Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture Read Online Free PDF Page B

of intolerance frustrate their movement; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind).” 3
    Dery and Sinker were not the first to explore the deplorable need of some to dehumanize others in the quest for power. Yet their frameworks led to Afrofuturistic writings that for the first time linked the transatlantic slave trade to a metaphor of alien abduction.
    What does it mean to be nonhuman? As a nonhuman, your life is not valued. You are an “alien,” “foreign,” “exotic,” “savage”—a wild one to be conquered or a nuisance to be destroyed. Your bodies are not your own, fit for probing and research. You have no history of value. You are incapable of creating culture in general,but when you do, it is from an impulse or emotion, never intellect. Humans, well meaning or otherwise, can’t relate to a nonhuman.
    Even the term “illegal alien,” often used for undocumented workers moving to nations across the world, plays off fears of otherness, invasion, and takeover. The fear fanned by the fast-approaching minority-majority nation shift in the United States has led to hotly debated laws and policies that mostly target Latino immigrants. Advocates charge that racial profiling and other human-rights violations are on the upswing as undocumented workers and those who fit the ethnic description of the stereotyped “illegal alien” fall prey to unjust attacks, violence, or surveillance.
    The greater part of the civil rights movement in the United States, as well as self-rule movements in precolonial India, the Caribbean, and on the African continent, were efforts to ensure equal rights for all. And this struggle paralleled equal efforts to prove that people of color, women, LGBTQ people, the working class, and others were in fact human.
    The burden of having to prove one’s humanity has defined the attainment of some of the greatest human rights achievements of our times as well as some of the greatest artistic works.
    However, this notion of otherness prevails.
The Other Side of the Rainbow
    The alien metaphor is one of the most common tropes in science fiction. Whether they are invading, as in
Independence Day;
the ultimate enemy, as portrayed in
Alien;
or misunderstood, like in
E.T.
, there is a societal lesson of conquering or tolerance that reminds viewers of real-life human divisions.
    Other films are more explicit in the racial metaphor.
District 9
, a film set in South Africa about segregated alien settlements, was inspired by the horrors of Cape Town’s District Six during the apartheid era.
Avatar
is a thinly veiled commentary on imperialism and indigenous cultures. And
The Brother from Another Planet
depicts an extraterrestrial in the form of a black man confused by the racial norms of the day.
    Much of the science fiction fascination with earthbound alien encounters is preoccupied with how both cultures could merge and the turmoil that would ensue from overcoming perceptions of difference.
    But other artists have compared their wrestling with W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness or the struggle of being both American and black with alien motifs. Artists from Sun Ra to Lil Wayne have referenced being alien to explain isolation.
    Author Saidiya Hartman wrote in her book
Lose Your Mother
about feeling trapped in a racial paradox: “Was it why I sometimes felt as weary of America as if I too had landed in what was now South Carolina in 1526 or in Jamestown in 1619? Was it the tug of all the lost mothers and orphaned children? Or was it that each generation felt anew the yoke of a damaged life and the distress of being a native stranger, an eternal alien?” 4
Theorists and the Double Alien
    â€œI think that using alien to describe otherness works,” says Reynaldo Anderson, a professor who