sci-fi emancipation

"Discuss as you see fit links between [The Last Angel of History] and anything we have read (or watched) so far."

To be honest, I'm having trouble seeing many connections between Lilith's Brood and the African Diaspora. There's obviously the analogy between Africans taken as slaves for America and humans pushed into genetic bondage with the Oankali; there's black suffrage and Akin's efforts to represent the humans and secure a human Akjai. However, other details, especially the eventual merging of the races, resonate much less with me. That doesn't mean that The Last Angel of History is invalid. The hypothesis that science fiction shares themes with the African Diaspora follows through in those two examples, and they're broad enough to warrant further discussion.

Factually speaking, Africans were taken from their homes, put on strange ships, and transported to a foreign land as slave labor. In Butler's post-apocalyptic fiction, humans are taken from Earth, put on strange ships, and are eventually replanted on a foreign, drastically changed Earth to engage in labor of a more biological kind. In both cases, the vast majority of the enslaved reject their captors, despite the slavers' belief that they are somehow helping the enslaved. The Oankali are utterly convinced that without a "trade", the humans are doomed to destroy themselves. I wouldn't doubt that the colonial slavers believed that without their help, the Africans would similarly degenerate into barbarism.

As for black suffrage and Human Akjai, I'm reminded of the post topic from last week. Historically, it wasn't a "hybrid" African-Caucasian human who fought for black rights. However, the most famous of them, Martin Luther King, Jr., had insights into cultures on either side, just as Akin eventually came to have. It's this mutual understanding that allows real progress to be made between opposing groups.

I think I may have taken those connections a bit far. The link is much cleaner where it concerns music and the technology and themes used to produce it. Eshun wrote in "Future Considerations on Afrofuturism" that music, despite not being sci-fi, shares many themes and occupies just as important a space in Afrofuturism. Artists like Sun Ra and George Clinton make the connection explicit, bringing to their African audience the idea of space travel, new technology, something better. In a nutshell, the connection is this: science fiction and African creative output are both concerned with imagining something new, something better and more hopeful than the present state.