Beyond Anglo-Saxon Afrofuturism: Caribbean Futurism and Santería in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé

Abstract

The term Afrofuturism refers to an aesthetic-artistic label coined in the 1990s to indicate cultural products in which imaginary hypertechnological futures welcome the triumphant return of pre-diasporic African identity in a context of overcoming racial differences. However, the term Afrofuturism is not easily adaptable to speculative products produced outside the African-American framework. Indeed, in different chronotopological contexts, such as the Hispanic Caribbean, the elements that refer to colonial and Afro-diasporic history acquire original features. This paper proposes a descriptive analysis of the novel La mucama de Omicunlé (2015) by the Dominican writer Rita Indiana as an example of the Caribbean futurist speculative-projective current.