How Does The Black God's Drums Exhibit Qualities Of Afrofuturism?

Question: How does Clark's depiction of New Orleans and its architecture in The Black God’s Drums exhibit qualities of Afrofuturism?

Intro:
Afrofuturism has been portrayed in movies, literature, art, and more, but what would it look like if an author incorporated afrofuturism into every detail of a book, down to the briefly described architecture? Djèlí Clark does just this in his novel, The Black God’s Drums, a story that follows Creeper, a 13-year-old Black girl, as she works to save her city. Throughout, Clark creates the embodiment of an afrofuturist environment for his characters to live in. Djèlí Clark uses the contrast between the colorful and diverse depiction of New Orleans architecture and the broken depiction of the Dead City in

Early on in his novel, Clark describes the environment that Creeper walks through: “narrow streets bordered by a mix of buildings that carry pieces of New Orleans’s history: colorful two-story Creole structures with gilded balconies, patterned Spanish arches, narrow flat-fronted redbrick American townhouses, even big stone monstrosities with ancient-looking columns and scowling gargoyles” (42). This sentence shows Afrofuturism in multiple ways. First of all, Clark intentionally inputs diversity into this book by mentioning three different cultures while describing this architecture. It’s also important to note that he describes these buildings as “pieces of New Orleans’s history”. This exemplifies the concept of reflecting on history without a white-focused lens that afrofuturism often explores. Ways that architecture can be afrofuturist is better described by Emily Roos in her paper, “‘Afrofuturist’ Architecture” when she writes “Afrofuturist architectural movements … would promote a non-segregating, racially diverse, culturally colorful future for our African brothers and sisters and those who have cultural and ethnic African roots” (2). The words “racially diverse” and “culturally colorful” apply almost exactly to Clark’s writing. His description of multiple cultures within the architecture achieves exactly what Roos

Clark presents the city as crumbling and overgrown when Clark writes about the ”...buildings of weather-stained stone with plants and whole trees growing out their open windows” (72). And a couple pages later when he writes about a building that “ used to be a church. All that’s left is walls, with clumps of hanging moss and vines growing through them like long twisting worms” (75). This representation of the Dead City as being destroyed and forgotten may be alluding to the history of African Americans. As Samuel R. Delany said in an interview in Mark Dery’s novel, Black to the Future, many African Americans “have no idea where, in Africa, [their] black ancestors came from because, when they reached the slave markets of New Orleans, records of such things were systematically destroyed” (191). Clark seems to use the tempêtes noires as a metaphor for slavery and the buildings of Dead City represent the damage that it left on Black people's lives even after it had passed. Additionally, Clark illustrating the Dead City as overgrown could be referencing to the forgotten past of black individuals when it comes to writing sci-fi despite their history being close resemblance to one of these stories. Black individuals exclusion from sci-fi “is especially perplexing in light of the fact that African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien