Rachel Hughes is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in The Vernal Arts & Music Festival, FringePVD, Talking Bodies, in print in the Frequency Writers’ anthology and online at soar.forharriet.com and wnba-books.org where she placed third for fiction in The Bookwoman’s 2018 writing contest. Rachel is also the founder of the international arts collaborative Sidereal with members in Australia, England and the US. Next month she’ll be teaching a one-day class for Frequency Writers, “Writing for the Diaspora,” that will examine Afro-futurism and speculative fiction about and for people from the African diaspora.
Rekha Rosha (Motif): What is the future of Afrofuturism?
Rachel Hughes: Afrofuturism has existed well before the term was first coined in 1991. It is storytelling in the tradition of a displaced people dependent on their oral histories. It’s honoring futuristic gods by those who were disconnected from their past. It’s a celebration and a map of who we were, who we are and who we will be. Speculative storytelling has existed through the entirety of Afro-Caribbean history and we get to continue that tradition today and for all time. The Afrofuture we’re living in today is wonderfully visual: movies, web series, music videos and live shows like the recent Missy Eliot VMA performance during which an alien spaceship descended toward the stage to levitate a man up from the audience. There’s all of this great visual content that is also still leaving ample room for Afrofuturism’s literary and storytelling roots. Going forward, I think the genre is set to expand further into ready-to-wear fashion. I think we’ll see more designers bringing the aesthetic to the forefront through clothes, accessories and makeup. We’ll see more mainstream, wearable, visual reminders that there are black people living in the future.
