Naturally, Black inventors in the US were the first to express such possibilities. The creation of speculative art with distinctly Black aesthetics started in the middle of the 20th century, as writers, singers, and others with a worldview rooted in the troubled past and present and a variety of other cultural assumptions than white hegemony.

In 1993, the style was retroactively given the name “Afrofuturism.” Afrofuturism is defined broadly as “visions of the future — including science, technology, and its cultures in the laboratory, in social theory, and in aesthetics — through the experience and perspective of African diasporic communities,” according to sociologist Alondra Nelson, who insists that it “should be a big tent of expanding borders of the possibilities for Black life.”

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