Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand - Afrofuturism

Afrofuturism

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand employs the cultural trope of Afrofuturism. Mark Dery states that afrofuturism within speculative fiction, “treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century techno-culture”. Delany’s use of technology to discuss issues of race within his novel complies with Dery’s definition. Delany uses space travel, hologram, alien life forms, and an interconnected web of information to comment on the ways in which the technologies of the future can work to reflect the experiences of dislocation, isolation, and foreignness black Americans historically and presently feel. In addition to his use of technology, Delany comments on the digital divide through Rat Korga. Rat Korga’s inaccessibility to the Web reflects the raced and classed limitations on access to technology. Alondra Nelson writes that, “Blackness gets constructed as always oppositional to technologically driven chronicles of progress” pointing to the racialization of technology and the consequent limitations on technological availability to black people globally. Delany’s use of technology and his commentary on the digital divide work to make Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand an Afrofuturistic text.

In Further Considerations on Afrofuturism, Kodwo Eshun explains that modernity has caused the growth of a new kind of esteem for the future, as the avant-garde’s playground. Eshun writes that “The field of Afrofuturism does not seek to deny the tradition of countermemory. Rather, it aims to extend that tradition by reorienting the intercultural vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective”. These Afrofuturist concepts of nonlinear time and the projection of oneself in what would ordinarily be considered past and future can be read through Delany’s Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand. The evelmi who are an intelligent species that coexist with humans on the planet Velm, have multiple tongues, allowing them to simultaneously devise various speech patterns. They learn and gather information through their much developed sense of taste. One can consider the evelmi as a species that exists primarily in the immediate present, the sensorial now. However in the novel, humans, whose sense of taste is advanced compared to that of the reader but relatively basic next to that of the evelmi, manage to gain knowledge through mechanical technology as opposed to organic developments. They have created a glove that allows them to connect to “General Information”, a network of facts, information and news, much like the modern day Internet. So with this glove, humans can transport themselves to other places and times through the process of learning. The new places, beings and concepts that humans can learn about constitute a sort of potential future in Delany’s novel.