Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Jakeya Caruthers

In full disclosure, the R’s intrepid leader, Latoya Peterson, is completely in love with your class, especially the homework! What are you teaching our gurl in your class? Wow, that’s really humbling! Well, I should begin by saying this is nowhere near the first time a course like this has been taught; conceptually, Afrofuturism has grown to take up a LOT of space within academic and artistic conversations, so it’s an enormous field of inquiry.  I designed the course to be taught through Stanford’s Program in Feminist and Queer Studies, so I sort of stumbled on a useful way to organize some of the themes, and I’m constantly trying to take it somewhere new.  To get where we’re going, we don’t only look at texts or art that gets explicitly identified as Afrofuturist, we also look at seemingly disparate texts that tap into Afrofuturism’s concerns about existence, knowledge, time, space, survival, power, gender, sex, and the body. May I give an example? During a week where we talk about speculative sex and sexuality, we might read an article on the racial implications of certain works of slash and fan fiction; we’ll even grapple with that categorical distinction.  Referencing queer, feminist, and critical race theories, we’ll go to images and fan fictions about imagined encounters between Lt. Uhura and Lt. Sulu from the original Star Trek series, discussing the implications, problematics, and queer possibilities that could emerge from the pairing and thinking through howAfrofuturism often deals with racialized gender transgression and narratives of sexual excess or danger? In the same session, we’d read a text about the politics of desire in Samuel Delaney’s work, analyzing his short story “Aye, and Gomorrah,” which possibly contains a critique of how the nature of a worker’s labor (inthis case, a sex worker) comes to constitute her embodied identity. And even though The Fifth Element is not a futuristic film written or produced by black folks, its supporting cast features a curiously significant number of black characters; one of the most striking ones is Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod.  So we’d round out the class by discussing alllllll the sexual and gender ambiguity represented in the character, including how deep and amazing it is that, among other things, Ruby Rhod’s fabulously kinky blonde hair is (arguably) styled into a phallus that itself bears a hole.  Within the same conversation, we’d also try and figure out where the hell Funkadelic was headed with a track like “Jimmy’s Got a Little Bit of Bitch in Him.” There’s a lot going on! For those not familiar with the term, what exactly is “Afrofuturism,” including its history, major motifs, and major influences? Well, the term Afrofuturism has morphed considerably over time and is constantly expanding and evolving, thanks to academia, the art universe, and a rumbling cultural moment that is pretty hospitable to the kinds of things Afrofuturism might signify.  The actual word is most times attributed to an essay written by scholar Mark Dery in 1994, but folks have been writing and thinking about it for a long time: some of the names that repeatedly come up are Tricia Rose, Greg Tate, Kodwo Eshun, Alex Weheliye, Alondra Nelson, and many many others. I think Kodwo Eshun’s characterization as “a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afro-diasporic projection” feels spot on.  It can refer to science fiction and speculations of future utopias/dystopias/atopias; questions around cyber-technology, artificial intelligence and the machine; and it could refer to black thoughts and inquiries about (outer) space, aliens, time travel, and the cosmos.  It’s an epistemological  and aesthetic approach through which black folk can disrupt, speculate, strategize, or register critiques… about liberation.  It’s Sun-Ra and George Clinton, Derrick Bell and Octavia Butler.  It’s Grace Jones, it’s Renee Cox, it’s Outkast.  Sometimes it signifies black postmodernism, and other times it’s simply shorthand for a contemporary black “nerd” aesthetic. Truthfully, the concept of Afrofuturism is funky and nebulous in ways that are both thrilling and exhausting,so its explosion into popular consciousness has not come without some backlash and fatigue. I’ve definitely heard scholars complain of the term’s misappropriation, over use, or referential emptiness.  That critique is to be expected, but obviously I don’t completely agree!