Afrofuturism as Weapon: Fighting Erasure with Imagination

In Brazil, the past doesn’t stay buried. It hums in drum circles, dances through carnival processions, and echoes through ancestral memory. Yet for centuries, the future was a space colonized by whiteness—whether on television, in schoolbooks, or in national mythology. To be Black in Brazil often meant being trapped in a looping present: silenced, excluded, and hyper-visible only as stereotype.

But something has shifted.

Across Brazilian cities and digital landscapes, a cultural and political insurgency is rewriting the script. It’s called Afrofuturismo, and while it shares DNA with its North American cousin, it has evolved into something singular: a movement where ancestral cosmologies, techno-utopias, and street-level resistance converge into a kaleidoscope of radical possibilities.

This is the story of how Brazilian Afrofuturism is transforming science fiction into a tool of social engineering, artistic reinvention, and collective emancipation.

I. The Whitening of Utopia: Dissecting the Myth of Racial Democracy

Brazil’s self-image has long been wrapped in the seductive lie of democracia racial—the idea that, unlike the U.S., racial harmony was baked into the national character. This narrative allowed the country to sidestep hard conversations about racism by framing inequality as a cultural coincidence rather than a systemic inheritance of slavery.

The state's propaganda machinery gave this myth artistic form. In Goiânia, the “Monument to the Three Races” presents a sculptural kumbaya of Indigenous, African, and European figures—a frozen tableau of reconciliation. But one only needs to turn to A Redenção de Cam (1895) by Modesto Brocos to see the rot beneath the harmony. In it, a dark-skinned grandmother looks on as her lighter-skinned daughter and blond grandson represent the supposed “redemption” from Blackness through generational whitening.

This ideology seeped into everything: TV, education, urban planning. Even in Mozambique, a country with an overwhelming Black majority, Brazilian soap operas dominated screens, exporting a vision of Brazil where Blackness was peripheral, servile, or outright absent.

Afrofuturism in Brazil emerges as an antidote to these aesthetic lies—an insurgent narrative that not only reclaims the right to imagine Black futures, but also interrogates how time, memory, and modernity have been weaponized against Afro-Brazilians.

II. Quilombos of the Mind: The Long Arc of Black Brazilian Resistance

To understand Brazilian Afrofuturism, we must return to its deepest source code: quilombismo. Named after the fugitive slave communities that resisted colonialism in the forests, quilombismo was redefined in the 20th century by poet, playwright, and politician Abdias do Nascimento. For Abdias, the quilombo was not merely geographic—it was epistemological. A site of cultural sovereignty, of ritual continuity, of artistic invention.

Born in 1914 and exiled during the dictatorship, Abdias used painting, theatre, and academic work to center African diasporic knowledge. While teaching in U.S. universities, he inserted Yoruba iconography—like Oxóssi’s bow and Xangô’s axe—into the American and Brazilian flags, inverting the semiotics of empire and nationhood. These weren’t just visual metaphors. They were assertions that Black Brazilians belonged in the future as cultural architects, not ghosts of a slave past.

Quilombismo became the backbone for contemporary Afrofuturism’s political ecology—a distributed network of artists, activists, and educators who remixed SF tropes with decolonial urgency.

III. Carnival as Interface: Music, Media, and Mass Mobilization

The success of Afrofuturism in Brazil isn’t just theoretical. It rides on Brazil’s most powerful cultural vehicle: music.

From Salvador’s blocos afro like Ilê Aiyê, who have used carnival as a platform for Black pride since 1974, to samba queen Elza Soares’ Afrofuturist reinterpretations of Juízo Final, sound has always been both resistance and prophecy.

In her twilight years, Elza collaborated with young creators to reinterpret samba through digital futurism. Her take on Juízo Final, originally written during the dictatorship, becomes an eerie prayer for justice in a Brazil once again teetering under authoritarianism. The accompanying video places her voice in a biomechanical landscape, where Afro-Brazilian cosmology and environmental grief blur into a kind of sonic lamentation.

Meanwhile, collectives like BSAM Brasil (Black Speculative Arts Movement) have organized nationwide events, supported by transatlantic collaborations and platforms like Carnegie Hall’s Afrofuturist Festival. These aren’t niche scenes—they are cultural superstructures, weaving together visual art, fashion, literature, and pedagogy.

Brazilian Afrofuturism, unlike some imported genres, isn’t just consumed—it’s lived.

IV. New Worlds, Old Wounds: Literature as Ritual and Resistance

Brazil’s Afrofuturist literary scene is as layered as the country’s history. From forgotten pioneers to genre-busting rebels, its books trace a timeline of defiance.

In 1985, Aline França published A Mulher de Aleduma, a novel where an alien-descended island community faces exploitation by an outsider bent on industrialization. The allegory is clear: colonial capitalism arrives masked as modernity, bearing rape and ecological destruction.

In the 21st century, authors like Alê Santos and Sandra Menezes explore Afrofuturism through interplanetary escape, climate collapse, and spiritual resurgence. Menezes' O Céu entre Mundos—a tale of Black civilization starting anew on a different planet—was even shortlisted for the prestigious Jabuti Prize.

But the genre also births new subgenres. Fabio Kabral has rejected the “Afrofuturist” label in favor of macumbapunk—a speculative universe where science and Afro-Brazilian religion entwine, where ancestral trauma meets digital ancestry, and where gender flows as fluidly as the Orisha.

Kabral’s refusal to be boxed in is emblematic. For many, Afrofuturism isn’t a brand. It’s a battlefront.

V. Films as Fire Starters: Visual Futures from the Favelas

Brazilian Afrofuturist cinema doesn’t ask for permission. It takes the genre’s toolkit—speculation, temporality, and aesthetic rupture—and applies it to urgent political questions.

In Branco sai, preto fica (2014), real survivors of a 1980s police massacre in Ceilândia reenact their trauma through time-travel fiction. The film becomes a hybrid of testimony and science fiction, exposing the failure of Brasília’s modernist utopia.

Negrum3 (2018) offers an Afrofuturist portrait of queer Black youth in São Paulo, ending in a scene where a trans performer descends from a UFO—evoking Sun Ra and signaling an interstellar refusal of cis-hetero norms.

Perhaps most politically incendiary is Medida Provisória (2021), based on Aldri Anunciação’s play. It envisions a future where the state offers Afro-Brazilians “repatriation” as a grotesque form of reparation. When people refuse, deportations begin. Underground bunkers become hubs of resistance—a metaphor that felt all too close during Brazil’s far-right wave under Bolsonaro.

These films don’t just entertain. They build visual infrastructures of resistance, inviting viewers to occupy future imaginaries that are not dictated by whiteness or trauma.

VI. Hacking the Genre: Afrofuturism as Social Technology

What unites these disparate voices isn’t just aesthetics—it’s function. Brazilian Afrofuturism is deeply heuristic. It uses speculative fiction not just to imagine alternatives, but to train the political imagination.

Three key affordances enable this:

1. Temporality: Afrofuturism densifies time. It insists that the past haunts the present and stains the future. Time is not a neutral flow but a battleground where historical erasure can be interrupted.
2. Speculation: Beyond mere fantasy, speculation becomes a mental architecture—a way of processing trauma, testing possibilities, and mobilizing action. It serves both poetic and practical ends.
3. Genre Infrastructure: SF, as John Rieder argues, is a mass genre system supported by boundary objects—artifacts that bridge communities. In Brazil, Afrofuturism becomes a traceable infrastructure of care, with creators leaving breadcrumbs—“trace records”—for future generations to follow.

From online publishing platforms to neighborhood workshops, these infrastructures aren't just artistic—they're survivalist. They allow Black Brazilians to navigate a country that still oscillates between denial and hostility, and to imagine worlds where their joy, genius, and pain are central.

VII. Imagining Otherwise: A Conclusion (for Now)

Afrofuturism in Brazil is more than a genre. It’s a grammar of liberation. It teaches that futurity is not a neutral space waiting to be colonized by AI and capital. It’s contested territory, haunted and radiant.

Through speculative art, these creators insist: the future must be Black—not just in skin, but in cosmology, structure, and spirit.

They are not waiting for permission to build that world. They’re doing it—in code, in costume, in community, in collective memory.

And the rest of us? We’d better catch up.

This piece is based on the original academic essay by Patrick Brock, research fellow at the University of Oslo’s CoFutures project. The original appears in SFRA Review 53.3 (2023).