Remixing Wakanda: Hip-Hop and Afrofuturist Design as Critical Praxis

• In Event: Remixing Response-ability: An Interactive Session Exploring Accountability and Praxis in Hip-Hop-Based Education and Research

Abstract

Despite its long history in the African-diaspora, the box office success and cultural impact of the movie Black Panther has placed Afrofuturism in the public consciousness. Afrofuturism explicitly addresses systems of oppression by redefining these systems--and race itself--as technologies developed to subjugate communities of color. But like any technology, these systems of white supremacy can be “hacked into and rewritten” (Jennings & Fluker, p. 13) or remixed. This hacking has a rebellious and imaginative element to it that can be seen in novels (e.g. Octavia Butler), contemporary comics and film (e.g. Black Panther, Luke Cage), and popular music particularly hip-hop (e.g. Kendrick Lamar, Erykah Badu, and Janelle Monae).
This paper is interested in examining the ways youth from Afro-diasporic communities in the arts and sciences create understandings of and representations of themselves through Afrofuturism and critical making practices. In this paper I examine Critical Afrofuturist Design (CAD) as critical praxis and share artifacts and insights from a maker workshop co-designed with youth of color focusing on how Hip-Hop & Afrofuturism impact their sense(s) of self.
Both Hip-Hop and Afrofuturism play with science fiction and non-Western cosmologies to project forward from the lived realities and (deleted) histories of Diasporic communities. We see this for example in Outkast’s or Missy Elliot’s music and visual aesthetic. As Afrofuturists they question and reimagine the present and past--seeing them as collections of objects, representations, and meanings that can be “modified, mixed, and repurposed to design future societies and technologies that center people of color” (Jennings, 2017).
Afrofuturist Design is a dynamic, aesthetic space for young people of color, that are no longer children and yet not quite adults, to play (Harris, 2000). In this project we take up questions regarding how Critical Design, and Afrofuturism more specifically in this case, might provide a space for young people to openly discuss and challenge the unsettling pressure(s) of what it means to be an adult of color in America? When youth are encouraged to play with their personal past and present, and through a critical making workshop invited to imagine future technologies, societies, and communities, how might they recreate themselves and their communities? What technologies can be created to enhance the community’s strengths or to emancipate it from systemic oppression?
In a series of maker workshops co-constructed with high-school youth, we have begun to develop and study the nature and potential of a critical constructionist design practice. Over eight design sessions and in collaboration with professional comic artists, activists, and scholars, five Black teen girls were invited to imagine futures that center their experiences and priorities by designing and fabricating original pieces of art and technology. In this paper I share exemplar artifacts and excerpts from interviews taken throughout the design process to illustrate how designers proposed alternate visions of literacy, science and technology by playfully constructing novel technologies and societies that highlight their relationship to the environment, their community, and themselves.

Author

• Michael B Dando, St Cloud State University