Afrofuturism:Queering Time in Octavia Butler’s "Kindred" and Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman’s "Neptune Frost"

Start from the future, go back to the past, in order to understand the present problems and the potentiality of the present! This is one of the complicated strategies employed by afrofuturistic works. In afrofuturism, the connection between past-present-future is strong and eye-opening, but the temporality of the connection is ambiguous and often constructed in physically impossible ways. The impossibility is integrated as a necessary part of the process. Therefore, I will argue that afrofuturism is not just about remembering the past and hoping for a better future, it is about understanding the intersectional space of different temporalities. Through impossible meetings at the crossroads of time and by connecting ancestry and hypermodernity, afrofuturistic works queer our awareness of time and history with the aim of making a critique of chrono-normative Western modernity. In this article, I analyze the impossible temporalities in Octavia Butler’s groundbreaking novel Kindred (1979) that uses time-travels to depict the lingering effects of slavery in a post-slavery society and the unique musical-movie Neptune Frost (2021), directed by the African-American multitalent Saul Williams and the Rwandesian director Anisia Uzeyman that depicts relations with the ancestors as directly connected with the use of hypertechnology and telekinesis.