NEW YORK, NY.- On Feb. 17, the Adler Planetarium in Chicago unveiled a new sky show called “Niyah and the Multiverse,” a blend of theoretical cosmology, Black culture and imagination. And as with many things Afrofuturistic, Ytasha Womack’s fingerprints are all over it.
Womack, who writes both about the genre and from within it, has curated Afrofuturism events across the country — including Carnegie Hall’s citywide festival — and her work is currently featured in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Afrofuturism is perhaps most popularly on display in the “Black Panther” films, which immerse viewers in an alternate reality of diverse, technologically advanced African tribes untouched by the forces of colonialism. (In 2023, Womack published “Black Panther: A Cultural Exploration,” Marvel’s reference book examining the films’ influences.)
But examples of the genre include science fiction writer Octavia Butler, Star Trek character Nyota Uhura and the cyborgian songs of Janelle Monáe. Some even envision the immortality of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose cells were taken without consent for what became revolutionary breakthroughs in medicine, as an Afrofuturist parable.
Womack was one of the scriptwriters for “Niyah and the Multiverse.” She spoke with The New York Times about what Afrofuturism means to her, the process of weaving the genre’s themes with core concepts in physics and how the show aims to inspire. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Q: How do you define Afrofuturism?
A: Afrofuturism is a way of thinking about the future, with alternate realities based on perspectives of the African diaspora. It integrates imagination, liberation, technology and mysticism.
Imagination is important because it is liberating. People have used imagination to transform their circumstances, to move from one reality to another. They’ve used it as a way to escape. When you are in challenging environments, you’re not socialized to imagine. And so to claim your imagination — to embrace it — can be a way of elevating your consciousness.
What makes Afrofuturism different from other futuristic takes is that it has a nonlinear perspective of time. So the future, past and present can very much be one. And that’s a concept expressed in quantum physics, when you think about these other kinds of realities.
Those alternate realities could be philosophical cosmologies, or they could be scientifically explained worlds. How we explain them runs the gamut, depending on what your basis for knowledge is.
Q: Which Afrofuturist works have influenced you?
A: I think about Parliament-Funkadelic, a popular music collective of the 1970s. As a kid, their album covers were in my basement. A lot of artists during that era — Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, Earth, Wind & Fire, Labelle — had these very epic, Afrofuturistic album covers, but Parliament-Funkadelic sticks out. There’s one depicting Star Child, the alter ego of George Clinton, the lead musical artist, emerging from a spaceship. That sort of space-tastic imagery was abounding for me as a kid.
“The Wiz,” a re-imagining of “The Wizard of Oz,” was on all the time in my house growing up. It had this fabulosity to it — a heightened dream world that reflected 1970s New York. You had the Twin Towers in Emerald City, the empty lots Dorothy walked through with all the trash, the Wicked Witch running a fashion sweatshop, representing the garment district. The film took an urban landscape and made it fabulous, tying in this theme of Dorothy coming into her own through her journey.
Those are images that had a very strong impact on me. As I matured, I got into house music and dance, and began to see relationships between rhythm, movement, space and time. It’s not always something I can give language to, but it’s certainly become a basis for how I talk about metaphysics, in a physical kind of way.
Q: What inspired your team to create “Niyah and the Multiverse”?
A: We wanted to tell a story about a young girl named Niyah, who wants to be a scientist and who is figuring out who she is — not just on Earth, but also in the universe.
Niyah looks for insight from her grandparents, who explain some of the symbolism of the African artwork in her home. She thinks about concepts she has learned from her science teacher. And she even meets her future self, who is a theoretical astrophysicist. Together, the two explore some of the more popular multiverse theories that scientists are looking at today.
Q: Which theories are those?
A: Niyah learns about the many-worlds theory, which is this idea that all of your choices evolve into different universes. The choices you make create new paths, essentially creating multiple existences of yourself.
She learns about bubble theory, which says that after our Big Bang, more universes sort of bubbled off, each with their own laws of physics. Niyah also explores the idea of shadow matter, in which particles get reassembled as similar entities in mirror universes.
Q: So there’s this parallel between Niyah learning about the multiverse and also exploring her own identity through her ancestral heritage.
A: Right. Because both of these are paths of meaning, different ways of understanding who we are. Afrofuturists tend to think in a way that is accepting of a lot of different realities anyway, so it was a pretty seamless experience to weave the physics and other aspects of the genre together. There’s already this intergenerational, or interdimensional, element to the conversation and the art that comes out of it.
The show is presented in the planetarium dome, which has a 360-degree screen, so it’s very immersive. Stepping into the space and watching the show feels like an interdimensional experience of its own.
The first audience to see it had a very emotional response. Some people were crying. There were Black women in the audience saying they always wanted to see this kind of imagery, that they had wanted to be scientists at one point in time. Others were deeply touched by the vibrancy of the show, of how it was able to bring these multiverse theories to life.
Q: It’s impressive that these physics concepts, which can be difficult for people to understand or relate to, are made so accessible with examples that are not only imaginative but very rooted in Black culture.
A: Right. And it wasn’t difficult for us to do that, because as Afrofuturists, we operate in that space. It’s just about mirroring a way of being that we have always been immersed in.
I think “Niyah and the Multiverse” expresses that we all have different relationships to space and time. We are all looking to understand who we are, where we come from and where we can go in this broader space-time trajectory.
And maybe for some, the show normalizes the idea that there are kids who are Black who dream and are curious about the world. That curiosity can take them in the direction of becoming an artist, or becoming a scientist.
Q: What challenges did you face in tackling the multiverse?
A: In trying to write some elements of the story, we had to push our own imagination to come up with what a universe might look like if you’re not using the laws of physics that exist in this one. Like, what does it mean to have your particles reassembled into something else? Sometimes we’d come up with ideas for different worlds, and our science consultants would say that already exists.
For me, this shows the beauty of bridging art and science. Artists can give visuals and narratives to ideas that scientists come up with. Or it could happen the other way around: Artists imagine something, and scientists think about what might be needed to support a universe that looks that way.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
