We Bring with Us the Strength of Tomorrow: Visions of Future and Resistance in Brazil, and the Caribbean

Abstract

The Afrofuturist movement has significantly impacted Latin American artists and scholars who seek to recover alternative understandings of the future and create spaces for counterhegemonic narratives within their nations. Brazilian and Caribbean Afrofuturist artists, in particular, have celebrated the integration of Africa and Afrodiasporic philosophies, mythology, cosmology, and technology through artistic performances that depict Afro-centered futures and alternative realities. By focusing on temporality bending, alternative timelines, the revision of the past, and the speculation of future technologies, these narratives illuminate present anxieties and challenge the constructs behind the discourses of futurity within the Brazilian and Caribbean Afro-diasporas. Most important, they raise questions such as, how do these literary works facilitate an epistemic shift pertinent to the struggles of Afro-Brazilian and Caribbean subjects? How do the structure and content of these narratives challenge official historical constructs? In what ways do these stories break away from Westernized visions of futurity to introduce new epistemes into national narratives?