From the Black Brain Belts to the Wakanda Design Group: Black Science, Science Fiction, and Afrofuturism, 1945 to 2022

Since 2018, global audiences have celebrated the style and esthetics of Afrofuturism as shown in Marvel Studios’ films, Black Panther and Wakanda Forever . However, the artists and scholars who have developed the ideas behind these films are only beginning to receive the acknowledgment for their work. The foundation for the public acclaim about the visionary art of Afrofuturism was presented by the African American Intellectual History Society in 2016 under the title, “The Introduction to the Wakanda Syllabus.” That essay reflected 30 years of scholarly work to interpret the literature of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, and Dwayne McDuffie through a transformation of the media landscape described in academic settings as “convergence.” Indeed, the phenomenon of Afrofuturism is as old as civilization itself. It is the speculative design process of imagining the continent of Africa and its diasporic people across time and space, defying the disciplinary constraints of the European liberal arts. Using the concept of Sankofa (looking forward and backward through time), Afrofuturist Design combines art, history, and education in a specific study of historic Black communities that destroyed Jim Crow segregation through determined study of law, technology, and economics. The cinematic production of the Wakanda Design Group represents the century-long growth of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the Divine Nine Black sororities and fraternities, and the hundreds of Black Brain Belt communities that created the Information Age around the world.