Goodbye Black History Month, Hello Black Future

This episode is brought to you by Life Lock.

When you visit the doctor, you probably hand over your insurance, your ID, and contact details.

It's just one of the many places that has your personal info, and if any of them accidentally expose it, you could be at risk for identity theft.

Life Lock monitors millions of data points a second.

If you become a victim, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back.

Save up to 40% your first year at lifelock.com/slash podcast.

Terms apply.

Black History Month has once again come to an end.

This time, it left us a present.

More than ever before, the world is getting to see visions of a black future, from Black Panther to Janelle Minet.

Why is the domain of art called Afrofuturism having such a moment?

And what does it tell us about ours?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

With me here in D.C., we've got Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Hello, Jeff.

Hi, Matt.

Over in New York, we've got Alex.

The band's back together.

Alex Wagner.

Wagner on drums.

Goldberg on vocals.

No, Alex.

Thompson on lead guitar.

No, that's not the way the band should go.

Vibraphone or Theremin, I think, would be my

stop talking dirty.

Please don't talk dirty on this podcast.

Thank you very much.

And with us here in D.C.

is Adam Serwer.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Thank you for joining us.

Hi.

Who is Adam?

Adam is an editor on the politics and policy team at The Atlantic.

That's fantastic.

Who also writes very smart and insightful and wonderful things about the world.

Adam has the tedious tedious talents of being able to edit the crap out of a piece and also write the crap out of a piece.

In fact, we all think we're such good writers, then our editor turns around and just like throws us under the bus with his totally viral sensational

articles that are viral sensation.

Why are you sucking up to him?

I don't even understand.

What's going on here?

Because she has to file something, Sam.

Apparently, she should have write something.

Exactly.

Thank you, Alex.

Exactly.

Oh, the listeners love this cross.

The thing that brings us together this

afternoon, this day, is that as we speak, Hollywood is about to sit down for the Academy Awards, which is, of course, its somewhat idiosyncratic vision of the best in cinema.

Meanwhile, though, a very different vision of cinema is dominating screens around the country.

And I am talking, of course, about Black Panther, the movie that has been taking over theaters across the world.

This movie has meant that America is having the opportunity to see a vision of what is and what could be that the country has never encountered at this scale.

Obviously, there have been huge movies with mostly black casts and mostly black makers before.

One of them might even win Best Picture.

But blockbuster audiences have never seen anything like Wakanda, which is the fictional futuristic world that Black Panther is set in.

That means that we have never had the chance that we do to talk about this completely different vision of the world and what it tells us about our own world.

Oh, quick word on spoilers.

We have them.

We have them.

If you haven't seen Black Panther yet, I think this crew is pretty unapologetic about

talking about some of the details of the movie.

I will say for the record.

If you haven't seen the movie yet, you haven't been on the internet in like two weeks.

If you haven't seen the movie yet, you're a racist.

That's my

Jeff.

I'm just going to outkillmonger.

I'm going to out-kill Killmonger.

I am going to say that I think this is a hard movie to spoil.

So little of its actual dynamism is in the particular plot points, and so much is in the very particular vision that takes shape on film.

I don't think that there's anything that we're going to talk about that could diminish listeners' enjoyment of the movie, but listeners, if you are a spoiler cop, pause now or forever hold your peace.

And now, Adam, as you're very good writing about this movie attests, it's a film filled with a lot of ideas and is telling a whole lot of different stories at once.

Tell our listeners what story you saw take shape on screen.

So I think the center of Black Panther is this sort of ideological

dispute between the protagonist T'Challa, the Black Panther, who wants to maintain,

you know, Wakanda is a country that is more technologically advanced than any other country in the world, but it's hidden and it maintains this facade as a third world country in order to avoid the ravages of colonialism, which have caused havoc all over the rest of the continent.

And the villain Killmonger basically comes to Wakanda with the sense that Wakanda has abandoned its responsibility to the rest of the world, particularly to black people.

And his big evil plan is essentially to start revolutions all over the world using this precious metal that can only be found in Wakanda that can be used to make weapons of incredible power.

And, you know,

a lot of audience members are sympathetic to Killmonger's plan, even though at its base, Killmonger is kind of reproducing.

I would argue he's sort of

corrupted by American foreign policy within the context of the film.

There's a white CIA agent.

He's one of the only two white characters.

And he repeatedly identifies Killmonger's behavior as American.

He says, when Killmonger's on screen, he says, he's not Wakandan, he's one of ours.

they're examining what Killmonger is doing, he's taking over the country, he's like, oh, this is what we train these guys to do.

So there's this sense that Killmonger's idealism has been infected by the very colonialism that he imagines himself fighting.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: On that note, Adam, you make the point in your essay for the Atlantic that because Killmonger is such a nuanced enemy,

the real villain in the story is probably something that doesn't take human form, but it's the very history of imperialism.

I mean, and Jelani Cobb in the New Yorker makes the same point.

He says the villain, to the extent that the term even applies, is history itself.

We talk about Black Panther so much in terms of, well, it's situated in sort of like a futuristic, and we'll talk more about Afrofuturism in the second half of the podcast.

But really, it's all about the past, isn't it?

You know, can I add to that just a quick thought, which is

before we go to Afrofuturism, let's go to Afro-pastism.

That's not an actual term.

But when I was watching it, I was thinking of Du Bois and Booker T.

Washington a little bit.

Both victims of

a certain set of circumstances, both had a very different approach to the problems of African Americans in that case.

But I thought,

you know,

the obvious sympathy of the audience is with Killmonger in the same way that today's readers, today's thinkers, intellectuals, their sympathy is obviously more with Du Bois than Booker T.

Washington's kind of gradualism,

respectability politics, kind of bootstrap yourself, don't get involved in the messy radicalism of the moment.

Jeff and Adam, it's interesting for me to hear you say how firmly history was in your mind as you watched Black Panther.

My experience of it was a movie informed by history, but not constricted by it, and also set very much in a world that sort of rhymes with our own, but is built on fundamentally different premises.

Jeff, you mentioned Booker T.

Washington, W.E.B.

Du Bois.

The quote that came to mind for me when I thought about how the movie related to America today was from James Baldwin.

Back in 1965, Baldwin had this legendary debate with William F.

Buckley about the American dream.

And he made the point that for some of us, I mean, for all of us, America's history can constrict our ability to dream.

But let me let him say it.

Until the moment comes.

When we the Americans, we the American people are able to accept the fact that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and black,

that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other,

and that I am not a ward

of America.

I am not an object of missionary charity.

I am one of the people who built the country.

Until this moment, there is scarcely any hope for the American dream

because the people who are denied participation in it

by their very presence

will wreck it.

And if that happens, it's a very grave moment for the West.

Thank you.

For some of us in America today, it's possible to look to history and have this untinged nostalgia to imagine that we came from some sort of golden age.

But for some of us, particularly if you're black in America, that golden age just does not exist in the past.

The future, though, especially a future set in a world with a slightly different history,

that has potential.

Five years ago, NPR conducted this poll of African Americans that surprised people with just how hopeful black Americans were about the future, even relative to the overall population, which was also relatively hopeful.

In 2015, The Atlantic did a broad survey of Americans, and that poll too had a similar flavor.

People, black folks in in particular, felt especially hopeful about what was ahead.

I don't know how that outlook has fared in President Trump's America, but I do think that part of what is so striking about Black Panther is it portrays a world with a different history and therefore a different set of power dynamics, not just who has it, but in how it could be wielded.

Adam, Jeff talked about Du Bois and Booker T.

I cited Baldwin.

Whose voice were you hearing as you watched Black Panther?

I think, well, this is partially informed by notes that my colleague Van Newkirk gave me when I asked him to read my piece.

But I really think the film

is, in my view, a kind of allegory for the breakdown of the Black Panther Party.

So it's this sort of ironic, it's about the superhero Black Panther, but it is actually sort of secretly about the Black Panther Party as well.

And the original Black Panther Party, during its dissolution, there was a big ideological split between a group that was made up mostly of the original leadership that was moving towards basically a kind of social democracy and the more radical, which is mostly made up of younger members who really wanted to start waging a guerrilla war against the United States.

And obviously, a lot of the older leadership that thought that it was insane given the

disparity in resources.

And in a way, I think, you know, it's not that,

you know,

I don't think that the Wakandans think that violence is abhorrent, right?

They're not civil rights activists in the 1960s.

They're not non-violent.

They use violence to overthrow Killmonger.

But I do think that,

you know...

at the end of the movie you see a reflection of this of which side of that wins that dispute.

So you see the more social democracy aspect of the Black Panther Party, the breakfast programs, the education stuff.

That is like sort of represented in the solution that T'Challa chooses to engage in the world rather than the more radical violent overthrow version, which is what Killmonger represents.

So I really think, you know, and

director Ryan Kugler is from Oakland and, you know, the Black Panther Party was obviously born in Oakland.

So I think that that whole dispute does inform sort of the shape of the film and the characters and the underlying ideological dispute that happens.

Yeah.

One of the points of departure for this conversation was Adam's great piece about the villain at the center of the movie, Killmonger.

Adam, tell our listeners what Killmonger said to you as a character and why you found him so tragic, complex, and interesting.

Aaron Powell, I think Killmonger has a number, I mean he's a very layered villain.

I mean first of all he represents this sort of sense of orphanhood in African American culture due to the separation of black people from their ancestral homeland.

You know, black people brought to the United States as slaves.

We have no idea, you know, what part of Africa we're from, what our cultural backgrounds were, what our language was, our religion.

So in a way,

Killmonger, who is furious at Wakanda for not using its technological prowess to, say, end the slave trade or end segregation or apartheid, is sort of a representative of the pain and anger of that separation.

But he's also a unique villain in that he represents maybe the first time that I've seen in a superhero film where the villain more or less wins the argument.

Audiences, I think, really liked Killmonger because when he walks, he strolls into the throne room in Wakanda and says, you know, there's two billion people in the world who look like us whose lives are much harder.

And where was Wakanda?

Why didn't you guys do anything?

A lot of people were like, yeah, that's a...

really good question.

And the truth is that the protagonist of the film, T'Challa, the Black Panther, or or if you prefer to be ambiguous, they're both sort of the Black Panther.

He accepts that argument.

He rebukes his own father.

He's like on the ancestral plane, and he tells all the previous Wakandan Black Panthers, you were wrong.

You were wrong to isolate Wakanda.

And at the end of the film, even though he defeats Killmonger and Killmonger is fatally wounded,

T'Challa is sad.

He's got tears in his eyes.

He folds Killmonger's arms in the Wakandan salute.

I think T'Challa has a sense, and you really get that on screen, that this didn't have to be this way.

That Killmonger became Killmonger sort of out of his own choices, but also out of circumstances that were not at all his fault and that were forced upon him, you know, partially by T'Challa's own father, T'Chaka, who abandoned him in Oakland after murdering his father.

Adam and

Jeff and Matt, you know, just to sort of take a step back here,

away from Black Panther specifically and sort of contextualizing this in our broader pop culture landscape, it's interesting to me that Get Out and Black Panther, which are two of the most sort of two films that have led to, I think, the most robust

and broad conversations we've had about race in this country, are guised as these kind of popcorn films.

Do you think...

It's the only way you sneak it in.

I guess so, right?

Fruit Vale Station didn't make a billion bucks, did it?

Well, but we wouldn't have, I mean,

one would not exist without the other, right?

Does it surprise you guys that the conversation has touched as many people as it seems to have?

And do you think this changes the way we talk about race and also the kind of films we make?

So

it doesn't surprise me in part because the work itself is so strong.

I mean, there's some things we haven't even touched on.

I mean, yesterday...

There are many things we haven't even touched on.

Yesterday when we we were at, I was at the Atlantic event at the Apollo Theater and Lupita and Yango was talking about her relationship with one of the other, her character, Nakia's relationship with Okoya, one of the other characters in the film, and sort of like they have this like incredible scene where they're both,

you know, they're having this argument.

You know, one of them is loyal to the throne itself and what she sees is the greater principle.

And of course,

Lupita's character, Nakia, is more personally loyal to T'Challa, and she thinks, you know, Okoya is making a mistake.

And that sort of conversation that happens in the movie between those two characters, I don't think we've ever seen a conversation like that between two female characters in a superhero movie before.

And there are like multiple instances of that in Black Panther.

The depth and richness of the female characters is unusual.

And there's been so much writing about that as well.

There's been so much writing about sort of the class elements of the film and like to what extent does T'Challa represent a sort of black middle class that has become insensitive to the plight of the black underclass?

I think yesterday, um, Chadwick Boseman mentioned

he sort of vindicated that.

He said, you know, I got it when I was doing my character, I had to think about the fact that I was born with a quote-unquote vibranium spoon in my mouth.

You know, so there's just part of it is that Get Out and Black Panther, they're genre films, right?

But they're so

they're so thoughtful and layered because of the genius of their directors that they've provoked and inspired a lot of nuanced discussion from the people who saw them.

As to whether it changes the business, I mean, I don't know, it's very difficult.

You know, it's not as though we haven't had great films from black directors or from women directors before, but Hollywood

is way more culturally conservative than the hype would have you believe.

And I think,

you know, another thing that Hollywood does is

it often hues to what it believes to be the cultural zeitgeist.

And it's.

which is why we're going to have Black Panther 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10.

Or hopefully one of them

is led by Janelle Minet.

Naturally.

No, Alex, your point is so interesting.

I mean, these are another way of looking at this is saying these are the smart, this is the smartest horror movie, Get Out, and the smartest.

superhero movie.

I happen to not like superhero movies very much, so I'm prejudiced against them.

But they're the smartest

of those two genres ever made.

And I think they're smart out of necessity.

I mean, which is to say, I mean,

if you're these directors,

you want to sneak politics in to the multiplex, you're going to have to sneak it in in a very entertaining package.

And that's the subversive genius of what's going on

in this moment.

But part of it is also just the fact that...

we look at genre movies as one type of thing, and we look at other movies as another type of thing.

So ex-Machina, for example, to name another movie, gets kind of bucketed into a different category.

It gets to be a prestige film.

It gets to,

it is on, it's not thought of as a popcorn movie, but I think that something like,

I mean, maybe, I mean, certainly the folks in the art house are thinking about Ex Machina as another in the vast horde of popcorn movies, but I think that one of the characteristics of Black Panther is it's a film that's as well executed, as creative, as filled with ideas, as visually and narratively interesting as any other film that you could see, whether it's in a landmark theater or an AMC megaplex.

And it's mostly sort of our weird conventions

that force us to sort of put Black Panther in the genre bucket instead of the crazy good movie bucket.

Well, I also think that, you know, you got to remember, like,

there's not a lot of tolerance.

I would say that minority directors and women directors have a lot lower threshold for making mistakes.

And so part of the reasons these movies are so good are that these are the few directors who have been able to break out into actually making their own movie.

You know, we get plenty of mediocre action and horror movies all over the place that are made by white directors.

But if you're going to be, if a studio is going to trust you with like a billion dollars to make your movie or whatever, you have to be, you know, you have to be kind of a genius.

Can I say one thing?

I did write an article about this for the Atlantic about how hard it is to get movies made.

That was a good article.

The thing that, you know, we're not talking about is just how incredibly this film is done at the box office.

And for all of, I think, the hand-wringing around Hollywood and a lot of it's legitimate about how hard it is for women and minorities to make it.

I do think this is, this changes the game in a fundamental way because it had a proper big big

blockbuster opening and the narrative that black people don't go to the movies and that black films don't do well overseas is basically smashed.

Not only that, but you have probably one of the most sophisticated racial allegories like movies, books, whatever, what have you.

It's prompted this insanely dynamic conversation about reconciling America's slave history to the sort of the legacy of imperialism, gender roles.

I mean,

it's an incredibly robust conversation.

I mean, it's not going to bring down the Trump presidency.

So let's not go.

Well, that's another piece.

Would this film have done as well under President Obama?

I think it probably would have, but in a different way.

No, I don't, I was thinking about it.

I don't think so necessarily because I think the moment, I think the sour moment for a lot of people, including especially African Americans,

I think this was kind of a balm, maybe a little bit.

This is kind of a thing that's like, okay, you know what?

I'm going to go to the movies to feel better because the news isn't making me feel that good.

I think in one of my hopes about the movie, and I hope we'll talk about this more in the second part of our conversation, one of my hopes about the movie is that we resist the urge to pigeonhole it.

And I think that the hypothetical, would it have done better in Obama's America than would it have done worse,

is in part that.

I mean, one of my hopes for the movie, part of what's interesting about it to me, in addition to the ideas, just

the scope and range and ambition of the ideas that are in it, is a hope that actually the ideas that are from it start to infect other ways of storytelling, other movies, other

methods of

smart superhero movies?

Not just smart superhero movies, but I mean, one of the qualities of Wakanda in this film is that it is a place that is deeply organic.

We've been used to for a few years seeing,

since Kubrick, honestly, we've been used to seeing visions on the screen of the future that are scrubbed clean.

They don't have trees in them.

They are shiny and metallic.

They're antiseptic.

They lack a variety even of people within them.

There is a monoculture in those screens.

They are all dystopias.

And one of the things about Wakanda that's so interesting about it, to see what distinguishes it almost instantly, is that it is an organic, tree-filled, land-filled place with a variety of people, not only from the folks in the theater audience, but a variety of people depicted within the screen who look different, who are doing familiar human rituals and acts of fellowship, who are having conversations, dealing with tensions that are both familiar but also quite forward-pointing, distinct.

It really is imagining

a different world.

My question, Adam, is which

genre is going to be co-opted next by what clever African-American director?

Oh, I have no idea.

I'm going to guess

the rom-com.

I know, you know what?

The alien movie, maybe.

I don't know.

That would be interesting.

Janelle Monet rom-com is going to be the focus

of our next conversation.

No, Janelle Monet in space.

That's a movie I'd think.

It's going to involve robots.

We were about to kick Jeff out the room for a minute to talk about why.

I don't think we're allowed to do that, contractually.

Because I said, Janelle Monet in space, and I would watch.

Instead of Sandra Bullock, how about Janelle Monet?

So we can make it a clear.

Driving a bus?

A runaway bus?

No, driving a runaway spaceship.

Jeff will leave us to go on Gallivants, and he will be back with us next week.

And Van Newkirk, staff writer for the Atlantic, will come and join his place.

Stick with us.

This episode is brought to you by Onit.

Want to know the secret to staying locked in?

Onit Alpha Brain.

This daily supplement is jam-packed with clinically studied ingredients that support focus, memory, and mental speed.

Whether you're in your daily grind or deep in the zone, Onit Alpha Brain helps you stay razor sharp.

Visit Onit.com for 15% off, subscribe and save, and see what your brain can really do.

Before we pick up part two of the conversation, I asked a couple of our colleagues to tell us about some recent incarnations of Afrofuturism they particularly enjoyed.

Here's Taylor Hosking, an editorial fellow on our politics and policy team.

In the video for All the Stars, Kendrick Lamar and Sizza went on a powerful Afrofuturist migration back to Africa that ended in Egypt.

I found that seeing them in those explicit contexts felt really different from the way that African American musicians had been expressing their relationship to the diaspora before that.

As a millennial, I saw African American artists putting themselves on the continent, wearing fabrics that are not from cultures that they were raised in and engaging with the kind of questions that I do every day when I want to wear certain things or when I want to create art.

And I think it was an important moment for Afrofuturism to show that this history that is very African American,

it has a place today and imagining our future.

We are joined for this part of the conversation by Van Newkirk, Atlantic staff writer.

Van, welcome to the table.

Thanks for having me.

Van, welcome.

Thanks.

We're talking in the first half of our conversation about the notion of an Afrofuturist rom-com, among other things.

And I kind of wanted to start there, even though I had originally wanted to start with your very good piece in the magazine in the

we're going to talk about that in a second.

One of the other releases of the moment in our Afrofuturist moment

is Janelle Monet has released the beginnings of what promises to be a visual concept album called Dirty Computer.

She's released two videos, Django Jane, and a video called Make Me Feel.

Make Me Feel

might be described as, among other things, a black rom-com set, partially in a future.

Yeah, definitely.

It's been done.

It's like it's about to be done

in a really big way.

One of the things that's interesting about Janelle Manet, for the conversation that we were just having about Black Panther.

So Janelle is in this broad tradition that we are calling,

using Mark Derry's term and calling Afrofuturism.

Janelle arrived in this in this landscape kind of fully formed as an artist who is clearly part of a long tradition of musicians who have taken music as a medium, music and the music video as a medium in which to imagine different futures,

to imagine different mixings of gender and power, among other things.

Monet's first big album, The Arc Android, was another concept album that had at its center a character named Cindy Mayweather, who was an android.

Janelle's second album, The Electric Lady, featured the acronym Queen,

Queen standing for queer, untouchables, emigrants, excommunicated, and negroid.

But Janelle Monet has been, ever since she's been a popular musician, using music to imagine characters and stories.

that are rich, vivid, and super, super interesting.

And she has, with this latest effort, kind of formally

taken the baton from Prince, including using some of the actual sounds apparently that he created in working with her.

I am curious.

I wanted to start it there.

She starts with Make Me Feel, the first, one of the first videos, which is a music video with her and Tessa Thompson walking into a club where the boundaries of sexuality and performance and power all seem to be quite blurry.

And it's going to go from there.

What does that catalog, Manet's catalog, teach you, man?

Well, let's start with that video and we can start unpacking from there.

That's just the way you make me feel.

That's just the way you make me feel.

That's just the way you make me feel.

That's just the way you make me.

So that video, you mentioned Prince, right?

You mentioned the influence of Prince.

This song, Make Me Feel, is so, it's such a Prince song.

It's got the Minneapolis funk guitar lick on the chorus.

It is such a direct Prince tribute from Janelle Monet.

And the video sort of falls into the same, it's a very Princeian video.

You've got Tessa Thompson made up just like Vanity, like some of the same exact looks Vanity wore when she was.

making music.

And so you have this, I think, a very purposeful homage to Prince.

but you mentioned monel getting started uh and how she sort of always wrapped in afrofuturism uh this aesthetic not just this aesthetic but this commentary into what she does and i hate to be that person uh but you know i've been listening i've been listening to to janelle uh for much longer than uh her first album well before the arc android i was in atlanta listening to her in the coffee shops back when she was signed to big boy's label right right back when she she was very much still then an Afrofuturist artist.

Big Boy, who was part of Outcast, which was, among other things, also

imagining doing its work very much within this tradition.

So she was taking, yeah, ATLIN.

She was taking

the aesthetic that was considered for most people a male aesthetic by Big Boy and by Andre and making it into this really, I think, much broader sense of Afrofuturism that went well beyond even Andre, what he was doing.

And that was before the Arch Android.

Cindy was already around before then.

Yeah.

I think one of the reasons why we're talking about Prince and Janelle Monet and Andre 3000, who's become, well, by virtue of his name,

who is

perhaps the king, the contemporary king of Afrofuturism, although it's verged into dandyism of late.

One of the reasons why these artists feel like outliers, especially to sort of the general public, is, and it's something that you've written about, Van, is they reimagine the oppressive past that we often associate with black characters, black artists, that they're sort of, which isn't to say they're forsaking the sort of African-American experience in America, but they've created persona that exist independent of it and actually show us in a way how fungible identity can be and how freeing, right?

And another thing is that they are, because they are operating within the world of music, which is a domain in which the power dynamics,

the creative forces driving it, have a different racial character than a lot of other industries and a lot of other creative media.

Because they get to make art in this universe where there really is a whole landscape that is fully mainstream, that is the biggest music out there, that's inhabited by the likes of Missy Elliott and Prince and Michael Jackson and George Clinton,

that as far back as you can name

in popular music, there is a tradition of artists that

are flying to the moon and putting spaceships on stage.

And so within that, in the space where they can already be dominant, they can tell stories and ask questions and bring ideas into the sound of the music that they're making that just feel both distinctive and like they're part of a whole other world, which I think is part of what gives such a richness to their music.

Janelle Monet is, I mean, Archandroid in particular is sort of like, it's like a musical epic.

Like you could almost make Archandroid into like madrigals in Archandroid.

You could almost make it.

Yeah, you could make it into like an opera.

You know what I mean?

Like it would be, it would be very easy.

Like it has this like sweeping plot about like time travel and saving the world and like like forbidden love between humans and robots.

And like it's just, and it's, and it has the whole like weird Fritz Lang metropolis aesthetic behind.

I mean, it's just, it's just an incredible album.

You know, Electric Lady is, I think, more traditional,

but it's certainly like she has existed in that sort of space of making not just like music that's influenced by science fiction, but is a kind of science fiction in and of itself.

Yeah.

Right.

And getting back to something Alex was talking about,

Afrofuturism here is such a great lens because when you have a people who exist in a space where so much of their history has been purposefully stripped away from them, when their languages have been taken, and also when the prospect of the future is so uncertain, imagining both, reimagining both the past and the future are both, those are revolutionary acts.

And that's the crux of Afrofuturism right there.

And as Adam has pointed out, I mean, so much of African history, whether it's one's own personal history or the history writ large, has been stolen and has disappeared into the void.

And you wrote about this, Adam, in your own experience going back to Senegal.

Yeah, so I mean, I had the opportunity to visit Senegal and I went to the slave house on Gorey Island, which has, you know, the door of no return when you look out and it's, you know, there's like it's the door where the plank would go where they'd march people onto the ships.

And it's just like an overwhelming and like crushing experience to like conceive of what people were going through, what they were thinking, what they were feeling as they were being forced, you know, out of the only world they had ever known into bondage.

And I mean, yeah, I mean, there's, there's, I mean, like, you, you, you can, you can certainly see

that pain doesn't disappear from Afrofuturism, right?

It's not like they imagine a world without that pain, but it, but that pain is woven into a different kind of story.

Yeah.

A few years ago, I had a conversation with a novelist named Yatasha Womack, who writes in the Afrofuturist tradition in her novels.

And when I asked her what that mode gave her as a writer, as a novelist, she said, I wanted to create a character who was not limited by our definition of

what a woman could do or what a person of color could do.

I didn't want her to have any kind of social constrictions.

So placing the character in the future on another planet enabled me to create a world where she didn't have to deal with some things you might assume someone may have to deal with today.

Part of this tradition for her, part of the mode for her, was enabling her to have a different set of premises.

to ask a different set of questions than you have to ask if you are stuck in a world where the power dynamics and the the histories are exactly what they are in the real world.

And I think that that's been also part of the possibility

for other artists.

It's why, you know, when Miss C.

Elliott,

when Super Dupafly was a single and it just sounded unlike anything else that was on the radio, and you could sort of hear the future of music, the next decade of music embedded within it.

And you could also hear a little bit of history of music too, right?

That ability to kind of sidestep the universe that we're in and just create something that feels wholly new but has elements of familiarity, I think that's something that makes this genre pretty powerful.

And I also think, you know, when we have art, I recently interviewed Amy Sherrold, who painted Michelle Obama's official portrait, and she paints her black, she paints exclusively black subjects, and she paints them not not using black or brown paint, but using grayscale.

Because to her, painting

black bodies is inherently a political act, and she wants to free the canvas in the immediate from that and the history of what America has done to people of black and brown skin, and wants the art to exist in a different way.

And in the same way, I think you're seeing some of that with Afrofuturism, the creation of a narrative that exists independent of the legacy of white oppression and white culture that's framed in a completely different and unique and fundamentally new way.

It sort of draws our attention to how much we expect black artists, black movies, black musicians to operate within this framework that's been established not by them or informed by the black experience, but by a dominant white patriarchy.

Absolutely.

I've talked to Yatasha Womack.

I've talked to

lots of people who are making Afrofuturist art.

Lynn K.

Jemison, who just won two Hugo Awards back to back.

The basics of everything they're talking about here is essentially the basic of the storyline is a black character comes into power, into some sort of power that, like you said before, Matt, is not necessarily allowed or imagined in our current confines of reality.

And that's the same thing that happens in Black Panther.

The what if there is what if an entire country had this power that we've not been able to allow to envision.

You got all the different stories about both future and past.

They all fit into this Afrofuturist tradition where we are discussing power and who has it, who doesn't.

And so it is both a radical reorganization of what we believe to be true and possible, but also, I believe, an analysis of what is true and possible today.

So it's it's both fantasy and a stark view of of what reality is.

Yeah.

Van, you recently wrote about a series in the April of 2018 issue of The Atlantic that

is itself

a dystopian future.

And talk a little bit about

the series and

what it is, what story it tells, and what it tells you.

Yeah, so I wrote about Tomi Adeyemi's new book coming out.

It's called Children of Blood and Bone.

It's the first of an intended trilogy.

And she is a it's her debut novel.

They've got a massive book deal and also a movie deal for it already.

It's one of the biggest book film deals you'll see come out for a debut writer ever.

And it's written from the

perspective of the gods it uses, the supernatural framework.

It's a fantasy novel.

It uses Yorba Orisha as a framework for the supernatural.

So it takes

something considered by many Americans to be foreign, a West African set of deities, and it uses them instead of medieval Europe, which is always the setting for every single fantasy you read from Game of Thrones to Lord of the Rings.

And it subverts that, but it does pretty much the same thing you'd expect of a fantasy novel.

It takes a young person, and she is granted, again, extraordinary power

through magic, and she goes on a quest to destroy a

majorly oppressive emperor.

So that's pretty much the basic plotline for every single fantasy franchise you read.

But it's so fresh and new because of the addition of not just these West African European gods and goddesses,

but of characters who are dealing with power in a realistic way that people of color often deal with.

So you see that she includes scenes of police brutality in this book.

They include scenes of women who experience

pretty extraordinary violence from men who are grappling with

how they cope with that violence.

Do they repay men in full with violence or do they try to find another path?

And these are all meta-commentaries on both the black American and the black African experience for people who are for nations now that are trying to figure out their stance in the world.

Is progress achieved by finding a new path forward that the oppressors could not think of, or is it paid back with revenge in the same way the oppressors oppressed people?

So I think this is a major novel and it's going to be a major trilogy.

It's going to win some awards, sell lots of tickets when it becomes a movie.

It's probably going to be a big deal.

Yeah.

You heard it here first.

Part of what we're seeing, I think,

is that in medium after medium,

I mean, one way of construing the divide between movies and to some extent publishing, where there are fairly high,

there have been fairly high barriers to entry.

And music, which has been

part of the story, the formative story of a lot of popular music is kind of a weird Silicon Valley garage origin story, right?

Where it's someone with their

setup.

If it was 30 years ago, it was actual turntables.

If it's today, it's someone who has

an okay laptop.

But it's a form in which creators who don't have a lot of industry buy-in or capital or a clear pipeline into getting their work heard and seen can experiment, can dabble, and can make their own voice, can shape their own stories.

I think to come back to part of our earlier conversation, I think one of the differences here, one of the things that I'm excited for, is to as hopefully those barriers to creation get lower and lower in different forms in video games, in movies, Sean Baker, Florida Project, Tangerine, shot on an iPhone.

As those barriers become lower, to see the variety of stories.

that creators can tell, to see the multiplicity of worlds that storytellers get to imagine.

So I am looking forward to that.

Oh, definitely.

I have nothing to say other than that.

That's a mic drop moment.

So with that, even though I don't like to give myself the final word, I'm going to turn to keepers.

What have you heard, read, watched, seen, or listened to beyond the works that we've discussed in this conversation that you do not at this moment want to forget?

Adam Serwer, can we start with you?

Yeah, well, I guess I'm in the middle of Nell Irvin Painter's Standing at Armageddon, which is her history of the Gilded Age, and it's fantastic.

And I would highly recommend it.

There are a lot of parallels to our current political moment.

So, yeah, that's my keeper.

I'm so excited for that.

Nell Irvin Painter, of course, is the author of.

I should say, it's my first time reading it, but it's an old book.

She published it a few decades ago, but it is my ignorance that I'm only coming into it now, but it is really fantastic.

Thank you for the recommendation.

Alex Wagner, what do you want to keep?

In honor of our friends from Atlanta, I suggest that everybody go out and listen to the track Kryptonite by, well, the remix by Big Boy and Killer Mike, which remains one of my favorite

albums from down south and that period of Atlanta flourishing of the mid, the second half of the first decade of this millennium.

Amazing.

I will go back and re-listen.

Van Newkirk, what do you not want to forget?

I am going to stick with the dungeon family.

My suggestion, my keeper, is the song Equimini by Al Carl.

That's always a classic.

I believe it's the greatest song of all time.

It might be.

It was part of my wedding vows.

It is a very important and integral song to the Afrofuturist canon.

So if you want to start understanding what we're talking about, if you've never heard of any of this before,

get out your phone, listen to Aquimini by Outcast, and it will explain everything.

And it's the circle, nothing lasts forever.

But until they close the curve,

it's him and I, Aquimini.

You know, can I just say for the record that the Outcast song Happy Valentine's Day was part of my wedding nuptials

band, so we're on the same page.

These are all, this is just, I hope that everyone actually goes and

all of these things.

This is just a mixtape happening.

So because in part

I wanted to find a related but adjacent offering that has recently just stuck with me and that I hope to not forget soon, I'm going to make a totally different book recommendation.

It is a book by Annalie Newitz called called Autonomous.

And it is also a work of speculative fiction.

And

unlike a lot of speculative fiction books, some of the dangers, one of the dangers of sci-fi is that the stories can feel like essays that have thin kind of plots and characters with kind of half-baked motivations, but mostly are a vehicle for the author to say a thing about the world.

That is certainly not true of most of the works that we've discussed today, even though our discussion of them may make them sound that way.

But the best, I think, science fiction, for me at least, is

work that imagines a rich world, a rich and self-contained world, and lets you spend time in that world for a while.

And once you've left it, look at your own world with fresh eyes.

And Autonomous is one of those books.

It is rich.

It is fully and robustly narrative.

It has interesting characters with interesting backgrounds and problems.

It's a very like Wakanda, organic, textured world.

But one of the most interesting moments in it, and one of the ideas that is sort of central to the book, one of the protagonists is a sentient AI.

You know, there are a lot of books with sentient AIs as characters.

This one, named Paladin in the book, has the advantage of being a

also just a thoughtfully imagined character.

And in the book, Paladin undergoes, among other things, a change in pronouns.

And

the reason for that, the way that that narrative transition happens, and what it illuminates about gender and how it works in our world today, is one of, I think, the best walkthroughs of that experience, of that phenomenon that has been told in

this type of a way.

I think Ennelie did a really good job of thinking through, of stepping outside of her very sort of socially prescribed perspective and asking the question,

gender.

If a machine were encountering gender for the first time,

what would they think about it?

How would it limit or enable them?

How would they use it?

And asking that question through the lens of story and character and plot in a way that I think is really enriching and interesting.

So Autonomous by Annalie Newitz is is my recommendation, my keeper.

Adam, Alex, Van.

This has been a lovely conversation.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you for joining us.

Thanks, Adam and Van.

Oh, thanks.

Had a good time.

I look forward to future ones.

All right.

Till next time.

Once again, that'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau and Diana Douglas.

Thanks as always to my co-hosts Jeff and Alex and to our guests from the Atlantic staff, Adam Serwer and Ben Newkirk with cameos from Adrian Green and Taylor Hosking.

As always, thanks to John Batiste for the brilliant version of the battle hymn that plays us in and out.

Leave us a voicemail with your contact information and your vision of the future at 202-266-7600.

Check us out at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

Catch the show notes notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, we always appreciate it when you rate and review us in Apple Podcasts.

And of course, subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

But we appreciate you for listening.

May you imagine a richer world and help bring it about.

We'll see you next week.