For Ytasha Womack, the Afro-future is now

On February 17, Chicago’s Adler Planetarium unveiled a new air show called “Niyah and the Multiverse”, a mix of theoretical cosmology, black culture and imagination. And like many Afrofuturist things, Ytasha Womack’s fingerprints are all over it.

Mrs. Womack, who writes both about the genre and of in therehas curated Afrofuturist events across the country, including Carnegie Hall citywide festival – and her work is currently on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Afrofuturism is perhaps most popular in the “Black Panther” films, which immerse viewers in an alternate reality of diverse, technologically advanced African tribes untouched by the forces of colonialism. (In 2023, Ms. Womack published “Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration”, Marvel’s reference book exploring the films’ influences.)

But examples of the genre include science fiction writer Octavia Butler, the Star Trek character Nyota Uhura, and the cyborgian songs of Janelle Monáe. Some even imagine the immortality of Henrietta Lacks, a black woman whose cells were taken without consent for what would become revolutionary breakthroughs in medicine. as an Afrofuturist parable.

Ms. Womack was one of the screenwriters for “Niyah and the Multiverse.” She spoke to The New York Times about what Afrofuturism means to her, the process of interweaving the genre’s themes with core concepts from physics, and how the show aims to inspire. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How do you define Afrofuturism?

Afrofuturism is a way of thinking about the future, with alternative realities based on perspectives from the African diaspora. It integrates imagination, liberation, technology and mysticism.

Imagination is important because it is liberating. People have used imagination to transform their circumstances, to move from one reality to another. They used it as a way to escape. When you’re in challenging environments, you’re not socialized to imagine that. And so claiming your imagination – embracing it – can be a way to heighten your consciousness.

What makes Afrofuturism different from other futuristic versions is that it has a non-linear time perspective. So the future, the past and the present can very well be one. And that’s a concept that’s reflected in quantum physics, when you think about these kinds of other realities.

These alternative realities can be philosophical cosmologies, or scientifically explained worlds. How we explain them varies depending on what your basis for knowledge is.

Which Afrofuturist works have influenced you?

I think of Parliament-Funkadelic, a popular music collective from the 1970s. As a kid, their album covers were in my basement. A lot of artists from that era – Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Earth, Wind & Fire, Labelle – had very epic, Afrofuturist album covers, but Parliament-Funkadelic stands out. There’s one that depicts Star Child, the alter ego of George Clinton, the main music artist, emerging from a spaceship. Those kinds of space-tastic images were in abundance for me as a child.