On October 22, the Charles L. Blockson Collection in Sullivan Hall hosted a celebration of Reynaldo Anderson’s new book, Afrofuturism and World Order. The event featured a presentation by Anderson, followed by a Q&A session. Opening remarks were delivered by Professor Molefi Kete Asante.

Anderson, Director and co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement and Assistant Professor of Africology and African American Studies, recounted his background and path through academia, which eventually drew him to the idea of Afrocentrism—that is, the centering of African agency and historical context, as opposed to the overwhelmingly Eurocentric perspective taught in the Western world.“

I thought, ‘Dang, this stuff is all white,’” chuckled Anderson, looking back on his PhD studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “I knew there had to be people who weren’t European that also did all this stuff.”

Pushing back against those conventions has been central to Anderson’s work ever since. He argues that Afrofuturism represents much more than a new outlook on genre fiction and art—it’s a reclamation of African agency in the past, present and future of our world: “It functions as an epistemic decolonization in terms of what knowledge bases we’re going to use.”

Over the course of a wide-ranging presentation, Anderson outlined the chapters and concepts included in the textbook, while also exploring the origins of Afrofuturism. Anderson discussed what he calls the Black speculative tradition, which he traces back to the 19th century as a response to European science fiction.

“Science fiction…was a response to the limitations of British imperialism. They could see the contradictions that were inherent to British imperialism, allowing race to justify conquering other people, and this developed into the fear of being invaded by the alien,” explained Anderson. “The black speculative tradition emerged as a parallel to that, writing from an anti-racist, anti-slavery tradition in response to the scientific racism of the 19th century. For Instance, when [W.E.B.] DuBois wrote ‘The Comet,’ he was commenting on the permanence of racism—how black and white people only worked together when there is a catastrophe, but in the absence of that catastrophe, they’d go back to how things were."

During the Q&A session that followed the presentation, Anderson looked toward the future, speaking on the importance of centralizing African thought, myth and language in technology like AI-powered large language models, such as ChatGPT. Reclaiming cultural agency on such a high-tech playing field almost sounds like something out of Afrofuturistic genre fiction, but that’s by design.“

Afrofuturism is not only a philosophy of recovery,” notes Anderson. “It’s also one of projection, in terms of how the agency for our own concepts and ideas is asserted."

For more from the event, see Temple PhD grad Eric Nzeribe’s article for Funtimes Magazine.