HUMN 3800: History of Ancient Africa

This article from the Los Angeles Review of Books discusses the distinctions between Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism.

A brief video looks at the basic question behind Afrofuturism -- "Where is home for a person of African descent?"

A 2005 BBC documentary film by Don Letts on Sun Ra, the inventor of Afrofuturism.

A concise description of Afrofuturism and its beginnings in the music of Sun Ra.

Dery coined the word "afrofuturism" in this essay and defined it as "speculative fiction that treats African American themes and addresses African American concerns in the context of the twentieth century technoculture—and, more generally, African American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future."

An article on the philosophical concept of Négritude, which sought to address the question of what it means to be black in a white world.

In this song, jazz musician Sun Ra laid the foundation of Afrofuturism by linking an African identity to a future in outer space (21 min).

Sun Ra stars in a 1974 film based on his song, "Space Is the Place" (81 min).

"This film explores the 2006 - 2007 activity of the remaining members of the Sun Ra Arkestra - an experimental big band formed in the mid 1950s around the teachings of musician, philosopher, and spiritualist Sun Ra (32 min).

A talk by Masi Mbewe, an Afrofuturist writer and activist from Zambia.

A talk given by Dr. Alexander Brickler on blackness in popular culture.

An appreciation of black artists and writers who have made an African cultural identity central to their work.