Afrofuturism as a genre and way of thinking about music, literature, and other creative efforts has been around for several decades now, and people like Praise Afolabi keep pointing to different and important ways that creators in that space are exploring and using identity to point both to the past and the future. In this essay, Afolabi explores why it’s important that Afrofuturist texts present ways of remembering a/the past - which, as the excerpt above points out, was ruptured for much of the African diaspora by the slave trade. Referencing in particular Octavia E. Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and Samuel Delany, Afolabi shows how memory and history are important - and collective, not just individual.