Situating the Afronaut in contemporary art and Afrofuturism is very much about finding safe spaces for black life. It is about exploring and protecting and preparing the body for hostile environments. In an Afrofuturist vision that stakes out black space in the future, black life is often obscured and simultaneously endangered. This obscurity is the result of the overdetermination of the past on black future spaces, namely the baggage of colonialism and apartheid, slavery and Jim Crow, and legacies of displacement. Through the image of the Afronaut, artists are making definitive statements about current situations of liberation, freedom, and oppression, while simultaneously referencing the past and staking a place for black life in the future.
Tegan Bristow, interestingly, situates the Afrofuturist legacy within the trajectory of “the black man in space” (Bristow 2012). Several other theorists, such as J. Griffith Rollefson, also adopt this trajectory, acknowledging Sun Ra...