Ytasha Womack Quotes

It’s one thing when black people aren’t discussed in world history. Fortunately, teams of dedicated historians and culture advocates have chipped away at the propaganda often functioning as history for the world’s students to eradicate that glaring error. But when, even in the imaginary future—a space where the mind can stretch beyond the Milky Way to envision routine space travel, cuddly space animals, talking apes, and time machines—people can’t fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down.

Afrofuturism is an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation. “I generally define Afrofuturism as a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens,” says Ingrid LaFleur, an art curator and Afrofuturist.

The alien concept has been expanded to explain isolation as well, with studies of “the black geek” in literature and an array of self-created modalities that infer a discomfort in one’s own skin. In summer 2012, Emory University’s African-American Studies Collective issued a call for papers for their 2013 conference, titled “Alien Bodies: Race, Space, and Sex in the African Diaspora.” Held February 8 and 9, 2013, the conference examined the alien-as-race idea and looked at transformative tools to empower those who are alienated. It explored how “we begin to understand the ways in which race, space and sex configure ‘the alien’ within spaces allegedly ‘beyond’ markers of difference” and asked, “What are some ways in which the ‘alien from within as well as without’ can be overcome, and how do we make them sustainable?” Afrofuturist academics are looking at alien motifs as a progressive framework to examine how those who are alienated adopt modes of resistance and transformation. Stranger

Although she initially can’t see Davis past her bias and views his brown skin as alien, she moves past prejudice and falls for him. The responsibility of repopulating Earth consumes her passion. Just as the two are about to consummate their love, they are discovered by a rescue team. To Davis’s dismay, the comet destroyed New York, but the rest of the world is the same.

I’m not saying get rid of those twelve notes. I love what music has done and what it will be. But as a musician who is concerned about music, I say, what’s beyond those twelve notes?