot of bad energy in the 80's art world. In any case, Ramm left a series of messages on my voicemail saying all sorts of interesting things like "nobody runs the transverse like me! You tell Annina to go fuck herself! I am the master of the transuniversal alphabet, nigga! You ain't shit, and you ain't never gonna be shit. I hope you die! Tell Annina to go fuck herself!" Needless to say I called back and said things like "you ignorant crackhead! I will smash your fucking head in if I see you, etc. etc." We haven't seen one another in a couple of years, and needless to say, I do not like Ramm, and trust me, I know his work very well. Same kind of encounter I had with Tricky: the kind of fratricidal bitterness they levelled at me struck a resonance with the same kind of deeply intolerant bitterness I get from whites who are liberal on the surface, but once things begin to go well, well... (see the Voice a little while ago, there's a great article that speaks volumes about the newspaper, it's called "Boo!"). It's a kind of pathological loop of bitterness black artists seem to use to attack other black artists who are doing well, but it has its roots in the whole division equation "house nigga/field nigga" used during slavery days to divide resistance to the system--a group divided will always fall. Anyone who breaks that equation is a threat to the entire structure of relations. It's a mindset I have little patience or tolerance for--I guess I call it being "typographically alert." It's the reason that artists at the Harvard conference (see the incidents involving Kara Walker) a while ago attacked one another, and it's something that is basically a divide and conquer mentality. I respect elements of Ram's work - and agree they are intriguing, but I wish people on the list could MEET and deal with both Ram and Tricky. Personal experience always mediates thoughts on these issues. But then again, it's a different generation.... War, especially when it's not very well thought out, can be very boring. But hey, you're only hearing my side of the story." [Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky)]

    Ramlochand, Ramona

    • "Born in Guyana but grew-up in England and Canada and traveled extensively in Africa and in Southeast Asia. The Montréal artist has completed a collaborative exhibition with british Artist Keith Piper at the Ottawa Art Gallery which toured the country in 1998. Island in a Tender State was her first solo exhibition in Montréal." [Woboro]

    Reed, Ishmael

    Riggs, Marlon

    Rose, Tricia

    RZA

    Slim, Iceberg

    Smith, Harry

  • "Harry Smith's films are called "superimpositions" (visual collage) because he layered them using the special 3-D lanterns... Harry Smith was an associate of the jazz scene - his films were hand made, and etched with inscriptions and geometric patterns based on the live sets of Monk and Mingus that he sat through, then went home and made stream of conscious films about.... The way film unfolds as a kind of immersive environment fascinated Smith and many later film makers who were influenced by him.
  • "I see links between the extreme syncopation found in Busta Rhymes' Hype Williams produced videos and what Smith was doing a while ago. Smith and another archivist, Alan Lomax, collected folk sounds, African American prison songs, gospels, Appalachian folk music etc. etc. Harry Smith's record collection and the philosophy driving his archival impulses influenced people like Bob Dylan, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg, Amiri Baraka, and a host of the other experimental artists, musicians, and writers that came to his film happenings. He also made blues and folk "mixed tapes" of his archive (in the mid 1950's no less!) far earlier than many of the dj's operating today. His record collection was so important in terms of American multi-cultural perspectives on music that the Smithsonian Museum has it in its collection. They re-issued the collection last year.
  • I always try to create linkages between diverse avant garde movements--even the term "Afro-Futurism" is a combination of several ideological and cultural movements that informed the development of different aesthetic movements. Hybrid culture is something that fascinated Smith, and when he won the Grammy Award for his music collection mix tape selection a couple of years ago, there were different hip-hop groups, country music mavens, etc. etc. all around. As he accepted the award, he said looking around him, that his dream of a diverse american culture had finally come true. He died later that year." [Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky)]

    • Spearhead

    Stone, Sly

    Sun Ra

    Tal, Kalí

    • Longtime student of cyberculture, and author of articles on representations of race in cyberculture and cyberpunk. Does the gruntwork to maintain this web site.

    Tate, Greg

    Tricky

    Williams, Ben

    Williams, Hype

    Williams, Saul

    Wu Tang Clan