Theorizing Diasporic Future: Afro-Posthuman Ontology and Black Movement

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article explores the aesthetic inspiration that has translocated African American presence within another dimension. Since Martin R. Delany conceived the allohistorical antebellum U.S. in Blake; or, The Huts of America, black writers have created diverse alternate universes, which store and inherit Africana culture in its own ontological vein, interrogating and revising historical events insufficiently treated by realism.
In the post-war and post-Civil Rights Movement eras African American artists began reflecting on shifting racial dynamics in light of technological changes. This shift, in which black experience became mechanized and digitized, explains how technology became a source of new black cultural production. Responding to the conceptual transformation of humanity with a race-specific scope, such futuristic devices as transhuman anamorphosis, cyberspace, and digital souls, which explore humanity outside its phenotypic boundaries, provide African American artists with representational tools to demystify deterministic views of race.
Focusing on shifting racial dynamics caught up in the swirl of technological changes, in which posthumanistic imaginations make it possible for African American artists to envision how racial power can be reconfigured and renegotiated, this article illuminates a process of literary production in which black culture and identity have been continuously reinterpreted.

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