In this episode, Hippolyta Freeman’s scientific experimentation opens a gate to interdimensional/time travel. Hippolyta’s character arc reveals her own childhood passion for space and her talent for astrophysics/mathematics and how white supremacy and patriarchal expectations suppressed that talent. Through her travels through our world’s history and to other worlds entirely, she reflects on her life and, in an Afrofuturist blending of her child’s dreams with her own, becomes her fullest self.
Afrofuturism
The episode’s themes and aesthetic exemplify Afrofuturism, a term coined in 1993 by Mark Dery. Ytasha Womack’s (2013) definition of Afrofuturism as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation,” suits this episode particularly well.
The show introduces an Afrofuturist imagination in its first episode, when Hippolyta’s daughter, Diana, gives her father the newest comic she’s drawn: “Orithyia Blue.” Orithyia Blue is a Black, blue-haired woman who travels the universe having adventures and repairing communications technology. To imagine Orithyia Blue’s world was not just to imagine a world where people traveled to space (at a time before Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight), but where those people included Black women.
Hippolyta makes this space travel real when she accidentally travels to Earth 5041 using the magical orrery. Hippolyta meets the enlightened being Beyond C’Est, who sends her through space and time to discover her true self. Her encounters with Beyond C’Est and her closing adventure show two different kinds of Afrofuturism. When Hippolyta finally becomes an Orithyia Blue-like astronaut and explores space with her late husband George, their journey is accompanied by a voiceover from the 1972 film Space is the Place.
Sun Ra, the Chicago musician who first envisioned what would later be identified as the Afrofuturist aesthetic, created a range of Afrofuturist musical works, as well. Afrofuturism has also been used to describe the work of P-Funk, including Parliament’s Mothership Connection and more modern artists such as Janelle Monáe and Prince.
Although its origins are in music and film, Afrofuturism has become a widely read genre of fiction. Its best-known author, Octavia Butler, writes of time travel, apocalypse, and transformation. Several of her works, including Kindred and Parable of the Sower, have been turned into visually-stunning graphic novels. Those interested in exploring Afrofuturist imaginations might also consider the more recent Binti series Nnedi Okorafor, Rivers Solomon’s work, and N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy.
The library also owns two collections of Afrofuturist short stories:
Josephine Baker
In her first journey, Hippolyta sends herself through time to dance with Josephine Baker in Paris. As she befriends Baker and learns to express herself, Hippolyta realizes how many ways she has made herself small to fit the expectations of others.
Born in Missouri, Baker found her greatest success on the Paris stage, where she primarily performed burlesque. Between her success in Europe and the discrimination she experienced in the United States, Baker eventually became a French citizen. During WWII, she worked for the French resistance and later became active in the American Civil Rights movement. The Charles L. Blockson Collection on Josephine Baker, 1928-2003 includes programs, music, and photographs of Josephine Baker and her performances, with additional documents from retrospective events as well as advertisements using her name and image.
Women soldiers of the Dahomey Nation
On her second journey, Hippolyta trains with Nawi and the Dahomey Amazons, a group of women soldiers preparing to defend themselves against the French Foreign Legion. Dahomey was an African kingdom which fought to retain its independence from the colonial powers until losing the Second Franco-Dahomean War in 1894. The Dahomey nation was particularly noted for its corps of women fighters, nicknamed the Dahomey Amazons by Europeans who encountered them.
Black Astronomers
Black Americans have studied the stars since before the formation of the United States. Born free in 1731, Benjamin Banneker began his self-taught scientific career as a clock maker and surveyor. In his 50s, he deepened his work on astronomy and published a six-year series of almanacs. In addition to tables for the rising and setting times of the sun and moon, the phases of celestial objects, and the tides, the almanacs contain essays and poems on emancipation, peace, and other topical issues.2
A biographical sketch of Banneker is included in Phillis Wheatley Peters’ Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, published in London in 1773. Phillis Wheatley Peters was born in Africa and enslaved as a child. Her enslavers, the Wheatley family, taught her to read and write. In addition to Phillis Wheatley Peters’ poetry, the volume contains four memoirs or biographies of prominent African Americans written by W. H. Jackson, including Phillis Wheatley Peters and Benjamin Banneker. Banneker’s section includes correspondence with Thomas Jefferson in which he shares his almanac and makes the case for emancipation.
Nearly two hundred years later, as Hippolyta solved equations that would send her traveling through time and space, Katherine Johnson and other hidden figures of a younger generation of Black women performed the calculations necessary to put the first man on the moon.
Continue reading about Episode 8 : Jig-a-Bobo
Footnotes
1. The New Orleans area code 504 is often used in music and elsewhere as a statement of identity and/or solidarity with residents of the city and surrounding parishes of the greater metro region. back
2.The 1795 almanac includes an account of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. The essayist writes that very few Black Philadelphians died during the outbreak. Doctors of the time, including Benjamin Rush, believed that Black people were immune to the disease and requested the services of free Black nurses. The nurses and the Free African Society provided much support during the epidemic. Unfortunately, doctors were mistaken about their supposed immunity and many Black Philadelphians died alongside their white neighbors.
For additional information, see: A narrative of the proceedings of the Black people during the late awful calamity in Philadelphia in the year 1793 : and a refutation of some censures thrown upon them in some late publications by Absalom Jones and Richard Allenback