Chicanonautica: Afrofuturism, Identity, y Yo

by Ernest Hogan

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I am considered to be an Afrofuturist. Besides having a lot of Afro in my futurismo, racism is a primitive default setting the human organism uses to deal with the unfamiliar. All aliens look alike.

Now my novels are discussed in a dissertation, Afrofuturism, Science Fiction,and the Reinvention of African American Culture by Myungsung Kim, as part of the requirements for a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Arizona State University.

There I am, along with George Schuyler, Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler, and Nalo Hopkinson.

How do I (along with Gloria Anzaldúa, Alex Rivera, Rosa Sánchez, Beatriz Pita, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes, and Sesshu Foster) fit in here? Quoting Kim: Chicana/o scholars and artists constantly enact U.S./Mexico border experience as akin to the ontological status of alien. 

The story of my life!

And I have a peculiar relationship with black people, and it’s not just the accident of sharing the name of the Father of Ragtime, or the fact that I arrived on this planet on the same day that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus. All my life, I’ve been mistaken for black. I’ve been called the n-word a ridiculous number of times. As a teenaged science fiction fan, mine was often the only brown face in the room, and only later did I realize that I was counted many times as representative of the noncaucasian members of the human race.

In 1991, at the World Fantasy convention in Tucson, Harlan Ellison, one of my favorite writers, counted the black people in his audience to show how things have improved. He pointed on my direction. I looked around, and whispered, “What does he mean? I don’t see any black people on this side of the room.”

"He means you," my wife whispered back, in her wisdom.

I respectfully played black for the rest of the con, but then all I really had to do was be myself.

That, and being called a “dumb fucking white person” by an Indian in Taos, define my identity crisis.

Hopefully, this will come in handy in a world going crazy over the Black Panther movie. Is Afrofuturism going be normalized into mainstream, global culture? Or will it just be appropriated by Disney Marvel? Is this another breakthrough like the election of Obama? Or just another corporate product?

The phenomenon is not what I was expecting. People are going to the movie in Afro garb that is not cosplay copycatism. I was particularly impressed by two guys dressed like African kings, high-end suits, crowns, and obviously fake lion and leopard skins. It reminds me of Black Pride manifestations from the Sixties.

Don’t buy your identity off the corporate rack; create your own.

I’ve even heard rumors of white kids dressing like T’Challa. Disney Marvel probably won’t be able to control the phenomenon, and that’s a good thing.

The all-white future of the 20th century is dead. Sci-fi productions with nothing but caucasoid faces cause people to think, What’s wrong with this picture? And I can’t keep up with all the writers of color being published these days.

So, call me an Afrofuturist. I can be that, and a Chicano, and a cyberpunk, and a helluvalota other things. It’s just my complicated, crazy, mestizo/rasquache/recombocultural reality.

It’s also what the world is coming to--me, Black Panther, Myungsung Kim, and a whole lot other folks.

Ernest Hogan never knows what people are going to think he is. His mother’s maiden name is Garcia, and he was born in East L.A. As far as he knows, he’s on the planet legally.

Chicanonautica: Cruising the Galactic Barrio on the Mothership

by Ernest Hogan

Can’t you feel the shockwaves sweeping over the planet, and jangling your molecules? The Mothership has launched, and is coming your way! Are you ready, Earthlings?

I’m talking about the new anthology, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond edited by Bill Campell and Edward Hall. This humble Chicanonaut is aboard with “Skin Dragons Talk” -- a yarn about yakuza on the Moon, and a talking alien virus that wants to take over.

There are also stories by Junot Díaz, Lauren Beukes, Victor LaValle, Minister Faust, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, S.P. Somtow, Darius James, and many more!

It’s another part of the strange rumblings rattling through the world of sci-fi/science fiction/speculative fiction these days. Afrofuturism. Postcolonialism. Chicanonautica. Variations on a theme that’s becoming harding to ignore as we hurtle further in the 21st century.

Used to be, not too long ago on this here planet, “sci-fi” corporate product was produced mostly in the English-speaking quarter. It was considered to be the intellectual property of Western Civilization, and light-skinned peoples. When you brought up the subject of characters that represented the rest of the human race, you were told that they just weren’t hip to science and and technology out there in the “undeveloped” world. And if you dared ask about non-white writers -- that was a crazy idea!

Besides, who would buy such fiction? Wasn’t the audience all white, middle-class nerd boys from the Midwest?

Yeah, that was way back in the Nineteen-Hundreds. Things have changed in this Newfangled Millennium. The "science fiction" book market is dominated by nerd girls. And the sci-fi consumers aren’t all white, and they come from all over the planet.

Mix that up with the chaos that the publishing world is in over the coming of the ebook, and the demise of the corporate bookstore, what’s a Nueva York publisher to do?

They haven’t come to their senses yet -- Mothership, and other such anthologies are indie productions, taking advantage of the new technologies and social structures. I don’t know if the old, big-deal publishers will ever catch on. Besides, the days of Nueva York as the center of the book universe are coming to an end.

Publishing is becoming decolonialized.

I’ve been wrapped up in this struggle so long that it gives me déjà vu. It’s good to see hope for a blazing, bright future.

It’s time to claim that future, the galaxy, and beyond . . . 

So buy Mothership. Read it. Live the revolution.

Ernest Hogan has stories in the current anthologies, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology, and Super Stories of Heroes and Villains.