Afrofuturism

In Kodwo Eshun's “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” Afrofuturism is a struggle over the production, circulation, and control of futures. It extends Black Atlantic countermemory toward the proleptic because states, capital, technoscience, and media already govern through forecasts and the delivery of “reliable futures” (“Further Considerations”, pp. 3–5). The future is therefore a chronopolitical terrain: descriptions of what has not happened can distribute confidence, investment, fear, and constraint in the present.

Countermemory and counterfuture

Eshun does not reject the recovery of histories suppressed by the colonial archive. He begins from the necessity of countermemory and from slavery as a founding trauma of modernity, then argues that vigilance toward the imperial past must be extended into the field of the future (“Further Considerations”, pp. 2–4). Afrofuturism reorients Black Atlantic temporality toward the retrospective and the proleptic at once.

That double orientation matters because Africa is not excluded from futurism; it is intensely targeted by it. Corporate scenarios and development forecasts render the continent as a zone of predictable catastrophe, just as technological advertising renders other populations as occupants of a bright corporate tomorrow (“Further Considerations”, pp. 6–8). Eshun calls for intervention in the predictive, projected, envisioned, virtual, anticipatory, and future-conditional. Afrofuturism can expose who authors a forecast, whose conduct it is designed to shape, and what other futures its certainty forecloses.

SF capital and feedback

The page's direct connection to SF capital is explicit. Eshun adopts Mark Fisher's term for the positive feedback between future-oriented media and capital, then expands the “futures industry” across computer simulation, economic projection, consultancy, science fiction, sonic fiction, prophecy, and venture capital (“Further Considerations”, p. 5). Science fiction is not merely prediction or a distant utopia. It can preprogram the present by engineering feedback between a preferred future and its becoming-real (“Further Considerations”, pp. 5–6).

This resembles hyperstitional feedback, but Eshun's argument has a specific political location. Afrofuturist work contests the unequal power to make descriptions credible and actionable. The conceptual overlap should not erase the Black Atlantic histories, institutions, and media through which his chronopolitics operates.

Sonic process as an archive of futures

Eshun calls Black vernacular sonic process indispensable to Afrofuturism and treats earlier musical futures as a resource for contemporary work (“Further Considerations”, p. 9). His key constellation includes Sun Ra, Lee Perry, Parliament-Funkadelic, Detroit techno, and Drexciya, but it is not a list of futuristic imagery. Recording studios, records, sleeves, concepts, names, and narratives act together as durable world-building systems.

Black Audio Film Collective's The Last Angel of History provides a major relay. Eshun describes the film's Data Thief and its network of music, space, futurology, Africa, and diaspora; Black sonic processes become telecommunications and components of a “secret technology” oriented toward diasporic futures (“Further Considerations”, p. 10). The film is evidence of a developed Afrofuturist method, not proof that the musicians it connects shared one doctrine.

Machine interfaces and alienation

Digital sequencers, samplers, synthesizers, and software complicate the racial identification of sound. Eshun argues that Detroit techno's human-machine interface allowed producers to estrange themselves from fixed sonic identity and to become at home in alienation (“Further Considerations”, p. 11). Afrofuturism uses that alienation rather than promising its disappearance. It assembles countermemory and mediated practice to access forms of multiple consciousness unavailable to an identity understood as singular and settled (“Further Considerations”, pp. 13–14).

Extraterrestriality is one device for this work. Eshun frames it as a hyperbolic route through imposed dislocation and the changing names forced upon Black Atlantic subjects. Science-fictional estrangement can defamiliarize the real violence of slavery without making that violence fictional (“Further Considerations”, pp. 13–15). His account of Drexciya's water-breathing descendants of enslaved pregnant women thrown overboard shows this “temporal switchback” at its most concentrated: the fiction reroutes the implications of the Middle Passage through aquatic mutation, sonic production, and an invented Black Atlantic polity (“Further Considerations”, pp. 15–16).

Jeff Mills: the circuit made audible

Hari Kunzru's 1998 Jeff Mills interview gives this temporal engineering a concrete technical form. Kunzru describes a circuit in which an informational message moves from an imagined future through producer, studio, record, DJ, sound system, and dancers. Mills says the music should remove the listener's present location and make them feel placed in a time ahead (“Music is the Message”, pp. 1–2). Authorship is not abolished: Mills speaks as a creator trying to transmit an idea. Yet the work exists as a relay rather than an inviolate object.

The same interview complicates that authorship. Mills describes leaving a sequence running for hours or days so the machines fluctuate and acquire a character of their own; Kunzru reads Detroit as a site where industrial machinery gives way to informational flows and human relations with technology are reconfigured (“Music is the Message”, pp. 3–4). The archive does not settle whether surrender to mechanized repetition is resistance or submission. Kunzru ends by holding those possibilities together (“Music is the Message”, p. 5).

Eshun's concluding formulation is similarly open: Afrofuturism recovers counterfutures made under conditions hostile to Afrodiasporic projection while manufacturing tools for present intervention. It is an expanded multimedia field across theoretical, fictional, digital, sonic, visual, and architectural practices, held together by acts of coding, adaptation, mistranslation, revision, and reuse (“Further Considerations”, p. 16). Continue through *More Brilliant Than the Sun*, sonic fiction, mythscience, and the archive's Afrofuturist trail.