![]() In so doing, Afrofuturist films increasingly abandoned a narrow ideology of racial uplift that accompanied Civil Rights rhetoric, celebrating instead a collective rejection of “upward mobility” and a conceptual embrace of outerspace as a directionless void where previously unimaginable alliances across difference could be forged. This article tracks the evolution of the trope of “planetary exile” in a series of Afrofuturist and science fiction films in the late 20th century to argue that the depiction of outerspace as a material and discursive haven for black communities simultaneously worked to articulate the experience of blackness to other previously ignored marginalized identities, namely the categories of “woman” and “queer.” Through close readings of Sun Ra’s Space is the Place, John Sayle’s The Brother from Another Planet (1984), and David Fincher’s Alien3 (1992), I show how Afrofuturist film conceptually attached the social experience of “blackness” to the category of “queerness,” or non-normative gender or sexual identity, in order to argue the real-world necessity of acknowledging the shared social interests of African Americans, women, and the LGBT community in the post-Civil Rights era. In his utopian 1974 film, Space is the Place, the avant-garde musician Sun Ra would claim to a group of disaffected African American youth, “Everything you desire upon this planet and never have received will be yours in outerspace.” Ra’s vision of racial uplift based on a fantasy of the black race’s willful relocation to another planet explicitly repurposed the meanings attached to outerspace as a site of white colonial expansion, linking the physical disorientations of space to a figurative disorientation of traditional social hierarchies. ![]()
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