Contested Space(s): Cathode-Ray Tube Afrofuturism

Join the UCLA Film & Television Archive in partnership with UCLA Cinema & Media Studies Program for a night of Afrofuturism as part of their PST ART: Art & Science Collide film series Science Fiction Against the Margins.

With cameras pointed toward the skies, historically, the television lens has framed the aspirations and triumphs of America’s space program as a largely patriotic, mostly homogeneous final frontier. Concurrently, amid the fanfare of rockets and moon shots, artists of vision and conscience have disrupted such regularly scheduled TV programming to contest the cool medium’s status-quo constructions of race, space and place. Breaking the barriers of the cathode-ray tube, these counter-narratives expand the small screen universe, centering African Americans in humankind’s reaching endeavors to explore strange new worlds. Through poetry, music and allegorical drama, this assembly of provocative broadcasts explicates unjust conditions on Earth while challenging the mythos of a benevolent, star-spangled militaryindustrial complex that serves as gatekeeper to the galaxies.

Screenings include Black Wax (Robert Mugge), The Outer Limits: “Nightmare” (John Erman), The Space Program (Warren Fu), Cosmic Slop: “Space Traders” (Reginald Hudlin), and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: “Far Beyond the Stars” (Avery Brooks).