The underground railroad as afrofuturism: Enslaved blacks who imagined a future and used technology to reach the “outer spaces of slavery”

Abstract

This article employs the lens of Afrofuturism to address the Underground Railroad, detailing what imagination, tact, and technology, it took for fugitive Blacks to flee to the “outer spaces of slavery.” Black enslavement was as terrifying as any exotic fictional tale, but it happened to real humans alienated in the “peculiar institution.” Escaping slavery brought dreams to life, and at times must have felt like “magical realism,” or an out-of-body experience, and the American North, Canada, Mexico, Africa, Europe, and free Caribbean islands were otherworldly and science fiction-like, in contrast to where Black fugitives ascended. This article will address the intersections of race, technology, and liberation, by retroactively applying a modern concept to historical moments.