Talk:Afrofuturism: Difference between revisions

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{{WikiProject ScienceAfrican Fictiondiaspora |class=Start|importance=Mid Low}}

[[Jalal_Mansur_Nuriddin|Nuriddin's]] ''Beyonder'' depicts a futuristic apocalyptic dystopia, in which ecological disasters have plagued mankind in the dying out of the earth's ecosystems. The poem's plot follows the "last of men and jinn"–this being a phrase which Nuruddin calls "racially coded" "in which 'men are evidently the subordinate people of color and 'jinn' are the white ruling elite." The leaders of the jinn have programmed a cyborg, Sir Manikin, "an android jinn" to aid the jinn in their escape from the failing earth–and as Nuruddin nicely summarizes, "through their mastery of science and technology, they [hope to] escape the dying planet and conquer a new frontier" .<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Nuruddin|first1=Yusuf|title=Ancient Black astronauts and extraterrestrial Jihads: Islamic science fiction as urban mythology|journal=Socialism and Democracy|date=20 Sep 2010|volume=20|issue=3|page=127-165|doi=10.1080/08854300600950277}}</ref>. The creation of Manikin is blasphemous from an Islamic perspective, representing "the height of arrogance and folly as it is an attempt to abrogate powers of creation that belong to Almighty Allah alone." The POC under these white-man jinn leaders wash their hands of the effort, and the exiting jinn leave them behind on the planet–when everything goes wrong, Sir Manikin tries to help the jinn but arrives too late and is destroyed by the Angel of Death at the close of the epic poem. Nuruddin claims that this poem is a prime example of Afrofuturism, and bears clear influences from Islam and NOI. Along with [[Steven Barnes|Stephen Barnes]]' alternate history in his novels ''[[Lion's Blood|Lion's Blood']]' and ''[[Zulu Heart]],'' ''Beyonder'' represents some of the only explicitly Islamic American Afrofuturist text. Nuruddin attributes the small number of such Islamic fictional works to the fact that "literary productions has been stifled by strains of conservative religious thought" in Islam, which do not stifle the production of poetry, visual arts, fashion design, and other media.