EUROPE & DC '23 • Day 4: Washington DC
- Bob Aron
- Sep 3, 2023
- 2 min read
AFROFUTURISM
NATIONAL MUSEUM of AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY & CULTURE
There is a lot to take in at this museum and knowing I will likely be visiting DC more often makes it a lot easier to not try and do it all at once. In general, I start shutting down after 90 minutes or so at any history museum, and all the names and dates just start blurring together. Couple that with the subject of slavery in America and everything that has followed, and I was about spent when I reached the Civil War. I plan on leaving the post Civil War & 20th century exhibits for next time. It's really the time I'm most interested in anyway. The atrocities of the slave trade are a lot more difficult to process because people 200-300 years ago knew and understood the world, it's cultures, it's science and everything else, so differently than we do today. It's hard to know from te context of our own era what empathetic people with good intentions back then, actually thought about cultures so radically different from their own. These people literally didn't know anything about the native peoples of Africa, Asia, the America's and South Pacific. In 2023, at least the prejudices and behaviors we see all around us can be contextualized in a culture we sort of understand. The photo above was actually in the Afrofuturism exhibit and I thought a very powerful and creative statement that sums up all th contradictions we continue to deal with in today's culture.
AFROFUTURISM
The great thing about visiting the same museum multiple times is that just checking out a special exhibit or two is enough. Today's special exhibit on Afrofuturism was right down my alley. The majority of the sci-fi and music content of this exhibit occurred in my lifetime and is part of my own nerd canon. I'm embarrassed to admit that even with all the science fiction I have read, I didnt know that Samuel Delany was an African American author. I haven't yet read any of his work but several of his novels have been sitting on my sci-fi reading list in my quest to read all the Nebula and Hugo award winners. The genre has been so dominated by white men for so long, it is evident to anyone that continues to read more recent works, that the influx of a much more diverse collection of authors, shows that we've been missing unique and interesting perspectives in storytelling all these years.
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