Overview

Examining Afro-German artists’ use of Afrofuturist tropes to critique German racial history The term Afrofuturism was first coined in the 1990s to describe African diasporic artists’ use of science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy to reimagine the diaspora’s pasts and to counter not only Eurocentric prejudices but also pessimistic narratives. Out of This World: Afro-German Afrofuturism focuses on contemporary Black German Afrofuturist literature and performance that critiques Eurocentrism and, specifically, German racism and colonial history. This young generation has, Priscilla Layne argues, engaged with Afrofuturism to disrupt linear time and imagine alternative worlds, to introduce non-Western technologies into the German cultural milieu, and to consider the possibilities of posthumanism. Their experiments in futurist and speculative narratives offer new tools for breaking with the binary thinking about race, culture, and gender identity that have been enforced by repressive ideological and state apparatuses, such as educational, cultural, and police institutions. Rather than providing escapism or purely imaginary alternatives, however, they have created a space—outer and artistic—in which their lives matter.

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9780810147584

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Reviews

"""This study deftly analyzes a remarkably fresh array of innovative materials. Layne expertly weaves close readings of aesthetic form together with theoretical insights into the importance of Black German culture today for refining and revising transnational concepts of Afrofuturism.""-- Leslie A. Adelson, Cornell University ""Out of This World offers an important dialogic interanimation of Afrofuturism and contemporary Black German literary, performative, and dramatic texts. This is a lucidly argued, theoretically sophisticated, timely, and compelling book.""--Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, Brown University"

Author Information

Priscilla Dionne Layne is a professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture.

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