Afrofuturism is an aesthetic and literary movement that focuses on the intersection of Black history, culture, science fiction, and technology. the term was coined by white journalist Mark Dery in is 1994 article "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate and Tricia Rose". Dery states that Afrofuturism is "...speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture-and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future".
Speculative fiction is a genre that includes elements from science fiction, horror, fantasy, and horror fiction to explore worlds unlike our own. Afrofuturism is unique as it explores the experience of the African Diaspora (specifically the African-American experience), critiquing present day social issues in the black community but also reexamining the past and reinventing the future. Technology, Afrocentricity, Afrodiasporic cosmology and spirituality are commonly used within works in this genre to examine Black culture and the African Diaspora through a non-western and non-white lens.
Africanfuturism is a similar but separate aesthetic and philosophy. The term was coined by Nigerian American writer Nnedi Okorafor. It is directly focused on the African continent and firmly rooted in African history, culture, mysticism, and philosophy. It explores African culture through science fiction without the "...othering of the white gaze and the de facto colonial Western mindset" (Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the Language of Black Speculative Literature, 2020) .
Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, and the language of Black speculative literature. (2020, August 27). Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/afrofuturism-africanfuturism-and-the-language-of-black-speculative-literature/