The Underground Railroad As Afrofuturism: Enslaved Blacks Who Imagined A Future And Used Technology To Reach The “Outer Spaces of Slavery”

dann j. Broyld

doi:10.29333/ejecs/301

Authors

dann j. Broyld Central Connecticut State University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29333/ejecs/301

Keywords:

Afrofuturism, Enslavement, Technology, Underground Railroad.

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.

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Author Biography

dann j. Broyld, Central Connecticut State University

dann j. Broyld is an associate professor of Public History & African American History at Central Connecticut State University. He earned his PhD in nineteenth-century United States and African Diaspora history at Howard University in 2011. His work focuses on the American-Canadian borderlands and issues of Black identity, migration, and transnational relations as well as oral history and museum-community interaction.

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