The Perfect Afrofuturist Manifesto
version 1 (2026)
*an abridged version of this manifesto was originally published in uhuru journal, the journal of the African studies department at McGill.
We, those who long for an alternative, radical lens to imagine and create Afrofuturist realities, require a broader manifesto. We seek to hack, hijack, and generally fuck up any framework that limits or in any way attempts to contain Black artistic production. Beyond artistic production, we Perfect Afrofuturists are seeking a guide (ever changing and thorough) which we can use to help create our Free State. We propose an idea of perfection that is inherently multiplicitious, non-singular, and anti-static. We choose not to burn the Mundane Afrofuturist manifesto, instead we build upon it to construct this new framework. The Perfect Afrofuturist Manifesto presents a continuum of collective ideation, creation, and imagination, from ancestor to progeny and between one Black person and another.
The Perfect Afrofuturists also recognize that:
We did not originate in the cosmos, and we aren’t aliens. We are humans, and we aren’t inherently more special than any other humans.
A post-racial society is not a reality that we will ever live in. We can still deconstruct and reconstruct, or abolish and create, race in our artwork, literature, and minds. We must accept the reality of Blackness and find something to do about it.
A post-colonial society is not the reality that we live in currently, but that can change. We must dismantle colonial hierarchies in our realities, imaginations, and creations and build something new in their place.
An extremely narrow view of Afrofuturism, reduced to specific style of dress and specific kind of music, is restrictive. Still, we can recognize the significance of this narrow aesthetic to other people and how these more common artifacts of Afrofuturism can draw an unassuming person into the discipline.
Space travel is not going to give us the freedom we seek. Change has to be made in people’s minds and in the structures that govern society in order to obtain freedom. Only then should we go to space.
We Perfect Afrofuturists suggest:
An Afrofuturist aesthetic with its sights and specificities in the near-future, rather than a distant one, with a nonlinear way of viewing time. Time is shaped like a spiral with no end or beginning in sight.
An embrace of the abstract, oblique, confusing Black art. We invite Black art that is non specific and a bit off putting as well as Black art that is overtly representative of our experience. No matter what, we make space for any art made by any Black person.
We examine who and what we view as desirable. Desire is informed by white supremacy if left unchecked (even still when we check it). We celebrate fat bodies, kinky hair, and dark skin. We embrace Blackness in every form that it comes, and in turn we accept ourselves.
We see how our struggle for liberation is interconnected with Indigenous peoples (in the case we aren’t Indigenous ourselves), and all other oppressed people’s struggles.
We engage with texts that show Black people as magical, fantastical, inhuman, spectacular, or different. There is value in seeing ourselves outside of reality.
We resituate ourselves in relation to the environment. Our environment is trees and mountains and oceans, but it’s also factories and mines and plantations. Black victims of the trans*atlantic slave trade were cruelly tied to the land during their time of bondage, and still many Black people perform labor akin to slavery in our environments. Part of repairing the harm done by colonization is reconnecting to the land and non-human beings on it. Where possible, we must attempt to change our relationship to Earth. It wasn’t the fields of cotton or mineral mines that oppress(ed) us, it was people.
The oppressors, white people, have no place in the construction of this near Afrofuture. White dollars are accepted, but not white presence, suggestions, and definitely not white supremacy. Moreso, in the constructed white capitalist colonial patriarchal society, anyone not Black has the potential to be overtly and/or subliminally anti-Black (Black people also can be anti-Black; we digress). We must be aware of this too as we set out building our near-futures.
We stop policing each other and ourselves. The oppressor is doing that already, so we don’t need to do it for them.
We Perfect Afrofuturists know that:
We need Black people
Who are disabled,
Who are gay,
Who are queer,
Who are trans,
Who are different,
We need the yns, the young hos,
We need Black capitalists,
We need Black people who can’t read or write,
We need the weird Black girls,
We need Black scholars and scientists,
And Black artists,
Black makers and crafters,
We need Black cosplayers,
We need Black sex workers,
We need Black people from every continent, every country who speak every language,
We need Black people who think they’re from outer space,
We need Black descendants of the trans*atlantic slave trade,
We need Black victims of modern slavery,
We need the “whitewashed” Black people,
We need Black people who have decolonized their minds and those who have not.
We need all Black people, and we also need our Black baggage, Black trauma, Black joy, Black mistakes, Black laughter, Black excellence, Black exuberance, Black failures, Black shortcomings, and everything else Black, in order to achieve our goals of total liberation.
Liberation must be achieved intraracially and interracially, through education, violence, and care. We concur that our goal of liberation will not be achieved solely through imagination or theoretical work, we must be committed to action.
We Perfect Afrofuturists promise to:
Try something
Do something
Make something
Grow something
Learn something
Teach something
Notice something
Notice someone
Love someone
Love ourselves
Love everyone
even if we don’t feel ready, capable, or like we’re enough (we are). If this manifesto is backwards, if it’s out of touch, or simply not making any damn sense, rewrite it. Have someone else read it, and make them add some things too.
-signed clearly by the Perfect Afrofuturists