Sometimes the stars align: the assignment to review Elizabeth Carmel Hamilton’s Charting the Afrofuturist Imaginary in African American Art: The Black Female Fantastic arrived shortly after I had seen Blaque Orbit, an Afrofuturist film series offered by LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) and curated by Camm Harrison. A six-hour deep dive into Afrofuturistic visions from 1992 to 2022, the lineup featured works by several Black women artists, including Cauleen Smith and Martine Syms. While reading Hamilton’s book, Smith’s video The Fullness of Time (2008) came to mind, as it features Smith wandering through New Orleans three years after Hurricane Katrina and offers meditations on a dehumanized future. Smith’s meditations dovetail with Hamilton’s argument that “art history needs more explicitly scholarly incorporation of the visual arts into Afrofuturism,” (5) and her assertion that the contemporary concept of Afrofuturism should include what she calls “the black female fantastic,” (5) a lens that rejects the historical representations of the Black female body such as those contained in 19th-century daguerreotypes of enslaved women and more contemporary images that consign black women to the tropes of the mammy, the Jezebel, and the strong Black woman. Hamilton acknowledges the traditional visual language of Afrofuturism tended to be communicated via musicians such as Sun-Ra in his 1974 film Space is the Place, and the focus was on escaping the racism of the present into a utopia not based on earth, but in a locale completely devoid of white people: essentially a migration narrative.

Hamilton’s characterization of Afrofuturism places its visual language as a centering assembly around which “black liberation, transformation, materiality, and temporality orbited around it” (3). The author goes on to state, “I added fugitivity to the concept of black liberation and appropriation as an element within Afrofuturism’s orbit” (3). Hamilton’s visual language of Afrofuturism affords a particular kind of expansive creative space for the illumination of the Black female fantastic: the author is not only insistent on breaking the stereotyped and alienating boundaries of the imagery associated with Black women, Hamilton considers Afrofuturism as a freeing mechanism—that allows the past and the future to be considered simultaneously and in a nonlinear fashion. In this reading, the artist working in the Afrofuturist space is able to achieve a particular kind of freedom from the weightiness of past trauma related to enslavement: “Afrofuturist artists have an orientation toward what is to come while being constantly aware of the past. They have expansive imaginations, expanding on what is possible, not just what the world has offered in the past” (3). Hamilton adds the concept of fugitivity to the Afrofuturism orbit “as a way to think about the possibilities of black liberation in the past and present” (3).

Hamilton’s first chapter positions Harriet Tubman as an avatar of Afrofuturism who guaranteed the future of Black people escaping enslavement. Conceiving Tubman in this manner illustrates the fluidity of Black temporality. Tubman’s agency over her own body and her ability to instill that quality in others to facilitate escape from enslavement made her a compelling subject for artists of her time and for centuries afterward, as is demonstrated by Alison Saar’s 2007 bronze sculpture Harriet Tubman Memorial. Hamilton also notes the Tubman Afrofuturist influence in the writing of Octavia Butler, where she is positioned as “a contemporary critique of capitalism and its exploitation of the most vulnerable members of society” (30).

The second chapter examines Black feminist futures in art history, as expressed through the work of artists such as Alma Thomas, whose abstract paintings were an example of space exploration of the 1960s and 1970s. Thomas is featured by Hamilton as a pinnacle of her argument, as “an Afrofuturist par excellence” (60). Thomas conceived of herself as an astronaut; she was not interested in exploring the past, or in being held in place by gravity—her gaze was firmly fixed on the galaxies above. Her “Space Paintings,” produced from 1968 to 1972, coincided with the final years of NASA’s Apollo missions and were part of her migration narrative. Works such as A Glimpse of Mars (1969), inspired by grainy NASA photographs, along with the composition and color choices were a method to transcend the confines of traditional, modern painting. Working during a period of political and social turmoil, Thomas made a deliberate choice to create a respite: “Her insistence on art that created something beautiful is her fugitive performance” (64). The chapter includes an examination of the quilts of Harriet Powers and applies Hamilton’s construct of the visual language of Afrofuturism to Powers’s quilts and explains how past interpretations led to distortions and circumscribed descriptions that suppressed the full meaning of the imagery contained therein. Hamilton’s argument partakes of Farrah Jasmine Griffin’s work on Black migration and links it to a narrative of fugitivity, which she defines as more than just escaping slavery. Hamilton’s concept of fugitivity includes “the mundane, innocuous, and quotidian practices of refusing slavery and, more broadly, white supremacy” (51). Fugitivity can exist in mind as well as body, and this linked but split stance is still necessary in order to escape the tendrils of white supremacy from attaching themselves to the Black body and consciousness in a manner that infects one’s sense of self. Hamilton’s concept perfectly captures the in-betweenness of Black life that remains a staple of Black existence. Capturing that flux via art making is a particularly variegated enterprise: “The art-historical archive reeks of forced silences due to enslavement and American apartheid. Consequently, the study of African American art requires creative and interdisciplinary methods” (59).  

The book’s third chapter, “Mammy as (anti)Heroine” considers the heroic aspects of the mammy figure as depicted by several Black contemporary artists. Here, she confronts the stereotype of Black femininity that was a product of “the white imagination of and desire for faithful black servitude” (77).  The author examines the modern renderings of the mammy figure in Black art, from the 1970s Black Arts Movement to Betye Saar’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima to the mid-1990s (Forever Free Post) Wonder Woman by Michael Ray Charles, in which she’s clothed like a superhero against a magazine background that feels like a sly spoof of The Saturday Evening Post. The mammy figure retains a prominent position in the visual language of Black women’s bodies, and perhaps no recent work illustrated this as much as Kara Walker’s 2014 A Subtlety, installed in the former Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. Hamilton writes that Walker “continues to utilize antebellum scenes to confront the exploitation of the black female body during slavery and create artwork that makes it difficult to ignore the pervading and enduring stereotypes of black women” (90).

“The Alchemy of Hair,” Hamilton’s fourth chapter, reinforces the extent to which Black women’s bodies remain public spaces, territories where the arguments for interpretations of Black female physicality, style, and way of being are constantly assessed and debated—even more so in the age of social media. Black women’s hair can be perceived as a political statement, a gesture of assimilation, and an opportunity for appropriation, as well as a territory for control by someone other than the woman to whom the hair belongs. The author chronicles how the loss of cultural touchstones separated enslaved people from hairstyles that were an integral part of African culture. Voyages from the continent were a transformational gateway wherein Black hair morphed from a unique expression of self, with hair care tools that were created and reflected the same, into “a source of shame and ridicule” (105). The work and artistic processes of Ellen Gallagher, Sonya Clark, Robert Pruitt (whose piece Free graces the cover), and Mequitta Ahuja are investigated, along with Fantastic Sagas, the graphic novel by Mat Johnson and Robert Pruitt. While contemplating the art in this chapter, I wondered if it were possible for a new generation of Afrofuturists to harness the transformational alchemy that Hamilton describes as “rooted in the Afrofuturist imagination” (109), excise the politics, and discard the apparatus of problematization that Hamilton adeptly portrays.   

The concluding chapter discusses the boundless possibilities for depictions of the Black female body when “not subject to the whims of white supremacy and misogyny” (142). In order to reach the elevated ground of the Black female fantastic, Hamilton must contend with and dispose of the myriad omnipresent and offensive negative stereotypes that accompany and burden imagery associated with the Black female body, something the topic and organization of Hamilton’s chapters accomplish quite effectively. She explicates the layers of meaning and utility of the mammy figure and its durability as a conception and representation of the physical presence of Black women.

Hamilton envisions an expansive and freeing methodology for artists to creatively engage with Black female identity in their work. Hamilton’s vision of the Black female fantastic is as a space intended to explode boundaries, something Afrofuturism’s orbiting concepts are uniquely positioned to do. It is a creative space where limiting gender constructs no longer apply, identity binaries are discarded, as is anything that limits movement and growth, and where the territoriality and temporality of Blackness remain indefinitely flexible. It is a space of possibility and a robust and resilient antidote to those energies that seek to restrict and silence Black women.