Afrofuturism at Work: Critique & Praxis
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, so-called essential workers from minoritized racial and ethnic groups were disproportionately subjected to workplace indignities that resembled, in the words of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a modern “Black plague.” Some observers expressed faith in existing corporate governance regimes, noting that many business leaders were steadily improving their management of competing stakeholder interests. Others, from essential workers to organized labor, demanded more stringent workplace regulations to combat irresponsible corporate behavior and limited worker bargaining power. However, a few turned to speculative fiction—such as Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower—for answers. For legal scholars, the fictional writings of Butler and other “Afrofuturist” literature— works that resurrect untold Black histories and imagine Black technocultural futures—not only contain plot elements that seemingly predict modern societal calamities but also offer pathways to reimagine law and political economy. This Essay provides two contributions to this emerging “Afrofuturism and the Law” movement.
First, this Essay advances an Afrofuturist legal critique of the modern workplace that challenges the form and function of business enterprises in advanced capitalist markets. Three themes of Afrofuturist literature ground this critique: (1) Afrofuturism calls for the disruption of elitist, identity-based hierarchies that undermine human dignity; (2) Afrofuturism urges the reformation of legal systems that foster alienation in political and economic society; and (3) Afrofuturism demands the abolition of hegemonic framings of the human condition that naturalize involuntary human sacrifice (both literal and figurative) in everyday life. Second, this Essay articulates an Afrofuturist legal praxis that emphasizes the dialogical, constitutive, and legitimating nature of law. Afrofuturism’s legal critique of the modern workplace suggests that business enterprises cannot simultaneously man-age competing stakeholder interests and uphold worker dignity without reckoning with the alienation and human sacrifice that are endemic to capitalist economies.
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