Attempting to undo this knot are proponents of Afrofuturism, a multidisciplinary movement that crystallized at the turn of the 1990s in response to theoretical, political, and ultimately aesthetic lethargy. A hybrid object articulated around the notions of Africanness, civil rights, science fiction, and futurity, Afrofuturism is positioned as a philosophy of emancipation and free will, using an array of practices and knowledge precluded from modern Western thought. Although the term first gained critical traction following the publication in 1993 of Mark Dery\u2019s article \u201cBlack to the Future,\u201d in response to his students\u2019 art production combining postcolonialism and new science and technology, such creative m\u00e9tissage emerged long before this postcolonial flood. Reynaldo Anderson, theoretician and cofounder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement, attributes the rise of \u201cBlack speculative thought\u201d^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - \u00ab Black speculative thought <\/em>\u00bb [trad. libre]. Anderson favours this umbrella term over \u201cAfrofuturism.\u201d Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones (eds.), Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness<\/em> (Minneapolis: Lexington Books, 2015).<\/span> to the influence of Afro-American literature at the turn of the nineteenth century, including the works of novelist Pauline Hopkins and writer W.E.B. Du Bois. Their writings, resembling antiracist socio-political analyses, with subjects such as the foreigner, the machine, space, and a utopian future, take a critical and constructive look at the notions of difference, progress, territory, and agency. Picking up on their ideas, Afrofuturism envisages liberating decolonial alternatives to a future that can no longer be considered a simple and inevitable consequence of the past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This tension between tradition and contemporaneity sets the course for another movement parallel to Afrofuturism, one that is also anchored in a theoretical and aesthetic conception of an emancipatory future: Indigenous futurism. Defined by Anishinabe theoretician Grace Dillon in Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction<\/em>the expression finds its roots in images, themes, and methodologies that draw on science fiction with the aim of modelling a future from an Indigenous perspective as \u201ca way to renew, recover, and extend First Nations peoples’ voices and traditions.”^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Grace L. Dillon (dir.), Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction<\/em> (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2012): 1-2.<\/span> Less central in the Afrofuturist narrative, questions of tradition, memory, and transmission are at the heart of the Indigenous futurist imaginary. This valorization of the symbolic and material heritage of past generations in the constitution of Indigenous identities becomes fertile ground, here, for reflection on possible futurities beyond the assimilationist tropes of colonialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inspired by Molly Swain, one of the hosts of the podcast M\u00e9tis in Space<\/em>, and her vision of a dystopian now<\/em>, Lindsay Nixon, Two-spirit curator of Cree-M\u00e9tis-Saulteaux origin, adopts a stance that counteracts the putative spatiotemporal sequence mapped out by modern Western society. Suggesting a specifically Indigenous epistemological prerogative regarding the future, Nixon underlines, \u201cWe are the descendants of a future imaginary that has already passed; the outcomes of the intentions, resistance, and survivance of our ancestors.\u201d^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Lindsay Nixon, \u201cVisual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms,\u201d GUTS<\/em>, May 20, 2016, <http:\/\/gutsmagazine.ca\/visual-cultures\/>.<\/span> The notion of survivance \u2014 a neologism at the intersection of survival and resistance \u2014 also central to Dillon\u2019s thought, illustrates the resilience of First Peoples and affirms a timeless identity. For many Indigenous artists, this intrinsic and historical resistance to being inscribed in a temporal linearity (with the advent of colonialism marking an important hiatus in this sequence) opens the door to an imaginary in which time is tractable, simultaneous, or simply not referenced. Furthermore, the utopian projection into an \u201cIndigenized\u201d and performative future responds to the communities\u2019 vital need to architect renewable tomorrows. <\/p>\n\n\n\n