The past, present and future in critical Afrofuturisms.

As contributors to this collection think imaginatively about the future, and what it might mean to be black in the future, an accompanying question is what kind of relation to the past will there be? In the area of culture termed Afrofuturism (a label first used in the 1990s), alongside an orientation towards futurity, artists and critics have negotiated this question in several ways. To what extent does a history of colonisation and slavery, which produced constructions of race and understandings of progress still felt today, inform images of the future, concepts of temporality and the envisioning of alternatives to ‘now’? In this piece I will focus on how a handful of Afrofuturist critics have addressed the interlinking of past, present and future