Imagine that Benjamin Banneker, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass, instead of being tasked with fighting slavery and arguing for Black humanity, crewed a spaceship together. This is what comes to mind upon entering the new exhibition “Afrofuturism: A History of Black Futures” at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC).
This is not the first time a visitor to the NMAAHC is confronted with the feeling of boarding a spaceship. Known by many as the “Blacksonian,” the museum itself, located in the heart of Washington, D.C., is a significant work of Afrofuturist art, politics, design, and engineering, with its structure mirroring a Yoruba-design crown that looks ready for liftoff. Every time the museum comes into view while walking down 14th Street NW, I have the thought that it is like a phoenix rising from the ashes. I have often asked myself: Why this particular association? And I have come to realize that it is because Black humanity is itself a phoenix: No matter how many times colonizers and white supremacists have tried to destroy our communities, languages, and interior worlds, we have been resilient. Black livingness, as Black Canadian scholar Katherine McKittrick has called it, is an Afrofuturist endeavor.
Afrofuturism is difficult to define, and for me, this is actually one of its pleasures. It is a kaleidoscope that offers multiple readings depending on the viewer’s perspective. Writer and cultural critic Mark Dery, who has the unique role of being the only white person we see in the entire exhibition, coined the term “Afrofuturism” in the introduction to a series of interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia
