Two Book Tuesdays: Afrofuturism, Afrocentricity, and the Great Migration

This weekend was a rare two book weekend thanks to two flight. I read Adam X. Smith’s Afrocentricity in Afrofuturism (2023) and Judith Weisenfeld’s New World A-Coming Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (2016). Both books will contribute in significant ways to my work on Black pseudoarchaeology. 

Smith’s book situates Afrofuturism within the discourse of Afrocentrism especially as it has emerged as an academic field. In some ways, this connection is obvious. The Black Panther film is merely the latest iteration of long history of Black futures being tied to Africa. At the same time, the contributors to Smith’s volume extended the connections between Afrofuturism and African culture well beyond the continent representing a suitably exotic backdrop for Black futurism. Instead, Africa introduced new social concepts, trajectories, and, perhaps most importantly, values to the science fiction vocabulary. This opened Afrofuturism — including Afrofuturist music, fiction, and films — to more complex Afrocentric critiques that reinforce the role of African science, for example, in not only Black, but also global futures. If “the future is Black” as the saying goes, then Afrocentricity stands as a reserve of hope and power for Afrofuturism.

Judith Weisenfeld’s New World A-Coming Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration is a brilliant and expansive book that does exactly what it says in the cover: it situates Black religion and racial identity in the experience of the Great Migration and the social, political, cultural, and religious transformations associated with Black urban life in the north. In some ways, this book too is about Afrofuturism, but rather than involving the distant future imbued with revolutionary technologies, it involved 20th century utopian imaginaries that sought to achieve a better future by transforming the present. From Nation of Islam to Father Divine, Noble Drew Ali, and the various Black Israelite movements, social innovation, charisma, and creativity characterized Black religious expression in the Great Migration period. The futurism and utopian thinking that permeated Black religion of the Great Migration also produced new ways of understanding Black pasts. Some groups, like Father Divine’s Peace Mission movement required his followers to discard their past identities, names, and histories. Other groups, such as Nation of Islam or the followers of Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple had strong commitments to newly articulated historical identities.

Of course, these newly articulated pasts, which I’ve blogged before, often stood in contrast to the dominant narratives of mid-century America. The Nation of Islam, for example, posited Black people as the original humans and white people as recent creations produced through the abuse of Black science and selective breeding. Moorish Science Temple members traced their Black ancestry to the Moors who, they argued, controlled vast swaths of northwestern Africa. Some Black Israelite movements connected their identities to various lost tribes of Israel who migrated to Ethiopia or elsewhere in Asia.

These efforts to articulate new visions of the Black past drew upon and contributed to the same intellectual currents that fueled the rise of pseudoarchaeology in the post-war period. The interest in technology, science, and new standards of disciplinary knowledge making (as in archaeology, for example), on the one hand, and mysticism, religious innovation, and new forms of cultural expression on the other (e.g. modernism, jazz music, et c.) provided fertile ground for Afrofuturism, religious innovation, and pseudoarchaeological thinking. The Great Migration served as an incubator and accelerant for these movements and a fertilizer for new pasts and new futures.

If I was skilled in thinking in syllogisms, I would try to tie Afrofuturism to Afrocentrism and Afrocentrism to Black religious thought and Afrofuturism to Black religious thought and drop the entire concoction into the Great Migration to argue that evergreen character of pseudoarchaeology isn’t because of its relentless promotion at the hands of (largely white) grifters, but because the concepts on which pseudoarchaeology draws upon are deeply embedded within the American experience.