Afrofutures Africa and the Aesthetics of Black Revolution

This article explores the role of Africa in the avant-garde aesthetic and political convictions of Jeff Donaldson and the AfriCOBRA group. It considers AfriCOBRA and its Black Nationalist artistic expressions in terms of a diasporic strategy for articulating and constructing community. Rather than consider the work’s engagement with Africa as solely a look to an ancestral past, this article considers Africa as a touchstone for articulating a revolutionary and future-looking art movement. Discussions of ‘Afrofuturism’ often focus on fantasy and science fiction seen in examples such as the futuristic persona of Sun Ra and his film, Space is the Place. This article discusses the political and rhetorical work of revolution in the Black Nationalist thinking embraced by AfriCOBRA as a similar kind of conceptual reimagining of the world and its potential futures. © 2018 Third Text.