In 1998, Alondra Nelson started the Afrofuturism listserv, which brought together artists, musicians, and scholars interested in researching and producing Afrofuturistic texts, with DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller), novelist Nalo Hopkinson, and cultural critic Alexander Weheliye as early guest moderators. In 2002, while she was a doctoral candidate at New York University, Nelson edited a special issue of the cultural studies journal Social Text with a focus on Afrofuturism. The Afrofuturism issue—which addressed “the intersection between African diasporic culture and technology through literature, poetry, science fiction and speculative fiction, music, visual art, and the Internet,” and which maintained that “racial identity fundamentally influences technocultural practices”—turned out to be a seminal issue in the academic investigation of Afrofuturism. It also laid the foundation for Nelson’s work in producing critical interventions into Blackness and technology. Afrofuturism’s tentacular reach two decades later extends the prescience of the listserv and that collection of early texts on the subject beyond the academy and into the arts, community, and cultural institutions.

Nelson’s work unfolds new ways of knowing the relationships between Blackness and technology. Her first book, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), is an in-depth exploration of the Black Panthers’ organizing around the provision of health care to African American communities in the 1960s. In this text, Nelson draws lines between the historical conditions that the Black Panthers were responding to (often using new medical technology) and contemporary health disparities. Her most recent book, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (Beacon Press, 2016), responds to social changes produced through genetic testing technologies, uncovering African Americans as early adopters and drivers of genetic testing services, and exploring the implications the technology has had on the experiences and perceptions of race in America.

Nelson is the president of the Social Science Research Council, located in Brooklyn. Shortly after our interview, she became the Harold F. Linder Chair at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. My own intellectual journey has been shaped by the possibilities she has modeled as a Black woman in the academy; I drew on her work in my research on the interactions between material and virtual spaces in the everyday lives of racialized women. I’m intrigued by the deftness with which she extracts these complex and intricate narratives of race and technology, which—while they engage in acts of testimony and celebration—counteract dominant narratives of subjugation in the face of technological advancement. I spoke with Dr. Nelson over the phone from Toronto—she was in New York.

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