What a Recently Uncovered Story by W.E.B. Du Bois Tells Us About Afrofuturism

“Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” So queried cultural critic Mark Dery, who in the early ’90s coined the term Afrofuturism in “Black to the Future,” his introductory essay to interviews with cultural critics Tricia Rose and Greg Tate and sci-fi writer Samuel Delany.