Defining blackness beyond the Middle Passage (or, put another way, to include those whose ancestors were not enslaved in the Americas) is the quest of Afrofuturism. Afrofuturism is a decades-old vision of blackness first developed by American jazz musician Sun Ra; it constructs blackness within and beyond world histories, thus defining blackness outside of its more immediate histories of slavery, colonialism and postcolonial political oppression and economic exploitation by drawing on images of interplanetary travel by 'Afronauts' (black space travellers), ancient Egypt (especially under the Nubian pharaohs) and alien encounters. The term itself was coined by the white American journalist and writer Mark Dery in his essay Black to the Future (1994), in which he noted the explosion of African American fiction using futuristic and time-travelling tropes. Expanding Dery's definition by engaging with the creative work of  
musicians such as George Clinton, Parliament Funkadelic and Janelle Monáe and of visual artists such as Rashid Johnson and Jean-Michel Basquiat, leading American Afrofuturist scholar Alondra Nelson memorably defined the central tenet of Afrofuturism as a 'utopic striving' for a better future in the here and now (Afrofuturism: Past-Future Visions, 2000). Although the work of Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu and of British-Ghanaian filmmaker and theorist Kodwo Eshun is not explicitly located as part of this movement, their artistic creations have nonetheless been described as Afrofuturist and/or Afrosurrealist, which defines blackness as a surreal state of being, especially within dominant white (European) environments.