AFROFUTURISM

A few years ago when I started this website I had a comic made about the alternate start to SZN. That comic and the style my brand evolved from was hard to describe, till now. Afrofuturism is a term I stumbled upon and it encompasses some of the style elements and inspirations that make up SZN.

Afrofuturism is a literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical events of the past. (Wikipedia)

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"We don't give a great deal of thought to being human... But at one point in history, ..scientists and profiteers argued about just who was human and who was not. A color-based, sex-based hierarchy was formed largely to regulate who had access to the world's resources and rights of self-determination and who did not. 

This dehumanization was wrongfully encoded in laws, violently enforced, perpetuated by propaganda and stereotypes, and falsely substantiated by inaccurate science, all to justify a swath of violent atrocities in the name of greed. 

The greater part of the civil rights movement ...were efforts to ensure equal rights for all. And this struggle paralleled equal efforts to prove that people of color, women, LGBTQ people, the working class, and others were in fact human. The burden of having to prove one's humanity has defined the attainment of some of the greatest human rights achievements of our times as well as some of the greatest artistic works." (Ytasha L. Womack in Afrofuturism)

[Images: IAfrofuturism, Jinfeng, Erykah Badu]