Alice Coltrane’s errant sonic experiments with Asian musical forms offer a way to think about a constellation of Afrofuturism that turns not towards outer space, as in the case of Sun Ra’s film Space is the Place (directed by John Coney, 2917), but towards an exploration of inner worlds as harbingers of another organization of things within the present. From a consideration of Alice Coltrane’s Afro-Asian imagination, I turn to Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahui’s recent speculations on Africa, in particular Okorafor’s 2010 novel Who Fears Death and Kahui’s short film Pumzi from 2009. These fictional texts offer errantry, myths, and stories as generative strategies through which the dystopian speculations of Africa on which corporate scenarios rely might be resisted, and the worlds those dystopian imaginations work to suppress can be felt.

Kara Keeling is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at The University of Chicago. Keeling is author of The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007) and coeditor (with Josh Kun) of a selection of writings about sound and American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). A second monograph, Queer Times, Black Futures, will be published in the spring of 2019 by New York University Press.