We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments, and Diffractions 9783837646016, 9783839446010

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Henriette Gunkel, kara lynch (eds.) We Travel the Space Ways

Post_colonial Media Studies  | Volume 8

The series is edited by Ulrike Bergermann.

Henriette Gunkel (PhD) is lecturer at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work focusses on the politics of time from a decolonizing, queer-feminist perspective. She is working on a monograph on Alien Time that focusses on Africanist science-fictional interventions. She is the author of The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa (Routledge, 2010) and co-editor of What Can a Body Do? (Campus, 2012), Undutiful Daughters. New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice (Palgrave McMillan, 2012), and Futures & Fictions (Repeater, 2017), which was nominated for the 2018 International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award in the Critical Writing and Research category. kara lynch (MFA) is a time-based artist living in the Bronx, NY who earns a living as an Associate Professor of Video and Critical Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Ambivalent towards hyper-visual culture, she is curious about duration, embodiment, and aural experience; and through lowfi, collective practice and social intervention lynch explores aesthetic/political relationships between time + space. Her work is vigilantly raced, classed, and gendered – Black, queer and feminist. Major projects include: ‘Black Russians’ – a feature documentary video (2001), ‘The Outing’ – a video travelogue (19992004), ‘Mouhawala Oula’ – a gender-bending trio performance for oriental dance, live video, and saxophone (2009). The current project ‘INVISIBLE’, an episodic, speculative, multi-site video/audio installation – excavates the terror and resilient beauty of Black experience.

Henriette Gunkel, kara lynch (eds.)

We Travel the Space Ways Black Imagination, Fragments, and Diffractions

Funded by

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2019 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover concept: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Julie Mehretu: Fever graph (algorithm for serendipity), 2013. Graphite, Ink and Acrylic on Canvas, 96x120 inches (JM 0590.13) Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4601-6 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4601-0 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839446010

Table of Contents

Acknowledgement | 9

0. Constellation Black Astrophysics: A Homemade Field of Love

Alexis Pauline Gumbs | 15 Lift Off… an Introduction

kara lynch and Henriette Gunkel | 21

I. City of Mirage

Kiluanji Kia Henda | 47 Reach, Robot: AfroFuturist Technologies

Grisha Coleman and Thomas F. DeFrantz | 53 Glitches Running Trains Out In Negrizonia, A Gynocidal Western

Greg Tate | 69 To Win the War, You Fought It Sideways: Kojo Laing’s Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars

Kodwo Eshun | 83 Black Atlantis

Ayesha Hameed | 107

II. The Palace of the Quilombos

Frohawk Two Feathers | 129 The Sound of Afrofuturism

Stefanie Alisch and Carla J. Maier | 133 The Revolutionist

Milumbe Haimbe | 151 The Crypt of Blackness: or Assotto Saint with Gilles Deleuze

Tavia Nyong’o | 175

Rise of the Astro Blacks

Greg Tate | 199

III. The Archivist’s Vault :: Door Of No Return

kara lynch | 205 An Afrofuturist Time Capsule – One Point in Space-Time in the Collective Consciousness of Black Speculation

M. Asli Dukan with Wildseeds, sorryyoufeeluncomfortable, and AfroFuturist Affair | 211

Organize Your Own Temporality: Notes on Self-Determined Temporalities and Radical Futurities

Rasheedah Phillips | 237 “I Feel Love”: Race, Gender, Technē, and the (Im)Proper Sonic Habitus

Kara Keeling | 245 Afrofuturism On My Mind: Imagining Black Lives in a Post-Obama World

Anna Everett | 251

IV. Brother Kyot

Daniel Kojo Schrade | 281 Intervening into the Future Script: A Conversation about Fiction, Magic, and the Speculative Power of Images

Kiluanji Kia Henda and Nadine Siegert | 287 Dismantle Imperia

Robyn Smith | 303 Textures of Time – Abstraction, Afronauts, and the Archive in the Artwork of Daniel Kojo Schrade

Tobias Nagl | 321 There Are Storytellers Everywhere

Raimi Gbadamosi | 343

V. Prophetika

Abigail DeVille | 357 The Secessionist Manifestos of Certain Received Wisdoms

John Akomfrah and Kodwo Eshun | 363 They Sent You?

Jim Chuchu | 371 Alienation and Queer Discontent

Henriette Gunkel | 387 FAR SPACE-WISE – Without Edges a Center Cannot Exist in Stasis

Jamika Ajalon | 405

VI. FINAL ORBIT Future

Rasheedah Phillips | 433 Authors | 441

Acknowledgement

This book project has been an exciting and challenging journey of collaborative and collective future visionings. The voices and practices that form the foundation of this volume are those generated by African descendent people, sometimes in conversation, and/or alongside with white European scholars, which opens the ‘we’ that is indicated throughout the pages of this book, to all the complexities and contradictions in this collectively assembled project. We want to thank all the contributors who embarked on this journey with us. Focusing on the political objective of centering and amplifying black lineages of thinking, making, acting, dreaming therefore necessarily means decentering particular systems of thought that are embedded in whiteness. We want to acknowledge how complex it becomes to write into each other’s voices – as editors, contributors, artists, collectives, and thinkers. Some of us, at one point or another, met in Bayreuth, Germany where the Academy of Advanced African Studies with its thematical focus on “Future Africa, Visions in Time”, and particularly the subproject “Concepts of Future in MediaSpaces” with Susan Arndt and Peggy Piesche, provided a meeting point that enabled a number of discussions and ideas reflected in the book. The complex field of African Studies, at the same time, made apparent how this project requires our constant critique of whiteness as a violent system that produces a certain system of thought through the elision of other histories, experiences and knowledges. This book provides us with an understanding of how much the project of searching for and manifesting multiple black visions are drawn to the act of excavation of the past and of the archive – while tackling the complicated question of representation and, importantly, providing us with an epistemological shift on how we think about race. It urges us to tackle the question of how then can we collectively consider the ‘dreaming and visioning’ of our ancestors? While realizing that the excavation of the past is important to all of us, no matter of the racialized positionings, all contributors to this volume actively center black epistemologies and aesthetics – not in a way that makes whiteness yet again invisible or assigning it a ‘neutral’ position but by acknowledging how the different histories – some visible,

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some not – define us all, albeit differently. Whiteness is produced by the elisions in the archive, and by pointing to the void in the archive from multi-ethnic perspectives, we seek to provide an understanding that the histories that are missing are the histories of all of us and that the different and complex power relations that have formed these histories and experiences are still operating today. Taking seriously that we “dwell within neoliberalism” and as Tomlinson and Lipsitz remind us, that “the discourses we inhabit seek to shape not merely what we think but, more importantly, how we think” (2013: 7-8), as editors, we are grateful to each contributor for their leap of faith and trust that in bringing all of their pieces together into one volume we could compose something that brings out each voice and vision in accompaniment1 that makes space for discord, melodies, harmony, through call and response, overlap, repetition, cross-talk, deep reflection, and improvisation. We do so in honor of those whose shoulders we stand and those who will follow. Intellectual and artistic forbearers are acknowledged throughout this volume in our collective citation and references. We want to thank the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies for the generous and important support in this research and book project. Thanks to Doris Loehr and Renate Crowe for facilitating meetings points and research fellowships that allowed us to finalize this project. Institutionally, Hampshire College has provided vital support for the completion of this project through sabbatical leave and faculty development funds and their disbursement by Jean Sepanski and Jackie Jeffery in the Dean of Faculty Office. We want to thank Ulrike Bergermann for believing in this project and offering it a place in her book series Post_colonial Media Studies, and for the general support from the Transcript team, particularly Annika Linnemann and Daniel Bonanati. We want to thank Ken Wissoker and the anonymous reviewer of Duke University Press for their productive feedback. We are indebted to Talisa Feliciano and Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz for providing a careful and thorough proofreading of this project; as well as to Renzo Baas for proofreading and layout. Many thanks to Samira Paraschiv for transcribing the conversation between Kiluani Kia Henda and Nadine Siegert; and to Olivia Streisand for editing the transcriptions from M. Asli Dukan and Soraya Jean-Louise’s skype conversation and the intertextual layout homage to Samuel Delany that now lives as ‘An Afrofuturist Timecapsule’. Thank you to Susan Kowal Lynch, Vanessa Mobley, and Peggy Hageman for inside info on publishing. Many thanks to Sujani Reddy who read an early draft of the Introduction and provided invaluable feedback.

1

Tomlinson, Barbara and George Lipsitz (2013): “American Studies as Accompaniment.” In: American Quarterly 65/1, The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 1-30.

A CKNOWLEDGEMENT | 11

A significant meeting point for us, as editors, was the AfroSat II exhibition at the Iwalewa Haus, University of Bayreuth and supported by the BIGSAS Festival of African and African-Diasporic Literatures in the spring of 2012 and we are grateful to both Anna Schrade and Daniel Kojo Schrade for this significant intervention and introduction. kara lynch would like to thank colleagues in Africana Studies at Hampshire College, Amy Jordan and Chris Tinson, for their support for offering an advanced Africana Studies seminar spring 2016 entitled, hacu 333::Black Imagination, Fragments and Diffractions – Dialogs across the African Diaspora; and acknowledge the dynamic exchange between students that informed and emboldened this project. Thanks to: Izy Coffey-Moore, Eunice Esomonu, Kayla Foney, Dykee Gorrell, Rahma Haji, Sydney Loving, Sara Orzak, Langston Sanchez, and Olivia Streisand for their collective innovative engagement with, and enthusiastic, deep dive into the material, and their leap of faith as we hovered at the edge of the black hole that generated spectacular research projects. There are of course too many people to name whose love and support and whose art practice inspired that has made it possible to dedicate time and energy to this project, I would like to thank biological family – Lynch and Dounelis sides – especially Stevia, Wayne, and Steve, for constant belief in my art practice and for decades of living and learning how to thrive in the complexity of Diaspora and displacement; and queer feminist family – you know who you are – for teaching me collectively with joy. Special thanks for your mentor/companionship on this intellectual journey: Joy James, Joan Gibbs, Celeste Henery, jamika ajalon, Peggy Piesche, Grisha Coleman, Kevin Quashie, Sara Abu Ghazal, Maite Bermudez, Morelia Privas, Elizabeth Steeby, Charlotte Brathwaite, Courtney Bryan, Mariana Valencia, and Constance Valis-Hill; and for the many art dates that span the course of this project: Robin Coste Lewis and Hope Tucker. Henriette Gunkel would like to extend her appreciation to the colleagues of the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies for offering the time and space to embark on this journey of speculative fictioning. Thank you to Susan Arndt for the invitation to work alongside each other and together in a radical and inspiring way. Thanks to Peggy Piesche, Katharina Fink, Nadine Siegert, and Sybille Bauriedl for sharing thoughts, laughter, and the need for a glass of wine. Thanks to Jim Chuchu, Greg Tate, Kara Keeling, Grisha Coleman, Paul D. Miller, John Akomfrah, and Wangui Wa Goro for your mentorship and willingness to share. Thanks is due to the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU for offering a visiting scholarship in 2013; enabling conversations with the late José Esteban Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, and Alondra Nelson in particular that were invaluable to kickstart this project. Thanks to the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College where I found a new intellectual home, also for this and future research projects, and to the wonderful and engaging students in my Radical Imaginations and Speculative Voyages classes who taught me so much of what is articulated in this research project. Thanks to

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Kodwo Eshun, Elvira Dyangani Ose, the late Mark Fisher, Ayesha Hameed, Simon O’Sullivan, Bridget Crone, and Nicole Wolf for being the colleagues that one needs for collaborative and collective thinking in a time in which future visionings are actively discouraged. Special thanks to my parents, Joachim and Barbara Gunkel, my sisters and brothers, and thanks to Renzo Baas and Karim Gunkel for the love and joy as well as the space that this project demanded.

0. Constellation

Black Astrophysics: A Homemade Field of Love Dedicated to Clyde Eliot Gumbs A LEXIS P AULINE G UMBS

I.

B Y THE T IME I R EALLY S EE Y OU , Y OU A RE G ONE

The night my father died I called him on the phone to say hello and to see when he would be leaving the hospital. He didn’t answer. I left a message and at the last moment before I hung up I quickly said, “rest well.” I don’t know if he heard me. Maybe he had the strength to listen but not to call back. I don’t know. Maybe he was already in the place where he could hear everything I said, no matter that I was in a car in Durham, still sweaty from dance class, and his body was losing temperature and breath in a hospital room in New Jersey. No matter. Just energy. So now I have to learn astro-physics. What we do with the light of stars that are gone by the time we notice them. What we do with the darkness that scientists fear. The darkness we are all taught to fear. The unknowable that scholars fear and fetishize. The darkness where we think we see a star. Is any message too late? In the colored people’s time sense? In the black sense? In the cosmic sense? I was born just a few hours too late to share my father’s birthday. Now I fear celebrating will break me. So I procrastinate like the day will never come. I make no plans. My own approximation of darkness. I cling to not knowing as long as I can. My father’s first birthday after he died, I went to the Hayden Planetarium. One of his favorite places. With my head tilted back towards a round projected sky, I listened to Neil DeGrasse Tyson tell me that I wasn’t the center of the universe. And that I was. And that everything in the universe is moving apart. Further every second. By the time I really see you, you are gone. This time I won’t let the stars distract me. The ever-present darkness says expand. That is to say, I love you. But I cannot keep you. And part of me hates the rate of change that means that I will lose everyone I love, or they will lose me. And

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both. I know that writing this is changing me. Faster than I can accept. Could I be the same person, even for the length of one essay? The process of one prayer? I am opening this by opening up. Letting go and holding on to you, and poets, and prophets, and physicists, and particles, and my father, and my freedom, and my fears. But we both know, in the time you take to read this book, what you knew about yourself will burn. By the time you see these words, I am gone.

II. S OME

OF

U S D ID N OT D IE (Y ET )

In my practice of speaking to the dead a little too late, I am not alone. I am joined by almost all of literature. Let’s use the example of June Jordan. June Jordan went to Barnard many years before I did. During my first year of college I dug through the archives and brought her words to a new generation of black students, I kept them on my walls. June Jordan was alive then. She came and spoke at Barnard, one of her last speeches ever. It was after September 11th and the speech was called “Some of Us Did Not Die.” She was alive. I missed it. I was somehow out of town. And then she did die. And I did not. I ended up being the first researcher to visit her archival papers. And I have been writing about her ever since. Turns out she writes to dead people too. In 1977, the great Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer died of breast cancer. And days later June Jordan published a poem in the New York Times in the second person as in: “You used to say ‘June? Honey when you come down here you stay with me.’ Where else?”

June Jordan’s most anti-imperialist book of poems is called Living Room. She sat in her kitchen and told Alexis De Veaux and Essence Magazine that “poems are housework” and should be “as nutritious as a good breakfast.” And her definition of home was shaped profoundly by Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou Hamer who fed and housed organizers after being kicked out of her home for attempting to register to vote. Fannie Lou Hamer who stayed in Mississippi after the window next to her bed was shot through in the night. Fannie Lou Hamer who was jailed and beaten until her body felt like lead. Fannie Lou Hamer who spoke her truth in protest of the Democratic National Convention. “Is this America?” she asked. Fannie Lou Hamer who adopted children after the state hos-

B LACK A STROPHYSICS

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pital sterilized her without her consent. Fannie Lou Hamer who created a farm where disenfranchised black and white farmers could nourish each other and their community. That Fannie Lou Hamer was June Jordan’s mentor and model for what Jordan called “Black home.” In 1970 in the New York Times, Jordan wrote about Mississippi as a “Black home,” a site of dark energy. She spoke against the way black lives were invisible to the readers of the New York Times except in death. She insisted: “They are there, right there. They are alive and changing their lives, point by point.”

Not exactly stars, but impactful and dark points of black, like most of the energy and matter in the universe. In 1977, feeling homeless and proud, June Jordan described Fannie Lou Hamer as: “one full Black lily luminescent in a homemade field of love”

In her recent book Field Theories and in her mixtape poem in honor of June Jordan, poet Samiya Bashir, student of June Jordan and participant in her “Poetry for the People” program at UC Berkeley cites part of that same poem: “one full Black lily luminescent in a homemade field”

What exactly is a field? What is the difference between a store-bought one and one made at home? Can we think of a field in the astrophysical sense as a relation? Can we think of it as the energetic context of darkness in the universe; most famous for the enlightenment-confounding phenomenon of black (w)holes;1 those places in the universe where time does not necessarily move forward; where you are not necessarily one being;2 where, as Rasheedah Phillips explores so beautifully in her work, you come back and meet yourself because what happened is unhappening?

1

Shout out to Evelyn Hammonds.

2

Shout out to Fred Moten and Édouard Glissant.

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Ronald Mallet, a retired black theoretical physicist, is building a time machine so he can reunite with his father who died when he was a child. Literature reaches for what black life already wants. Everything that was taken too soon. Which is to say, everything. Do you think Fannie Lou Hamer can hear her name being spoken across time in print right now? How many times do I have to repeat it? One of my niece’s first words was “Hamer.” She has her own copy of the out of print children’s book “Fannie Lou Hamer” by June Jordan. Was June Jordan creating black hole portals for black (w)holeness with her pattern of writing to the dead? Are we all doing that? Are we participating in an astrophysical exercise to undo the meaning of black life as death? In 1992, June Jordan wrote to fellow black West Indian poet, mother, and teacher Audre Lorde soon after Lorde died, in time for the funeral program. In this letter, again in the second person, she talked about their differences and what brought them together. Their relationship, shaped by tokenization was not always an easy one. June Jordan’s first public appearance after Fannie Lou Hamer died in 1977 was to introduce Audre Lorde as the first black poet to read at the national library. She compared Lorde to Fannie Lou Hamer, and Lorde wrote a letter thanking her. By the time of the 1992 letter, Audre Lorde had died, like Fannie Lou Hamer, from breast cancer, a disease that June Jordan was fighting as she wrote the letter and which she would fight with support from her community for ten more years. Early on in the letter Jordan explains their common motivation in the struggle for open admissions at City University of New York. Against arguments that the admission of the black and Puerto Rican youth who made up the majority of the NYC public school systems would lower the standards of the university, she said: “We knew better. We had been Black children. And each of us had given birth to a Black child here, in America. So we knew the precious, unimaginably deep music and the precious unimaginably complicated mathematics that our forbidden Black bodies enveloped.”

Right. Dark energy. So now I gotta learn math. And how to get back to you with the supermassive weight of all I want to unhappen.

III. B LACK S PACE T RAVEL  / N OT B ECOMING S TARS A year before my father died, he was close to the threshold. He was getting lifesaving blood transfusions every few days. Every few days his blood ran out. At some point his doctor prescribed him a new medicine that stabilized him for a

B LACK A STROPHYSICS

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while. But, before that, one day while I sat with my father in a small room in New Jersey, I didn’t know what to say. So I tried to read him my afro-utopian young adult novella, shaped around his father’s frequent warning “those who do not hear will feel.” He could barely keep his eyes open in the hospital bed. At some point he told me to stop reading so we could tune in and be with “the brothers and sisters in Detroit.” Was it the pain medication or the lucidity of being barely alive that made him want, need, and know how to move beyond his body and be anywhere? We were physically in New Jersey, just a few miles from where he grew up, and where I was born, and where much of our family lived. But though neither of us had ever lived in Detroit, I was not surprised that we would go to such a black place of sound. I believed him that we could travel there. And so we did. Grace Lee Boggs had recently died, so maybe the door was open. We were going through some changes that would change us forever anyway. We were going to Detroit. Do black geographic spaces function as portals? What happens when due to gentrification (or urban recolonization) traveling to erstwhile black cultural spaces also requires us to travel back in time? Are black spaces inherently irresistibly attractive to light? Whence the density of Detroit? What is the intergalactic weight of the changes black spaces are going through? June Jordan related her changes to Detroit’s changes too. In her 1971 debut poetry collection Some Changes, she relates her own heartbreak to the situation of black urban spaces. Whereas my father reached out from his hospital bed to “the brothers and sisters in Detroit,” the poem “The New Pieta,” in Jordan’s book is dedicated to the “mothers and children of Detroit.” Jordan starts in iambic pentameter: “They wait like darkness not becoming stars,”

connecting this work on Detroit to classical forms in poetry and painting and referencing the sacred mothering in the pieta (used to describe paintings of Mary and Jesus). Three stanzas of three lines each invoke the trinity. Is it mother, child, and missing father? Is it son, spirit, and missing God? How do we calculate the thermodynamics of the Detroit rebellion in the relationship of a black mother to her dead and dying son? Is it collective cremation? Does it register as dark energy? What about the burning streets still “not becoming stars”? Jordan offers the images of “a poor escape from fire” and “lights to claim to torch the body” and “(a burning door).” But the end of the first and last stanzas repeat the result of the thermodynamic situation: “he moves no more.”

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Was my father warning me of a shift in his movement, of where he was headed? Was he teaching me a new mode? Immobilized by the preventable cancer in his bones that no one noticed until it was too late because he didn’t have health insurance most of his life, did he actually develop a skill for transporting himself to black space? Is the lack of health insurance already a black space? Is dark energy a space of queer movement, of disability justice? Why was a man, who could not move from his bed, the first person to seriously invite me travel through space and time? Can we take on the leadership of disabled black travelers in a journey that queers the meaning of movement all together? Can we be like June Jordan “not becoming stars” but following instead the darkness of what we want, the togetherness that enlightenment won’t let us have? I wish that violence and neglect didn’t steal black life right in front of our faces. I wish that my father was here. This writing is how I bring him. Who are you bringing? Death reveals to me that all my archival obsession, all my research, all my poetics, all my ritual making is a black refusal to be separate from blackness, from the unknown and the unknowable, from you. The black breadth of the universe. A homemade field of love.

Lift Off… an Introduction KARA LYNCH AND

H ENRIETTE G UNKEL We travel the Space Ways from Planet to Planet. SUN RA 1960/1 We hold this myth to be potential Not self-evident but equational Another Dimension Of another kind of Living Life. SUN RA 2005: 231

We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments and Diffractions is an aspirational research project to gather together in one volume a range of voices that ring across this narrow bridge between the 20th and 21st centuries; each pulling with them legacies of 500 years of contact between Africa, Europe, and the Americas while reaching towards the stars and unknown planets, galaxies, and ways of living life. As we collectively orbit towards the year 2020, the editors and contributors of this volume have noticed a re-emergence of the currency of a black visioning of a future that is political and cultural, and proposes practices, identities, and a way of being in the world. Although some of these outcroppings have become branded and sold back to us through the capitalist system, a radical strain of black fictions, visions, and imaginings surface and retain collective resonance. Those that attract our attention are queer, feminist, and circumnavigate continents. In this volume, contributors from multiple geographical contexts and racialized positionings engage critically, consciously, and creatively with questions of race, time, space, technology, imagination, speculative aesthetics and content, outer space, and black history/presence/future to mark their vision for Afrofuture con-

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templation. We have invited artists, scholars, writers, musicians, and cultural critics: visionaries, friends, and fellow travelers, to guide us in this journey.

O UTER -S PACE // W HERE Y A A T ?

AT

S EA // U NDERGROUND ::

…there is no crossing that is ever undertaken once and for all. M. JACQUI ALEXANDER 2005: 6

As editors compiling this volume, we acknowledge the concrete impact of antiblack violence and we also circulate in other spheres, ones that breathe some space into speculating and dreaming otherwise. In these spheres time and space converge and transform. While paying homage to the people that walked these paths before us, it is black visioning that looks into outer-space, underground, and at sea that guide us. These visionary fictions reference the past in our present in order to claim a future. This is what happens when ‘afro’ meets futurism. These speculations rely upon memory and the body as an archive and as the seedling for expanding the horizon of what could be. These proposals, not bound to the power dynamics of geopolitical realities, shift our perspective to see and envision what is possible in the here and now. At the crossroads. This project begins at the crossroads. As a touchstone for black imagination, The Last Angel of History encourages us to consider all the roads and pathways sparked by an anti-colonial, pan-Africanist future project. In this film, produced in 1995 by the Black Audio Film Collective and directed by John Akomfrah, the Data Thief, moving in and out of space and time in the context of blackness, finds himself at the crossroads. When he roams the ‘internet of black culture’ he moves between contemporary diasporic futurist interventions and past African futurist projects. After travelling back and forth between the African continent and its diasporas, the Data Thief, however, fails to return to the ‘land of African memory’. This points to a void in the archive, an unfinished conversation between African(ist) utopian projects, as well as to the restrictions upon black subjectivity and the obstacles to belonging in the context of migration. In revealing these intersecting lines and trajectories we look towards the crossroads from the continental plates of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Contributors find home-space in Nairobi, Johannesburg, Lagos, Lusaka, Luanda, London, Paris, Berlin, Bayreuth, Lisbon, Toronto, Amherst, New York, New Orleans, Tempe, Durham, Los Angeles, Kingston, and Philadelphia. And through their interventions

L IFT O FF ...

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we find ourselves in the crosscurrents of being at sea, in outer-space, and the underground, recognizing that, as Jared Sexton puts it, “black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in” (2011: 28). We do not travel to these deep dark tides for escape; rather we gather in this confluence as a practice of critical fabulation (Hartman 2008) and re-membering from what M. Jacqui Alexander describes as “a forgetting so deep, we had forgotten that we had forgotten.” (2005: 263). The circulation of people, knowledge, culture, technology, and the stuff of life across different geopolitical contexts calls upon us to pause when thinking through a contemporary re-emergence of the currency of black visioning. In recognizing these triangular routes past and present, we need to also acknowledge the politics of time in these geopolitical formations. From the Enlightenment project onwards, Europe, for example, continues to position itself up in relation to Africa. In this way, temporally, Africa, and by extension its diaspora, remains spatially outside – an anachronistic space – always as a past that Europe races to leave behind by way of settler colonial logics of eminent domain.1 The colonial viewpoint renders black people spatially static and outside of history. Current economic discourses of ‘Africa Rising’ and also the emergent interest in future projects on the continent continue to give meaning to these discourses. Africanist science fictional interventions on the continent and its diasporas emerge and circulate in this context, not outside of it. Following in the footsteps of Hortense Spiller’s tracing of the beginning ruptures, massive demographic shifts, violent formations, and interruptions to the development of black African consciousness and culture initiated by the Atlantic Slave Trade,2 the resistant strains within this volume “write under the pressure of these

1

In her discussion of panoptical time and anachronistic space in the first chapter of her seminal book Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock writes: “Hegel, for example, perhaps the most influential philosophical proponent of this notion, figured Africa as inhabiting not simply a different geographical space but a different temporal zone, surviving anachronistically within the time of history. Africa, announces Hegel, ‘is no Historical part of the world […] it has no movement or development to exhibit.’ Africa came to be seen as the colonial paradigm of anachronistic space, a land perpetually out of time in modernity, marooned and historically abandoned. Africa was a fetish-land, inhabited by cannibals, dervishes and witch doctors, abandoned in prehistory at the precise moment before the Weltgeist (as the cunning agent of Reason) manifested itself in history” (1994: 40-41).

2

“The symbolic order that I wish to trace in this writing, calling it an ‘American Grammar’, begins at the ‘beginning’, which is really a rupture and a radically different kind of cultural continuation of the massive demographic shifts, the violent formation of a modern African consciousness, that take place on the sub-Saharan continent during the initiative strikes which open the Atlantic Slave Trade in the fifteenth century of our Christ, interrupted hundreds of years of black African culture. We write and think, then, about an

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events” (1987: 68-9). By articulating this form of wake work,3 this project revises, recalibrates, and recognizes African descendants as a global people – we/they4 are in Ferguson, Marikana, and Calais – and critically contests anti-black violence, past/present/future that circulates through the crosscurrents of the middle passage and the Mediterranean Sea. Geographies are not fixed, and no one vantage-point privileged over another. As Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung5 prompts us in his suspicion of the sudden interest in African futures, we endeavor to pay attention to the limitations that accrue when the future becomes the privileged dimension of time and, by extension, consider the future as inseparable from the past and present. Criticisms from the African continent convince us that even though we know that Afrofuturism and black visioning were never enclosed by the national or geopolitical borders of the Americas or Europe, it is important to address the diaspora’s dominance in claiming this moniker. Once we shift our geographical standpoint from New York, the U.S., North America, to London or Berlin, Europe, The Diaspora, to multiple locations within Africa – Luanda to Nairobi, Ghana to South Africa – and in conversation with practicing artists, scholars, and collectives on the continent, we also shift and expand our conversations about futures and future-making. While this volume emphasizes the movement and exchange between different geographies, and focuses on artists, writers, scholars, and activists who reformulate and reshape our understanding of space, we acknowledge that our points of reference are predominantly Anglophone. In considering the gap this creates, we suspect that in the Americas and on the African continent there are stories – encoded in multiple indigenous languages, Portuguese, French, and Spanish – that contend with digging into the past to speculate a future, or that conjure the supernatural. Additionally, in these contexts, labels such as magical realism and fantasy may be

outcome of aspects of African-American life in the United States under the pressure of those events. I might as well add that the familiarity of this narrative does nothing to appease the hunger of recorded memory, nor does the persistence of the repeated rob these well-known, oft-told events of their power, even now, to startle. In a very real sense, every writing as revision makes the ‘discovery’ all over again.” (Spillers 1987: 69) 3 4

See Christina Sharpe (2016). Following the example of Eve Tuck and K. W. Yang (2012). „Decolonization is not a Metaphor,” In: Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1/ 1, p. 3 and as an African Descendent scholar and a white European scholar writing together, we have used forward slashes to reflect our discrepant positionings in our pronouns throughout this essay.

5

Cited in Heidenreich-Seleme and Sean O’Toole (2016: 131).

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interchangeable with science fiction.6 We see this project in conversation with a multilingual and multigenre African fictioning. Digging into the past to vision the future and address the present means developing critical analyses and practices that challenge and disrupt white settler colonialism and whiteness as the dominant thread of future making and revisiting the motivations behind and the legacies of pan-African future projects. Questions of science, technology, space, and revolution are upended and revisioned from a black African perspective. Jim Chuchu reminds us in his questioning of the very term Afrofuturism: “Does the ‘Afro’ prefix serve to demarcate Afrofuturism as being separate from broader, more serious futurisms? Who benefits from the construct of Afrofuturism? Is it an imaginary audience of Africans in need of utopias, or the curatorial bureaucracy around Afrofuturism? What do Africans think of African futurism? Why do so many Afrofuturistic images involve Africans appropriating junk and remixing waste? Is there no room for the new in the future? Does the too-easy, broad-stroke application of the term Afrofuturism eclipse other irreverent or subversive urges that have nothing to do with futurism?” (Heidenreich-Seleme and Sean O’Toole 2016: 95)

Here, Chuchu points to the complex layers within the political that guide us through this research project. When it comes to new and challenging ways of using science and technology, this meditation on ‘Africanicity’ (see also Akomfrah in this volume) generatively destabilizes binary divisions between North and South, and likewise, between privileged and disadvantaged, as expressed in the notion of the digital divide. We recognize a shift from thinking the body in relation to technology to one in which we understand the body as technology and how this reconceptualization of technology – sound, image, machine, etc. – becomes our theoretical anchoring – in other words, becomes theory itself (see, for example, Coleman and DeFrantz in this volume). These theoretical practices do not produce a static temporal divide that leaves the African continent in the past. Not beholden to,

6

For those who may deepen this project with further research into a rich archive of African diaspora stories of the global South in languages other than English, in this volume, we point to Kodwo Eshun’s rich exploration of Kojo Laing’s writing as a template for engaging the complexity of genre bending works. Additionally, the dynamic discussion between Kiluanji Kia Henda and Nadine Siegert that unearths currents of intercontinental archiving of ritual and culture, and the overlaps between superpowers and witchcraft in Angola. We believe these may prove generative in later considerations of black science fiction and black visioning in Central and South America where there is a long tradition of magical realism in literature, art, and politics.

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nor entrapped by whiteness and settler colonialism, what is significant about Black Imagination, Fragments, and Diffractions is that black speculative practices are of our/their own imagining.

F UTURES

OF

M OURNING // H ORIZONS

OF

H OPE

Our ancestors dreamed us up and then bent reality to create us WALIDAH IMARISHA 2015: 11

In the current moment, the integrity and substance of black people as whole and human is contested and dismantled globally with the continuum of African and African descendent people’s social and physical death. This constant black death is evidenced by mass migrations and human trafficking of people of African descent fleeing the devastation wrought by structural adjustment, war, and climate chaos, and their subsequent perishing at sea or in camps; the refusal by the European Union to provide safe harbors for migrants in distress in the Mediterranean Sea; the systematic racial profiling across Europe; mass state sponsored killings of black youth by U.S. trained Brazilian para-military troops; the militarization of police forces and the impunity with which they mete out violence and death on black communities in the U.S.; neoliberal, neocolonial, and neo-communist policies of extraction, speculation, and exploitation of human labor and natural resources all across the African continent; displacement of Black people from their indigenous lands in the Americas and the African Continent from Colombia SA to Namibia; and the refusal by European countries and the U.S. to disburse reparations to African peoples as restitution for colonialism, slavery, and genocide. In this context, we recognize the need to reconsider the very notion of the human (Wynter 2003; Jackson 2016), and black imagination as an aesthetic-political counterpoint that animates and builds our social and political movements. We agree with the editors of and contributors to the recent anthology, Octavia’s Brood that grassroots political movement building for black people has always relied upon speculative fictioning and visioning another world as a radical response to concrete oppressive and repressive experiences on the ground.7 As further articulated by

7

In her introduction, Walidah Imarisha states immediately: “Whenever we try to envision a world without war, without violence, without prisons, without capitalism, we are engaging in speculative fiction. All organizing is science fiction. Organizers and activists dedicate their lives to creating and envisioning another world, or many other worlds” (2015: 10).

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Wildseeds Collective member Soraya Jean-Louise and Rasheedah Phillips of AfroFuturist Affair in this volume, here practices of future fictioning can provide a safe(r) space from which to formulate a radical and collectively assembled critique of the present while providing an epistemological shift around how we think about race and point to alternative systems of thought and knowledge – and as such rendering modernity forever suspect.8 With this in mind, we align the goals of this project with the speculative fictioning and movement building of #BlackLivesMatter as a digital platform, organizing principle, and queer and feminist rallying cry that critically analyzes the continuity and brutality of anti-black violence and in turn mobilizes black imagination towards direct action for black lives. Black imagination embodies and emboldens our complex subjectivities and collective visions that include histories and futures of mourning, resistance, resilience, healing, black joy, and horizons of hope. As articulated in the by now pivotal quote by Samuel R. Delany: “We need images of tomorrow; and our people need them more than most. Without an image of tomorrow, one is trapped by blind history, economics and politics beyond our control. […] Only by having clear and vital images of the many alternatives, good and bad, of where one can go, will we have any control over the way we may actually get there in a reality tomorrow will bring all too quickly.” (2012: 14)

Those of us searching for and manifesting multiple black visions are drawn to the act of excavation of the past and of the archive precisely because, as Delany points out, African peoples have been forcibly restricted from access to our histories. This visioning is simultaneously entangled with an excavation and confabulation9 of the archive in order to recognize and realize images of our past. Knowledge production generated by African Descendent peoples is the foundation for this volume. All those contributing to the volume come to it with the political objective of centering and amplifying these lineages of thinking, making, acting, dreaming. This project also requires our constant critique of whiteness as a violent and voracious ideology that will extract, consume, and call the ‘other’ its own. How then do we collectively consider the ‘dreaming and visioning’ of our ancestors? White European contributors to this volume actively shift away and against the supremacist visions of their

8

Toni Morrison makes this point in conversation with Paul Gilroy (1994).

9

With this we bring into the conversation Saidiya Hartman and her approach to the archive of the afterlife of slavery, and Jared Sexton’s reading of Donna V. Jones’ 2010 book The racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Negritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, in: “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism.” In: Tensions Journal 5, winter 2011, Toronto, Canada: York University, pp. 13-15.

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predecessors as they center black epistemologies and aesthetics. African Descendent contributors equipped with potent frameworks of 21st century double consciousness and fortified by legacies of black freedom dreaming10 offer “clear and vital images of the many alternatives… where one can go” (ibid). Practices and forms of future fictioning, which we can find across literary, sonic, visual, and performance art, draw our attention to non-linear conceptions of time, to different rhythms and rituals of time, and inspire our theorization of futurity as alternative space-times (see also Phillips in this volume). Afrofuturism is arguably the most famous concept that allows this non-linear model of the future of the African diaspora, a concept that Alondra Nelson understands as: “Neither a mantra nor a movement, AfroFuturism is a critical perspective that opens up inquiry into the many overlaps between technoculture and black diasporic histories. AfroFuturism looks across popular culture – jazz, hip-hop, and techno music; experimental film; graffiti art; new photography – to find models of expression that transform spaces of alienation into novel forms of creative potential. In the process, it reclaims theorizing about the future.” (2000: 35)

As a number of contributors in this volume have expressed their interest in an intergenerational and cross-continental exploration of the term, rather than an investment in the term itself, we lean into Nelson’s exposition of it in order to foreground the crosscurrent movements that the term Afrofuturism entails. Sonic fiction, digital ecology, myth-science, hyperstition, biomythology, hauntology, fabulation, confabulation are terms that circulated at the time of the 1990s when Afrofuturism was coined. These terms all name and theorize certain art practices and critical/theoretical approaches that we can find, not necessarily exclusively, when blackness and science fiction meet in the context of black visioning (see Akomfrah and Eshun in this volume). We observe that these earlier terms seem to have taken a backseat or even disappeared in the context of black futures/black visions. In our re-consideration of Afrofuturism, we see that there has been a refocusing that expands the disciplines, forms, cultures, and practices that fall within its sway.

10 See Robin D.G. Kelley (2008) for the conceptualization of freedom dreaming in the context of black radical imagination.

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WALK WITH ME :: TRANSFIGURATION TO TRANSLINEAR LIGHT 11 …if we put one fourth of the time into trying to understand our spirituality that we put into wanting to grow more wealthy, we would find some of the incredible things occurring in our universe that we need to be aware of… ALICE COLTRANE N.D.12

We pause to acknowledge that all of these ‘future’ terms by themselves are not necessarily progressive in and of themselves.13 Given how much speculation informs the current financial market, or how much fictioning operates in the context of current election campaigns leading to Brexit and Trump as the current U.S. president, this distinction is imperative. Rather, it is through a combination of these practices in the context of black liberation and self-determination, and the conscious production of alternative space-times through art and politics in the context of alienation, that black visioning issues a futurism that is not embedded in fascism, that reveals forms of the imagination detached from the Enlightenment project, and initiates a form of speculation that operates against the neoliberal market/SF capital and its processes of individualization.14 We are particularly interested in exploring these practices from a queer-feminist perspective that emphasizes collaborations and collectives as well as notions of the commons. Working from this framework we see how often these concerns were neglected in the context of Afrofuturism, and we question and critique how, when referenced, this earlier moment became singularly male and heteronormative and

11 These are the title tracks of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s last two recordings respectively – 1978/2004 – between which she dedicated her life practice to a deep spiritual journey of meditation and musical exploration. We attribute these aspirations to her here as a guiding light and touchstone for recalibrating our collective freedom dreams. 12 As quoted on a website dedicated to her life and practice: https://www.alicecoltrane. com/life. Las Access 29.08.2018. 13 See Gunkel, Hameed and O’Sullivan (2017) for further discussions on future fictioning and its relationship to contemporary global politics. 14 “Building oppositional practices within and across multiple simultaneous sites is imperative in political struggle as is the cultivation of the discipline of freedom and collective self-determination in terms that supersede those of free-market democracy. Yet, oppositional consciousness is a process rather than a given before the fact of political practice. And further, we cannot afford to be continually, one-sidedly oppositional” (Alexander 2005: 6).

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was consistently attributed to a few individuals with name recognition, and often situated in the U.S. context. This masculinist depiction of the field did not jive with what we know of generations of visionaries and their black imaginings. As we recontextualize current cultural and political practices that we see emerging we invoke theorist Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s conjuring of the black Atlantic as queer Atlantic: “The key to making black queer sense of such self-pieces is not turning to race-, class-, or geographically unmarked models of sexuality and humanity – based in European Enlightenment philosophy that justified slavery in the first place – but tracing as carefully as possible the particular, specific, always marked contours, the contested beach-scapes of African Diaspora histories of gender and sexuality. So in the black queer time and place of the door of no return, fluid desire is neither purely metaphor nor purely luxury. Instead – like the blue embrace of two bodies of water – its connections and cross currents look to speak through and beyond the washed lading, the multiply effaced identities of the Middle Passage.” (2008: 211)

Our journey then has been one of mapping the legacies, and topographies of collectively assembled black visions. In this book project we want to foreground practices that inform the range of concepts that we find in the context of Afrofuturism and black visioning to our sense of being together in this world. We do this while exploring our sense of time, space, and community and the concrete implications of such practices. We recognize art strategies that propose different forms of being in the world by cutting familiar lines of association and reassembling new worlds as visible in practices of collage, montage, layering, the cut-up, syncretism, and fragmented writing, for example. Practices represented in We Travel the Space Ways traverse literary forms, sound and performance art, visual and plastic arts, and likewise community organizing/visioning/action. Our collective imagination guides us in our practices as we continue to ask, ‘How will we be free?’ What is at stake here in the context of the imagination is building and working through mourning, resistance, resilience, healing, hope and joy – together. This road map to our survival15 and our thriving is a historically situated project that does not leave past experiences and events or the community behind. It rather understands history as an ongoing and participatory project that extends into alternative visions of being in this world together. Examples of this can be found in earlier projects like afrofuturism.net, a full issue of Social Text in 2002 edited by Alondra Nelson, Dark Matter: A Century of

15 Here we are inspired specifically by the tools and maps that a visionary author like Octavia Butler provides in books like Parable of the Sower (1993) in which she makes a checklist of our survival kit for the 21st century.

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Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora edited by Sharee Renee Thomas, the Afro-Geeks conferences spearheaded by Anna Everett, and The Last Angel of History which started off as a research project and involved Edward George in collaboration with the Black Audio Film Collective. These legacies continue in projects like Octavia’s Brood (2015) where editors Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown collaborate with organizers and movement builders to generate an archive of their visionary fiction in honor of and inspired by Octavia Butler’s oeuvre. In We Travel the Space Ways, listening in on the collective conversation reveals that Wildseeds: The New Orleans Octavia Butler Emergent Strategy Collective began as a feminist science fiction reading group formed out of their shared connection with Butler’s writing. sorryyoufeeluncomfortable also incorporates reading groups as a component of their collective art practice and this is in conversation with exhibitions and public projects. AfroFuturist Affair culls its resources to create a year-long community engaged art and social practice entitled, “Community Futurisms: Time & Memory in North Philly” where residents of North Philadelphia participate in oral history, visioning projects, and science fiction writing workshops in order to hold onto their past and envision their futures as a community under the siege of eminent domain and physical displacement. Multiple conferences, workshops, socially engaged art projects, reading groups, film screenings, and performances all influence our understanding of community building and meaning making, as well as our experience of public space. Initiatives in the 21st century further include The Nest Collective in Nairobi – of which Jim Chuchu is a member – that understands itself as a “small army of thinkers, makers and believers” working in film, music, fashion, visual arts and literature in order to explore “our troubling modern identities, re-imagine our pasts and remix our futures”.16 In this volume, Kiluanji Kia Henda introduces Fucking Global, a public intervention in an abandoned hotel in Luanda by his cohort of Angolan artists in which they collectively move towards alternate modes of display and experience of art. Reaching people across spaces and making connections, forming collaborations as set out through sound waves is visible in the history of communitybased pirate radio stations, as explored by Carla Meier and Stef Alisch in the context of London in this volume, for example. It is also visible in projects like the Pan-African Space Station (PASS), a pop-up live radio studio that also operates as performance and exhibition space as research platform and living archive, and is linked to Chimurenga, a pan-African publication of writing, art, and politics based in Cape Town.

16 See Gunkel in this volume.

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What these projects have in common is a commitment to the speculative collectivity and action. We owe a great deal to these manifestations and initiatives and place this project in the mix of our collectively assembled archive.

W E T RAVEL … An artist project initiates each section of this volume. Contributions experiment with form and take aesthetic-political stances, which are in dialog with the thematic and conceptual intervention posed by the visual material. A City Called Mirage, The Palace of the Quilombos, The Archivist’s Vault, Brother Kyot, and Prophetika provide wayfinding for our black visioning and imagination. Mirroring one another, each section includes: a dynamic conversation between peers and fellow travelers, fictioning and speculation projects, a close reading of cultural artifacts and arguments, and expressive essays that engage strategies of fragmentation, diffraction, and personal/political propositions. Each section provides a strong dialog between the three continents, Africa, America, and Europe, and develop our feminist and queer thinking around black futures. Among the interventions by authors and artists in each section: A City Called Mirage is a play between shadow and light, permanence and ephemera; The Palace of the Quilombos offers a syncretic, marronage palimpsest for liberation; the Archivist’s Vault circumnavigates the crossroads of a black time-space continuum across centuries and continents; we follow the trickster Brother Kyot through a collage of allegory and parable; and finally, Prophetika coaxes dark matter back to the beginning – and into the future.

> A C ITY C ALLED M IRAGE The book lifts off with Kiluanji Kia Henda’s art work “A City Called Mirage” which proposes a new narrative structure that emerges out of the assemblage of ephemeral symbols and letters traditionally used in Angolan sand drawings when transformed and fixed into iron sculptures in the desert via mathematics and architecture. This freedom to reclaim and transform symbols and space, its meaning, and its narrative provides a new structure of thinking around history, heritage, and the commons and opens up to a selection of interventions by authors and artists in this section to work through or test their hypotheses. The opening conversation between Grisha Coleman and Thomas F. DeFrantz explores the possibilities for Afrofuturist technologies in the context of ongoing anti-black violence and hence a conceptualization of Afrofuturism that accounts for contemporary programming and technological design today. Coleman and

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DeFrantz’ own art practices provide the framework for the discussion. DeFrantz shares a queer and feminist genealogy of African diaspora dance that insists upon black subjectivity while contextualizing a possible blueprint for recognizing the black body as a technology. As a case study, Coleman’s project Reach, Robot! introduces us to the idea of programming conduction17 with sensors and sounds that are triggered by improvised movement in public space. Here the artist reconfigures a plaza in Pittsburg, PA so that black technologies reverberate through the space and the participants’ bodies, while reaching into the archive and the black history of the place. Their practices engage composition, improvisation, movement, and black liberation, answering one of the key questions addressed in this conversation: “What could a viable ‘black robot’ tell us about power, resistance, survival, or mobility?” The freedom to create new spaces through fiction is also evident in Greg Tate’s writing in which glitches form an undercommons, a contested and dangerous space held together by desire and music. This space is in conversation and close proximity with a self-assembled archive that reconstructs a collective memory. Kodwo Eshun’s thorough introduction to a multifaceted continental critique of Afrofuturism oblige him to consider continental futurisms not as a new phenomenon but as part of an already existing black visioning on the continent. Eshun’s exploration of Ghanaian author Kojo Laing’s incredible visual language, Laing’s visionary and speculative writing practice that creates new worlds and new alliances, forces us to pay attention to the specific context in which futurisms have been embedded – to search for them in unlikely places – in this case within magical realism. Liberating them out of this context, as Eshun does for us, enables futurist texts of the past to operate as possible pressure points in the discourse of Afrofuturism and raises a critique alerting us to the consequences of too easily placing continental futurisms within its frameworks. In her performative and visual writing, Ayesha Hameed, similarly reaches into the archive and ferries us from outer-space to the bottom of the sea, understood here as an active archive that allows for connections between different geographies of time, the aural and visual afterlives of the middle passage, and contemporary migration from the African continent to Europe. While remaining committed to the materiality of the sea and to a critical ecology, Hameed explores the idea of a Black Atlantis through dialectical images, temporal leaps, the movement of bodies, and an

17 See Grisha Coleman and Tommy DeFrantz in this volume: “…Butch Morris developed a system of ‘Conduction’ to organize his music – at once rigorous and open so that he and the players he worked with could practice this transferal - test it. He created a technology for collective practice. A deeply black one, you knew from the sound, the themes, the sensibility – and that form!”

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Afrofuturist soundtrack. Hameed’s project insists upon an exploration of the accumulation of violence through a futurist scenario that continues to follow the quest for freedom and allows our bodies to move to a different beat.

>> T HE P ALACE

OF THE

Q UILOMBOS

Space is the Place. Frohawk Two Feathers turns to places outside the center and reconsiders the sites of resistance, healing, and resilience. The world-making potential of quilombos is visualized through practices of remapping, reimagining, hypermythologizing, a play of symbols, and syncretism. Very similar to an Ancient Egyptian art tradition in which the living and the dead past/future are chronicled, Frohawk Two Feather’s pictographs/pictograms/ciphers/ideograms/glyphs depict the past and predict the future. In their cross-continental discussion of sonic practices that give way to resistant strains such as Grime and Broken Beat in the UK, and Kuduro in Angola, Stefanie Alisch and Carla Maier detail the sense of being in community through music set out by MC’s, DJ’s, musicians, and off the grid publics, while playing out the sounds of Afrofuturism as an analytic tool. What they find is a sense of a “rythmachinic takeover of space-time”18 that is affected and mobilized through dancefloors and sound system culture, pirate economy, and aerial connections. As such, these Afrofuturist practices resist capital consumption in that they rely upon alternative distribution circuits, while following traces of entangled histories and experiences, and imagining new sonic worlds between Europe, the U.S., and Africa. Afrofuturism meets feminist discontent in the figure of secret agent Ananiya in Milumbe Haimbe’s graphic novel “The Revolutionist” which is set in a dystopian future in which a sense of being in community is controlled by a corporation whose interest is maximal productivity through exploitation and control and aims to replace women through sex robots. This totalitarian, highly gendered regime is challenged by the ‘Army for the Restoration of Womanhood’, an army of revolutionists who are organized underground, and we follow Ananiya in her covert operation into the robotic plants in order to gather information about the new prototype that is indistinguishable from humans with the aim to stop its mass production. While she has the first encounter with the prototype her people are gathering in another part of the town to protest the brutal assault of a girl that went missing. “The Revolutionist” is a three-part graphic novel and what we have here is the full first chapter of Book I.

18 As coined by Steve Goodman in his book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press (2010: 173).

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Tavia Nyong’o’s engagement with a sense of being in relation via black death that includes queers and feminists and takes seriously performance art/action/the body, also provides ways of seeing and recognizing the ancestors who walk among us as we approach or enact the future they had envisioned for us. How will we understand a future in which many of our community will not join us? Thinking about black futures as a practice that pulls from the past to imagine the future – as well as the collectivity of those who dreamed our lives for us before we arrived; how will we both enact these present-futures they imagined and do the same for those who follow us? Nyong’o takes this haunting as a provocation to explore what he calls the crypt of blackness through the world-making works of AIDS-era Black gay poets and filmmakers Marlon Riggs and Assotto Saint and their echoes in current works by choreographer Mariana Valencia in relation to theoretical negativity as he beckons a future collectivity in Afrofabulation. In “The Rise of the Astro Blacks” Greg Tate reaches into the archive and marks his trajectory, we witness a shared experience for which the example of this one person can illuminate the way, honoring past/present. Within the triangular movement that this book points to, Tate’s contributions reflect back foundations that ground a future that is queer-feminist and Black.

>>> T HE A RCHIVIST ’ S V AULT “It is the present. Haunted by the past and doubtful of the future, The Archivist excavates the vault. She dusts off relics cataloging each artifact. From this vast inventory she selects series for the viewing public.”19 This selection, “The Door of No Return”, collapses time and space to offer a visual meditation of hauntings – skeletons, murmurations, rattlings, new constructions, and road-signs – at the crossroads of African migrations marked by the triangular route of the transatlantic slave trade. Understanding Afrofuturism as a co-created project in the 21st century, we are drawn to the works of collectives in the realm of black visioning and initiated a virtual intercontinental diaspora conversation between three art collectives: sorryyoufeeluncomfortable in London, AfroFuturist Affair in Philadelphia, and Wildseeds – The New Orleans Octavia Butler Emergent Strategy Collective in New Orleans. This Afrofuturist timecapsule was mediated by Menka-t Asli Dukan who pulled from her own research on a history of blackness in speculative fiction.20 Dukan asked the collectives to share their practices and concerns, how they came together, and to describe their future projects. Additionally, each collective was in-

19 See lynch [(2013) 2099]. 20 See Dukan (n.d.).

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vited to choose an image as a moniker for their contribution to this volume. The outcome is full of temporal lapses and provides a rich assemblage of multidisciplinary community art projects, speculative solutions to issues of gentrification and displacement, creative tools for recovering and archiving histories, quantum time capsules, and intergenerational listening sessions that are cooperative/non-capitalist in nature and indebted to an expansive black queer-feminist tradition of survival and healing. In “Organize your Own Temporality”, artist, lawyer, community organizer, Rasheedah Phillips, further expounds upon her theorizing of Black Quantum Futures by asking: How does a radical movement conceive of its own future in the face of hostile visions of the future when the future was never meant for them? Phillips lays out multiple living temporalities including black womanist and feminist, indigenous African time that forego linear Eurocentric dead-time frames. “Alternative temporalities embodied by such cultural movements as Afrofuturism, and DIY theories as Black Quantum Futurism, have developed practical tools and technologies for exploring reality and shaping past and future narratives”. “‘I Feel Love’: Race, Gender, Technē, and the (Im)Proper Sonic Habitus” time travels toward disco as a rich colliery for, and progenitor of Afrofuturism. Simultaneously writing in dialog with fellow scholar, Tavia Nyong’o, Kara Keeling hails the gender, racial, and sexual difference of disco’s queer family at the temporal moment of its crossover appeal. In this provocative piece, Keeling shares an incisive, “… experiment in expanding the vibrational field and bringing forth errant connections between and among the we who are sound, Donna Summer’s performance of ‘I Feel Love’, as technē, [that] might remind us of pasts with futures that never were”. As an early adaptor and organizer around black imagination in the digital diaspora, Anna Everett also revisits for us Afrofuturism twenty years later and through a geopolitical lens, as both a theoretical concept and a creative practice in what she calls ‘Trump Time’. In this personal/essayistic reflection she looks at current events and anti-black violence, black political movement building in the 21st century, popular culture and representation, the output of contemporary Afrofuturist cultural practitioners, as we hit a new edge in ‘toting technologies’. While questioning her “profound ambivalence about the hopefulness of Afrofuturism amid such black existential peril”, Everett draws continuities between the technological use and the success of the black women led Million Woman March in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1997 and Black Lives Matter’s Hashtag activism today, arguing that Afrofuturism allows for “imagining a creative resistance strategy to any number of persistent existential threats to black life and culture, especially today and going forward”.

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>>>> B ROTHER K YOT Daniel Kojo Schrade’s abstract, non-representational compositions and paintings provide research into unknown history while claiming central pieces or icons of European so-called high culture and repositioning them into an African and Africandiasporic context. “Brother Kyot”, a trickster figure, references Kyot, a scholar understood to have influenced Wolfram van Eschenbach’s piece “Parzival”, and as such occupies this liminal space between foreground and background that which Schrade asks us to pay close attention. By turning canons and icons upside down or injecting them with syncretism, tricksterism, and collage, Schrade’s work reveals and recovers layers and layers of meaning to punctuate the contact between Africa, America, and Europe that is central to this book project. The result is a reimagining, also in the context of Afrofuturism, and the creation of alternative spacetimes. The question of what becomes intelligible in the context of black visioning is addressed by Kiluanji Kia Henda in his conversation with Nadine Siegert. As we follow Kia Henda's trans-character in “Poderosa de Bom Jesus” being appropriated into a cis woman in another artist’s work in Brazil, we learn about the syncretic and cross-fertilizing relationship between Angola and Brazil as a traditional culture meets in the past, present, and future and how that impacts on speculative fiction. Siegert’s insightful prompts dig into Kia Henda’s playful critical perspective on what happens when socialism, capitalism, and traditional culture intersect, and begin to understand the various contexts that inspire art practices from the continent. While Kia Henda’s work draws inspiration from Sun Ra as well as the history of Cold War era science fiction and pays attention to a certain aesthetic developed in the context of socialist friendships and Superpower proxy competition on the African continent to trigger a narrative and vision that takes us into outer-space and back to the terrestrial, in this context Angola. In Tobias Nagl’s close readings of Schrade’s work we encounter fellow travelers to Brother Kyot that operate as Leitmotifs in his ongoing work, such as Brother Beethoven and the Afronaut. Embedded in Schrade’s biographical context, we are introduced not only to geopolitical positioning often ignored in an Afrofuturist canon, but also to an art historical interpretation of Afrofuturism. In Nagl’s exploration of Schrade’s art practice we follow Brother Beethoven and the Afronaut through complex layering of paint, charcoal lines, defining scriptural fragments, and figurative elements from an Afrofuturist archive that form the in-between space that the Afro-diasporic figures inhabit. Nagl’s writing and Schrade’s performances and paintings take us into this triangular movement between the three continents and through different time zones and as such combined provide a form and method of

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time travel that is not understood as moving between clearly distinguishable dimensions of time. Robyn-Brooke Smith’s original Maroon comic of Nanny and her descendants, “Dismantling Imperia: Re-imagining the Superhero” centers three historical Caribbean freedom fighters and their 21st century descendants. Each one is a force of nature and their powers amplify with the passing of time. Each episode includes portrait drawings and establishing comics as a template for this prophetic series. Robyn-Brook Smith’s vision is informed by in depth research of folkloric, oral, and institutional historical accounts of the Caribbean and the African Diaspora in the Americas. It is also grounded in the present-day urgency of calls to action to contest anti-black violence and confirm that BlackLivesMatter. Womanist in vision and execution “Dismantling Imperia” interrupts the white tyranny of comics as Robyn creates ‘a league of her own’ to express black excellence, survival, resistance, and ultimately manifest freedom. In Raimi Gbadamosi’s personal and essayistic writing that reflects on reading comics while growing up in Nigeria we encounter yet another character, Powerman, a black superhero figure who helps him navigate American and British comics as colonial ideological impositions upon African contexts and their limitations in the envisioning of what ‘Africa’, but also African superheroes could look like. This text is about heroes and becoming a hero oneself. There are storytellers everywhere, and we can find them not only in a growing archive of a diverse range of comics and graphic novels on the continent, or in song lyrics, but also in the liminal space between reality and fiction.

>>>>> P ROPHETIKA Abigail DeVille’s “Prophetika: gaze in the mirror, invisible man”, acts as a soothsayer and emerges at the crossroads between installation and performance art that time-travels and shape-shifts Sun Ra’s icon into a queered 21st century cyborg. In a first response to the erupting protests to the death of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City Police,21 DeVille’s project entitled “The Day the Earth Stood Still”

21 DeVille’s thoughts for the exhibition were also shaped by the following quotation from the production script: “You the people of Earth have reached the danger point in your development. We can no longer merely watch. That is whey I am here, to bring you my message of warning. Your hunting-killing instincts must be controlled. If not, your next step inevitably will be to travel beyond your own solar system and try to conquer peaceable worlds which have no defense against you … I have lived among you. I have eaten of your food. I have walked your streets. I have seen where your poor live and your rich. I

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imagines that “peaceful outer space visitors land on Earth and are greeted by a barrage of bullets.”22 We encounter electric trash that takes us back to the beginning, to analogue technology, which also takes us back to the promise of the internet – remember the Data Thief who roams the internet of black culture – while Prophetika takes us into the future. These meditations do not invent new technology in the context of Afrofuturism, but re-use and re-signify black technologies already available to us. What we see are reconsiderations of a future. In their conversation, “The Secessionist Manifestoes of Certain Received Wisdoms”, Kodwo Eshun and John Akomfrah reflect upon The Last Angel of History twenty years after its production, and also in light of recent critiques of reading continental futurisms in the context of Afrofuturism. Together Eshun and Akomfrah critically dismember the terms and practices of Afrofuturism so that we can see them more clearly and to specify the ways in which identity and political formations come into being. What draws our attention is their engagement with what is often ignored in the discussion about the film: the historical aspect of it, the “unfinished conversation about the utopian African project” that the Data Thief keeps returning to in his travel through space and time, not in search of another layer of essentialism but in search for answers to the question of “what constitutes Africanity and how it might be talked about through and in the present.” “They Sent You?” and Stories of our Lives push back on utopian ideas of outerspace and what ifs. These African fictional interventions are propelled by desires for liberation and collective self-actualization for Africans and the Diaspora. Here Jim Chuchu tackles the complicated question of representation while making an intervention into the present – the afterlife of colonialism – through a futurist setting. Interplanetary exploration becomes mundane and monotonous and what we find in another galaxy is more of the same for black people. There is no escape. And yet because it is a fiction, Chuchu plays out one possible storyline, (BLAM! electromagnetic disturbances no more), as an unlikely emissary from earth meets an

have met people who are good and kind. You have many good people among you, you must use them as examples. My friends, your choice is simple. Live in peace. Or pursue your present course – and face obliteration. We will be waiting for your answer. It is up to you. We will be watching ... and waiting” (from: The Day the Earth Stood Still, directed by Charlotte Brathwaite in 2015 which is the precursor to the 2016 co-created project, Prophetika). 22 The story “asks us to look at our exploding world and examine our own humanity in its midst. Through collected texts, stories, media images, sounds, and choreographed bodies, this project reflects on the world we live in and prompts us to imagine the world as we would truthfully like it to be.” (https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2015-abigaildeville-exhibition. Last Access 10.09.2018).

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android left behind to ward off and protect a temple from earthly colonial destruction. No good guys in this story. It is a playing out and a recognition of our current experience set on a alternate stage to see what’s possible and provide commentary on the here and now. As Henriette Gunkel guides us through “Each Night I Dream”, an episode of Chuchu’s Stories of Our Lives, we can understand the repetition of the main character’s dreaming as one with a difference. One that has an alternative rhythm not bound by Western time. In this queer time the ritual enchantment of backward moving becomes circular and transformative as the main character works through the multiple temporalities that answer: “what will we do when they come for us?” This dreaming and speculating takes seriously the physical violence of the here and now for queers in Nairobi, and strategies for survival while drawing from traditional fables, rituals, shape-shifting, and the supernatural to upend the outcome of mob violence. “If we're not Africans, what are we? Maybe we’re aliens […] Maybe we came here to find out what it’s like to be human”. Gunkel points to the fragmented and speculative ways of thinking about freedom and understands the journey into outer-space not as an escape but as a process of becoming in the context of antiblack violence that resists assimilation. Being in community queerly is also central to Jamika Ajalon’s biomythography, which reconstructs a collective memory and future in revisiting one’s own physical, psychic, and analytical journey. Ajalon activates personal/collective storytelling and experimental prose/fiction/poetry/cipher in order to pursue this journey of radical movements of women of color below majoriborg surveillance, which makes visible that when we imagine our futures as queers of color, we are haunted and inspired by our ancestors of whom there are many. Crucially, this radical movement between different places and languages of resistance is as much a queer-feminist project as it is pan-African and points to the in-between spaces that define notions of diaspora.

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C ONSTELLATIONS Watch the trailer for Saturday Night Fever (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5tBXe0kSLA) If we understand sound in the terms Eidsheim offers us, as an “always becoming field of vibration” which includes both inanimate and animate matter, then we have to pause and interrogate our assumptions about the names we give to specific materializations and the significance we attribute to them. We might ask, how does ‘white masculinity’ become perceptible as a characterization of a vibrational practice such that Nyong’o can identify it in an analysis of Saturday Night Fever? We pause and interrogate our assumptions because we realize that as intellectuals, critics, and artists, we participate in reifying or challenging and/or re-directing the relations sound facilitates. We are participants in sound or, as Eidsheim would have it, “we are sound. Like sound, which comes into being through its material transmission, human beings are not stable and knowable prior to entering into a relationship; rather, we unfold and bring each other into being through relationships” (2015: n.p.). This is the context in which I want you, dear reader, to listen to the music video for “I Feel Love”. Here, in 2018, while the right-wing forces of hate are beating on the doors of history, hoping to break them down again, I invite you to hear and feel

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and see the event of the music video for “I Feel Love”: >> Watch “I Feel Love” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0h8Pjf4vNM) In 1977, the same year Saturday Night Fever packaged disco for mainstream pleasure through consumption, Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” was transforming the sound and feel of disco and with it, the rhythms and gestures of gay and trans* desire and comportment. The music video itself underscores Donna Summer’s imbrication with technology. Years before the singer Janelle Monae helped us to embrace our inner dirty computers, Donna Summer’s body, its movements at times flowing, and at other times rigid and mechanical, embraced the microphone and teased the microphone stand, and thus established a connection with them consistent with the interpenetration of her vocals and the other data on the sixteen-track tape recorder Italian producer and DJ Giorgio Moroder and English songwriter and producer Pete Bellotte used to layer and synchronize Summer’s vocals. Summer, Moroder, and Bellotte’s innovations in music production revealed an intimacy between feminine vocal performance and technological modifications. It helps us to recognize gender expressions as technē. When it dropped in 1977, “I Feel Love” heralded a new direction in the sonic staging of the imbrication of technology with biology. Within the terms I have been developing here, we could say disco, particularly as it became more intimate with sound technology, facilitated an (im)proper sonic habitus, one in which no-body can be extracted from another. This habitus is characterized by, as Tavia Nyong’o put it, “an exhilarating extension into an environment aided by the auxiliary organs of the mirror ball, the DJ, the drugs, and so on” (2008: 108). An (im)proper sonic habitus is one in which relations of property and propriety no longer cohere – in this “always becoming field of vibration” (Eidsheim 2015, n.p.) any one’s body is offered by its steward as an extension of others. Therefore, all are stewards of the matter in the space. The disco floor and the imagination of it evoked by “I Feel Love” is a fleeting, but potentially significant, ephemeral experiment in ecstasy. About “I Feel Love”, music critic Jon Savage writes, “Within its modulations and pulses, it achieves the perfect state of grace that is the ambition of every dance record: it obliterates the tyranny of the clock – the everyday world of work, responsibility, money – and creates its own time, a moment of pleasure, ecstasy and motion that seems infinitely expandable, if not eternal” (2012: n.p.). This crossover hit single targets the straight time of the workday, and the strictures of normative time(s). It is sensuous and fluid, a flowing mix engineered for bodies in motion towards each other. A steady electronic beat keeps Donna Summer’s airy, technologically enhanced vocals, sometimes multiplied by other female vocalists and by overdubs, grounded. Even as, in the video at least, Summer’s arms

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movement indicates that she might take flight. The song aims for ecstasy, whose root comes from the Greek ekstasis, meaning standing outside oneself. It transduces one into more than one, someone who is many. They. “I Feel Love” fueled the dance floors in those years of sweat and sex and innocence before the first cases in the United States of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) were reported in 1979. (The virus itself was ‘discovered’ by scientists in 1983.) “I Feel Love” is part of the pre-history of today’s trans* movements. It also is a harbinger of the post-punk, synth-pop, and new wave music of the 1980s, and a wayward contributor to Afrofuturism (Reynolds 2017). After “I Feel Love”, synthesized music would never be the same. Neither would gay and trans* dance floors. After the mainstreaming of disco subcultures in Saturday Night Fever, disco would never be the same. Yet. Still. As an experiment in expanding the vibrational field and bringing forth errant connections between and among the we who are sound, Donna Summer’s performance of “I Feel Love,” as technē, might remind us of pasts with futures that never were. And will be.

L ITERATURE Eidsheim, Nina Sun (2015): Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Sign, Storage, Transmission). Duke University Press. Kindle Edition. Heidegger, Martin (1954). The Question Concerning Technology. New York and London: Garland Science. Nyong’o, Tavia (2008). “I Feel Love: Disco and Its Discontents.” In: Criticism, 50/1, pp. 101-112. Reynolds, Simon (2017). “Song from the Future: The Story of Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s ‘I Feel Love.’” In: Pitchfork.Com: https://pitchfork.com/ features/article/song-from-the-future-the-story-of-donna-summer-and-giorgiomoroders-i-feel-love. Last Access 12.09.2018. Savage, Jon and Ewan Pearson (2012). “How Donna Summer’s I Feel Love changed pop.” In: TheGuardian.Com: https://www.theguardian.com/music/ musicblog/2012/may/18/donna-summer-i-feel-love. Last Access 09.09.2018. Small, Christopher (1998). Musicking. The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press.

Afrofuturism On My Mind: Imagining Black Lives in a Post-Obama World A NNA E VERETT Black people are rarely featured in sci-fi and fantasy films – that is unless that person is Will Smith. So how do black people get to exist in the future? Afrofuturism is one answer. BARTON AND MASSIE 2016: N.P. Obama . . . Noooo!! I’m not ready. I’m not ready for a new one!!! CHAYTEN 2016: N.P. I’m not so much disavowing Afrofuturism. I’m backing away from it and letting people who seem really to need it, or need to leverage it, have it. I’m not entirely comfortable with how reductive it has become. SMITH IN HUBERT 2017: N.P.

Tryna1 reconcile my fragmented thoughts on Afrofuturism became considerably more disconcerting than I could have imagined in the wake of the 2016 presidential elections that resulted in Donald J. Trump becoming the 45th president of the United

1

Tryna is a 21st century black American vernacular term that contracts the words ‘trying’ and ‘to’ together in a way that reflects folks’ speech patterns. Its decidedly black culturalinflected and highly affective registers authorize such wording not usually contracted in this way.

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States. Initially, I conceived of structuring this essay around lamenting our passage into a post-Obama world as a structuring discursive through-line. Now, I am finalizing this meditation in the aftermath of the near-unprecedented pre-and post-election tumult with an important revelation that bears on our Afrofuturism discussion on two fronts. First, writing in this moment made me confront key aspects of my distress over the perils this current political environment portends for America’s realpolitik post-President Obama and particularly for black people in the U.S. and throughout the African Diaspora. I am yoking here a #BlackLivesMatter Movement (BLMM) framework and Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’ concept concerning what the racial politics of Brexit (Britain’s controversial exit from the European Union) mean for black Britons, for example. Second, confronting the intensification of 21st century anti-civil rights backlash politics occurring as the Trump Presidential era moves into its second year exacerbates my tenuousness about embracing an optimistic Afrofuturist ethos – ne – my thinking is stopped dead in its tracks! To say that I am ambivalent about Afrofuturism is completely inadequate in our political new normal ushered in by Trump’s politics of white racial resentment on steroids, including racism directed specifically at black women that Moya Bailey calls ‘misogynoir’.2 And while virulent, anti-black women prejudice is not new; recall Senator Daniel P. Moynihan’s disingenuous and destructive post-Watts, California uprising report in the 1960s. Laying sole blame for the national catastrophe that was the Watts rebellion on the so-called ‘black matriarchy’ familial pathology that Moynihan deemed responsible for holding back the whole black community was consequential enough. Today’s iteration of blaming black people for America’s ‘New Jim Crow’ racism in Michelle Alexander’s terminology, seems more destructive, indeed.3 It is this current environment of misognynoir and de rigueur anti-black racial discrimination that contributes substantially to my Afrofuturism skepticism. Let me hasten to add here that I do appreciate Afrofuturism as a useful heuristic device for imagining a creative resistance strategy to any number of persistent existential threats to black life, culture, and livelihood especially today and going forward. Before plugging into a national collective dread over Trump’s scary and disastrous presidency for people of color, I must echo the tearful outburst of then-6-yearold Kameria Chayten on YouTube that went viral in early 2016:

2

See for example, Eliza Anyangwe’s informative piece for The Guardian online entitled “Misogynoir: Where Racism and Sexism Meet,” 5 October 2015.

3

The article that explores the disproportionate number of murders of black women is telling in this regard. See for example, Robin Razzi’s article “Black Women are Killed in U.S. More Than Any Other Race, CDC Reports,” 27 July 2017, on WHUR.Com. Whereas the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) frames its chilling report in terms of intimate partner violence, the point of misogynoir writ large holds.

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Source: Chayten and her letter to President Obama, collaged with an image of her and her family visiting the White house.

“I am not ready for a new one,” she cries, and of course Trump is the ‘new one’ that the majority of Americans were/are not ready for. Like this traumatized little black girl (who later met President Obama), I confess to dreading any ‘new’ president of the United States (POTUS) in 2016 who was not President Obama, our nation’s first black president. Now, that was Afrofuturism, in effect! Before Trump, the fact of a post-Obama world was anxiety-producing enough; and this post-Obama state of affairs attenuated further my conflicted attitude about Afrofuturism. In fact, before Trump, filmmaker Cauleen Smith’s sentiment, also quoted above, articulates perfectly what I was getting at by naming this piece “Afrofuturism on my mind”. However, my post-Obama anxiety over the specter of what I am calling ‘Trump-Time’ that has exacerbated my feelings of a total foreclosure on a viable black futurity had, out of necessity, abated. After all, it is difficult not to be guardedly optimistic about all the latest Afrofuturism 2.0 and even 3.0 discourse production and activities of late. This includes the fact that a black Millennial woman co-organized the wildly successful 2017 Woman’s March (of activism and resistance against Trump) – the largest grass roots crowd mobilization in U. S. history,4 and the 2016 anthology entitled Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astroblackness, edited by Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, among others considered below. Then, a major rupture in my conflicted Afrofuturism thinking by three recent Trump affronts ensued. First and incredulously, POTUS called neo-Nazis and white supremacists ‘nice people’ after the infamous Unite the Right’s deadly racist riots over Charlottesville, VA voters’ thoughtful decision to remove the municipality’s Confederate statues.

4

See Ruth La Ferla (2016): “Afrofuturism: The Next Generation.” In: The New York Times December 12. In January 2017, Union College in Schenectady, NY formed a reading group on Afrofuturism and an exhibit entitled “Black Space: Reading (and Writing) Ourselves into the Future. A Celebration of the African Diasporic Imagination in Afrofuturism” in advance of this public forum centering on African American technoculture in the 21st century.

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Second, POTUS declared ideological war on black athletes in the NFL over explayer Colin Kaepernick’s silent-protest-move against unchecked police violence, and the targeting and killing of unarmed black people following the unjustified Trayvon Martin killing that reinvigorated black social justice activism. Trump’s ire was due to Kaepernick’s ‘taking the knee’ silent protests during the singing of the National Anthem ceremonies at NFL football games. Third, as January 2018 rolled in, Trump called African nations, El Salvador, and Haiti “shithole countries” in an official White House meeting, to the shock, horror, and dismay of the globe! Now, recalling it all, I am pissed off and traumatized all over again! Recalibrating thought.

B LACK L IVES M ATTER M OVEMENT AND THE A FROFUTURIST I MAGINARY

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At this point when contemplating Afrofuturism as both theoretical concept and creative practice either altogether or singularly, my need to develop and then to trouble the trope ‘Trump-Time’ is bound up with what I consider Afrofuturism’s always already overdetermined conceptual frameworks. In one sense Afrofuturism seems straightforward enough, almost laudable, in its suggestions of a viable future world wherein black folks’ hard-fought economic and social achievements and political gains can, against the odds, survive and thrive by the collective forces of African Diasporic peoples’ sheer will, survival histories, irrepressible talents, and dogged determination. Moreover, black people across the globe continue to build solid transnational bridges linking their common struggles and everyday resistance campaigns against white supremacy (local and global) and what I call global antiblackness, and other modes of racialized oppression. And yet, black people globally continue catching hell. Exemplary here is a 2017 French jury that acquitted a 22-year-old black rapist who impregnated an 11-yearold black girl because these French citizens believed the under-aged minor consented (Sexual Politics 2017). This is a racist view that dovetails perfectly with research in the U.S. about the troubling so-called ‘adultification’ of black girls as young as 5-years-old because they are considered less innocent than their white counterparts.5 Consider also the neo-colonialist trafficking in African child slavery and conflict minerals – those extracted natural resources mined dangerously amidst war time conflicts in Africa. These natural resources include the infamously dubbed ‘blood diamonds’. Other such minerals supply our cell-phones, computer tablets/fablets,

5

See Finley, Taryn (2017): “Black Girls Are Viewed As Less Innocent Than White Girls Starting At Age 5: Study.” HuffingtonPost.Com. Last Access 10.09.2018.

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and other high-tech “toting technologies”6 as Erica Mohammad once called today’s ubiquitous mobile devices.7 Also, I am thinking here of Africa’s homegrown Isis-sympathizing terrorists operating as Boko Haram and their abduction of Nigerian school-going girls; then there is the matter of African Diasporic peoples in Muslim countries swept up in the West’s contemporary anti-Muslim dragnets happening with Brexit; and Trump’s U.S. Muslim travel and immigration bans, among many others. In terms of Brexit, for example, the British press reports that racially motivated hate crimes jumped 57 per cent following the Brexit vote. Journalist Peter Yeung’s July 2, 2016 news story for the Independent entitled, “Brexit: BBC Journalist Called a ‘n****r’ as Post-EU Referendum Race Hate Crime Spikes” is a powerful case in point. Seriously. Lobbing the N-word in Britain exemplifies millennial global culture gone terribly wrong. Black people here in the U.S. continue catching a specific and recognizable type of hell emanating from a blatant resurgence of white supremacist, anti-black terror, featuring routinized state-sanctioned police violence visited upon black men and boys, as well as black women and girls, with too much frequency and at the time of this writing, absolutely no accountability. This encompasses America’s infamous school-to-prison pipeline that sees black bodies, especially youthful ones who get incarcerated at hugely disproportionate rates than their non-black counterparts, ensnared in the U.S. criminal justice system. In 2013, for instance, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund warned that the “enhanced police presence in schools is not a panacea” for preventing school violence. Rather, they found that: “adding police and armed security to schools often means that normal student behavior becomes criminalized. The negative consequences of increased police activity are felt most sharply in schools with large numbers of African-American and poor children” (NAACP Legal Defense 2013). Exacerbating the problem is the harsh reality that as early as

6

Several studies and reports have been made of the trafficking in child slavery to mine coltan – the “conflict mineral” found in the Congo and a necessary element in cell phones and other computer devices. See for example, Ewan Sutherland’s 2011research study entitled “Coltan, the Congo and your cell phone: The connection between your cell phone and human rights abuses in Africa” ; Frank Piasecki Poulsen’s 2012 report for The Guardian entitled “Children of the Congo who Risk their Lives to Supply our Mobile Phones,” among others.

7

At MIT’s Race in Digital Space conference that I co-organized with Tara McPherson and Henry Jenkins back in 2001, Erika Dalya Muhammad remarked off-handedly that early mobile technologies were “toting technologies”. I never forgot that as it seemed so perfect a terminology for the urban youths she studied at that time.

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preschool, Yale researchers found that teachers demonstrate racial bias against black children, particularly black boys (Brown 2016). We also must add here Trump’s Department of Education’s intensified systemic defunding of public schools especially in communities of color in favor of often unproven charter, voucher, and military-style school programs. Many of these privatized school programs are for profit, with too many fueling the school-to-prison pipeline particularly with alarmingly disproportionate rates for black students as compared with their white counterparts (Gardner 2016; Camera 2016). And as Trump’s egregious Charlottesville and NFL confrontations attest, these are representative of many unrelenting oppressive structures and racist indignities black folks endure daily, sometimes hourly, as a matter of course and via Twitter in Trump-Time. I use the trope ‘Trump-Time’ intentionally and discursively to differentiate it from, say, the concepts of ‘The Trump Era’ and ‘The Age of Trump’. Whereas an era and an age suggest a significant or marked temporal duration, Trump-Time in my formulation signifies a delimited temporal precarity that suggests, if not predicts, a short-lived or ruptured period of time and influence. The hope or idea here is that black people will endure Trump-Time as a temporary and pessimistic existential moment haunted by that seemingly more optimistic memory of black futurity promised by the hopeful, if not giddy, Obama Era. However, in Trump-Time today Afrofuturism feels disconnected from the black trauma and terror that abounds and is intensified by Trump’s unfiltered, Twitterfueled racist rants, pronouncements, and overt sanctioning of white supremacist terror both inside and outside of government. And, so, what occurred to me early on in this rumination that addresses most effectively Afrofuturism and black people’s perilous predicament across the globe as this 21st century millennium congeals, and Trump-Time intensifies, is the deepening social media juggernaut and its unanticipated foment of effective hashtag activism. Enter #BlackLivesMatter (BLM), BLMM, and even the #MeToo Movement. By situating the BLMM at the forefront of today’s hashtag activism in a continuum of the Afrofuturist imaginary we confront the following: the persistence of black technolust that is often marginalized if not put under erasure entirely these days as it was when I began researching black peoples’ early adoption of digital media technologies back in the 1990s and earlier. I discuss the marginalization of black technophilia at length in my book Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace – and across my other scholarly works on digital culture – in which I catalogue how “the rhetoric of ‘the digital divide’ functions to obfuscate” black people’s early participation in the digital revolution of the 1990s despite mainstream and independent media newspapers and other media reportage to the contrary (2009, 23). Indeed, earlier influential works such as Manual Castells’s book The Rise of the Network Society (1995), Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1996), Sherry Turkel’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the In-

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ternet (1997), Sadie Plant’s Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1997), and others helped lay the discursive groundwork for our comprehension of the transformative nature of digital culture and ultimately the social media revolution. However, only Haraway foregrounds and problematizes issues of gender, race, and blackness in her assessments of cyborg culture and the digital revolution. My own, more targeted documentation of the role grassroots websites and early black blogs (and their precursors – the personal homepages before MySpace and Facebook) played in the phenomenal success of the Million Woman March (MWM) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania back in 1997, for example, suggests a crucial through-line existing between the fin de siècle black women-led MWM and today’s BLM activism. Clearly, then, it is important to recognize how the MWM organized a massive protest against state-sanctioned police and legal violence terrorizing black communities at the close of the 1990s. Such early online activism and organization anticipated the social change agenda of Twitter’s global microblogging imperative that ultimately gave rise to #BLM’s hashtag activism that emerged after the senseless murder of unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin at the hand of a white adult male vigilante in the new millennium. For as tragic as the racially motivated murder of Trayvon Martin was, and all those that followed, how could we have anticipated a precipitous rise of neo-Nazis, a revived Ku Klux Klan (KKK), and their so-called Alt-Right and Unite the Right Movements occurring in late 2017 with blatant rhetorical support and empathetic complicity from Trump as POTUS? At the same time that I lament the viability of a useful Afrofuturist imaginary amid all of this, it is well worth noting that this new millennium also has been marked by a pronounced creative influence of cool and desirable global blackness that cuts across several cultural spheres including music, literature, fine and expressive arts, film and television, sports, social media, and activist politics. In fact, it is precisely to our 21st century’s contradictory logic of simultaneously desiring and despising racial blackness that this melancholic reflection on Afrofuturism in Trump-Time turns. Please know that this turning encompasses my personal recalibrated reality-check and deep struggle to reconcile my strangely enjoyable postObama nostalgia disrupted completely with the very real existential dangers of Trump-Time to visible black bodies like my own. Now, to wit, nothing seems to encapsulate this global blackness desire/despise dialectic more concretely than the transnational culture mining of: Hip Hop music; the persistent popularity of former President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama; the formidable successes of black athletes during the 2016 Olympics in Brazil; the paradigm-shifting black girl music magic of Janelle Monae’s ArchAndroid (2010) and Beyonce’s Lemonade (2016) albums, and Beyonce’s hugely popular 2016 “Formation” video; Colin Kaepernick’s taking the knee in protest against

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racist state violence; and the cultural appropriations of black women’s massively successful online beauty and natural hair cultures, among so much more. Sadly, the foregoing must be juxtaposed to the unconscionable and unprecedented escalation of murders of black people in the U.S. (and internationally) by police officers, state actors, and racist citizenry across the Black Atlantic since the Jim Crow era. Now global anti-blackness has engendered actual slave auctions of desperate migrant sub-Saharan Africans seeking asylum in Europe who get routed through Libya’s human-trafficking apocalypse (or a 21st century Middle Passage!) in the postQaddafi era, as documented by international reporters for CNN!8 Contemporaneously, then, today’s new millennial black resistance tactics and strategies have spawned the now-transnational BLM/M,9 and its corollary the shortlived #Bring Back Our Girls Movement, that each point a way forward for 21st century global freedom fighting largely advanced through African Diasporic peoples’ strategic deployment of social media technologies. Significantly, though, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that black folks’ social media activism today has augmented, not displaced, the storied and ongoing practices of yesterday’s civil rights struggles. Those struggles which took black demands for equality to the streets and city centers of our non-idealized public spheres ahead of news transmission nationwide via television and print media so effectively back in the day. In fact, as contemporary mainstream media organizations (print and electronic) put their own profits over informing the public about crucial news of the day (departing from television’s practices of covering the Civil Rights Movement activities of the 1960s), black millennials and Civil Rights Movement veterans increasingly leverage all manner of social media platforms to engender 21st century style real-time face-to-face tactical meetups and flash squads deployed for today’s social justice and social change imperatives. Now, let me add this about my yoking of the #BLM/M to today’s iteration of an Afrofuturism movement. Founded in 2013 by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, it expanded into a national network of over thirty chapters, BLM – the African American women-created activist movement – is a decentralized network without a formal hierarchy. Instead, it is one “with official and unofficial Facebook pages, meet-ups, and blogs” that serves to rally civil rights activists and organize mass demonstrations “throughout America and the world” (Collins and Mak 2015). What needs acknowledgement is the unanticipated national reach and powerful affective resonance of BLM across America in the wake of the shocking 2012 murder

8

See, for example, https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/14/africa/libya-migrant-auctions/index. html. Last Access 30.11.2017.

9

Nigerian activist Obiageli Ezekwesili created the hashtag to foreground the abduction of young girls by the Boko Haram terrorists in 2014.

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committed by gun-toting-wannabe-cop George Zimmerman of teen Trayvon Martin which brought a necessary national spotlight on the routinized murder of unarmed black people. Worst, of course, is the now commonplace scourge of unjustified murders of black people with impunity for lawless perpetrators (including cops) even during the so-called post-racial Obama era. Still, it also needs acknowledgement that just as the notoriously unconscionable murder of 14-year-old Emmet Till back in 1955 jump-started last century’s Civil Rights Movement, Zimmerman’s callus murder of 17-year-old Martin jump-started black social media activism by a new generation, and the woke BLM/M was born – this century’s global Civil Rights Movement. However, unlike its ideological primogenitor, BLM seemed to strike a responsive chord almost instantaneously with highly diverse race, gender, generation, and class constituencies and allies, as well as with a myriad group of transnational communities largely in real-time that straddle vast cultural borderlines. Indeed, social media’s unique abilities to accelerate affective affinities, information flows and data distribution in record time due to revolutionary digital technologies meant this movement’s reach and timely influence could be historically unparalleled. One case in point is the fact that a scant three years after its founding in the U.S., BLM had inspired sister movement activism in such disparate city spaces as Tokyo, Japan; Paris, France; Melbourne, Australia; Hannover, Germany; Delhi, India; New York, New York; Berkeley, California; Tel Aviv, Israel; and Toronto, Canada, among others. In addition, BLM received due recognition for its trailblazing enactments of digital democracy when it garnered the University of Sydney, Australia’s prestigious Global Peace Award, and general commendation for its game-changing social justice work and global influence. When thinking about BLM’s selection for this award, it feels even more significant because of how it ties into my ambivalence about the Afrofuturism concept in general and in the post-Obama, Trump-Time moment in particular. In fact, as of this writing Americans are witnessing one of those recursive moments of predictable racist assaults and terrorist attacks on American democracy by Americans (primarily angry, white American men, with white women in tow – primarily descendants of the Civil War Era Confederacy). And while it seems logical that I might perceive BLM/M as a powerful manifestation of the Afrofuturist ethos, the Trump Administration’s ultra-reactionary stance against BLM and black people (on the continent and throughout the diaspora) undergirds my Afrofuturist skepticism. For sure, being woke to Charlottesville did little to rein in my ambivalent Afrofuturism position. In fact, statistics show that racial hate incidents and crimes are spiking at historic rates in Trump-Time. What this situation suggests is that we are confronted with a palpable Afrofuturism and Neo Confederacy duality in America’s putative “New South” as exemplified by the now-reviled Charlottesville incident. On Saturday, August 12, 2017 a deadly ‘Unite the Right’ white supremacist protest played out against Char-

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lottesville, VA’s vetted decision to remove the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a park near the storied University of Virginia campus. Many political factions of Right-Wing extremists and Trump loyalists (young white men dressed in white polo shirts, khaki pants and Trump’s infamous red Make America Great Again (MAGA) caps descended upon Charlottesville the night before the scheduled so-called ‘Free Speech’ March. They carried Tiki torches and chanted “Jews will not replace us”, among other racist taunts and affronts. At the licensed march the following day, the increased ranks of the Unite the Right provocateurmarchers arrived in Charlottesville wielding police-style body shields, bats, batons, with many toting ‘long guns’ or rifles (legal in VA, an open-carry state) to beat up on protestors against white supremacy, under the guise of free speech. As the march progressed, the nation and the globe were horrified by the bloody confrontation unfolding on the streets of an American city in a small, bucolic college town on August 18, 2017, in which one anti-racist protestor named Heather Heyer was murdered by one of Unite the Right’s neo-Nazi or KKK adherents. Compounding this shock is the fact that this horror occurred in 2017! Fueling my own disgust and horror at the bloody encounter, aka #Charlottesville, I was watching Charlottesville police stand down as all these white racist Klansmen, neo-Nazi, neo-Fascists, and other sundry so-called ‘Alt Right’ confederates wreaked their unimpeded havoc that seriously injured many people before Heyer was killed. I contrasted the local police’s laissez-faire enforcement or ‘handsoff’ and ‘measured’ restrained stance in Charlottesville to the highly militarized, hands-on-guns, phalanx of military tanks, and over-policed law enforcement stance in Ferguson, Missouri a few years earlier. In that instance, the BLM activists who came out to support the black community’s justified protests in the wake of the tragic Michael Brown killing by white cop Darren Wilson (who was never indicted for the murder) were treated completely differently. This comparison is important to make because even as this radically disparate treatment of peaceful, unarmed black protesters and allies (including BLM activists) in Ferguson, many white rights activists had begun appropriating the ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan proclaiming conversely that ‘Blue Lives Matter’ to change the narrative to concern for police, not victims of police violence. Makes me wanna holla, throw up both my hands!! (Channeling the late, great Marvin Gaye, here.) For here was a lesson in blatantly racist police protocols permitting police to stand by as armed white racists bashed some opponents’ heads without police intervention. Conversely there was excessive police bashing of black protesters’ heads as black people demanded accountability for yet another unjustified police murder of an unarmed young black American man, this time in Ferguson. Igniting passions further, following the Charlottesville riot and murder, POTUS Trump equated antifascist and anti-racist protestors with the neo-Nazi and KKK racist attackers, doubling down on his assertion that “there was blame on all sides,” and that “in the

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other group also you had some nice people, but you also had some troublemakers”. Say what? Ugh!

IS AFROFUTURISM THE COUNTERNARRATIVE WE NEED NOW? Of primary concern, at this point, is my profound ambivalence about the hopefulness of Afrofuturism amid such black existential peril despite today’s technoutopian rhetoric promoting technologies of progress and transformation. It is not enough to champion digital media’s facilitation of black folks speaking truth to power through massive social media organizing and financial crowdsourcing achievements. From the early media interventions by black folks’ establishment of the black press’ abolitionist and anti-lynching racial uplift agendas in the 18th and 19th centuries; the New Negro black modernism agendas in black film and literature in the 20th century; the global post-Civil Rights Era push for multicultural equality via black social media and Black Twitter in the 21st century, we know very well the historic limits of black participation in new media forms to effectuate lasting racial justice and equality in America and beyond for African Diasporic populations.10 Informed by research of the rhetorical self-fulfilling prophesy of the digital divide once positioning black peoples cynically as digitally disadvantaged, outside the technology revolution, and as incapable of participating in the emergent global information economy, my research documents a different reality. And consistent with my proffer of interventionist scholarship as a counter-narrative to the damaging rhetoric of black technophobia, was Mark Dery’s 1994 anthology, Flame Wars, among other earlier essential readings mentioned above that informed my own digital diaspora, and subsequent AfroGeeks concepts. In fact, by the time I developed the AfroGeeks/Afrogeeks concept I had researched early adoptions of technology by black communities across the plethora of media industries as stated above. In Digital Diaspora, I explored the underacknowledged fact of black technophilia at the dawn of the digital age, and new computer information technologies. My research into the black press in Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949 historicizes how the African American press (popular and scholarly) interrogated the significance and impact of the then-new film technology at the dawn of the 20th century on black folks in Jim Crow America. What this body of scholarship provides are clear parallels to what is occurring in the 21st century black encounter with digital media tech-

10 See Everett (2001) for a fuller discussion of the roles of the black press and black filmmakers in black Americans’ racial uplift and modernism agendas.

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nologies. This leads into my essentially paradoxical discussion of a fruitful Afrofuturist epistemology. Still, as in the 1990s, I have difficulty reconciling Marinetti’s troubling fascistic and anti-feminist modern 1920s ‘futurism’ with Mark Dery’s more progressive 1994 postmodern envisioning. Dery posits Afrofuturism as a discursive framework for imagining creative practices of racially inclusive futurist worldbuilding. Revisiting 1990s Afrofuturism at this juncture, in what I lament as our post-Obama age, provides the opportunity to rethink this dialogic encounter, refracted through my jaded 21st century geopolitical lens. This essay turns now to a mapping of how well the 20th century fin de siècle Afrofuturist speculations of yesterday track with African Diasporic existentialism in the current millennium, especially in the creative industries. What realities of black life and culture in the 21st century might best be considered manifestations of Afrofuturist predictions and possibilities imagined from the 1990s? And are we now capable, with any level of precision or plausibility, of accounting for the concept’s persistence, resilience, utility, and relevance from a 2018 retrospective gaze, going forward? While I find it difficult to embrace Afrofuturism as some optimistic black futurity after unrelenting black oppression for millennia, black artists’ creative expressions have captured an Afrofuturist zeitgeist quite attuned to this millennium that I don’t completely resist or reject. In fact, so much of popular culture’s engagement with blackness aligns with Roxanne Gay’s apt description of Black Entertainment Television (BET) as a televisual network travesty with shoddy programming for black folks. I tend to extrapolate on Gay’s view to include the majority of mainstream cultural productions. The Afrofuturism aesthetic permeating black music, film, painting, literature, or graphic arts, however, leads me to find solace in its expression as a valuable creative practice that simultaneously provokes and inspires especially in the current tumult of Trump-Time. So, Real Afrofuturism versus Reel Afrofuturism is coming your way!

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W HAT AN A FROFUTURIST I MAGINARY L OOKS AND A CTS L IKE IN THIS M ILLENNIUM [Octavia] Butler’s Xenogenesis would be the visual representation of the early 21st century’s zeitgeist, despite being written decades ago. We should be seeing Butler’s work on screen. We need more science film and television from a black perspective. TAYLOR 2016: N.P.

In “Why is Hollywood Ignoring This Incredible Science Fiction Writer”, columnist Shawn Taylor asks the obvious question for fans of Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Steve Barnes, other black science fiction (SF) writers, and by extension adherents of Afrofuturism. Taylor’s necessary critique of Hollywood’s inability or unwillingness to mine black SF writers’ prolix future visions for “new and inclusive content” tailored for the nation’s screens illuminates this lost opportunity (ibid). In lamenting the dearth of black SF stories in mainstream media culture and industries especially in comparison to over a century of dominant white SF literature and narratives adapted to film and television, Taylor’s call for Hollywood to adapt Butler’s and other black SF writers’ narratives makes perfect sense. Moreover, his demand recalls Kali Tal’s 2002 convincing argument for resituating even earlier black writings on futurity and science into normative SF genre formations reserved for canonic white authors. African American authors, including Sutton Griggs and George Schuyler, penned the science-inflected speculative texts Imperium in Imperio (1899) and the Black Empire newspaper (1936-38), respectively, that according to Tal “comprise the genre of black militant science fiction” (2002: 67). Tal’s naming of these texts as “black militant science fiction” is strategic in reminding us of Griggs and Schuyler’s creative constructions of black militant resistance to white Western systems of racial oppression in their own times, even as Tal suggests these specific texts genuflect to an Afrofuturist-cum-speculative fiction aesthetic. It is hardly surprising that Tal built the original Afrofuturism website for the early 1990s era Afrofuturism listserv community established by scholar-activists Alondra Nelson, Art McGee, et al. Tal designed a strikingly colorful black futurist logo for the Afrofuturism listserv’s website, which essentially captures the period’s black technoimago signified by her black phoenix-like figure rising from a fiery computer monitor. Tal’s image was wholly consistent with the forward-looking, vibrant, and even discordant conversations occurring on the listserv. I participated in several of its riveting discussion threads.

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Taylor’s and Tal’s astute, temporally separated observations mesh along discursive parallel tracks that reveal a historically persistent erasure of black SF in multiple media formats through the last millennium and into the present. Returning to Taylor, it is important to acknowledge the timely register of his just protestations on behalf of black SF film fans and superfans.11 His insistence that Octavia Butler no longer be relegated to “the back of the science fiction bus” is spot on (ibid). Taylor is right to couch his appeal in terms of Butler’s unqualified excellence and longoverdue adaptation to the cinematic medium. Among other honors, Taylor notes, “She is the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur ‘genius’ award. She is in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame […] She is one of the genesis points of the aesthetic now known as ‘Afrofuturism’. […] Her books are totally immersive worlds that present, at times, more like prophesy than fiction” (ibid).

Source: Tal’s early logo for the Afrofuturism Listserv. ©Kali Tal.

What strikes me about Taylor’s remarks is how well he articulates the timelessness of Butler’s creativity including her celebrated, original SF characters inspired by the power and majesty of early African science, African civilizations, and cosmology along with African Diasporic modernist cultural ingenuity, creativity, and political resistance, and freedom fighting. Taylor’s call for adapting Butler raises a key concern about adaptation’s close association with the translation process since both participate in what translation studies term ‘regimes of reading’ or meaning/sense

11 According to Taylor’s tally the white male “old guard” SF works have often been adapted to film: Jules Verne (140+), H.G. Welles (80+), Ray Bradbury (70+), Michael Crichton (20+), Philip K. Dick (20+); Harlan Ellison, Issac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and even the work of Mary Shelley, a white female SF author, have also been adapted many times.

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making and comprehension across different textual systems. According to translation scholar Riitta Oittinen “the main difference between translation and adaptation lies in our attitudes and points of view, not in any concrete differences between the two” (Minier 2014: 14). When considering how problematic a Hollywood adaptation of Butler’s SF literature to film might be, author-activist James Baldwin’s insights are useful. For Baldwin, we should beware because adaptations can present a number of challenges, especially where translating from a literary text to a cinematic one: “Now, obviously, the only way to translate the written word to the cinema involves doing considerable violence to the written word, to the extent, indeed of forgetting the written word […] The cinematic translation, nevertheless, however great and necessary the violence it is compelled to use on the original form, is obliged to remain faithful to the intention, and the vision, of the original form. The necessary violence of the translation involves making very subtle and difficult choices. The root motives of the choices made can be gauged by the effect of these choices: and the effect of these deliberate choices deliberately made, must be considered as resulting in a willed and deliberate act […] Why? What do the filmmakers wish us to learn?” (1976: 130)

Baldwin critiques the violence enacted upon the translation of legendary jazz signer Billie Holiday’s transcribed, ‘as told to’ testimony about her life and times to its largely unsatisfactory adaptation in Lady Sings the Blues (Furie 1972), starring Diana Ross. Co-produced by the Paramount movie studio and the Motown music company, Lady Sings the Blues serves as a cautionary tale for how not to achieve a successful cinematic translation, at least in Baldwin’s estimation. Baldwin’s concerns remind us to be careful of what we wish for. After all, with such blackthemed, anti-Afrofuturist SF films and TV texts as The Brother from Another Planet (Sayles 1984) and Homeboys in Outer Space (UPN 1996-97), signifying Hollywood’s deranged black SF imaginary, we may have dodged a major bullet of damaging cultural appropriation given how much has and continues to go wrong in Hollywood’s toxic industrial brew of racist, sexist, and demeaning black stereotypes. Hollywood and Indy media’s historic practices of trafficking in and profiteering on the greenlighting of anti-black representational discourses is legend. Exacerbating the problem is white and some benighted black media organizations’ cynicism when serving up such retrograde productions to undervalued black SF audiences yearning to see themselves represented in SF films/TV. After decades of anemic black SF characters most often in supporting or supernumerary roles relegated to the margins of the mise-en-scène, arguably black millennial audiences inculcated to an Afrofuturist aesthetic in music, literature, art, television, and film demand more. At the same time, there is no denying the fact that media audiences and media makers today are ready (though not in equal measure) to embrace more diversity-

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oriented and racially inclusive SF films and TV. By laying stress upon Butler’s long-overdue representational economies of diversity vis-a-vis SF characters of color, and their empowering images that resonate with today’s black SF superfans and Afrofuturist adherents, Taylor’s refusal to let Hollywood off the hook for privileging Eurocentric whiteness and futurity should be a teachable moment for American media industries. It is not only a disservice to underserved SF fans across the Black Atlantic, the larger diaspora, and the African motherland for Hollywood to refuse this loyal movie-going and avid television viewing market-share its visual pleasure, to borrow Laura Mulvey’s term. Moreover, it is also a matter of fiscal malfeasance (more about this later). Consider, for example, how easy it is to locate statistics affirming the high rates of black spending on media which have been vital if takenfor-granted consumer blocs in America’s economic engine. From the 1950-60’s Civil Rights Era bus boycotts in the South, and the nationwide NAACP boycotts of the 1950s Amos ‘N Andy TV show, to the boycotts of rap music in the 1990s, African Americans especially have been effective historically at leveraging their economic power to promote social and cultural change (Love 2016). One indication of changed black economic power in the present involves data culled from a Nielsen Report for The Atlantic magazine story on black purchasing power, media savvy, and consequential demographic shifts. Here, 2015 is seen as a significant temporal tipping point for mapping African American consumer growth and power with such crucial inflection points of consequential change as black people’s voracious media consumption, innovative social media practices, and growing cultural influences in America and beyond. The study ups the ante further stating that with black Americans’ buying power likely to reach the staggering sum of $ 1.2-1.4 Trillion by 2020, equivalent to the 15th largest economy globally in GDP – or the size of Mexico – by World Bank standards! These stats make the case for our need to attend to how corporations vie for black economic power and cultural clout in cultivating brand loyalty and product buzz even as little changes in regards to earning black patronage/consumer loyalty either through investing in black businesses, hiring black people, or anything else. Most concerning about this report in this instance is the fact that big corporations, including media companies that “spend $75 billion a year on advertising but only three percent of that goes to Black publications, Black TV and radio stations and the casting of Black actors” (ibid). This reality confirms much about the 2016 #OscarsSoWhite charge against Hollywood for its ongoing refusal to hire black talent or tell black stories of any consequence. This leads to our pivot back to Hollywood’s disinterest in Octavia Butler’s SF, or any other African American SF writers to speak of for that matter. There does seem to be some forward movement in mainstream media industries’ interest in developing profitable partnerships with black media consumers and black SF superfans with quasi Afrofuturist overtones – enter Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Abrams 2015), featuring black British actor John Boyega and Kenyan

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Mexican actor Lupita Nyong’o, and Star Trek: Discovery (CBS All Access 2017) with African American lead actor Sonequa Martin-Green. Now, the future-inflected music of African American musician and entrepreneur Janelle Monáe, including her Metropolis: The Chase Suite (2008), The Arch Android (2010), The Electric Lady (2013), Dirty Computer (2018) music, and Rihanna’s futuristic fashions (2016), for example, are different entirely. Today, one thing is notable among the woke crowd, Afrofuturism is having a moment.

Source: Janelle Monáe’s The Arch Android Cover Art.

What makes any exploration of Afrofuturism so fruitful today is the fact that it follows an apparent growth of the black illuminati’s embrace of the concept during the new millennium’s putative ‘post-racial’ Obama era. I am impressed by Afrofuturism 2.0 – 3.0 and their growing influences and affective purchases on the black creative communities in the U.S. and across the black Atlantic. Yes. Afrofuturism is a real thing. It is a powerful concept that has captured the imagination of the black millennial generation. As a media scholar, I can appreciate Ron Eglash’s point that “the Afrofuturists have attempted to forge a new identity that puts black cultural origins in categories of the artificial as much as in those of the natural. Afrofuturists blur the distinctions between the mothership and Mother Africa, the middle passage and of the black Atlantic and the musical passages of the black electronic, the mojo hand and the mouse.” (2002, 5960)

Whereas Eglash takes issue with the limitations of Afrofuturism’s expressions primarily in art and literature and not in science and technology, instead, I find those creative expressions to be generative and leading directly to today’s next-genAfrofuturism 3.0 expressivity. Eglash is spot on in his ability to negate technocul-

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ture’s deracination of the nerd by articulating how black, Asian, and women nerds foment an anti-essentialist Afrofuturist ethos that positions these techno-affinity groups rightfully alongside the iconic white nerd. When I coined the term AfroGeeks it was my challenge to mainstream technoculture’s unbearable whiteness of being represented by the brilliant if awkward white geeks and nerds of Silicon Valley and Industrial Light and Magic fame, for example. I’d like to conclude this contemplation by delving a bit more into a few compelling exemplars of Afrofuturism 2.0 and 3.0 aesthetics, thought and creativity that undergird my cautious optimism about other people’s investments in Afrofuturist logics of cultural productions in the post Obama Era.

O N R ETHINKING A FROFUTURISM ’ S AND 3.0 A RT P RACTICES

A SPIRATIONAL L OGICS

Ooh God Like a rose in the cold, will I rise? I’m packing my space suit And I’m taking my shit and moving to the moon Where there are no rules MONÁE IN “SALLY RIDE” 2008

My extended research unveiled two informative and nuanced exemplars of what I consider key Afrofuturism 3.0 primers that are in tune with and on time for our unfolding millennial epoch. First up is Florence Okoye’s captivating essay “Black to the Future: Afrofuturism and Tech Power,” published August 25, 2015 for openDemocracy.com. Second is Alisha Acquaye’s 2017 offering entitled “Black to the Future: OkayAfrica’s Introduction to Afrofuturism”. The crucial use value of these informative commentaries inheres in their cogent insights regarding Afrofuturism’s evolving popular culture aesthetics and technocultural exchange value for both lay and informed audiences alike. Taking Okoye’s essay first, let me begin by acknowledging that her selfidentification as a fan and activist participant-observer of Afrofuturism and what I am calling the ‘Afrofuturism 3.0’ community situates her as a potent social media influencer. It was Okoye’s apt digest of several Afrofuturist tenets and applications that temper, somewhat, my pessimism about black survival in Trump-Time, and thus moves me to be more excited about the ways millennials in particular are breathing new life, vigor, and creativity into the resilient Afrofuturism framework. Afrofuturism 3.0 constitutes a useful aspirational logic for today’s Afrofuturist adherents. One compelling aspect of Okoye’s essay is her articulation of Afrofutur-

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ism’s utility that conjoins her participant-observer status to my formulation of the AfroGeek persona that contests the tech economy’s still hegemonic, unbearable whiteness. Okoye’s African Diasporic voice emanates from the United Kingdom tech community and proudly extends her activist social media tentacles throughout the Diaspora. Okoye is a UX (User Experience) Designer working across areas of human-computer interaction and theoretical physics in her development of interdisciplinary research apps. What I find so enchantingly valuable about Okoye’s Afrofuturism overview is her personal insider narrative that anticipates the breakout little sister role, Suri, of Marvel Comics’ 2018 superhero megahit film Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler. Okoye’s technophilic reportorial style coveys a kindred ethos that aligns with my own discussion of black women’s digital sass in my Afrogeeks formulation. I extrapolate from Joanne Braxton’s research into the West African etymology of the term sass “that is associated with the female aspect of the trickster” (quoted in Everett 2011: 56) to flesh out a particular feature of black women Afrogeeks. Braxton “historicizes ‘sass’ as a survivalist speech act utilized by black women during and after slavery. Sass, for slave women, Braxton notes, employs verbal warfare and defensive verbal posturing as tools of liberation” (ibid: 55-56). So, when Princess Shuri, the teen girl chief technology genius in all of Wakanda, delivers those fan favorite one-liners in the Black Panther film such as: “I invite you to my lab and you just kick things around!” “Great! Another broken white boy for us to fix!” “Don’t scare me like that, colonizer!” Shuri’s sassy persona, then, represents the powerful ‘black girl magic’ trope that many expect to inspire young millennial and Gen-Z black women and girls to consider careers in the STEM fields (Stidhum 2018). How sassy is that? Whereas Letitia Wright, the actor portraying Shuri, wears her enthusiastic technolust boldly in the cinematic African wonderland of Wakanda, Florence Okoye boasts sassily about technological progress in real-life Nigeria. Okoye writes from her current immigrant home base in Britain, and I quote her at length: “I grew up learning that all the kids in Nigeria were geniuses. Whenever a laptop broke, our mother would shrug it off and say ‘Well, when we go home this summer, we’ll take it with us to Enugu. The Boys there will know what to do with it.’ Fast forward to now. I’m not at all surprised to see hand-made vehicles and green blazered teenage girls showing off urine powered electricity generators, all over the Maker Faire Africa website. We’ve always been makers, even before it was cool.” (2015: n.p., emphasis added)

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Source: Shuri and T’Challa share the Wakanda Forever Salute. Screen grab, Black Panther film trailer, © Marvel Studios.

As a longstanding fangirl of SF literature and other media, Okoye makes the link to an Afrofuturism 3.0 imago quite direct when she continues: “Both in Africa and amongst the diaspora […] many of us are sharpening the skills to create technology to shape the world we live in for ourselves, rather than on handouts from the likes of Apple and Microsoft” (ibid). In addition to highlighting the above cases of actual technology sophistication in Nigeria and the African diaspora more broadly, Okoye does a great job of pointing to Afrofuturist cultural texts in literature and other artistic expressions, which are too numerous to explore here. Okoye has a digital footprint worth reviewing to better understand millennial Afrogeeks and their 21st century Afrofuturist cultural practices. Another powerful Afrofuturist 3.0 adherent who offers up a useful discursive primer is Alisha Acquaye, a proud Ghanaian American millennial woman and impressive social media influencer. In “Black to the Future”, Acquaye designates the article’s dateline as “Diaspora”. For this millennial black Afrogeek woman, Janelle Monáe’s music was the gateway to an ardent Afrofuturism fandom. She writes: “The first time I spotted Afrofuturism – and had an inkling of what it was – was in college when I saw Janelle Monae’s ‘Many Moons’ music video” (2017, n.p.). From an Afrofuturist fangirl retrospective gaze, Acquaye helps her readers decode key elements in Monáe’s subversive musical imagery represented by the musician’s Cyndi Mayweather cyborg alter ego persona. As Mayweather, Monáe successfully reinscribes the historical degradation of the slave auction block to an act of empowerment as an annual android fashion show runway. To that end, Acquaye cites from Monáe’s “Many Moons” video: “Your freedom’s in your mind” (ibid). In addition, Acquaye informs her audience that Monáe participates in an impressive continuum

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of futuristic popular culture texts including those by black music artists Missy Elliot, Janet Jackson, and Busta Rhymes, among others. Acquaye even reaches back to highlight historic video clips from earlier black musicians interpellated within her Afrofuturism framework including “The Color Is” clip from the Michael Jackson-Diana Ross musical film The Wiz (1978), a black cast remake of the classic white cast Hollywood film The Wizard of Oz (1939), and a National Public Radio broadcast of the Sun Ra Arkestra and its song “Tiny Desk Concert”.12 To complete her Afrofuturism 3.0 pop culture ecology, Acquaye adds such SF writers, actors, multimedia artists, and filmmakers to the mix as Samuel L. Delany, Octavia Butler, Charles Saunders, Steve Barnes, N. K. Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, Geoffrey Thorne, Nnedi Okorafor, Tanarive Due, Grace Jones, Rihanna, Solange, FKA Twigs, Cyrus Kabiru, Lina Iris Viktor, Wangechi Mutu, and Jordan Peele. As with Okoye, Acquaye gives a shout out to Mark Dery as the first to articulate Afrofuturism. Though Dery’s conceptual Afrofuturism could be in the eye of the beholder (pessimistic or optimistic), Acquaye and other Afrofuturism 3.0 adherents imbue contemporary iterations of the idea as “empowering and effervescent”. In 2018 Acquaye revisited her 2017 essay to address more recent Afrofuturist inspired developments in literature and other media; the essay is entitled “Black to the Future II: Afrofuturism Should Be Put Into Practice as Much as It’s Consumed – But How?” Touting the OkayAfrica website’s month-long exploration of “Afrofutures,” and “the possibility of putting Afrofuturism into action” as she puts it, Acquaye opens her remarks with an enigmatic epigraph taken from the 2018 album “Dirty Computer” by Janélle Monae: “I’ll love you when there’s space, and time”. This is a cryptic utterance befitting Acquaye’s goal of reflecting on Afrofuturism’s growing influence in black cultural productions, millennial audiences’ enthusiasm for the concept’s pop cultural expressions, and her own efforts to mobilize an Afrofuturist activism in her own everyday life. As a freelance journalist for Teen Vogue, Essence, Time, GQ, Elle, Everyday Feminism, Bustle and OkayAfrica, Acquaye possesses a black woman’s sassy voice that reverberates powerfully across wide ranging media outlets and testifies to her strength as a cultural influencer. She takes this opportunity to address a number of Afrofuturist works not included in (or perhaps not available for) her earlier article, works such as Ytasha Womack’s and Reynaldo Anderson’s books Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture and Afrofuturism 2.0, respectively, but Acquaye also recruits the legendary figures Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks into her Afrofuturism activist pantheon.

12 Acquaye’s imbedded Youtube clip identifies the Sun Ra song incorrectly as “Tink Desk Concert,” not its actual title “Tiny Desk Concert.”

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Admitting that writing her essay was challenging, Acquaye sums up the piece this way, “Frankly, I’m not completely certain how to live Afrofuturistically … Perhaps the Afrofuturist examples we love so much are filled with messages hidden in plain sight … Perhaps the very act of imagining is … a weapon for progress; for thinking freely is a signifier of freedom” (2018, n.p.). By and large, I am fully on board with Acqaye’s contemplations on why Afrofuturism matters. Therefore, I want to segue to what I call ‘Afrofuturism 3.0’ by citing this Black Panther reference from Acquaye: “How can we go to Wakanda without attempting to jump into our screens and injuring ourselves? How can we ensure that we make it to the future, by preserving ourselves now” (ibid)? My own response to Acquaye provocative question is this: if you missed Black Panther in 3D Imax, you missed the closest one can physically get to experiencing Wakanda in all its visual sumptuousness and technological magic that immersive cinema can provide. As a self-identified Afrogeek myself, let me paraphrase Mr. T (of The ATeam, a 1980s TV show), I pity the fool who did not go to Wakanda via Black Panther in 3D Imax. Alert! First Person Voice and Code Switching in Effect. Yes, gentle reader, Director Ryan Coogler and Marvel Studio’s entire Black Panther squad’s Afrofuturism 3.0 scopic regime made a believer out of me! Sort of. So, in my capacities as a scholar, a researcher, a professor of film and media studies, and a fan of the superhero film genre, I saw Black Panther three times in three different contexts. My first screening was a part of an entourage of black folks who organized a social event around the film’s special preview showing and hewing to my millennial crew’s request that everyone wear Afrocentric garb, I was happy to oblige. I counted on the squad-screening experience to supplant any disappointment the film might engender. Despite the film’s pre-sold audience bloc of the Marvel Comics and mega-films franchise, I was unprepared for the snaking line of enthusiastic, interracial, transgenerational, and pan-gendered filmgoers patiently waiting for that second screening of the film preview for which my entourage eagerly queued up. Wow! Seeing Black Panther for a second time with a former student was especially memorable. It was our fortune to catch one of the last combination 3-D and Imax format screenings of the film. Most memorable was sharing my penchant for sitting in the front rows of the movie theater to get a more immersive experience of any screening. Braving that literal in-your-face visual spectacle, my student confessed to enjoying sitting so close and thus becoming a convert, one who totally got me! At my final screening of Black Panther, a date-night with my husband, my attention was bifurcated in terms of my scholarly assessment and my visual pleasure pointof-view. Not surprisingly, each screening afforded new revelations about Black Panther’s discursive Afrofuturism. To date, Black Panther is the best superhero movie, ever. Let me repeat, best superhero movie, eva’, eva’!! To support such a claim with the numerous instances of writerly, actorly, and directorial excellence

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would belabor too much this already lengthy work. I will point to a few artistic and technological elements driving this film’s critical acclaim and success. I do have some quibbles with a few narrative plot-points in Black Panther, chiefly that African American villain N’Jadaka aka ‘Erik Killmonger’ Stevens’s suspect fratricidal bloodlust targets his African relatives in Wakanda, and Hollywood’s inescapable white savior subplot involving Everett K. Ross, white CIA agent and literal life savior of King T’Challa. Against Hollywood’s original and persistent sin of institutional racism and the 21st century hashtag activism movements (#OscarsSoWhite), I was prepared for aestheticized treatments of American society’s discourse agreements about black toxic masculinity and black-on-black violence that underpins Killmonger’s tragic and complex narrative arc. I was not even surprised when Princess Shuri used her technological superiority and the magical properties of vibranium to save the white savior Agent Ross’s life, but not the life of her troubled black cousin Killmonger, for whatever lame reason this curious plot point prefers. That said, I was wholly unprepared for Black Panther’s overall black narrative fabulousness. Combined with the latest state-of-the-art technological advances, both aspects were so new and inspiring. This is saying a lot coming out of the Marvel Comics Universe’s (MCU) cog in the wheel of Hollywood’s robust dream factory.

Source: Coogler’s Afrofuturist style in Wakanda Worldbuilding. Screen grab, Black Panther film trailer, © Marvel Studios.

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B LACK P ANTHER AND OF ‘A FROHUMANISM ’

THE I NSTANTIATION

“To be African is to be beautiful […] To be African is just to be human.” THEGRIOT 2018, N.P.

In a February 2018 interview, Black Panther director Coogler talks passionately and clearly about how his first trip to Africa necessarily informed his development of Wakanda, the fictional African nation that was never postcolonial for the simple fact that it had never been colonized and subsequently pillaged by European powers. Affirming his speculative narrative of cinematic blackness, Coogler makes the point that not only would Black Panther visualize the point that “To be African is to be human”, but for black auteur Coogler, more needed saying (ibid). He adds “For whatever reason, I hadn’t seen much media that showed that. So it was really exciting to be able to explore that on this canvas” (ibid). Black Panther star, Lupita Nyong’o, facilitated Coogler’s inaugural trip, inviting and hosting him to the African homeland of their familial bloodlines. Further fleshing out the shared vision of Black Panther’s production, Nyong’o’s put the film’s Afrofuturism 3.0 aesthetic perfectly: “We were creating an aspirational world where an African people are in charge of their own destiny. And that really appealed to me […] To just have African people, Black people, at the center of that narrative is so exciting” (ibid). As key indices of why I view Black Panther as the best superhero movie ever, eva’, these heartfelt sentiments speak to the yearning of black people throughout the African Diaspora to be seen and respected simply as human beings. Nothing more. Nothing less. I have to acknowledge my inspiration to distill all the of Black Panther’s cinematic excellence and fandom affectiveness down to one new word, a neologism of mine: ‘Afrohumanism’. Granted, evoking humanism in praise of a superhero movie suggests a bit of critical inconsistency but I think I can work it out on a conceptual level. Searching for the perfect ending/epilogue for a wonderfully meandering thought-piece cum treatise on my Afrofuturism ambivalence, led me to a video of prolific SF/F writer Nalo Hopkinson, a self-proclaimed African Diasporic subject of Canadian, Jamaican, and Guyanese descent. Hopkinson proffers a powerful statement that helps explain why Black Panther fired the imaginations of so many of this film’s spectators stating, “it is a radical act for black people to imagine having a future” (Dahya 2018). What? Regarding Black Panther specifically, Hopkinson had me at “And then there is the fun part of it, as well; Black Panther’s is going to be

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groundbreaking – it’s already groundbreaking! The movie could suck – it doesn’t matter!” (ibid). For her, the film is important because it celebrates “our continued existence … where the world recognizes you as a human being” (ibid). Hopkinson is the author of six novels, including her most renowned Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), one of her works that she considers technically her weakest, but happens to be a fan fave. She remains a huge fan of Star Trek, especially characters Mr. Spock and Lieutenant Uhura. Upon learning that her favorite SF/F author Samuel R. Delany was a black man, Hopkinson was convinced that she too could write SF/F. When Hopkinson defined Afrofuturism in terms of affirming a radicalism in black people’s abilities to even image, let alone act to ensure, their future existences, I experienced a definite ‘aha’ moment. Combined with Coogler’s insistence that the cinematic canvas display Africans as humans, at least as far as Black Panther could move that imperative along, it occurred to me that black futurity begins with the societal embrace of black humanity, implicit and explicit. With my term Afrohumanism as a concept in development, let me highlight a few of those amazing elements that make Black Panther the best superhero SF/F film ever that can help instantiate an aesthetic of Afrohumanism. To that end, Coogler’s Black Panther is a loving paean to black people all across the African Diaspora. This novel cinematic expression of black love defining a superhero movie is evident with Coogler’s intentional casting of dark skinned black actors as stars and leading characters; his emphasis on celebrating black natural hairstyles, which the film hits out of the park thanks to Black Panther’s Hair Department Head, Camille Friend; and the Afrocentric wardrobe and costuming featuring visual references to African cultures, governed by Ruth E. Carter, “the first African American costume designer nominated for an Academy Award” (Lang 2018; Martin 2018). Both Friend and Carter did extensive research before embarking upon the oncein-a-career opportunity to fashion a believable yet Afrofuturist look for what turns out to be one of the most significant A-List black films produced by Hollywood in the history of, like foreva’! For Carter, the extensive research about the cultures and histories of sub-Saharan African nations was sketched out on numerous storyboards that aided in her costume and apparel designs for the all-women warriors protecting King T’Challa (the Dora Milaje), the real-life Dogon tribe inspired her Wakandan Jabari Tribe: “I’ve done superheroes before – Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Tina Turner – they were all superheroes,” Carter emphasized (Lang 2018). I loved Carter saying that. For Friend, situating Black Panther’s hairstyles within historic African hair cultures and today’s vibrant black natural hair community fully embraced by black millennial women, was everything. As Friend put it, “We did a totally Afrocentric, natural hair movie […] There was not a pressing comb or relaxer on set. That

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wasn’t happening. We’re in a moment when people are feeling empowered about being black […] The hair helps communicate that” (Martin 2018). It is essential to add that Black Panther follows Julie Dash’s independent film Daughters of the Dust (1991) in promoting and celebrating the beauty of black women’s natural hairstyles on film. Although black films across the African Diaspora have featured black women wearing African wrap hairstyles in Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl (1966), and the large Afro styles of numerous black women stars of the blaxploitation films of the 1970s, for instance; and yet, it was Dash’s Daughters, that innovated an aesthetics of sumptuous and visually detailed beauty and diversity of black women’s natural hairstyles. These exemplars tell a contemporary story of black love, even Afrophilia, if you will allow me another fitting neologism. Sure, Coogler’s Wakanda projects a future vision that dares to image black existence beyond Trump-Time, but the film’s global mega success speaks more to a present existential reality embraced fully by a woke transnational fan base capable of accepting my call for Afrohumanism right now, and like Wakanda, forever!

L ITERATURE Anderson, Chris (2012): Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. New York: Crown Publishing Group. Anderson, Reynaldo and Charles E. Jones (eds.) (2016): Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. London: Lexington Books. Acquaye, Alisha (2017): “Black to the Future: OkayAfrica’s Introduction to Afrofuturism.” In: OkayAfrica.Com. Last Access 11.08.2017. Baldwin, James (1976): The Devil Finds Work: An Essay. New York: Laurel. Barton, Gina/Massie, Victoria M. Massie. (2016): “Afrofuturism Mixes Sci-fi and Social Justice. Here’s How It Works.” Vox.Com. Last Access 25.01.2017. Berghaus, Gunter (ed.) (2006): F.T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Trans. Doug Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Brown, Emma (2016): “Yale Study Suggests Racial Bias Among Preschool Teachers.” Washington Post.Com. Last Access 30.11.2017. Butler, Octavia (2005): “Science Fiction Writer Octavia Butler on Race, Global Warming.” DemocracyNow.org. Web. Last Access 30.07.2016. Camera, Lauren (2006): “Charter Schools Propping Up the School-to-Prison Pipeline.” USNews.Com. Last Access 01.05.2017. Chayten, Kameria/Harris, Caprina D. (2016): “Adorable Little Girl Sobs Realizing Obama is Leaving Office.” Hot Viral News: YouTube Last Access 03.04.2016.

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NAACP Legal Defense (2013): “Coalition Warns that Armed Police in Schools Lead to Unintended Consequences.” http://www.naacpldf.org/update/coalitionwarns-armed-police-schools-lead-unintended-consequences. Last Access 01.05.2017. Collins, Ben/Mak Tim. (2015): “Who Really Runs #BlackLivesMatter?” DailyBeast.Com. Last Access 25.03.2017. Dahya, Reza (2018): “Afrofuturism, Sci-Fi and Why ‘It is a Radical Act for Black People to Imagine Having a Future.” CBC.CA. Last Access 11.08.2018. Dery, Mark (1994) “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose.” In: Mark Dery (ed.) Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 179-222. Eglash, Ron (2002): “Race, Sex, and Nerds: From Black Geeks to Asian American Hipsters.” Social Text, 20/2, pp. 49-64. Everett, Anna (2001): Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949. New York and Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Everett, Anna (2011): Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Finley, Taryn (2017): “Black Girls Are Viewed As Less Innocent Than White Girls Starting At Age 5: Study.” HuffingtonPost.Com. Last Access 14.07.2017. Gardner, Justin (2016): “School-to-Prison Pipeline Complete: New Law Makes Schoolyard Fights a Felony.” TheFreeThoughtProject.Com. Last Access 02.05. 2017. Gay, Roxanne (2014): Bad Feminist: Essays. New York: Harper Perennial. Henry, T.J. (2015): “Afrofuturism and the Power of Black Imagination: Can You Dig It?” NBCBLK:News; NBC.Com. Last Access 13.01.2016. Hubert, Craig (2017). “A Moving Image Artist Finds Freedom After Abandoning the Film Industry,” Hyperallergic.Com. Last Access 24.03.2017. BBC News (2016). “Hundreds Join Black Lives Matter March Through London.” BBC.Com. Last Access 12.09.2018. Kington, Tom (2016): “Italian Soccer Fan Arrested in Fatal Beating of Refugee Who Fled Boko Haram.” LosAngelesTimes.Com. Last Access 03.04.2016. Krumm, John (2010): Ubiquitous Computing Fundamentals. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman and Hall. Lang, Cady (2018): “Black Panther Costumer Designer Ruth E. Carter on Three Decades of Dressing Superheroes.” Time.Com. Last Access 12.08.2018. Love, David (2016): “2016 Nielsen Report: Black Buying Power Has Reached Tipping Point, But How Will Black America Leverage it to Create Wealth?” AtlantaBlackStar.Com. Last Access 28.07.2016. Martin, Crystal. (2018): “How ‘Black Panther’ Got Its Gorgeous Afrocentric Hair,” NYTimes.Com. Last Access 21.07.2018. McKay, Tom. (2014): “27 Stunning Photos #BlackLivesMatter Protests from Around the Globe.” Mic.Com. Last Access 04.02.2016.

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Minier, Marta (2014): “Definitions, Dyads, Triads and Other Points of Connection in Translation and Adaptation Discourse.” In: Katja Krebs (ed.) Translation and Adaptation in Theater and Film. New York: Routledge, pp. 13-35. Razzi, Robin. (2017): “Black Women are Killed in U.S. More Than Any Other Race, CDC Reports,” WHUR.Com. Last Access 08.08.2017. Okoye, Florence. (2015): “Black to the Future: Afrofuturism and Tech Power.” Opendemocracy.Net. Last Access 15.11.2017. Sexual Politics (2017): “11-year-old Black French Girl Impregnated by 22-year-old Man, Jury Says She Was Consenting.” Afropunk.Com. Last Access 15.11.2017. Silva, Cristina (2017): “Black Lives Matter Wins Global Peace Prize for Championing Justice and Equality.” Newsweek.Com. Last Access 17.07.2017. Stidhum, Tonja Renée. (2018): “5 Iconic One-Liners from Letitia Wright’s Shuri In ‘Black Panther’” Shadow and Act. Last Access 23.05.2018. Tal, Kali. (2002): “‘That Just Kills Me’: Black Militant Near Future Fiction.” Social Text, 20/2, pp. 65-91. TheGriot. (2018): “Ryan Coogler Explains How Visiting Real African Countries Influenced the Making of ‘Black Panther.” TheGriot.Com. Last Access 20.08. 2018. Yeung, Peter. (2016): “Brexit: BBC Journalist Called a N****r as Post-EU Referendum Race Hate Crime Spikes.” Independent.Com. Last Access 20.08.2017.

IV.

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(1) listenings 2, 2018, Oil, Acrylic, Paper on Canvas 38in × 50in. (2) Afronaut-4L05, 2005, Acrylic, Oil on Canvas 70in × 50in. (3) Afronaut-8L05, 2005, Acrylic, Oil on Canvas 59in × 47in. (4) Brother Kyot P08bk15, 2015, Mixed Media on Paper 16in × 12in.

Intervening into the Future Script: A Conversation about Fiction, Magic, and the Speculative Power of Images 1 K ILUANJI K IA H ENDA

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Kiluanji Kia Henda transgresses the genre of documentary photography by applying fictioning strategies to his images and adding narrative aspects to his works. Often maintaining a certain documentary gaze, Kiluanji Kia Henda aesthetically offers alternative interpretations of history as in his series Redefining the Power (2011), for example. Here he performatively staged new monuments for the empty pedestals in the cityscape of Angola’s capital Luanda. He often creates fictions within his artworks by stressing a non-factual narrative and thus disturbs our sense of the real and the imagined. Kiluanji Kia Henda started his artistic practice in the first years after the end of the civil war that followed Angolan independence in 1975.2 In 1998, he lived in the house of the South African photographer John Liebenberg for one year. Besides documenting the Apartheid period in South Africa, Liebenberg also worked as a

1

The conversation was transcribed by Samira Paraschiv. All the images are courtesy of the artist and Galleria Fonti.

2

Angola has a long history of wars. The anticolonial war – mostly fought as a guerilla war by the three independence movements MPLA, FNLA and UNITA, began in 1961 and ended with the independence of the country in 1975. It was followed by a civil war between the two former independence movements, MPLA and UNITA, that lasted until 2002. Both were backed by Cold War protagonists and their respective political, economic, and cultural ideologies: whereas the MPLA received support by Cuba, the USSR, and other countries of the socialist block, UNITA was backed by the South African army and the USA. See, for example, Odd Arne Westad (2005): The Global Cold War, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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photojournalist during the South African invasion in Angola and the Angolan civil war. Influenced by his political motives, Kiluanji Kia Henda has chosen the medium of photography as his main technique. His recent practice also includes working with video, installation, and sculpture. Despite his own reluctance to contextualize his work within Afrofuturist aesthetics, some of his major artworks of the last ten years have been included into exhibitions curated along the thematic lines of Afrofuturism. The two most important ones have been Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction curated by Al Cameron and Nav Haq at Arnolfini in Bristol (2012) and The Shadows Took Shape curated by Naima J. Keith and Zoé Whitley at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2013). Both shows featured Kiluanji Kia Henda’s work Icarus 13, an eight-piece photographic installation with a maquette. Here, the artist uses fiction to inscribe an alternative narration into the memorial and narratively transforms the mausoleum into the rocket named Icarus with the mission to travel to the sun. This work probably became the one most closely read as an Afrofuturist commentary on African narratives of space missions. Other works such as the video work Concrete Affection – Zopo Lady (2014) have been included in exhibitions such as FAVT: Future Africa Visions in Time in Bayreuth (2015) and Nairobi (2017),3 and which question the past projections and anticipations of future and linear and static conceptions of temporality.

Figure 1: Kiluanji Kia Henda. Icarus 13. First Journey to the Sun. 2007. Digital Print.

3

Nadine Siegert: Did the concept of Afrofuturism ever matter for your practice or was it rather a certain reading of your work? Kiluanji Kia Henda: Well, I would say that it’s rather a certain reading of my work. I was never keen to focus on a single theme. I wouldn’t say that I haven’t thought about the concept of Afrofuturism before, but I think it was

See https://bayreuthacademyexhibition.wordpress.com/2015/07/24/kiluanji-kia-henda. Last Access 02.09.2018.

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more a way in which my work was placed. I am fine with that, but it was not my main intention, as I like to explore several topics in my work, which are occasionally connected. NS: The first work of yours that comes to mind in the context of Afrofuturism is Icarus 13. Here you combine the idea of space travel with the architectural history of Luanda, in particular with the Mausoleum of Agostinho Neto, Angola’s first president. The most popular nickname for this 120m high concrete futuristic building is o foguetao – ‘the space rocket’.4 It was planned and built by the USSR Design Institute in 1982 – but it was only completely finished in 2012 when it was opened to the public as a memorial to Neto, with the interior design by the North Korean company Mansudae. Due to the fall of USSR, the long-lasting civil war, and the economic and political crises in Angola, the completion of the construction had been postponed for more than twenty years. Similar to Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow, the sarcophagus of the former Angolan president is stored in a central bloc of o foguetao and thus constitutes the pyramid base of this constructivist tower made of concrete and juxtaposing plastic elements. The contrast between the rough and brutal elegance of the Memorial’s exterior and the airport-like interiors or the Dubai-like design of the surrounding area reveal the long history of the project and the shifting paradigms between the early independent government and the current one. The Memorial of Agostinho Neto is an ambiguous object. Looking at it from a certain distance, the mausoleum is an abstract construction, a gigantic beautiful landmark that suggests the boundary between sculpture and architecture. The bright socialist future embedded in Neto’s engraved poem “Farewell to the Stars”5 and in the beauty of the original design of the monumental building clashes with the current social issues that are evident in Luanda and affect the country. At present, the building could be seen as an architectural metaphor of a failed utopia or of the modernist melancholia of this late socialism, in which the architecture of the present has been monumentalized in order to project oneself into the future. Moreover, it could be interpreted as part of Soviet modernism referring to space travel and hyperbolic modernity. Your work then reflects this post-independence utopia, when socialist countries strived to be as equally powerful as their Western antagonists. It therefore seems important to understand your work in relation to the Cold War politics of that time – the ‘space race’ in particular, in which the USA and the Soviet Union escalated their ideological and scientific competition into outer space – and not only focusing on the Afrofuturist aspects of it. Or to say it in other words: to

4

Parts of the following paragraph have been researched and written together with Fabio Vanin from the University of Brussels.

5

“Farewell to the Stars” is a poem by Agóstinho Neto himself, published in his book Sagrada Esperança, one of the main texts that wrote independence into being.

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add this socialist modernist component to the concept of Afrofuturism. What does the Mausoleum mean for you, personally, and as an artist? KKH: I was always very intrigued by this monument. For me that was the starting point; it is a monument that I have known since I was a kid. We all had different fantasies of it because it looked like a rocket or a pipe of a Kalashnikov with a bayonet. So the project Icarus 13 was foremost connected with the suggestive architectural shape, then the history behind it. To approach the monument through science fiction really made sense for me since the political context in Angola was deeply influenced by the Cold War, and our partnership with the Soviet Union was the main reason to build this monument in Luanda. Somehow, we were part of the global strategy during the Cold War, the war in which science fiction was one of the weapons, with a significant role in the promotion of fear and the belief of invincibility. I was excited about how this constructivist architecture of the mausoleum would take me to another path of a fantastical imagination and at the same time allow me to discuss a critical historical period of Angola. At that time, I did not have any definition for Afrofuturism; for me the project was rather connected to science fiction in general and that is it. I did not want to put that into any geographical category, regional or continental, when the story I wanted to tell and the actual situation we were living in was part of a global strategy with a global impact. NS: Even though you were not interested in a specific geopolitical positioning, I am nevertheless interested in how you relate the concepts of science fiction and futurism to an African country, considering that the ‘space race’ took place between the United States and the Soviet Union and featured personalities such as Juri Alexejewitsch Gagarin and technological innovations such as Apollo 13. These became icons that were highly dramatized by the media and also entered popular culture and the arts – and it did not matter whether they really happened or were mere fiction. Do you think that we should invent or imagine similar moments for the African continent – no matter if they are real or fictional? Or, put differently, do you think it is important to inscribe a history of science fiction or space fiction to the African continent? KKH: We would have to take a closer look at science fiction's history and how it was contextualized during the Cold War, during the 1950s in particular, and why the American government invested so much into science fictional narratives during that time. Science Fiction allowed them to provide their own interpretation about what was going on; and create an image of a monster that was the Soviet Union and this idea of an apocalyptic future where some American hero would save the world. Science fiction was really important during the Cold War, there is no doubt about it. Now, when you look into the Angolan context, you can see how the civil war was influenced by the Cold War itself. And if you look at certain stories of what happened here during the war, you begin to understand that the degree of fantasy or madness articulated is very similar to what happens in many of the science fiction

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narratives. The surreal essence of these stories is not based on scientific phenomena but more on superstition. In Angola, witchcraft was very much used during the war – you would see how similar the two are regarding the way they manifest themselves. Many of these paranorFigure 2: Kiluanji Kia Henda. Icarus 13. First Journey mal events you see in to the Sun. 2007. Maquette. cartoons or movies – like men flying or being omnipresent, crossing walls, or transforming into animals – have a striking similarity in the narratives of the use of witchcraft during the war in Angola. Actually, this is one of the works that I am doing right now, to bring this relationship between witchcraft and science fiction closer. From that point of view, you can see that there is lot more in common between the Angolan soldiers in the bushes and an American superhero than we would imagine. Beyond being part of a tool used in the same war but with different impacts, the strategies used to resist become very similar when we are exposed to extreme violence. NS: Do you think as an artist you have the power to impact the real through fiction, to enter the reality script by aesthetic means? Using the elasticity and fluidity of historical scripts and reactivate them for an alternative imagination of the future? In particular, concerning witchcraft, one could say that it is similar to science fiction as a way of changing the script of reality. By referring to witchcraft and its magical techniques as an aesthetic strategy, for example, as a form of speculative time-travel one is able to enter into the historical script and change it in ways you would want the future to look like. Magical speculation thus becomes an imaginative power that can create reality, a new reality. Or it reactivates a failed future imagination from the past and makes it relevant for our present. How do you see the relation between the paranormal connected to witchcraft practices and the real world? KKH: In witchcraft we base the reasons for the things that are happening on a supernatural power, on some kind of supreme entity that is above and is looking at us with enough power to change our fate. In science fiction, we use science to explain the paranormal or the supernatural. For me this is the moment in which people start to believe – what makes everything more interesting and exciting – even when it comes to art. Witchcraft: does it exist or not? One could say, of course it does.

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But will it affect your life if you do not believe in it? From the moment you start believing in something, that is the moment when witchcraft or science fiction can affect reality, it is all about believing. In a certain way, I think there is some level of violence, some level of trauma that can take our beliefs to extreme points, so we do not really want to base ourselves on what our eyes can actually see, or on what our ears can hear. It would be too painful and cruel to just absorb reality as it is, hundred percent. It is the same thing that superpowers in science fiction use, as a way of saying ‘yes we are invincible, we can destroy the whole world, we are extremely powerful.’ So this was the message behind it – you are aware of provoking fear. It is due to fear and belief that science fiction and witchcraft have the power to move things in life. You see the things in common? Actually, we always have in our mind a certain degree of superstition, in the same way that science fiction in itself has a certain degree of becoming real one day. I think it is truly important to do this speculation of a possible future, even if it is dystopian. In the case of art, it is vital and legitimate, but it can become a cruel manipulation when it leaves an open door to mess with people’s real life. NS: What you have said above seems to also be connected to the idea of shared belief systems since these practices work only when a collective agrees upon accepting certain phenomenon as ‘real’. This brings me to the power and potential of the collective that goes beyond the impact we might have as individuals. Being an internationally acclaimed emerging artist, you have decided to dedicate part of your life to a collective endeavor in your home city of Luanda. You and a group of artists reactivated an old hotel space in Luanda, namely the Hotel Globo with Figure 3: Poster for Fucking Globo. 3rd edition.

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an artistic intervention called Fucking Globo. You already had four editions there. What is the role of the artist collective and how is it related to the future of Luanda or the art world in general? KKH: I live in downtown Luanda and most of the friends I spend my time with drinking and partying are from the art scene. The idea of Fucking Globo was to spend our time the other way around, instead of just getting drunk and partying, but still having fun. What we were really trying to do at Fucking Globo, besides activating the collective dynamic, was that we wanted to create some radical art works through an inclusive debate – radical in the sense that it would take ourselves as artists out of our comfort zone in terms of the media we work with, the topics we usually explore, and the way we approach those topics. One of the key ideas in Fucking Globo is the openness of sharing ideas during creative processes, so there is no space for big egos. Another idea was to take the public to a place that is not conventional for an exhibition space, inside the hotel rooms, in a place where the main morphologic characteristic permeates intimacy, and to confront them with their definition about art or how art is supposed to be shown and experienced. That was the main line for Fucking Globo, to dislocate a certain way of thinking and positioning ourselves, not only as creators but as producers of thoughts and other vibes – to communicate with society in the same way one would approach a lover. After the successful experience in the first edition, we decided to do it again. We did the first in December 2015 and the second in June 2016, and we could see that it was working as we expected: a ‘son of a bitch’ platform. At the same time, we are trying to expel the police we have in our minds, the actual political oppression, and other colonial traumas by using the freedom that fiction provides. It is not about ego as I said before, so the collaboration and dialogue between the artists are deeply encouraged in this event. We are not looking for any commercial profit with Fucking Globo, one of our lemmas is: from the people to the people – fuck the institution. To make it happen we ask for a contribution from the artists; every artist puts out a certain amount of money. Occasionally it happens that an artist doesn’t have the money to contribute, which does not mean that they cannot participate in the project; if they share our spirit, the same ideal. In those cases, we use the general budget to support the artists. So, it also brought up a spirit that has been lost in this society immersed in wild capitalism, called volunteership. The moment we do not talk about money, it really opens people's minds and attitudes. Again, it is not about hanging pictures on the wall, not at all. The idea is that not only the public learns something; it is we, the artists, who learn. No one would be the same person after this experience, in terms of the professional approach or even as a person. I have been learning a lot, indeed. NS: Fucking Globo was not only about visual arts but also included music and performance. You were already engaged in projects with musicians in the past. Re-

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lating this to futurism or even Afrofuturism where the sound is very important (as in the works of Sun-Ra or Parliament-Funkadelic, for example), how important is that sonic dimension in your work and how is it related to the notion of future making? KKH: Music has always had a very important dimension in my practice and continues to do so in my videos. It was also extremely relevant to elaborate on my concept of futurism. The songs and performances from musicians like Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Michael Jackson in the late 1980s were part of this learning process, and in fact more present than any other art expression. I had albums in vinyl that my brother Cassiano Bamba brought from Moscow – I had two brothers that studied in the Soviet Union during the 1980s – and one of those albums was Starman from David Bowie. I was eight years old when I got it and I remember the captions on the album cover were all written in Russian, which made me believe for a moment that David Bowie was a Russian man singing in English. I am almost sure that David Bowie never knew that a Russian rockstar was one of his thousands of characters. I am the last son out of six, so I listened to an immense variety of music from all of my siblings. I was lucky to grow up in a very eclectic musical environment. My oldest brother, who also studied in Russia, almost forced us to listen to jazz, from Dizzie Gillespie to Coltrane. But when you are a kid, jazz sometimes sounds too complex for your childish mind, it’s much easier to go on the waves and attitude of rock’n’roll, for example. Fortunately, I was able to develop my taste for this great music and lifestyle in the family jazz sessions my brother organized. My first experience with Sun Ra’s work was with the movie Space is the Place. It was a strange and impressive universe to deal with, so I had to watch it over and over again. The immediate impact it had on me was like being hypnotized. It provoked the disturbing feeling that the only way to become an artist would be by constantly breaking the boundaries in my creative process. His great music and the movie were an incredible mechanism that provided a soul able to get you out of the real world and to be aware of the infinite possibilities of creating your own universe. I felt like there was something I had been always missing: the freedom and the ability to speculate about the future. When you realize that you are the center of yourself, the legitimacy of tracing your own fate enables you to be from anywhere you may wish – so that was the beauty of Sun Ra’s transcendental music and performance. The sovereignty and depth of his artistic approach provided him with some kind of superpowers in order to control a colossal and fascinating universe where we can all be part of if we are brave enough to take the risk.

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NS: The question of superpowers brings me to another work of yours.6 As you know one of my favorite works is Poderosa de Bom Jesus, which I always also read as a form of creating a person with superpowers who transgresses notions of gender and ethnicity. The work inspired me to think about the ‘power of images’ and their relationship with the concept of ‘utopia’. I would foreground the potentiality of such an image to function as a powerful anticipator of a utopian future through the application of counter-visuality as an aesthetic practice. Poderosa is a female Portuguese name meaning the Powerful or the Almighty. This work’s title, Poderosa de Bom Jesus, opens some possible different interpretations. Bom Jesus is a town and one of the four communes in the municipality of Icolo e Bengo in Luanda Province. The life-size digital photographic portrait shows a young person standing upright in front of a flat, rural landscape. The portrayed person is wearing a garment that is ascribed to the women of the ethnic group of the Mumuila who live in the Huila province in southern Angola. The beadworks crossed over the breast are distinctive here. The braids, in the traditional context bound together with mud, are here transformed into dreadlocks that are roughly wrapped with a cord. Plastic wristlets refer to an urban context as well. You have chosen the area of Bom Jesus to take the picture in a semi-rural landscape, away from the capital city of Luanda but still not the remote province where the garment comes from. You left the capital of Luanda and travelled only a few kilometres to meet the young transgender woman called Poderosa. This is the first illusion this work confronts us with. More confusing might be the white sandals with their modest heels, which together with the self-confident but also seductive posture complete the ambivalence and opaqueness of the work. At first glance, the work looks like a documentary ethnographic portrait of a young man in a traditional setting. But you left the documentary genre and transgressed into staged photography to create a fiction here, a narration about a future yet to come creates a portrait that combines elements of very different origins and that creates allusions to various references. Or to say it differently, you stage a possible identity blueprint by creating an ambivalent portrait, capable of unsettling assumptions about ethnicity, gender and possibly the mode of documentary photography. Instead of repeating the ethnographic gaze and a representation of an image of the Mumuila women, you are offering a counter-visuality that is able to transgress former ethnographic representations. This reminds me of Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial reading of the cultural practise of mimicry. For him, mimicry is a pro-

6

The following paragraph includes reworked parts of my paper: “Mighty Images. Countervisuality as anticipation of utopian imagination.” In: Ijou Cheikh Moussa, Maroua El Naggare, Aminata Cécile Mbaye and Youssef Wahboun (eds.), Création et actualité en Afrique, Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Rabat. Université Mohammed V, Rabat.

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ductive misreading of colonial discourse and power and produces new forms of knowledge and unforeseeable subjectivity, which can be disruptive and transformative (Mullaney 2010:120). Bhabha elaborates on this clear rejection of any essentialist idea of identity. Mimicry must produce its slippage, indeterminableness, difference, and ambivalence. It is a sign of a double articulation and complex strategy of reform by the appropriation of the Other and, at the same time, a play with hierarchies and power as well as a visualization of it. As strong recalcitrance, it ruptures the dominant discourse and transforms the subject into something unstable, uncertain with a ‘partial’, incomplete, virtual presence. Your work partially refers to the dominant image of the ethnographic representation of the Mumuila, but it is this fragmentariness that makes the representation incomplete and opaque, not fulfilling the dominant gaze. But I would say that Poderosa de Bom Jesus is not only challenging exoticist stereotypes and representation of the Other, but also definite notions of gender. Poderosa is also the Portuguese version of Power Girl, a DC comic heroine who is fighting alongside Superman and other Superheroes. The almighty female hero from the comic book is here transferred into an urban, transgender, and trans-ethnic, thus queer figure – a figuration of a superpower heroine of the new post-war, post-socialist and neo-utopian generation. It is even as if this image has travelled from the future into our present time. Bhabha speaks about the intervening space of the beyond, which is both a space but also a time that is linked to the past: “… to dwell ‘in the beyond’ is also […]to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; […] to touch the future on its hither side. In that sense, then, the intervening ‘beyond’ becomes a space of intervention in the here and now.” (1994: 7)

Figure 4: Kiluanji Kia Henda. Poderosa de Bom Jesus. 2006. Digital Print.

The blueprint of a transgender and transethnic portrait is one strong example of a contemporary aesthetic that visualizes a possible society yet to come. It is not so much about the representation of the present but, rather, the will to participate in future imaginations. A process of productive mimicry as manipulation of cultural memory’s

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iconography is part of these strategies (ibid). Poderosa is living in the beyond and as such is able to touch the future from the hither side. From this space beyond they intervene in the here and now and are able to anticipate a future by becoming a concrete utopia. Would you agree with this interpretation? KKH: Poderosa is aimed to challenge our knowledge about the precolonial history in Africa, as well as the flagrant misinterpretation of the continent from abroad. I have been discussing with my friends the story of a video I am directing now, which is based on the poem of Agostinho Neto entitled “Havemos de Voltar” (We Shall Return). The poem articulates an understanding that Africans can only achieve independence by rescuing pre-colonial traditions. An impossible mission given the huge knowledge gap caused by slavery, colonization, and civil war history. We are so challenged and absorbed by the modern world, in a way that it simply defines the deepest of our essence today. All those bridges that are supposed to keep us connected with the modern world - they also provide ways for cultural and political contamination. And so my question is: what do we really understand or know about the pre-colonial African culture that we are supposed to be proud of? I do respect my origins, but how much do I know about it? How much does it influence my daily life in this society? If you look around in Angola’s cities, it has an insignificant influence in our ordinary life. However, sometimes it is employed by politicians as a form of censorship or to attack minorities like homosexuals. One of the most popular anti-gay arguments on the continent is that Europeans brought homosexuality to Africa when, as the writer José Eduardo Agualusa wrote in one of his articles, it is exactly the opposite. If there is anything that Europeans brought to Africa then, it is the homophobia that has been deeply implemented by western religions. Even today, there are many American evangelical churches that are part of the crusade against homosexuals in Africa. And so here appears Poderosa de Bom Jesus. My friend Poderosa is a transgender person from Luanda’s suburbs, who is the model of this photographic artwork. By dressing her like a traditional Mumuila and taking the portrait in a landscape 40 kilometers away from Luanda, we were busy creating a false image to challenge our knowledge and definition about identity and tradition. From the landscape up to the way she was dressed, everything is fabricated to provide an image of the exotic Africa. A number of performances you adopt in your daily life may define your gender, but it goes beyond that, it definitely redefines our conception of history. There was a very funny story that happened when exhibiting this artwork in one of the collective exhibitions I was part of in São Paulo, Brazil. I met an artist called Bantu Tabasisa, who copied the photograph of Poderosa de Bom Jesus and produced a very similar painting without my acknowledgement. Afterwards, he presented this work in an exhibition about the traditions of African women in the Parliament Museum of São Paulo. I thought that his painting became the real artwork,

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not mine, because Tabasisa was convinced that he was showing a woman, something that my friend Poderosa dreams to be in her real life. NS: So this means that Poderosa’s performance ‘worked’ and the Brazilian artist saw what he wanted to see? Her performance created a new reality that was accepted in a new setting. KKH: Yes, as I said in the beginning, it had a lot to do with what we know about or how we Angolans define our cultural and traditional identity. At the same time, the art work deals with how Africa is being seen from the outside. All these stereotypes created around a remote place, feed many fantasies mainly for a place that has this umbilical connection, like Brazil. That was very important to make Bantu innocently believe that my photograph represented a woman from an ancestral ethnic group. Once, a professor ironically told me: if you want to see the deep Africa, do not go to Africa but go to South America, go to Brazil. Many of Africa's ancestral religions and cultural traditions are kept alive there. Many people see it as a very aggressive affirmation, but I really understand that we are living in this territory where its history has been produced but at the same time it has not been preserved. So it was important to show this work in Brazil, because many people are still stuck with that image of that deep, pre-colonial Africa and there is a big ignorance about the modern Africa, of what Africa is today, of what a post-independence African society is. Bantu Tabasisa is Bakongo, from a region in the north of Angola, which is very rich in terms of its culture and art production. Bantu has been living in Brazil for twenty-five years and he understands that Brazilians are so nostalgic of that deep Africa, and he knows how to profit from that. I find this a legitimate way for an artist to make his living, a way of operating. But it becomes more interesting when you can actually play with that, when you can transform that into some fictitious narratives. And so for me it is about playing with that outside look towards Africa; it is also about playing with these perceptions that we can start to raise some question and arrive at some critical thinking. NS: Maybe we can see Poderosa as a shape-shifter: when she comes to Brazil, she takes on another form. Shifting shape to enable another interpretation, allow for different projections? KKH: Yes, completely. And that is why I love how the reading of an artwork changes from one context to another; for me that is the exciting thing about my work circulating, when I am able to get some feedback from the public. In China, for example, many people almost believed that Icarus 13 actually travelled to the sun. They are not stupid; I rather realized that they are living in a kind of prominent optimism when it comes to high-technology. China went to the moon recently, and so people would look at the Icarus 13 odyssey to the sun and think: ‘why not – it could happen, no?’ I remember, I had an interview for the Chinese television, and the journalist was almost convinced that the travel did happen and when I, unfortu-

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nately, said that it is fiction, he would point to different pictures asking: ‘where is this?’ ‘What is that?’ ‘What is happening in here?’ It felt like in an interrogation session rather than in a proper television interview. I had to carefully describe to him: no, that is a cinema, this is a firework festival, this is a laser green light during the celebration for the Angolan world cup qualification, not a launch of the rocket. NS: So you had to de-fictionalize your work? KKH: Yes, I felt like I had to dismantle my own trap. Much of the work I do is meant for people to believe in, or at least get lost between the tenuous line between reality and fiction. I have never tried, at any point of my work, to bring people back to a stable platform of thinking. I was not prepared for the moment that my intentions could become real. But I still firmly believe that to lie is the only way to keep fiction alive. NS: A last question concerns your recent project entitled A City Called Mirage. In your previous art practice, you have worked primarily with the two-dimensional medium of photography, but in this recent work you use the three-dimensional, the genre of sculpture. In A City Called Mirage, you also draw upon the symbolic language of the Tchokwe ethnic group from Eastern Angola and transform it into a sort of architectural structure. Is this a new, more abstract or conceptual approach, or do you rather travel between these two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces? How would you relate this work to what we already discussed – to future, space, and the Afrofuturist aspect?

Figure 5: Kiluanji Kia Henda. Rusty Mirage (The City Skyline) (2013).

KKH: I decided to work with the traditional drawings called Sona from the Tchokwe region (an ethnic group from the north-east of Angola), also known as ‘drawings of the sand’. These are very beautiful and complex drawings that are connected to ethno-mathematics. The drawings also function as a cultural expression that preserved an identity and certain traditions, being a key weapon to resist against the devastating and deep process of cultural assimilation introduced by the colonial regime in the 20th century in Angola. The drawings have an incredibly accurate geometry and are aesthetically very strong. The fact that they are also used

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by the storytellers of the region to illustrate the different stories based on oral tradition and the ephemeral condition of their existence (the drawings are subsequently erased from the sandy ground to give way to the next drawing), was the perfect metaphor and the main reference to realize iron structures that composed the fictitious city called Mirage and its ephemeral essence. What once was a simple drawing on the sand became a 12-meter object in iron placed in the desert landscape. The careening process of entropy in which these iron sculptures are subjected to in the desert makes them as ephemeral as the delicate drawings on the sand. I wanted to approach this topic in a poetic way, not forgetting that the emptiness itself is a fundamental condition for creation. So, my idea was to tell a story about the birth, life, and death of a city and the desert became the perfect blank sheet of paper to ‘write’ my story. Working in the emptiness gave me an immense freedom to immerse into fiction. To build an iron structure that represented a fragile silhouette of a city skyline, in a landscape where every movement, every object you place, becomes hugely significant. But at the same time, this significance is condemned to be gradually reduced into nothing; it is just a question of time as it is slowly devoured by the desert. One of the performances I did in the desert of Maleha in Sharjah consisted of re-forging twelve iron stakes into the earth that formed a circle, inserting them with a hammer one by one in a counter clockwise sequence. There are two things that really fascinate me: architecture and the desert. For me it was always important to find ideas to put them together; to tell a story that could have these two kinds of dimensions in the same shot, in the same frame. The beginning of this adventure was a completely rusty iron placard that I found which says: Miragem. This placard was the name of a restaurant in a small town called Tombwa, a town placed between the desert and the sea in the south of Angola that still faces the risk of desertification. Reflecting on the idea that the basis of capitalism and its vertical mega-cities is indeed the use of the material of iron, this sign became a metaphor for the post-capitalist era. The rough conditions of life in the cities transform into a rusty mirage, a place unable to fulfill our desires and achieve the dreams we had about living in a modern megalopolis. When I realized how architecture has dangerously become a tool in the hands of big capital – not actually fulfilling one of its fundamental roles of building cities that would provide a home, but in many times just obeying a greedy capitalist strategy instead – I thought of the idea of emptiness on many levels. This emptiness was also catastrophic, being one of the reasons for an economic crisis with a worldwide impact where real estate was the epicenter. It deeply affects people’s lives in a cruel way, when we treat basic and vital needs like housing as a mere mercantilism. It becomes more radical and takes on a surreal dimension when we go to places like Dubai, where they are busy creating a skyline for a touristic postcard. Today about 80 percent of Dubai is empty, so the symbiosis between architecture and the desert was already there: building a city in the desert and at the same time creating a desert

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inside the city. If we start to add all the square meters of the empty houses and cities – in Europe, the Middle East, in Asia, or in some parts of Africa – we are in the presence of an endless concrete desert. NS: Is this not rather a dystopian vision? KKH: Yes, it reminds me of a scene from the Superman movie in the 1970s, when his beloved woman dies, and he realized that the only way to make her alive again was to change the rotation of the globe. He used all his power in order to make the Earth rotate in the opposite direction, so he could reverse and go back in history. A City Called Mirage has the same will of increasing the planet’s rotation, but in order to anticipate the future, therefore accelerating the process of entropy. The idea was to create a city that was being built but at same time was a ruin – two similar stages in terms of aesthetics. I did one of these iron sculptures that is part of this project in Naples, a city where you can see the different archeological layers, from the Greek town to the Roman one – it is amazing how one civilization can be literarily built onto another. Therefore, the emptiness and the absence of a civilizational background made the desert the only site that could allow me to go to the past and invent my own history. In the recent history of Angola, we went through all these traumatic events from slavery to colonization and a long-term civil war, but the desert has kept itself almost intact. Thanks to its geography and hostile living conditions, no one wants to conquer a desert.

Figure 6: Still from the film Paradise Metallic (2014).

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I remember the first time I went to New York I felt like being at the biggest representation of the emptiness in the subsoils. I could imagine the whole New York upside down on the earth and see a giant crater. There were times when I believed in an apocalyptic theory that would consist of an implosion of the planet. It is scary to think on the variety and tons of raw materials that are extracted every day from the subsoil and placed on the ground. We go deep down to the home of hell, to build towers to scratch the heavenly skies. The thousands of people from everywhere in the planet that are part of the construction of skyscrapers are all united by one language definitely reminds me of the Tower of Babel. A City Called Mirage is about finding re-significations on what we perceive as mirage, beyond a physical phenomenon or, even as it has been described in literature and cinema, an illusionary state of mind when all our needs are supplied, and all our extravagant desires are accomplished. The mechanisms in the background that are used to build an illusion – this is where you find the dark side of the mirage.

L ITERATURE Bhabha, Homi (1994): The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Keith, Naima J. and Zoe Whitley (eds.) (2013): The Shadows Took Shape, 1st edition, New York, NY: Studio Museum in Harlem. Mullaney, Julie (2010): Postcolonial Literatures in Context, New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. Siegert, Nadine (2015): “Mighty Images. Counter-visuality as anticipation of utopian imagination.” In: Ijou Cheikh Moussa, Maroua El Naggare, Aminata Cécile Mbaye and Youssef Wahboun (eds.), Création et actualité en Afrique, Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de Rabat. Université Mohammed V, Rabat, pp. 255-267.

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P LANTATION O WNER

Textures of Time – Abstraction, Afronauts, and the Archive in the Artwork of Daniel Kojo Schrade T OBIAS N AGL My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back. If I stayed timeless time, I would have little luck. GERSHOM SCHOLEM, GREETING FROM ANGELUS

Figure 1: Daniel Kojo Schrade, afronaut-05L1 (2005).

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The work of Afro-German painter Daniel Kojo Schrade represents an important intervention in recent debates on Afrofuturism and contemporary art. In this essay, I aim to unfold Schrade’s aesthetics in relation to the abstract-modernist tradition and the Black diaspora, exploring questions of temporality and the use of semantic references, scriptural codes, and figurative elements in his art. I will reconstruct how Afrofuturist tropes in his work, such as the figure of the lone Black space traveller, emerged in response to his on-going engagement with and negotiation of abstraction in modern art history vis-à-vis his own position and experience as a Black diasporic artist with connections to Germany, Ghana, and the US. It is not only on the level of symbolic meaning or cultural influence that his work resonates with arguments about the cultural politics of the Black diaspora. A distinct diaspora aesthetics is also manifested on the level of form, artistic process, and his unique treatment of the materiality of paint and canvas, resulting in a distorted temporality, the syncopated times and time-lags characteristic of the Black Atlantic and the Afrofuturist project, the dissolution of borders – between layers of color, but also those between expressive codes and genres –, and fleeting expressions of what one might call an archival impulse. Although the notion of diaspora aesthetics, like Afrofuturism, is open, multifaceted and anything but statically defined among its theorists and practitioners (Nelson 2006), it might be Jewish-American painter R. B. Kitaj, having spent most of his life in self-elected exile, who comes close to something like a definition. In his First Diasporist Manifesto, Kitaj writes: “Diasporist art is contradictory at its heart, being both internationalist and particularist. It can be inconsistent, which is a major blasphemy against the logic of much art education, because life in Diaspora is often inconsistent and tense; schismatic contradiction animates each day. To be consistent can mean the painter is settled and at home.” (1989: 36-37)

It is perhaps this very inconsistency and oscillation which diasporic artists, such as Schrade, have mobilized against the centralized space, the teleological conception of time, and the hierarchical organization of meaning that lies behind the Western colonial project and its racialized epistemology. I will argue that in Schrade’s largely abstract œuvre, the afronaut at some point emerges precisely as such a figure of unsettling possibility.

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In a seminal essay, the American art historian W. J. T. Mitchell asked with playful irony: If pictures were people, what kind of people would they be? Would they have a color – or a gender? If pictures were people, what would they want? In

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Mitchell’s eyes, pictures want one thing above all: to be recognized as “complex individuals” which, like people, have “multiple subject positions and identities” (1996: 82). Mitchell’s post-humanist reversal of the relationship between viewer and picture not only points to some of the difficulties involved in speaking and writing about pictures; more importantly, it also reminds us that every act of painting and writing takes place in a political arena of representation and recognition and that paintings, at least temporarily as an heuristic exercise, might also be acknowledged as others (or aliens). Abstract painting, in particular since the triumph of abstract expressionism during the Cold War, aided by the cultural policies of the US State Department, in its radical striving for form, its refusal of superficial reference, and its self-reflexive approach towards color and canvas as elements of pure mediaspecific expression, has since the 1970s been suspiciously viewed by progressive art historians as an expression of a hermetic high modernism. In its supposed neutrality and universalism, which excludes large parts of the world, abstract painting is seen to be permeated by Western ideologies of modernization, bound to US geopolitical interests, and branded the domain of dead white men. It is only in recent years that this view has been questioned by postcolonial critics, who point out the mono-cultural bias of this well-meant critique, emphasizing the global character of aesthetic modernity and the forgotten contributions of non-Western or Black diasporic artists to the history of abstraction in the 20th century. At the same time, it is important to point out that unlike the primitivism of the 1920s, which “had been a one-sided affair that involved unilateral appropriation rather than mutual borrowing, abstract expressionism arose at a moment when cross-cultural interaction became a two-way conversation for the first time in the 20th century” (Mercer 2006: 8-9). Although theorists of abstract expressionism like Clement Greenberg rejected any positive reference to the outside of the painterly codes of the canvas, calling for a purity of abstraction, which only referred to the developmental laws of the painterly material, more recent studies have pointed out that such a purity (including its racial and sexual undertones) never existed, especially when the canon is expanded to include non-white, non-male or non-heterosexual artists, emphasizing that the very critique of aesthetic mimesis formulated by Greenberg and others has to be read against the grain because it is linked to a Jewish intellectual tradition that includes the profoundly historical experience of diaspora, exile, racial trauma, and genocide (Greenberg 1986; Kaplan 1999; Godfrey 2007). Looking at the American configurations of the global and dialogical dimensions of abstract expressionism described by Kobena Mercer, Ann Gibson in her landmark study The Search for Freedom: African American Abstract Painting 1945-1975 stresses that abstraction was one attractive option, among others, to Black American painters because it allowed artists to escape the racialization of recognizably African or African American images, while still enabling them to search for a universal “ancestral imagery” (1991: 37) of forms.

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Figure 2: Daniel Kojo Schrade, Synapse VIII (1999). For marginalized artists the question of abstraction arose not only in relation to the development of the aesthetic material during modernism, but also in relation to the racialized regimes of the gaze in modernity. Abstraction promised liberation from the burden of signification, a “freedom from being read” (Morrison 2006: 138) that encompassed both the painting subject and the painted object. Since the modern racialization of the Black body is also indebted to a Cartesian or logocentric-binary conception of space and the subject, abstract painting’s promise of freedom should not only be defined in negative terms as refusal or unreadability. What appealed to marginalized artists was rather that formal experimentation with aesthetic form enabled the exploration of new forms of subjectivity and being-in-the-world. On the abstract African American painter Norman Lewis, Jeffrey C. Stewart writes: “Abstract expressionism was a radical salvation for Lewis, despite its social limitations. It was a break with the familiar terrain of Eurocentric art, from the Italian Renaissance to cubism. Abandoning the social, and especially the figurative, abstract expressionism created a rupture in traditional Western ways of thinking and acting … [The] Western subject […] was overturned by abstract expressionism, which promoted a radical, desubjectivizing vision of the world. Abstract expressionism thus had the possibility of effecting a revolution not only in aesthetics, but also in the Western perception of subject-based exploitation of the natural

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world as the agenda of humanity […] building a new way of being an artist outside the mimetic strategies of representation and aesthetic colonialism that had defined an African-raided European modernism.” (2015: 171)

Nevertheless, the discourse on minoritarian aesthetic formations is still dominated by sociological approaches and institutional critique, which tend to make the autonomy of aesthetic objects invisible. Only rarely are the works of diasporic artists ennobled with the “dignity of objecthood,” as Mercer (2005: 53) has persuasively argued.

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Schrade was born in 1967 into an artistic family: his mother is a painter, and both his stepfather and brother work as gallerists. For several years, the family lived in a castle his parents had renovated and turned into a studio and gallery space. His bohemian South-German family environment included painters affiliated with the Munich artists’ group SPUR, which for a short time formed the German section of the Situationist International (SI), or left-wing intellectuals with connections to Klaus Croissant, the Stuttgart-based lawyer of the Red Army Faction (RAF). In the late 1980s, Schrade studied fine arts in Munich and Cuenca, Spain, where he met painter Antonio Saura and came under the spell of abstraction. Among his early influences are American abstract expressionists such as Robert Motherwell, and artists associated with the art informel, a distinctly European branch of abstract expressionism that emerged in the 1950s, as represented by artists such as Asger Jorn, Antonio Tapiès or Serge Poliakoff. In the 1990s, Schrade immersed himself in Munich’s bohemian scene and continued his studies at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, where he also began to teach. Since 2008, he has been teaching painting as an Associate Professor of Art at Hampshire College. Reflecting on his time in Munich and the problems Black artists face in Germany, Schrade later recalled in an interview: “It was signaled to me that I could belong to the art scene – as long as I didn’t play up the color of my skin,” adding that the general reaction to the word Africa was something akin to panic (Fischer 2009). Schrade’s engagement with the formal questions informing abstract expressionism and art informel permeates his entire œuvre. This is already evident in some of his works from the late 1990s such as Untitled or Synapse VIII, which share certain qualities with works by informel artist Poliakoff (for example Composition Abstraite, 1960, or Composition gris et rouge, 1964), above all a virtuosity and luminosity of color, amplified by their concentration on a limited spectrum of color. In the case of Polikoff this is gray and orange, in Untitled or Synapse VIII (1999) black

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and brown, or a bluish gray/black, with an additional white hue in both of Schrade’s paintings. Although gestural elements are not particularly present in all of these examples, there is a shimmer that permeates the surface of fields of color, which result from the translucency of the underlying ground and the irregularities of the brushwork. Both artists work with a wobbly geography where the borders of the planes of color are pitted against each other like continental plates, searching for space, interacting with each other and occasionally engendering balanced spatial illusions. These tectonics point to the importance of layering, which in the case of Schrade resonates with his practice of painting with dry pigments that disallow the blending of colors on the canvas. Unlike Poliakoff, Schrade breaks up binary contrasts of color and form through smaller white color strips with gray grains that connect the upper and lower frame in Untitled, and the right and left frame in Synapse VIII. Syncopating the vocabulary of forms, such strips mediate between the laminary structures and intensify their chromaticity. From a postcolonial perspective, one might read Schrade’s geographical take on color fields quite literally. In our world “where borders gain a paradoxical centrality”, writes James Clifford (1997: 7), “margins, edges and lines of communications emerge as complex maps and histories” (ibid: 7). Whereas Poliakoff divides his canvases in the tradition of Russian icon painting into quadrants (implying the shape of a cross), Schrade’s compositions are more decentered, privileging vertical relations of thirds and quarters that can also be found in the segmentation of Motherwell’s canvases – an influence that Schrade returns to time and again in conversations, along with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Asger Jorn or Julie Mehretu. Unlike Poliakoff, Motherwell took a skeptical stance towards notions of pure abstraction and medium specificity and rather stressed the symbolic-historic and language-like side of non-figurative painting. This worldliness and openness towards historical reference is expressed through a polyvalent symbolism, scriptural-tachist elements and the titling of the paintings, which provide a semantic frame of interpretation. This is most evident in Motherwell’s series Elegy to the Spanish Republic, which he worked on from the late 1940s to his death in 1991. The key motif in this abstract, mainly black and white series is the alternation of vertical stripes and ovals. Through their size, flatness, and monochromacity, they dominate the pictorial foreground like a blotch (and resemble, according to Motherwell, the cut-off testicles that are presented to the audience at the end of bull fights in Spain). A similar problematization of the foreground (and the illusion of spatial depth) can be found in those paintings that challenge the painterly element through graphic components: in Dublin 1916, with Black and Tan (1964) it is a golden arrow on blue ground, resembling a matchstick man, house or tree – a recurrent motif in his early œuvre, similar to Schrade’s later use of the afronaut figure in an otherwise abstract context.

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A similar play with the introduction of elements that break-up foregroundbackground structures occurs in several paintings by Schrade created during different stages of the series Stop Look Listen. In one of the upright format paintings of the series, which he started in 2003, the lower third of the composition is dominated by white planes resembling overlapping, arctic patches of ice, which seem to drift on a striated white-grey sea of color from the lower border of the canvas to the middle of the picture. In the upper third of the painting one can recognize black triangular figures that shine through screaming red streaks that are running down the canvas like trails of blood, delimiting the spatial illusion in the lower third like mountains on a horizontal line. Cut off by the upper margin there are two fragments of block letters. They become readable or semantically meaningful in relation to the rest of the series: O and K – the last two letters of the word “Look”. Over this already quite complex structure Schrade applies another layer: three huge sand colored ovals with pointed bottoms. The ovals at the left and right margin are cut off; their grainy-scraped, opaque surface structure contrasts with the vertical streaks of color. Unlike the black ovals in Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic, Schrade’s ovals are not an integrated “part” of the picture or its composition – in Schrade’s painting, instead of being in the picture, they seem to rest on the painting like leaf gold and leap into the eye with almost haptic force. One is tempted to explain this difference, using the words of art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, as the difference between the detail and the pan. Whereas in the case of the detail the singularity of the appearance and the totality of the picture are mediated in a stable manner without troubling supplements, the pan engenders a disruptive effect that resembles the punctum described by Roland Barthes in his meditation on photography. Didi-Huberman describes the pan as a hysterical “symptom of paint within the picture” (2005: 261), arguing that paint should be understood as a “material cause” (ibid: 266), as a “sovereign accident” (ibid:256) that violates and tyrannizes representation, because it “insists” (ibid: 266) in the picture. While the detail can be extracted from the picture and tends towards stability and closure, the pan remains “semiotically labile and open” (ibid: 269). Unlike the punctum, the pan is not focused towards a point in the picture, but privileges the foreground and “frontal expansion” (ibid: 264). The pan does not simply demand a different perspective of contemplation; it delineates “another state of painting within the representative system of the picture.” It marks the “expansive force” of the local in the global. Such moments of the “intrusion of the paint”, according to Didi-Huberman, are “partial intensities in which the customary relation between the local and the global is upset: the local can no longer ‘isolate itself’ from the global, as in the case of the detail; on the contrary, it invests it, infects it” (ibid: 256).

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Figure 3: Daniel Kojo Schrade, Stop Look Listen (2003).

R ELICS

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Like Motherwell and Basquiat, Schrade likes to work with series and with the variation of motifs. Schrade uses the titles of paintings to forge political-historical references to afro-diasporic modes of consciousness, practices, and symbols. These references form what art historian Robert Farris Thompson has called the “flash of the

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spirit,” designating the visual and philosophical “streams of creativity and imagination” (1983: xiii) that run like a subterranean continuum through the Black Atlantic. Schrade integrates scriptural elements into his abstract compositions which open the painting up to a world of reference and a visual symbolism that increasingly does not shy away from singular figurative elements. Occasionally, this figurative dimension affects the foregrounded pictorial elements and augments their materiality with a symbolic dimension, resulting in an un-arrestable “oscillation between the material of painting and the painted” (Lüthy 2004: 94). In some of the frontally expanding fields of paint in series such as By Any Means, Du Bois or Stop Look Listen one can decipher allusions to the stylized form of the Ghanaian percussion instrument Gong-Gong (an iron double bell) or Anansi, the trickster spider. In paintings such as Afronaut (1999) Synapse VI (1999) or DuBois IV (1999) we find the abstract silhouette of a cephalopod that was derived from the play of Schrade’s then three-year old son who loved to stick a Gong-Gong into his toddler cap and walk around as if it was a horned helmet. This, too, might be one of the modalities through which the local in Schrade’s afro-diasporic abstract expressionism insists in the global. The title Stop Look Listen of Schrade’s series already turns modernism’s call to pause and confront the materiality of the painted object with one’s own eyes into an aesthetic program. Schrade’s works on canvas or paper in an exhibition space literally set the viewer in motion and require spatial interaction. Their dimensions range from over-sized canvases to tiny miniatures; on closer examination, their apparently flat surfaces turn out to be a complex assemblage of paint layers, charcoal lines, scriptural fragments (like sequences of letters), and added mineral elements, such as sand or marble dust, which call into question the two-dimensional “flatness” (Greenberg 1986) of the panel painting, subjecting the gaze of the viewer to an oscillatory movement between the macroscopic and the microscopic. While the command to ‘stop’ and to ‘look’ refers to the spatial dimensions of the aesthetic experience or the objecthood and materiality of the canvas, ‘listen’ bears a temporal and dialogical signature conjuring up musical and linguistic perception. The temporal dimension results both from the de- and re-territorializing movement described above, the controlled interplay of form-setting and form-dissolving elements and their effect on the viewer, and from Schrade’s mode of production. His pictures are created in stages over weeks and months, separated by breaks, in which he applies layer upon layer of paint, demarcates, reapplies, modifies, scrapes away, or re-contextualizes, adding figurative or scriptural elements. Schrade paints with his canvases spread out on the floor – a technique, as he points out, that has a strong performative dimension. The result of this multi-layered painting style is perhaps best described as a palimpsest; in a manner similar to collage or montage, even if they are gradually effaced, traces of earlier stages are still present or aufgehoben, even if they do not insist or persist on the surface, but now exist as an

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archive of multiple underground inscriptions which dialogue with each other underneath the paint, forming a latent text reminiscent of Sigmund Freud’s “Mystic Writing Pad”.1 “The pictorial structures that arise in this way are three-dimensional,” writes Thomas Huber (2000: n. p). “The composition of the paintings emerges from the depth and is indebted to both tectonics and architecture; forms are created by the layering of planes next to and on top of each other” (ibid: n.p.). Schrade’s afro-diasporic aesthetics of inscription, erasure, remembrance, and superimposition stages and dramatizes the performance of an individual and collective, postcolonial archive which extends both into the past and future. Before and beyond any meaningful pictorial or symbolic content, this artistic mode of production parallels the self-positioning and becoming of afro-diasporic subjectivity in the manner of an existential phenomenology and counter-historiographic or chronopolitical practice. On the one hand, Schrade’s work on the surfaces of his paintings resembles the work of the African archeologist from the future imagined by Kodwo Eshun (2003), who searches for hidden, forgotten, and repressed fragments and past connections across the Black Atlantic in our present. On the other hand, the work on these memories that are stored in different layers of paint and oscillate between presence and absence requires construction and improvisation, which can only unfold in an open temporal horizon, because they demand a different future that must be more than the prolongation of a racialized present. As much as the search for specific aesthetic constellations of the material preserves memories of the performative process of painting, the process itself is marked by a futurity, which, after the painting is finished, ventures into the space and the work of the spectator. In an interview, Schrade stated: “There is a quite practical connection between the painting and the layers of time. I work with countless layers of paint. Every layer is a memory, every layer is continued or affects the next one, and the end result is a cre-

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Schrade’s artistic method, based on a linear temporality of sequential steps that is finally negated through the simultaneity of traces present in the finished painting, recalls Freud’s notion of the unconscious as a palimpsest with multiple layers of inscription and different forms of temporality first developed in his 1925 essay “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’” (Freud 2008). Contemplating a new children’s toy, a wax tablet with a loose sheet of cellophane on top, Freud realized that old notes or drawings made on the surface of the pad remained readable in the underlying wax even when the surface marks were erased. For Freud, the mystic writing pad provides a metaphor for the functioning of the unconscious and the processing of sensory perception. While for Freud repression guarantees the stability of conscious self, it seems that in Schrade’s chronopolitical aesthetics of layering it is precisely these traces, related to his engagement with a repressed or lost history, that are key to the survival of the Black subject in an alien environment.

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ation permeated by different layers of time which in their layering as a sum total can acquire a larger meaning” (Gunkel 2014). These moments of perceived time are reinforced by the use of typographic elements (often emphasizing elements from the picture’s title, as in a close-up) which, unlike the simultaneity of viewing a picture, require a sequential reading and refer to the indeterminability of the production of meaning – an aspect of Schrade’s œuvre which is also reflected in his serial mode of production. Like the remixes of electronic music producers, it examines motifs in their multiple potentialities. Even the ambivalent status of writing itself – as a medium of an un-arrestable Derridian différance, as well as an expression of Western cultural superiority – is further twisted and complicated by Schrade’s subtle mode of production. He takes his brush and individually copies typographic letters that belong to the world of mechanical reproducibility and the printed word, thus calling into question the boundaries of symbolic and painterly codes. Like a floating postcolonial relic, writing in Schrade’s works often appears in the spaces between foreground and background, or in the transition between different color areas, creating a third space of interpretation and memory. At the same time, Schrade’s abstract compositions are opened up towards reference through the act of writing. Like Asger Jorn, Schrade reminds us that all painting – and writing – develops processually from what has been painted or written before and must be understood as the expression of a dialogic imagination, which, according to Mercer’s (1994) influential argument, represents an essential feature of Black and diasporic aesthetics across the Black Atlantic. Schrade’s use of text particles can thus be read as an echo of tri-continental traditions of applied art (Latin American and West African signs or hand-painted Indian cinema posters, for example) which he integrates as found objects in the manner of arte povera – in Afronauts 08CD01 (2008) he incorporates a printed sack of wheat from Ghana (the home country of Schrade’s father) into the canvas. These text particles are further direct reflections of politico-cultural, private and pop-mythological frames of reference: Stop Look Listen uses signs which can be found in Ghana at railway crossings, and which themselves are British imports that have been appropriated and often put to new uses. Other text fragments, together with the pictures’ titles to which they refer, allude to Malcom X, speculations about the African ancestry of Ludwig van Beethoven, or W. E. B. Du Bois, whose notion of double consciousness resonates even on a more formal level with Schrade’s use of multiple sign systems in his paintings.

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Figure 4: Daniel Kojo Schrade, Gap Junction II (2006). It is not simply through the symbolic content of these references, but through the interleaving of different semiotic codes (reminiscent of advertising or other forms of so-called low art) that Schrade positions himself in the tradition of political painting since the late 1960s, for example in a Black nationalist context the painters of Chicago’s AfriCOBRA collective, who like Schrade, insisted on representing the

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Black experience but rejected the social realism of other activists, oscillating between abstraction and figuration.2 The utilization of writing particles might be understood as a communicative strategy to activate the audience, which is forced to develop a new, simultaneous and sequential literacy, and face the painting as a reader and observer. Reading becomes a new form of seeing – and vice versa (Beckwith 2011: 44). Such fragments of writing, especially when working with iconic or slogan-like significations embedded in the picture and titles (“by any means necessary”) indicate that there is an addressee or reader outside of the hermetic world of the painting. In this way, Schrade’s works imply a call-and-response structure characteristic of afro-diasporic performances, confronting the spectator, as conceptual artist Adrian Piper phrased it, with the “spatio-temporal matrices in which they’re created” (1996: 241).

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Writing, as Schrade practices it, is situated between the word and the letter: sometimes the fragments of letters can be completed to become meaningful words, in other paintings their purely graphic character dominates. Occasionally, the letters appear as painted block capitals, but they might also have a handwritten character and transpire like a sketched outline through planes of paint. All this activates the cognitive participation of the spectator, because the gesture of sloganeering triumphs over semantic reference and the gaps have to be filled “with the eyes and the lips” (Barthes 1985: 157) in the space beyond the canvas. Dis poem is to be continued in your mind, as Jamaican dub poet Mutabaruka once put it in an influential poem, which formulated a powerful, syncretic-afro-diasporic poetics of incompleteness and postcolonial re-appropriation. In the rejection of plain readability and closure (augmented by a gestural surplus), writing does not function so much as a quote, but as the quotation of a quote or as a quotation gesture. Unlike the graphisms of Cy Twombly, Schrade’s diasporic traces of writing are not only decipherable but, like the scribblings of Basquiat, remain interpretable (despite their

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Because of their connections to Black nationalist agit-prop and vernacular forms of expression, the Chicago based collective AfriCOBRA for a long time was relegated to the rear-guard of art history. Founded in 1969, they postulated an Afrocentric aesthetics that aimed to create “awesome imagery” (Donaldson 2012: 85) of African Americans by putting a figural and literal “shine” (Jones Hogu 2012: 94) on the subjects depicted. Such an intense interest in luminosity and the materiality of color is also characteristic of Schrade’s work. For recent reassessments of AfriCOBRA, see Henderson 2012 and Ellsworth 2009.

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brokenness) through historical reference (Barthes 1985: 160). This resonates with a hybrid refusal of pure abstraction permeating not only Schrade’s œuvre, but also characteristic of the aesthetic of Black and other non-canonized abstract expressionists since World War II. Historically as well, writing and reading as a diasporic black secret technology (to quote the title of A Guy Called Gerald’s seminal 1995 Afrofuturist Jungle album) was too precious a good to vaporize semantic reference entirely in a radical gesture of transgression (Gates 1986). Schrade’s practice of including fragmented words problematizes the act of reading and writing in a way similar to Basquiat’s strategy of crossing out words. The emphasis on the isolated letter, of course, is also reminiscent of graffiti and the “Gothic Futurism” or “Ikonoklast Panzerism” of early HipHop MC and sprayer Rammelzee, who understood his work as a rebellion against the “tyranny” of the alphabet: “In a war against symbols which have been wrongly titled, only the letter can fight” (Tate 1992: 145). At the same time, letters as a trace of the performative act of writing that is subjected to temporality undermine the very “metaphysics of presence” linked to notions of abstract painting as a narcissistic, masculinist “mirror of the painter” (Krauss 1994: 70) which postcolonial and queer-feminist art history has challenged. This openness towards the referential in Schrade’s work is evident not only in playful titling or drawn or painted word fragments, but also through the figurative references embedded in such scriptural gestures. One of the most important references is linked to the omnipresent parasol or umbrella motif, which often develops out of the graphic lines Schrade applies to the interstices between foreground and background. Paul Klee is said to have described the graphic line as a “footpath and travel guide through the imaginary country of the picture” (Geier 1993: 4) and this geographic metaphor seems to be fitting here as well. If Schrade’s paint layers evoke associations of continents and landscapes, then the line as a trace of manual activity points to movement, migration, and diasporic connections. Semiotically and gesturally, these lines have an extremely complex function in Schrade’s work. As markers of ambivalence and in-between-ness, they can either turn into writing or into shapes and symbols. Culturally, the parasol is also a complex image: 19th century racist and colonial caricatures often showed Africans or African Americans with parasols as a failed and ridiculous imitation of Western civilization and its white epidermic ideal. At the same time, parasols are an important prop in New Orleans Second Line parades and conjure the subversive aspects of mimicry and the carnivalesque in the afro-diasporic tradition. In Schrade’s cosmology, the parasol directly refers to visionary Jamaican dub reggae producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. In the 1970s, as an alternative to the Black nationalist and religious traditions of Rastafarianism, the remix pioneer Lee Perry began to integrate science fiction, space, and alien metaphors into his private cosmology and to stylize himself as an extraterrestrial afronaut by means of a range of eccentric (or: ex-centric) costumes,

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aliases and mad props (CDs used as magic amulets, pressing irons, umbrella hats, amongst others) to remind us that “not all aliens come from outer space” (Corbett 1994: 7). The musical trickster Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry resorted to extra-terrestrial tropes in order to lend expression to diasporic experiences of alienation and abduction, but also as a means to open up a creative space of possibility resulting from the non-standardized, surreal-psychedelic usage of often antiquated studio technology in his Black Ark studio.3 As a modernist border crosser and as a radically antiessentialist figure, the afronaut represents not only lost roots, but above all the decentred routes taken across the Black Atlantic by Black people and Black forms of cultural knowledge over the past 400 years. In an essay for the Afrofuturism exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, curator Zoé Whitley notes: “Afrofuturism is primarily representational. […] Often, the human figure serves as a compass for the viewer in otherwise foreign surroundings – from flamboyant gold lame against the skin to dystopian topography extending to the horizon.” (2013: 22) As notable exceptions to this observation, she mentions Ellen Gallagher, Kira Lynn Harris and Sanford Biggers – and one might also add Schrade to this lineage, which not only reaches back further to Norman Lewis in the post-World War II era (Stewart 2015) but which also calls into question precisely the art historical hypostasis of the figuration/abstraction dichotomy on which Whitley’s argument is based. Around the year 2000, Schrade began a series entitled Afronaut, and here one can register not only an increased presence of referential and figurative elements but also the final appearance of the human figure previously only hinted at in Schrade’s paintings. The series by any means for example refers to the famous photo of Malcom X published in Ebony magazine in September 1964 which shows Malcom X with a M1 machine gun raising a curtain to peer through a window. By any means I (2002) and by any means II (2003) are vertical, abstract compositions, in which red and yellow color planes in a sea of black evoke associations of the window frame, the window, and the curtain. Malcom X, however, is not visible. In striking contrast to this missing subject or figure, the afronaut in Schrade’s work appears in a variety of figurative incarnations – from the monochrome UFO to the Black male torso, sometimes painted in the detailed Afrocentric psychedelic style of

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In an interview with David Toop, Perry described his Black Ark Studio (whose name, of course, resonates directly with Paul Gilroy’s notion of the ship as chronotopos of the Black Atlantic) in Afrofuturist terms: “It was like a space craft. You could hear space in the tracks. Something there was like a holy vibration and a godly sensation. Modern studios, they have a different set-up. They set up a business and a money-making concern. I set up like an ark… You have to be the Ark to save the animals and nature and music” (Toop 1995: 114). On Perry’s Afrofuturism, see also Nagl (1998: 71-72).

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AfriCOBRA or Chris Ofili. Most frequently, though, the afronaut figure appears as the dashed-off charcoal silhouette of an astronaut’s helmet or an umbrella (parasol), emerging from Schrade’s vibrant color compositions, layered surfaces and wobbly borders.

Figure 5: Daniel Kojo Schrade, Brother Beethoven 06L8 (2006). The characterization of the afronaut through these two props goes back to the cover photo of Kula Shaker’s 1999 album Peasants, Pips and Astronauts. Schrade in a 2004 catalogue included this album cover as supplementary material. In its floating movement, we might interpret the afronaut as an heir to and variation of the strange, Gong-Gong-inspired cephalopod that populated several of his late 1990s paintings such as DuBois IV (1999). As the agent of a radically different hermeneutics and chronopolitics, Schrade’s afronaut is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s equally extra-terrestrial angel of history (and also, in the transition between graphic and painterly codes, line and surface, of Paul Klee’s water color Angelus Novus (1920), which inspired Benjamin’s “Theses On The Philosophy of History”). Like Sun Ra and other Afrofuturist figures, Benjamin’s angel is a post-eschatological figure. He is propelled backwards by the storm of progress from a paradise lost into a future which he cannot see, looking at the course of history “which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (Benjamin 1968: 257), appearing as one single catastrophe. It is already “after the end of the world,” as Sun Ra stated on

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the soundtrack of John Coney’s Space is the Place (1974).4 Although Sun Ra and the Afrofuturist afronaut are travelling this apocalyptic timeline in a different direction, from the future back to the past, like Benjamin’s angel, they are disarticulating a messianic promise from the linear philosophy of history. It is maybe quite fitting in this regard that Schrade’s afronaut seems to have sidestepped this timeline entirely, moving laterally across the canvas. In his (or her) sketchy and fleeting appearance, the afronaut might also be read as a relatively direct reference to Basquiat’s repeated use of symbols of Black self-empowerment like the omnipresent royal crown he quickly tagged in graffiti style, which Schrade also references in the late 1990s in works such as zero gap II or early paintings from his Brother Beethoven cycle. Ranging from utterly abstract compositions to paintings that use the human figure precisely as what Whitley had dubbed a “compass for the viewer in otherwise foreign surroundings” (2013: 22) the series’ title playfully, and with compelling poetic license, riffs on the alleged North African ancestry of German composer Ludwig van Beethoven, an Afrocentric theory first popularized by Jamaican-American journalist J.A. Rodgers in the 1940s. In the isolated context of growing up Black in Germany, the power of the Black Beethoven image can hardly be underestimated. Although Rodgers’ theory has been refuted (Rinehart 2013; de Lerma 1990), Schrade uses the title and the pop cultural associations it evokes as a poetic symbol that defamiliarizes white washed notions of European history, hints at repressed transnational filiations across the Black Atlantic, and provides a cipher of AfroGerman excellence, while connecting the classical German musical heritage with African American 1960s and 70s soul culture.5 These genealogies also resonate with the artist’s biography. Schrade is an accomplished classical cello player but has also fronted a blues band and jammed with Free Jazz legend Wadada Leo Smith. Brother Beethoven 06L8 (2006) engenders such a notion of history in the subjunctive mood by answering the expectations set up by the painting’s title with an image of the afronaut, represented here through the hastily-drawn umbrella and a

4

For a compelling treatment of Afrofuturism’s messianic and apocalyptic streams, see also van Veen 2016.

5

Since Beethoven’s family was from Flanders, which for a long time was under Spanish rule, writers like Rodgers assumed a Moorish origin to account for contemporary descriptions of Beethoven’s dark appearance. The persistence of the popular discourse on “Black Beethoven” is perhaps best read against the whitewashing of classical music history, which has relegated the contributions of Black composers and performers such as Joseph Boulogne Chevalier de Saint-George (1745-1799), George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1778-1860), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1875-1912), William Grant Still (18951978), Ulysses Kay (1917-1995), or George Walker (born 1922) to mere footnotes.

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spaceship that emerges from a huge, light-blue blotch of paint by way of a few defining charcoal lines. While setting into play of a set of spatial and semiotic ambivalences through his layered and tactile brushwork and graphic usage of written fragments, Brother Beethoven 06L8 (2006) is one of the paintings from this period of the artist’s work that comes closest to a realistic representation of the human form. Behind the mothership, that seems to aggressively block the viewer’s gaze like a protective shield, two bald and bare-chested Black male torsos rise up in an austere, restrained pose: the project of symbolically re-constructing the Black body is only possible in the shadow of extra-terrestrial technology. In recent years, Schrade has expanded on these themes and stylistic preoccupations, occasionally substituting the afronaut with other alien proxies and exploring ways to integrate figurative and painterly reproduced photographic elements, often relating to the human body, to an even greater degree in his paintings, straddling the borders between abstraction and an Africanized take on pop art. In works such as Afronauts-Anglophone, Afronauts-Francophone and AfronautsLusophone (2010), he plays with advertisements for the French cheese brand La Vache Qui Rit popular in Francophone West Africa and appropriates other Western commodities such as the Michelin man made of tires or the retro-futurist image of the deep sea diver as variations on the space traveller, suggesting an enigmatic extra-terrestrial or submarine space of free-floating movement. In Brother Beethoven 08C04 (2010) we finally encounter Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry directly, wearing his famous umbrella hat and holding up an electric iron like a warrior’s shield, while the Brother Lafargue series (2015) points to the Black ancestry of Karl Marx’s son-inlaw and author of the anarchist classic Le Droit à la Paresse (1880). Some of these works are concerned with issues of site-specificity and the project of decolonizing the imperial archive: ‘La Vache Qui Rit’ was printed on the back of the cardboard which Senaglese painter Aboubacar Diané had used as a canvas and which Schrade had found in the collection of the Iwalewa House gallery at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. The Michelin man references the work of the late Nigerian painter and Afrobeat musician Prince Twins Seven-Seven, a representative of the Oshogbo school, who Peter Wollen once aptly dubbed an “idiosyncratic-art star from a hybrid matrix of traditional culture, urban vernacular culture and upmarket tourist art” (1993: 203).6 By connecting his own artistic practice to these African artists and the democratizing tendencies of vernacular practices, Schrade not only points to the crisis of modernism in the post-independence period, but also enriches our understanding of the multiple modernities in the 20th century, creating an awareness, as Mercer put it in an essay on non-Western pop art, “of the contradic-

6

On Prince Twins Seven-Seven and the pioneering role of German Jewish anthropologist Ulli Beier in the creation of the Oshogbo school, see also Glassie 2010.

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tory dynamics of popular culture when viewed in a global perspective” (2007: 7). Schrade’s skillful, but technologically obsolete practice of manually reproducing photographs in otherwise abstract compositions extends his interest in non-Western sign-writers, playfully riffing on notions of verisimilitude that were highly valued by low income groups who could not afford photomechanic or electronic forms of reproduction. Pointing to a wealth of transnational allusions, such faded inscriptions, fleeting figures, signs and overlapping temporalities and materialities in Schrade’s works create a diasporic archive which not only conjures up the past but also holds itself radically open to the future. Through the orchestrated interplay of formal construction, improvisation and chance, Schrade’s aesthetic can be understood as the AfroGerman expression of a Black vernacular modernism in which “formal mastery” and the “deformation of mastery” (Baker 1987: xvi) go hand in hand, rewriting art history from a cosmopolitan perspective and testifying to the generative powers of Afrofuturism in a yet to be decolonized art world.

L ITERATURE Baker Jr., Houston A. (1987): Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Barthes, Roland (1985): The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, New York: Hill and Wang. Beckwith, Naomi (2011): “Only Poetry.” In: Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete (eds.), The Freedom Principle. Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, pp. 39-51. Benjamin, Walter (1968): “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In: Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, New York: Knopf, pp. 253-264. Clifford, James. (1997): Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. Corbett, John (1994): Extended Play: Sounding Off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein, Durham: Duke Univ. Press. De Lerma, Dominique-René (1990): “Beethoven as a Black Composer.” In: Black Music Research Journal 10/1, pp. 118-122. Didi-Huberman, Georges (2005): Confronting Images. Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press. Donaldson, Jeff R (2012): “AfriCOBRA and TransAtlantic Connections.” In: Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 30, pp. 84-89. Ellsworth, Kirstin L (2009): “Africobra and the Negotiation of Visual Afrocentrism.” In: Civilisations 58/1, pp. 21-38.

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Eshun, Kodwo (2003): “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism.” In: CR: The New Centennial Review 3/2, pp. 287-302. Fischer, Jonathan (2009): “A Life Neither Here Nor There.” In: The African Times – A Monthly Newspaper from Germany, September. Freud, Sigmund (2008): A Note upon the “Mystic Writing Pad’.” In: Philip Rieff, (ed.) General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, New York: Simon and Schuster, pp. 211-16. Gates, Henry Louis (1986): “Introduction: Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes.” In: Henry Louis Gates Jr. (ed.), “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, pp. 1-20. Geier, Manfred (1993): “Scribble: Ursprüngliches Schreiben im Werk Cy Twomblys.” In: Jürgen Baurmann, Hartmut Günther and Ulrich Knoop (eds.), Homo scribens: Perspektiven der Schriftlichkeitsforschung, Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp. 1-10. Glassie, Henry (2010): Prince Twins Seven-Seven. His Art, His Life in Nigeria, His Exile in America, Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press. Godfrey, Mark (2007): Abstraction and the Holocaust, New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. Greenberg, Clement (1986): “Modernist Painting.” In: John O’Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg – The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance 1957-69, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, pp. 85-95. Gunkel, Henriette (2014): “Afronauts: Malerei aus dem Zwischenraum. Interview mit dem Künstler Daniel Kojo Schrade.” In: Malmoe on the Web, December 20. www.malmoe.org/artikel/erlebnispark/2889. Last 20.08.2018. Henderson, Napoleon Jones (2012): “Remembering AfriCOBRA and the Black Arts Movement in 1960s Chicago.” In: Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 30, pp. 98-103. Hugu Jones, Barbara (2012): “Inaugurating AfriCOBRA. History, Philosophy, and Aestehtics.” In: Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 30, pp. 90-97. Kaplan, Louis (1999): “Reframing the Self-Criticism. Clement Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting’ in Light of Jewish Identity.” In: Catherine M. Sousselof (ed.), Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, pp. 180-199. Kitaj, R. B. (1989): First Diasporist Manifesto, New York: Thames and Hudson. Krauss, Rosalind (1994): “Cy was here; Cy’s Up.” In: Artforum International 33/1, pp. 70-75. Lüthy, Michael (2004): “‘Sehen’ contra ‘Erkennen’. Die Erschieβung des Kaiser Maximilians und Die Eisenbahn von Eduard Manet.” In: Gert Mattenklott (ed.), Ästhetische Erfahnung im Zeichen der Entgrenzung der Künste. Epistemische, ästhetische und religiöse Formen von Erfahrung im Vergleich, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, pp. 83-101.

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Mercer, Kobena (1994): Welcome to The Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, London: Routledge. Mercer, Kobena (2005): “Iconography After Identity.” In: by David A. Bailey, Sonia Boyce and Ian Baucom (eds.), Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain, Durham: Duke Univ. Press, pp. 49-58. Mercer, Kobena (2006): “Introduction.” In: Kobena Mercer (ed.), Discrepant Abstraction, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, pp. 6-29. Mercer, Kobena (2007): “Introduction.” In: Kobena Mercer (ed.), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, pp. 6-35. Mitchell, W. J. T (1996): “What Do Pictures ‘Really’ Want?.” In: October 77, pp. 71-82 Morrison, Angeline (2005): In: Kobena Mercer (ed.), Discrepant Abstraction, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, pp. 135-153. Nagl, Tobias (1998): “‘I Wonder if Heaven’s Got a Ghetto’ – Aliens, Ethnizität und der SF-Film.” In: Diedrich Diederichsen (ed.), Loving The Alien. Science Fiction – Diaspora – Multikultur, Berlin: ID-Verlag, pp. 68-89. Nelson, Steven (2006): “Diaspora: Multiple Practices, Multiple Worldviews.” In: Amelia Jones (ed.), A Companion to Contemporary Art, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 296-316. Piper, Adrian (1996): “On Conceptual Art.” In: Adrian Piper: Out of Order, Out of Site, Vol. I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art, 1968-1992, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 241-244. Rinehart, Nicholas T (2013): “Black Beethoven and the Racial Politics of Music History.” In: Transition 112, pp. 117-130. Stewart, Jeffrey C (2015): “Beyond Category: Before Afrofuturism There Was Norman Lewis.” In: Ruth Fine (ed.), Procession. The Art of Norman Lewis, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, pp. 161-192. Tate, Greg (1992): Flyboy in the Buttermilk. Essays on Contemporary America, New York: Simon & Schuster. Thompson, Robert Farris (1983): Flash of the Spirit. African and Afro-American Art, New York: Vintage Books. Toop, David (1995): Ocean of Sound, London: Serpent’s Tail. Van Veen, Tobias C (2016): “The Armageddon Effect. Afrofuturism and the Chronopolitics of Alien Nation.” In: Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones (eds.) Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness, Lanham: Lexington Books, pp. 63-90. Whitley, Zoé (2013): “The Place is Space: Afrofuturism’s Transnational Geographies.” In: Naima J. Keith and Zoé Whitley (eds.), The Shadows Took Shape, New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, pp. 19-24. Wollen, Peter (1993): Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-century Culture, London: Verso.

There Are Storytellers Everywhere R AIMI G BADAMOSI

P OWERMAN

AND

ME

I remember reading Powerman1 as a child, it was apparently the only local comic in English available in Lagos at the time, and even this was not locally written. It was either that or American and British comics. There were a great number of American comics, from Richie Rich, to Casper the Friendly Ghost, and Archie, and we could find all the Marvel and DC comics one could imagine. One could also get the British range of Beano, Whizzer and Chips, Buster, 200AD, and a host of disparate others. There was even the occasional independent comic; and all were read with relish. The big difference, rather annoyance, was that these foreign comics would ar-

1

Powerman was a British comic book series written by Don Avenall (aka Donne Avenell) and Norman Worker, illustrated by Dave Gibbon and Brian Bolland, and distributed in Nigeria in the early 1970s. The series starred Powerman. Gibbons said that an executive from a Nigerian advertising agency approached Bardon Press Features to discuss the idea of making a series with a black superhero after he realized that in Nigeria, the comics available were imported and had White protagonists. Gibbons designed the character and the series logo and worked chores with Bolland. Gibbons said that he published one 14page issue per month, which was published every two weeks. Gibbons said that he remembered asking why Africans did not work on the strips and hearing that the African artists would likely emerge once comics become popular in Africa. Gibbons also recalls difficulty adjusting to writing for a Nigerian culture; for instance, the management told him that a fat stomach indicated “success and power” instead of “gluttony or greed” and that having Powerman “always get off with the girls” was not considered sexist. Each panel had a number to indicate the flow of the story. The Powerman anthologies also included a series called Jango, which starred a Black sheriff (http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Powerman_(comics), last accessed 20 January 2016).

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rive whenever it seemed they felt like it, so the idea of chronology in the storytelling soon disappeared. It was a constant source of frustration to get to the end of a comic, especially the Marvel and DC comics, and realize that the next installment was not readily available. Sometimes the installment would turn up many months later, or one would realize that one had read the following section a while ago. It did, however, lead to a very efficient form of swapping between us at school as we grasped that series and issue numbers mattered; and we soon became adept at holding stories in our heads to cope with the constant disjointedness of our reading sequences. The fact that Powerman came out on a regular basis, and one could see and assess character development in a chronological fashion was quite desirous, and led to a sense of ownership of the character and his exploits. We, the readers, developed with Powerman, we knew who he was; even if in memory or experience Powerman was no-one we knew, and carried out his exploits no-where we actually recognized as Lagos. Powerman would be on the newspaper stands and the department stores, and we knew when the latest issue arrived. With an attendant rush, a sequence of friends would arrange a queue to read after the ‘owner’ had savored every page. Ragged copies would make the rounds of the form-room, the stories discussed and analyzed, and then we would await the next issue. Far beyond the beneficial consequences of chronological storytelling from reading episodes in sequential order, Powerman was Black and the stories were based in a mythical Africa. The Myth of Africa, often presented in comics like Tarzan of the Jungle, where practically all Africans were ‘grass-skirted-savages’ to be dominated and controlled by the superior intellect and skills of the singular White man, did not much bother us as school-children – we too were alien to the continent we dwelled in – we were more likely to identify with Tintin in his exploits, and not question the presentations of a Dark Continent. A diet of adventure stories that treated Africa as a place impossible to understand meant any caricature of Africa and its peoples was not questioned by our pleasure-seeking readings. Powerman looked like the people around me, and we read him as an African. His language and adventures were different enough to Marvel and DC comics to render them believable as local stories. It made a difference to us that Powerman’s setting was somewhat familiar, real enough to identify with and fictional enough to capture the imagination. When I look back at Powerman, I realize that far beyond a mere hero to follow, we identified with this superhero. Seeing him in a local context was significant in a subliminal fashion. It is not that I was aware of the identification process; it is just that I could imagine seeing Powerman fly past me. This was never going to be the case for Spiderman or Batman. The Fantastic Four were quite fantastic, but that was it, they were fantastic and very far away from where I was. Whereas in Powerman, the language addressed local issues, it did not seem bent on constructing desire for irrational objects far away from ‘home’. Powerman’s weak-

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ness, being bitten by snakes, resonated deeply with me. Constantly being warned against snakes on our arrival in Nigeria lent great authority to the potency of the Achilles’ heel allocated to him – no Kryptonite here, something local and believable. Powerman: Africa’s Hero with Super Power, was a muscle bound Nigerian Black superhero, but I do not know where in Nigeria he came from. And like other superheroes of that time, Powerman was clad in a red skin-tight leotard with a stylized P bolting across his chest that linked him to lightning. (His supernatural powers having come from being struck by lightning as a child.) His over-pants were yellow ‘Leopard’ skin, the ensemble completed with a green cape. He had superhuman-powers, and fought everything from extra-terrestrials to evil giants; exploiting foreigners to ‘witch-doctors’ in defense of ‘the people’. In this same time period we deliberately sought and read foreign comics with complete stories to meet our desire for narrative completion. Publications like Commando held special appeal. With Commando comics, the war stories were far from our reality and heavily biased, (even back then it was fairly obvious), and characters came and went, but it was possible to identify with their everyday nature. Even to me as a young reader, though graphic novels were great and fotonovels brought films to us in comic form, they could not address my local setting: they simply did not translate. So Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) was read as a comic with relish, but did nothing to cause alarm, or the ‘horror’ of losing my body. Astounding Stories were a brilliant introduction to science fiction and strange facts. But even with this surplus of images and texts, within the African context, Powerman loomed large in the imagination. Investigating the impact of Powerman on the psyche demands an engagement with the representations of the ‘African’ people (treated as a unified and undifferentiated presence) in relation to the imported superhero, and more poignantly, to address the possibility of the African as superhero. It is worth noting that for us in Nigeria, the idea – superhero – already loomed large in the formation of the pantheon of gods that dwelt between the might of Olodumare and the frailty of humankind. This is reflected in literature. For instance, the novel Forest of a Thousand Daemons (1983) by Daniel Orowole Fagunwa, successfully transports the reader into a world of super-beings and presents a hero worthy of emulation, and provided a framework from which the idea of comics and a readership could emerge. The African as superhero also translated in syncretic ways within our everyday life. As a child and teenager, I travelled past the statue of Shango, the god ascribed to electricity in front of the Nigeria Electricity Power Authority (NEPA) building. He had superpowers, had an origin story known to all and sundry, and as Oba K’oso, he acted in a fashion worthy of any superhero. The idea of the super-being, everpresent in the pantheon of the gods, allowed for easy adoption of a superhero who

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‘controlled’ electricity. Within the Nigerian context, Powerman had already loomed large in the imagination, even before his arrival in comic-book form.

T O R EAD

A

C OMIC

I have read comics all my life, when I was supposed to, and when I was not: during lunch breaks, study periods (folded into textbooks and notebooks), classes (on my lap under the desk), in the back of the car. Old comics, new titles, relevant, irrelevant, re-reads, they were all read. Comics were a way into a new world, far away from where I was. In the face of the many reasons why comics are written, I, and many like me, read comics for enjoyment, cover to cover, longing after the objects in the advertisements, running through the publications (particularly at the back), wishing we could buy the x-ray specs, sea monkeys, or muscle-building kits. We craved access to the Annual at the end of the present year, not in the middle of the one following. We wanted our opinions heard when it was sought, but we were far away from the writers of the comics. We knew we were passive consumers. We knew this because we read other children’s comments and feedback. They won competitions, while we hoped. And yet we identified with the characters in the comics that came from over the seas. We wrapped our brains in the heroes’ bodies, disregarding gender; Wonder Woman was as seductive as Spider-Man. We knew this was wishful thinking, but the tales were seductive, and this was a world we thought we could control. Even if we knew the distant control was vicarious, alienating, disenabling, it was still desirable. For all their benign nature, and clear benefits to the learning child (if at the least, no one had to get us to read), comics were treated as dangerous contraband. And perhaps they were. If anything, they situated our imagination and aspirations far away from our place of residence. Comics, in their existing form, made the superhero, the ‘super-person’, the person to be emulated, a person that could not be local. Addressing this alienated imagination is one of the main reasons why the emergent local comic production on the continent is being lauded, considering there are just two comic producers of note continentally: Leti Arts in Ghana and Comic Republic in Nigeria. However, it has to be recognized that it is a literate community nurtured on foreign comics that are behind their production. This does not discredit all that is emerging. It does, however, explain the forms the comics take. The signifying imperatives behind ‘African’ comic production are hailed as ground-breaking because Africans are making superheroes of themselves. But even if the makers are acutely aware of the political, emotional, and cultural significance of comics, they realize the need to counter-balance imported iconography, and strive to eliminate

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the distance between comic readers and possibilities of imagined justice. The new internationalized consumption of these publications means the comics form a schizophrenic relationship with the continent as a lived experience.

C ONJECTURE

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P OSSIBILITIES

The comic as bound sequential narratives is almost synonymous with the superhero, defined by their series of successes over foes, and while the superhero will not be the only form of comic considered in this text, the sequential narrative will remain of prime concern in imagining the comic on the African continent. The superhero as is often accepted is a Western construction, with Superman being the zenith of what the superhero is, looks like, and stands for.2 Superman unsurprisingly has come to represent American values, even more than the character of Captain America who was created as a rallying figure for the American public during World War II. Different than the deliberately patriotic figure of Captain America, there is simply more scope for identification with Superman à la Laura Mulvey’s arguments of gendered identification, as well as the possibility of anyone being a superhero through a hidden identity. And while Captain America comes into being through technological innovations of the American State, Superman has proven greater endurance with his otherworldly alien origins. Considering the dominance of a particular trope promulgated by the comic genre, what will a superhero that comes out of a township, a hamlet, a town, or a city on the African continent look like? This is one of the prime questions with which comics on the continent will have to actively engage. One of the prevailing solutions is simply to retain the existing tropes and replace the ‘normal Caucasian’ figure with a non-Caucasian figure. It is clearly assumed that, to make the figure more relevant, an ‘African’ figure will do the job. Dress, intentions, values, and narrative structures are left unchanged. It is clearly assumed that the larger worldview is left untouched, unaffected, and is often ignored. This has the dual impact of rendering the ‘African’ superhero, superhero-like, and retains the dominance of the modal superhero constructed far away from the African continent. A good example of this is

2

There is an uncanny similarity between representations of the typical superhero and European knights of the Middle Ages. The position of the knight emanated from a higher authority: they were well off (supported by feudalism which rendered their source of income invisible); they had superior fighting abilities; they were meant to protect the weak; their personal identities were hidden in combat while fashioned insignia represented them (which rendered them immortal); and what was a knight without a billowing cape as he rode off after his act of ‘unparalleled’ bravery.

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the range of comics from Comic Republic in Nigeria. With names like Guardian Prime, that ostensibly function within Nigeria, the moment they take on their superpersona, they lapse into a Western mode of being. Other attributes of the superhero are worth considering. They are typically male and physically perfect; even where there are ‘imperfections’, such as in the case of Daredevil’s ‘blindness’, they form the basis of renewed perfection. They are almost always urban, and either reasonably or fabulously well off. These attributes matter a great deal when the superhero is planted on the African soil, as the superhero functions as an aspirational character more than simply a righter of wrongs. Larger than life villains are, however, easy to imagine on the African continent where the ‘average’ person has little or no means to defend their rights in the face of abuse. The necessity of invention is reduced where real-life political figures and business magnates are seen as able to make life and death decisions over others with impunity, and dispossessions are accepted as norms. A diversion into Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s lyrics in Power Show will assist in explaining the easy transformation of the ‘everyday person’ into a superhero or antihero as the situation may be. The role of the superhero is to wield power and alter a situation for the better, normally for the ‘weaker’ party, and notions of weakness are complicated when power is sought as a constant antidote to constant disempowerment. Fela sings: “Motor car owner sef him go take him car push, him car push labourer down for road Then him start to yap (yes) Foolish labourer (yes) Nonentity, (yes) him no get money (yes) Look him sandals (yes) e don tear finish (yes) Look him trouser (yes) e don tear for nyash (yes) Look him singlet (yes) e don dirty finish (yes) Look him body (yes) e no bath this morning (yes) Look him pocket (yes) e don dry finish (yes) You go suffer for nothing (yes) You go suffer for nothing (yes) You no know me sha? (yes) I be General (yes) for Army Office (yes) I be Officer (yes) for Police Station (yes) I be secretary (yes) for government office (yes)”3

3

“Power Show” on Fela Anikulapo-Kuti Original Suffer Head/I.T.T., Universal, 1981 [2000].

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In this context, the transformation from alter-ego to superhero is predicated on a series of declarations. Being a motorist is to be in disguise, but when conflict arises, the super powers that will solve all the problems rise to the fore. Within the logic of the song, in the Nigerian context, being a general, police officer, or administrative secretary is to be the superhero, and while this is clearly an abuse of self-declared powers, they are powers all the same. These super-powers have a role to play, they are to be kept hidden unless needed, and should only be put to beneficial uses, which Fela lists as: “Power Show na sad thing, (yes) na bad thing (yes) Na wrong show Power na to help your land (yes) And to help your mates (yes) Power Show Na wrong sho”

The ‘labourer’ in the narrative above needs a superhero, but then so does the motorist who has to boast their way out of a sticky situation. The continuing line of different degrees of disempowerment calls for a different type of superhero; other than battling supervillains who emerge only to test the mettle of a superhero who exists in a world where all is well and ordered. To date, for better or worse, the typical superhero is a white male able-bodied capitalist heterosexual Anglo-Saxon Protestant, who when considering their blind faith in the fights their nations get involved in, is a colonialist too, as they believe deeply in the exportation of the values their ‘country’ holds dear. An African superhero, and by extension, comics that centre the African continent will have to address communities seeking to make ends meet, where daily life is a challenge, where the pace of city life is hectic beyond the imagination of the average Westerner. This Western superhero, accepted as a product of an affluent urbanity, with a high-blown moral meter may find life difficult, or near impossible when dealing with the necessary nuanced crises they will face in the African context. Imagining a superhero dealing with Lagos rush-hour traffic or institutional injustices in Johannesburg, negotiating with police officers in Zimbabwe or protecting artifacts in Mali, reveals what can be expected of a person or being with extraordinary powers.

TO BE

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S UPERHERO

I wanted to be Superman, but Superman was not coming to Lagos any time soon. Judge Dredd would have been very welcome, but even Mega-City One was far away from my lived experience. I did not abhor the post-apocalyptic, in fact, Curs-

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ed Earth was where the imagination went in search of adventure. If a nuclear holocaust meant the emergence of psychic powers, then the bomb was welcomed, because comics supported a belief that one would survive the impossible. Comics allowed the possibility of becoming a superhero, until geography made its presence felt. The constant reinforcement of these foreign heroes did mean they forced their presence into our language. This has meant that the alien (for many: socially, racially, and culturally) superheroes have become an ideal that transcended their humanoid limitations. The listener knows what is being invoked without explanation as Bucie asks the dancer “can you be my Superman?” on Black Coffee’s eponymously titled Superman4, and Eric Roberson easily reminds his listeners on Couldn’t Hear Me: “As time went on she started to see I was not superman no I may have a gift for these words but I’m no more than a man so My songs about joy My songs about pain She loved them the same but to me she changed”5

The dominance of Superman in popular culture is not a surprise, even in areas where Superman is not considered to have superpowers, such as song-writing. Invoking him is not strange. It sits well, even for those that do not consider themselves readers of comics.

I NTERLUDE “The black oasis, Ancient Africa the sacred Awaking, the sleeping giant, science, art is your creation I dreamed that we could visit old Kemet Your history is too complex and rigid for some Western critics They want the whole subject diminished But Africa's the origin of all the world's religions We praise bridges that carried us over The battlefronts of Sudanic soldiers, the task put before us (Do you hear me now?)”6

4

“Superman” on Black Coffee, Africa Rising, Soulistic Music, 2016.

5

“Couldn’t Hear Me” on Eric Roberson, The Vault, Vol. 1.5, P-Vine Records, 2004.

6

“Africa Must Wake Up” on Damien Marley and Nas, Distant Relatives Universal Republic Records, 2010.

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Nas and Damien Marley sing of what Africa is supposed to mean at ‘home’ and in the diaspora, what it means to be at the forefront of cultural production, and the attendant expectations of what the continent should currently produce. So waking up to producing superheroes may be one option, but the existing comic format remains. Before there were written words, there were drawn images. The alphabet must have seemed, and remains, rather clever and soon took over from pictures, considering its efficiency in reproducing sound and ease of reproduction. It is no surprise that the alphabet has vastly superseded drawings that had served rather well for generations. Drawings have since been relegated to the realm of emotions, with letters linked to the intellect. This separation of emotion and intellect did a lot to displace drawn images as the primary form of communication, placing drawn images into the dominion of childhood and the unlearned, while lettered books indicated a move away from infancy into adulthood. Picture books became synonymous with infancy and were linked to the colonized body, where the deliberate simplicity of colonial communication is akin to drawing. Books that ostensibly contained serious information or knowledge eschewed pictures, except for a few instances where 'illustrated plates’ were accepted within the publication. In these cases, it was understood that the images were there to illustrate the written word, not form a fundamental part of the understanding of whatever the book was to impart. Words and drawings together, working in tandem is one way of describing comics, and the combination is still treated as childish material, or at best juvenile. And this has caused a prejudicial reading of comics on the African continent, where comics, or publications akin to comics have been used as a demeaning adult educational tool for medical and public health information purposes. This has linked comics to illiteracy, which in part explains the resistance comics have encountered within the continental educational system. It is therefore no surprise that while there are attempts to argue for the production of comics on the African continent, it is difficult to speak of serious production and consumption of comics on the continent. There is increasing attention on Nigeria and South Africa as centers of production, but most of the African material still emanates from outside the continent. Attempts to highlight comic production on the continent, or material deemed African is possible and emerging, but it still remains the case that these are exceptional instances, and are treated as such.

P OSSIBILITIES If the comic has been constructed as residing in the domain of Whiteness and foreignness, then perhaps there is a need to engage with the comic as form and con-

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tent. The African continent constitutes a readership that deserves attention. Even when the comic is deemed African (which will lead to the oxymoronic phrase: African comics), and these new forms are posited as black, it will only allow for the continuous masquerading of non-African publications as eminent form, then comics and a hearkening for an imaginative future will have to be fundamentally racialized in the home, and foreign imagination. The representation of Africa within the field of comics will have to be related, to a large extent, in a fictional and stereotypical portrayal of ‘African-ness’ in the emergent comic form. It is often the case that fiction precedes desired realities or presents existing realities in a form easily acceptable by the general public. Therefore, Africa and its Diaspora will have to find a treatment that does not place it outside existing technological modernity or an imagined future-present. Finding a superhero is never easy.

E PILOGUE : T HE M AN

IN THE

G REEN S HIRT

No one really believed in superheroes around here. Considering the state of things, it was hard to believe in heroes at all, let alone superheroes. That was until Mrs. Awoyemi’s store at the corner was burned down. Mrs. Awoyemi was great, so was her shop. She always seemed to be in her shop, knew all of us by name, had the best prices, had useful things in stock, and, as my mother always pointed out, her bread was always fresh. Fresh bread was the bane of the local shops. We were convinced the shopkeepers tampered with the ‘sell by’ dates, because no sooner did the ‘fresh’ bread make it to the house, that it sprouted green mold and produced that rather odd smell. We ate it all the same. My mother took no nonsense from us; our complaints were met with the suggestion that we toast the bread. It worked, toasting the bread that is. So we simply stopped complaining, and got on with it. I can tell you this didn’t do me any harm. So mold or not, we ate the bread. Word soon got around that Mrs. Awoyemi’s bread stayed fresh. You know how it is. So her shop was the first port of call for the weekly shop, and that last minute loaf at night for the lunch pack the following day. We ran out of bread a lot because we snacked on the supply in the house before and after lunch on our return from school. It was great walking into her shop, choosing the bread, giving it a quick squeeze, and knowing that lunch would be brilliant. Mother insisted on wholemeal bread, and Mrs. Awoyemi always had a few loaves just for us. Everyone called her Mrs. Awoyemi. It seemed impossible to call her anything else. She was elegant, regal in fact, and full of smiles. They were the kind of smiles that made us polite and respectful. It wasn't one of those smiles that looked as if we

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were made of plastic. All I know is that they made me feel warm inside whenever I went over to her shop. There were stories that she could alter her face into something frightening when treated improperly, but being that I hadn’t seen this other face, I came to the conclusion she must have two faces. That fired my imagination for a while. I finally saw the other face when those men in the matching shoes swore at her, called her those dreadful names, and broke her window. When I saw the face I had heard about, I can tell you this, I was riveted. She commanded the men to leave her premises, and they did. Then Mrs. Awoyemi looked over at me, and she was beaming. When the riots and the attacks started, we knew they were aimed at foreigners, but could not understand why. No one thought of Mrs. Awoyemi as foreign, she was simply part of our community, as South African as the next person. So it did seem strange when we heard that ‘they’ were attacking her shop and she was fending them off. We really couldn't understand it. Why in the world would anyone attack Mrs. Awoyemi’s shop? This is where we got our fresh bread. We gathered on the other side of the road. We have more sense than to get in the thick of it all. I saw Mrs. Awoyemi gesticulate at one of the men in front of her shop. It seemed she was trying to reason with him. Chanting men moved towards her shop. She pushed one away. He swore at her. While she was dealing with him, the others moved in. Then she would move on to another man. Strange as it may sound, it looked like a game of space invaders from afar. When the man with the petrol arrived, we knew something bad was going to happen. Then they started manhandling Mrs. Awoyemi, shouting at her that if she wouldn’t leave, they would burn her with her shop. I didn't know what to do. I wish my father had been at home. He would definitely be able to deal with these men, chase them as far away from here as possible. Mrs. Awoyemi did not move, so they started pushing her into her shop. Some of the children started screaming, telling the men to leave Mrs. Awoyemi alone. They ignored us and started throwing the petrol over the shop. That is when the man in the green shirt appeared. Almost out of nowhere. He pushed the men aside, two of them fell onto the ground. He rushed into the shop, grabbed Mrs. Awoyemi, and dragged her away. I could see that she was crying. I felt awful. Then the men set the shop on fire, and we watched it burn. I told my father the whole story when he got back that evening. I had told my mother the same story too when she got back from work earlier. She was furious that I had been outside when all of this was going on. I told her that I was okay, that nothing happened to any of us children. But that didn’t seem to help as she grounded me for the rest of the week. I explained to my father that the man in the green shirt must have been a superhero because he saved Mrs. Awoyemi. That was what superheroes did, they saved people, but you didn't know who they were.

V.

Prophetika A BIGAIL D E V ILLE

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(1) – (3) gaze in the mirror, invisible man, 2015.

The Secessionist Manifestos of Certain Received Wisdoms J OHN A KOMFRAH

AND

K ODWO E SHUN

In the winter sun in early 2016, 21 years after the first transmission of The Last Angel of History on ZDF in 1995, John Akomfrah and Kodwo Eshun were invited by the two editors, kara lynch and Henriette Gunkel, to discuss the film’s interventions into critical debates around black popular culture in the mid-1990s, its epistemological enquiry into modes of becoming, its analysis of the foreclosure of African political utopias, and its role in the evolution of Afrofuturism and African futures during the last two decades. The conversation between Kodwo Eshun and John Akomfrah took place on Tuesday March 15, 2016 from 7-9pm at Radio Extra Terrestrial at Galerie KIT. It was produced and presented by Miss Despoina during the exhibition We Hold This Myth to Be Potential: Investigations into Afrofuturism at Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. We Hold this Myth to be Potential was curated by Annett Busch and Florian Schneider for Meta.Morf 2016: Nice to be in Orbit! The Trondheim International Biennale for Art & Technology from March 10 to May 8, 2016. Kodwo Eshun: What we wanted to do today is to analyze three moments. The first would be the moment of 1995 when The Last Angel of History was broadcast in September on ZDF in Germany and Channel 4 in the UK under the name The Mothership Connection. The second would be the efflorescence of Afrofuturism in which we can observe its continuing popularity in the US and in Europe especially in the art worlds. The third moment would be the recent critiques of Afrofuturism developed from within the continent, South Africa largely, but also Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana. These critiques question the term for its exclusions of practices formulated from within the continent, now and in the past, that are overshadowed by the attention paid to canonical African-American artistic practices. John, could you out-

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line some of the impulses and imperatives that were informing The Last Angel of History in 1995? John Akomfrah: Trying to remember the detail of that moment is going to be difficult. But I will have a go. There are certain pointers that are still legible for me, even now. Some were intellectual, some were musical, some were cultural and political. Let’s look at the intellectual one, to start with. It was clear from about the early 1990s that a disparate range of writings on what one could call the Afrofuture was beginning to take shape. A number of essays about what could be an Afrofuturist narrative were beginning to be published in critical journals. It was increasingly clear that a certain cultural studies take-up of black cultural production was beginning to reach its ascendancy and that a number of genres and practitioners would not be part of that canon forming moment. The black popular culture moment seemed to suggest that the unpopular elements of what one could call black popular culture were not going to be addressed. A number of us were beginning to become aware that a set of musicians, composers, and producers could form the basis of a discussion. Not all of them necessarily made it into The Last Angel of History, but certainly the ones who did suggested what that field could be. Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, George Clinton, and Sun Ra were exemplars. They were by no means the sole representatives, but they seemed like emblematic figures. By the early 1990s you could see the emergence of musical genres that seemed to hint at the presence of these figures. Whether it was drum ’n’ bass or Detroit techno or what was beginning to happen in Germany with the beginnings of Basic Channel, these emergent sonic practices seemed to be borrowing heavily from this range of writers and thinkers. So all of that seemed to make sense for a research project like The Last Angel, which like all the Black Audio Film projects started essentially as research. KE: Gina Dent’s edited volume Black Popular Culture was an important reference for an American adaptation of British cultural studies that attempted to survey the entire scope of American popular culture. The popular in popular culture ensured an overwhelming emphasis on certain kinds of hip-hop at the expense of others. Detroit techno was written out of the grand narrative of popular culture that inherited the imperatives of gospel and R&B. The black in black popular culture did not stretch towards what was happening in Britain. The fact that Chicago acid house and Detroit techno were received better in Manchester, in London, in Berlin than in the USA indicated that a process of technopoetic creolization was underway. Acid house hybridized with British reggae sound system culture to form the hardcore continuum that would generate jungle techno, jungle, and drum ’n’ bass and then speed garage, 2 step, and grime, all of which were sustained by a pirate ecology of radio stations, independent record labels, and independent record stores. None of that would ever show up in a volume like Black Popular Culture which did not

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have a theoretical or critical vocabulary capable of accounting for that sonic and social process on its own terms. Given these multiple exclusions and elisions, it was not so difficult to pose the question of what a black unpopular culture would sound like. In the polemic spirit of the time, it was possible to speculate upon the existence of an uncultured, unpopular unblack unculture that would pressurize the inherited terms by which blackness was recognized, identified, and secured as identity. Listening to jungle and drum ’n’ bass confronted you with situations in which you could not reliably identify the identity of a producer. The music was straining the certainties that you brought to it: the recognition effects or the reality effects that previous generations had. The mutational capacity of certain dance music to pressurize expectations of what black dance music could be opened up a vector of mutation that could be followed into a taste for alienation, a demand for artificiality, and a demand for synthesis. This will to artificiality could be heard as a popular avant-garde produced by young people across Britain. The sonic and social implications invited a new theoretical vocabulary that drew upon terms from science, technology, and informatics. What was missing was the public acknowledgment and affirmation of this experiment with life. The Last Angel of History inherited these impulses and created a continuum of mutational imperatives between multiple American and British contexts. On a first encounter, one is struck by the alliance of musical producers with great science fiction novelists such as Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, and Ishmael Reed alongside critics such as myself, Greg Tate, and Paul D. Miller. This transdisciplinary imperative is personified in the figure of the Data Thief who embodies a desire to connect different types of thought, each of which is conducting its own enquiry. JA: I have not seen enough written about the idea of The Last Angel of History as an epistemological project invested in the formulation of knowledge. It was very clear from the beginning that that is what we were going to do. We were going to hand over much of the space to listening to the epistemological productions of a disparate range of black performers and cultural practitioners. The project would need some problem space in which a figure or an emblem attempts to summarize or listen to or ingest this information that was coming at you without synthesizing it. It was never a Hegelian project in that sense. We never envisioned it being a totalizing project. It was clear that what you said was not necessarily going to tie in with what Octavia Butler was saying which would not necessarily tie in with what Paul D. Miller, for instance, was saying. But that was never the aim. The aim was to point to the range of voices who could speak to this question of an Afrofuture from the different vantage points from which they come from. What always gets forgotten, especially when people talk about the film these days, is not even the Data Thief’s presence but what we as the ‘authors’ of the work are then saying about what the Data Thief is doing. He is in the land of African

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memory. He is breaking into the vaults. Those are our statements about the activities of the Data Thief which suggested that we were interested in something much more discursive than African-American production. We go back again and again and again to this question of what constitutes Africanity and how it might be talked about through and in the present. I regret that that part of the film has disappeared in a way, but I know some of the reasons why. Looking back now, what is clear to me is that we are the children of dub. I came from dub to free jazz and then to jazz. I knew more dub than I knew jazz. Dub made me receptive to certain kinds of sounds; sounds which were voiceless. It became clear to us that a certain canon forming moment was about to take place in which certain forms of black musical productions were going to be valorized as the key emblematic forms. And all of those seemed to have, at the center of them, the voice. The academy could talk about voices because that is much easier than to talk about the effects the sonic has on the body or how one works with the sonic. So the role played by the dub of Lee Perry, the Detroit Techno of Derrick May and Juan Atkins and the free jazz of Sun Ra was not accidental. We were interested in them precisely because of their alterity, for the very fact that they were not 12-bar blues with voices that narrated their becoming for you. It was important that these were immersive sonic spaces which called upon you to be formed by the sonic. KE: When you say there are reasons why the film’s reflections on the return to the land of African memory are not recalled, now, could you say more about those reasons? JA: This is the weirdest thing for me; you put out a project called The Last Angel of History that announces itself in explicitly Benjaminian terms. It says that we are going to be reflecting on the question of the historical and on how bodies are named and made in history. We are engaging in a Lukacsian, Benjaminian, DuBoisian project. It is clear from the beginning that the Data Thief is roaming across the internet of black culture and that some of the major spaces he was going to get into were banks of African memory. All of that the work says in advance, simply by the way it names itself. But it is also clear that the anxiety that informed this production, in a way, won out. One of the reasons we were doing it was because we felt that we were at this moment of rupture, when certain diasporic activities that had in the past been on the margins of certain institutional frameworks and knowledges were about to enter. You just sensed that something was going to happen – a door of representation was going to open, certain things would go through, and some would be left out. One of the things you wanted to see going in is that unfinished conversation about the African utopian project. You see very clearly in the film people waving banners, which are announcing the end of something. It just so happens that the end they were announcing was the closure of the post-war utopian futurist project of the Nkrumah government in 1966. None of this was hidden but in order for that to register you

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have to be not only interested in the sonic or the literary but also in the historical ambitions of the work. And I do not think that that translated sufficiently. I think people understood the literary ambitions and I am not sure that it is only because they are Americans. Because you could teach the literature. They almost certainly understood the sonic aspects because they seemed viable as a diasporic project. The historical meditation seemed to fall by the way side in these discussions. I think a lot of that had to do with the unworkability of it. What do you do with an Afrofuturist manifesto which says that we will spend our time unearthing futurist projects from the continent, most of which by then, had failed. An Afrofuturist manifesto had to be made up of things which were shiny and bright and new. Not fossils of failed and discarded projects. I think if I were pushed I would say that the aversion to touch on that material was not just to do with the fact that it is continental but that these were failed projects in a way. Now I dispute that distinction, but I have a feeling that is what it has to do with. KE: I think you are right. The figure of the Data Thief is a personification of the desire to navigate the internet of black histories. The Data Thief was the means to navigate the space of possibility opened up by sampling which Greg Tate articulates when he says that the advent of sampling allows all the eras of black music to be collapsed onto a chip and then freely accessed. The methodology of sampling as an implied aesthetic of time traveling through sound seemed at the time to prefigure one’s relation to the internet. The Data Thief is the figure that personifies the experiments with sampling in musics that foregrounded their deliberately posthuman dimension that drew on Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. Those aspects announced the futurity that brought a cultural energy that converged with the melancholia of Pan-Africanisms and the ending of Nkrumahist Futurisms to produce a complex geography of times that are collapsing, closing and opening in ways that are more legible to audiences now than at the time of the film’s release. Moving forward twenty years, we can see the impact of Afrofuturism in contemporary art. Artists such as Ellen Gallagher and Wangechi Mutu have emerged in the United States working a vocabulary of the extraterrestrial, the mythological, the alien and the synthetic that is familiar in its novelty. That artistic linkage can be seen in the projects of artists such as Kapwani Kiwanga and Kiluanji Kia Henda that work in and between continents. At the same time, there is an increasing critique that is directed at the term of Afrofuturism itself. Especially within South Africa, critics and artists distance themselves from its Americocentricity. One increasingly hears the argument that the term fails to capture the actual interest in inventing future-oriented practices within the continent. It is not a question of defending the term but of registering people’s impatience with it. More and more people sense a desire to clear a space from which to account for contemporary African future-oriented practices that are

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overshadowed by an Afrofuturism that sucks the air out of discussion and serves to obscure as much as enable thought. JA: As you were speaking one thing struck me: one of the major reasons for embarking on what became a prophetic project has to do with the need to try and emerge from an earlier moment of debate around essentialism and anti-essentialism. Once you have participated in this discussion from an anti-essentialist position, it then becomes incumbent upon you, the anti-essentialist, to try and give some indication of the becomings of these ontologies. For me, what was always interesting about the Afrofuturist project was the sense in which it comes at this question of identity via becomings, via constructions, via the notion of performance and so on. The fact that people were naming themselves in alien forms as extra-terrestrial attested to this question of becoming as self-realization. At the heart of this was the philosophical question that interested me: how do we get outside this cul-de-sac of anti-essentialism and suggest ways in which it might connect to the actual workings of identity? That was critical. Now to the extent that the project can be named as an Afrofuturist one – I am not that heavily invested in the term itself. But what I would say is this: what I do not think is interesting is to hold up another bloc of unchanging, untheorized identity called the African as articulated in the critique that comes from inside the continent and then use that as some sort of ideal type against which the diasporic valuation of itself as another solid unchanging bloc could be measured. I am not interested, in other words, in a counter-narrative that just says ‘Well, since we have had the African-American or the Afro-diasporic take on futures, actually all we need is to add more African and everything will be cool.’ Because that is missing the point of the whole project. The point of the project is to question that totalizing impulse. If you understand things as constructed and those constructions include questions of identity, it is then incumbent on everyone to specify the ways in which those formations come into being. If the critique of Afrofuturism is about pointing to that, I am all for it. If it is just offering up another bloc as I have heard sometimes in the past that states ‘Oh well, you speak about Lee Perry, but we have the Dogon cosmology’, as if every African has some access to Dogon cosmology, then I am not interested. Because that would, for me, undercut the profoundly philosophical dimension of the project itself. KE: I agree. The term itself acts as a strange attractor that seduces and compels envy, admiration. A discourse of becoming narrates means and methods of mutation that entail recognizing the degree to which one is already alienated and carries out a project of alienation as a self-conscious project. The focus on the term is almost beside the point. In The Last Angel of History Afrofuturism is barely mentioned, actually. More Brilliant than the Sun mentions it sparingly. The operative term is sonic fiction, not Afrofuturism. The project is to produce fictions from sound that foreground their fictionality.

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JA: There is a section going towards the end of The Last Angel of History where the Data Thief spills out an array of terms that are sonic and digital. A list of terms that piles up in front of you in this almost Benjaminian way. KE: Which does not privilege any single term. JA: No, it does not. KE: The Data Thief invokes them in order to move on. He is encountering them. JA: I think people are aware that the term has a certain purchase, a certain brand efficiency that if you could own it, you could do some work with it. At the very least, it invites you into a very exclusive club without even having to have done anything cosmopolitan. So everybody wants the term. But it cannot be at the expense of something that you mention in the film: at one point you talk about the question of secession. The extent to which the voices you are hearing in the film are secessionist manifestos in themselves of a certain received wisdom about ‘black culture’ or ‘African identity’. The sense in which these secessionist manifestos undercut what one would call the oratorical ‘we’, these binaries of we versus them that seem to always know what the ‘we’ means and almost certainly what the ‘they’ means. All of that work of undercutting which was part of the project of The Last Angel of History seems attractive to reject if you could just hang on to this notion of an Afrofuturism. Because, in a way, the term itself suggests that there is a ‘we’ and ‘them’. The term just feels like a credit card or something. And that is why people struggle over it. That is why no one fights over any of the other terms that we have talked about. Because the terms coming from The Last Angel of History or the ones that an array of people, including yourself, formulated are not credit cards at all. They are really difficult ways and means for picking your way through the morass of identity, which is still the case, despite what anyone might say.

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Alienation and Queer Discontent H ENRIETTE G UNKEL Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as a warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine the future. The future is queerness’s domain […] we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. MUÑOZ 2009: 1

In his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009), José Esteban Muñoz approaches the question of time through the notion of queer discontent. He conceptualizes queerness as a potential future perfect, as an ideality yet to be reached, and invites us to imagine alternatives to what seems available to us and to dream and enact more radical forms of being together. With his focus on the “not yet here” as a process of becoming, Muñoz mobilizes queerness as a concept constituted through time and as a form of “being in the world” that he holds radically open towards the future. Muñoz therefore insists on the potentiality of a queer politics and theory, which until recently, has been approached primarily through the concept of space rather than time, and hence on a potentiality of queerness that generates ruptures to normative orderings of time and history. As such he directly addresses the implications of heteronormative time (straight time) and works against the organization of individual human bodies towards maximum productivity, also in the context of desire, hence against what Elizabeth Freeman (2010: 7) calls chrononormativity. Freeman here refers to Walter Benjamin’s (1991) conception of

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homogeneous and empty time, which Benjamin formulated in his critique of history and its underlying notion and politics of progress. In Cruising Utopia, however, Muñoz stresses that the forces that constitute time not only operate in relation to sexuality and gender, but also always in relation to race and class. In this intervention Muñoz reflects back on Lee Edelman’s (2004) positioning of queer temporality within an anti-relational, anti-social politics of “no future” that breaks with teleological conceptions of hope and reproduction in the context of straight time. Edelman’s anti-reproductive futurism, which has to be read in the context of an HIV/Aids epidemic in Europe and the United States, indeed foregrounds the fact that certain groups of people are not envisioned in the future project or, respectively, that for certain groups the future is already foreclosed. According to Muñoz, Edelman fails to include a wider analysis of the racialized dimension of what constitutes straight time and hence tends to reproduce a “cryptouniversal white gay subject” that is “weirdly a-temporal” (2009: 94). By not adequately addressing the challenge of “imagining a futurity that exists beyond the self or the here and now”, Edelman instead repudiates a “crisis in afrofuturism” (2009: 94), as Muñoz argues. Muñoz’s understanding of Afrofuturism then reflects back on Audre Lorde’s prominent line “we were never meant to survive” in her poem “A Litany of Survival” (1995: 31),1 which reminds us that racialized bodies move differently in and out of time. Europe’s attitude and politics towards migrants and refugees – a politics that consciously turns the Mediterranean Sea into a graveyard for black and brown people – is one of many current examples that demonstrate how relevant Lorde’s poem is today. Another is the killings of African-Americans by white police, addressed in the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter which not only points to the fact that at this moment in the United States black lives do not matter but also mobilizes black people, specifically youth, and their allies to resist state sanctioned violence. Against these backgrounds the implications of no future, as proposed by Edelman stand in an uncanny tension to the violence that constitutes and defines blackness – a violence in which gay-lesbian and queer politics of homonormativity tend to be complicit.2 In his critique Muñoz insists on the principle of hope and radically reappropriates the concept of the future from a queer of color perspective. In his own

1

I want to thank Kara Keeling and Peggy Piesche for reminding me of Lorde’s poem.

2

For a more detailed analysis on the racist implications of homonormativity see, for example, the special issue ‘Racism in the Closet: Interrogating Postcolonial Sexuality’, that I co-edited together with Ben Pitcher for the online journal darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial cultures, available online here: http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/05/02/ racism-in-the-closet-interrogating-postcolonial-sexuality. Last Access 10.01.2016.

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conceptualization of queer temporality, then, Muñoz demands a political imagination that is inherently collective in nature and hence works against neoliberalism’s push for competitive individualism3 – a political imagination that needs to be read relational to historically situated struggles that give us insights into alternative times and spaces. Or, as Achille Mbembe argues: “… the category of the future was very central to the struggle for liberation if only in the sense that those who were involved in it had constantly to project themselves towards a time that would be different from what they were going through, what they were experiencing. So the political, in that sense, was about a constant engagement with the forces of the present that foreclosed the possibility of freedom, but it was also the political, closely associated with the idea of futurity.” (Mbembe in Blaser 2013: n.p.)

Mbembe’s notion of the future as a crucial force to think about and act upon freedom is reflected on in Muñoz’s political imagination that envisions a “not yet here” wherein queers of color do in fact have a chance to survive (2009: 94). In this chapter I want to approach this relationship between queer temporality and Afrofuturism, as introduced by Muñoz, through cinema, in particular through the film Stories of Our Lives (Kenya, 2014) by Jim Chuchu/The Nest Collective which addresses the current crisis in Afrofuturism from a continental queer perspective. I will bring the film into a brief conversation with Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman (USA, 1996) which in a way could be considered as a progenitor for Stories of Our Lives. Dunye’s classic offers a particular take on the notion of queer temporality in response to questions of visibility and representation in the 1990s in the United States which, as I will argue, continues to provide an urgency in current understandings of Afrofuturism. By doing so I will read cinema, the screen, the film itself as a “warm illumination of a horizon,” and as a space of potentiality in which we can dream and enact those “new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (Muñoz 2009: 1).4

3

See, for example, Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there No Alternative? (London: Verso, 2009).

4

In the context of cinema, one could, of course, argue that any film changes or transforms our understanding of time – via the use of time manipulation, through cuts and montages, through the deceleration or acceleration of moving image that changes our perception of the film. “To change time” in cinema is already achieved through post-production – any form of montage already provides a disruption of linear time, possibly supported by narrative forms of time travel, via flashbacks, for example, or repetitions. What I am interested in here, however, is the conscious deployment of time manipulation as a form of

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Within this framework of queer cinema then, I am mainly interested in the aesthetic and narrative strategies in the context of desire that unfold the multiple ways “of being with, in, and out of time, with others and without them,” as Elizabeth Grosz (2005: 1) puts it – a cinema that consciously admits to the disruption of colonial time5 and hence focuses on the implications and effects of a temporal imagination in which the future remains virtual and beyond the control of the present. I am interested in aesthetic strategies that consciously allow different temporalities to fold into and collide with each other and hence produce a decolonizing form of time travel. This includes a disordering of a linear or predictable temporality, a queering of “modernity’s progress-oriented articulation of past, present, and future, in which the future is constituted through the devaluing of the past and the erasure of the present” (Ross 2012: 5). In this time-oriented project in the context of queer cinema I am therefore interested in temporal strategies that question and produce a political imaginary in the context of desire, in the production of narratives, sound and image worlds that are understood as alternatives to our neoliberal and violent present: from futureoriented science-fiction and alternative space-time plots to myths and practices of fictioning that allow us to arrive at Muñoz’s formulated intensity of the radical and collectively assembled project of Afrofuturism, in which politics of temporal implications emerge as potentialities, as a threat within the virtuality of a presentbecoming-future. The Afrofuturist tradition references the use of fictioning as a temporal strategy in art practices and political writing, which presents an epistemological shift in how we think about race. Through a number of different strategies of time manipulation, combined with queer-feminist strategies of fictioning and the empowering politics of alienation, the films Stories of Our Lives and The Watermelon Women produce, as I will argue, powerful forms of sexual disorientation and becoming which bring us closer to Muñoz’s understanding of the potentiality of queerness as a force to think about freedom.

B ACKWARDS

TOWARDS A

R EVOLUTION

Subverting certain strategies of representation and producing new or different imageries of the relationship between sexuality and race is one of the motivations be-

unlearning normative regimes of gender and sexuality and in order to enact other, queerer ways of being in the world. 5

On the politics of time in the context of colonialism, see for example: Giordano Nanni, The Colonisation of Time. Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).

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hind the research and film project Stories of Our Lives – a collection of love stories about and by queers in Kenya by Nairobi-based film maker Jim Chuchu and the Nest Collective. The film fictionalizes five stories drawn from about two hundred narratives gathered by the collective from different parts of the country,6 consciously turning away from the genre of documentary film and towards the potential of the fictional.7 Some of the narratives are fairly universal, as Chuchu argues, for example the motive of being in love with the rather heterosexual best friend. Other plots respond to the specific situation in Kenya, to the intensification of homophobia in the country, which forces many queers to ask the question “will we fight? Or will we run?” In the second episode of the film with the title “Run,” this question becomes central as a queer club is pointed out to Patrick by his homophobic friend Karma, and to which Patrick, the main protagonist, returns one evening on his own. Through the form of the film, especially its temporal and auditory strategies, we experience three realistically marked sequences: the opening scene of a business deal at a street corner, and the joint walk through the streets afterwards in which Karma points to the queer space; Patrick’s preparation to visit that queer space on one of the following nights; and Karma’s homophobic attack subsequent to the club visit. These scenes alternate with other scenes in which non-diegetic, often damped sound is combined with time manipulations, such as slow-motion, repetition, reverse motion: when Patrick walks down the alley again, this time alone, and makes eye-contact with a smoking visitor in front of the bar; or when Patrick enters the club one evening, in slow-motion, the sound that we hear visibly adheres to a rhythm different than that of the bodies moving in the club. In this scene, Patrick is approached by the man who he saw smoking earlier that day – their bodies are drawn to each other, they touch each other and move together to the music. Patrick interrupts this moment of desire by stepping out on the street for a moment to breathe. Here the diegetic sound returns, and time appears to be normative. This is when he is unknowingly discovered by Karma. This scene reveals how sound – in this case diegetic sound – “shoots us back into the noise of reality – into its psychological sonorum which affects our everyday sense of time, space, mass, force, presence,” as Philip Brophy (2004: 2) describes the function of sound in film. As soon as Patrick steps back into the club, the sound changes again and becomes nondiegetic. The space here then refers to the internal experience of the character, an

6

Extracts from the interviews have been published in the following book: The Nest Collective. Stories of Our Lives (Nairobi: The Nest Collective and The Nest Arts Company Ltd., 2015).

7

The collective problematizes, for example, that documentary film is a popular medium when it comes to the representation of homosexuality on the African continent.

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alternative space that is confusing and exciting at the same time, to which Patrick opens up. It is a queer space that functions differently than the assumed real space – here he doesn’t need to constantly prove that he is not a fag. It is a space in which “new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world” (Muñoz 2009: 1) are possible and livable.

Source: Still from Stories of Our Lives (2014); copyright The Nest Collective. The film hence alternates in this episode between different ways of inhabiting space. Reality (marked here primarily as public space, which permeates into the personal and assumed private space) is structured and organized around a dominant understanding of sexuality – and countered with other alternative spaces and imageries. The temporal and auditory arrangement of reality is further challenged towards the end, when Patrick escapes his apartment in the aftermath of the attack and runs through Nairobi, as fast and far away as possible. This scene makes reference to a number of moments in film history, in particular François Truffaut’s final sequence in The 400 Blows (1959), while simultaneously employing aesthetic strategies reminiscent of music video clips.8 Here the temporal arrangement is accelerated in the run, the non-diegetic beat gains volume, while moments of the past events and experiences return as visual flashbacks – a montage of visual fragments, presented as different temporalities, sometimes forward moving, sometimes backwards, and partly in reverse slow-motion.

8

As former member of the electro/pop/funk/disco-project Just a Band one could say that Jim Chuchu came from music video clip production to film.

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The end not only brings Patrick, but also us, the viewers, back to the supposed reality, on the outskirts of Nairobi. Yet this experience of the past days has changed reality, it is calmer and somehow more composed. At the end, Patrick is willing to have an impact on reality, supported by the superimposed sentence “If I met him now, I wouldn’t run. I’m done running.” This moment, which can be read as a classical coming-out story, indicates a process of becoming; constructed not only in terms of space (from the closet into a subculture), but foremost in terms of movement in and out of time. Here the cinematic form produces the story; reality and dream world move towards each other, fold into each other and become one in the context of desire. Here we can see how strategies of intimate re-territorialization and queer temporality function in and through cinema.

Source: Still from Stories of Our Lives (2014); copyright The Nest Collective. This process of becoming is also visible in the last episode of the film, entitled “Each Night I Dream”, in which Liz visualizes escape plans for herself and her girlfriend Achieng, when local politicians threaten to enforce anti-gay laws, and a mob gathers to evict people suspected of being homosexuals – or in her words: “every night I wonder what we will do when they come for us.”9 In one of the nights, Liz imagines an island “just for themselves and other people like them,” a utopian space that reminds us of Sun Ra’s extraterrestrial space in John Coney’s Afrofuturist classic Space is the Place (1974) where “the music is different […], the vibrations are

9

The episode begins with news footages with the presenter mobilizing against what he calls ‘gayism’, calling “on the police to arrest any person who is promoting ‘gayism’ in Kenya [if the Police does not do so the law allows citizens to effect arrest].”

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different” and time is officially declared as ended: “we work on the other side of time.” In the final scenario, Liz invokes a spiritual past: by walking backwards around a Mũgumo tree10 seven times, she changes her sex/gender – intelligible also for the mob and the police, who arrive at the lovers’ house the next morning. What I find particularly interesting here is this backwards movement in the moment of the revolution that is actualized around the tree – a revolution activated through the change of time as demanded, for example, by Giorgio Agamben who states that “[e]very conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to ‘change the world’ but also – and above all – to ‘change time’.” (2004: 131)

This backwards movement in time in relation to sex and gender not only refers back to forms of intimacy that are not orientated towards the West, but also refuses a western teleological understanding, an always forward moving selfconceptualization of an international LGBTIQ politics, in which, for example, the coming out is often celebrated as a generally liberating moment. Instead, this movement backwards points to the proximate relationship between ritual and en-

10 The Mũgumo tree, which also features in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s writing, occupies a sacred place for Gĩkũyũ cosmology enacted through ritual, myth and song, as Matthew M. Karangi (2008), for example, argues. One of the myths that constitutes the “symbol of power, life and fertility” (117) of the Mũgumo tree which the scene in the film directly references, is the narrative of ‘Wacici the herd boy’ who was beaten by his father regularly as he spent more time playing with his friends then watching the cattle. Wacici regretted he was not born a girl as he realized that his sister who stayed at the homestead and helped her mother was never beaten. According to the myth, Wacici then hears from his friends the story of gender transformation that the Mũgumo tree enabled. And so the story continues, in the words of Karangi: “He was told this particular story of how one girl went round the Mũgumo tree seven times and turned into a boy. Wacici was really impressed even though those other boys refused to take him to the Mũgumo tree. Their fathers had prohibited them since it was here that Ngai [God] of the Gĩkũyũ lived. Wacici did not hesitate (ndarĩĩre marigu) and went there alone. After going round the Mũgumo tree seven times, he turned into a girl. He was very happy from that day, he never looked after the cattle again and thus escaped the beatings of his father” (2008: 126). Karangi, who considers the Mũgumo tree therefore as a site of transformation and rebirth, further argues that the number seven is widely associated with magic and witchcraft (ibid.).

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chantment in the context of intimacy and love, thereby exploring, as the Nest Collective formulates it, “our troubling modern identities, reimagining our pasts and inhabiting mythical African futures.”11 This visualization of the political in the context of sexuality and desire that the collective offers proposes a queerness that acknowledges the untranslatability of local(ized) terms and rituals into a globalized language of gay liberation, which seems to have its reference point of emergence clearly situated in the West, thus necessarily inscribing all cultures outside the West a certain backwardness when it comes to sexual liberation. The backwards movement in the moment of the revolution further reminds us of the speculative moment, the speculative promise almost, that influential texts within queer theory offered us, if only for a short moment: Judith Butler’s (1990) conceptualization of gender as performance, for example, that, similar to Liz’s movement around the Mũgumo tree, points to the potential of alternative rhythms while refusing a form of repetition that enables the construction of gender as a binary “timeless truths of being” (Freeman 2010: 4). Liz’s mobilization of a past ritual instead points to the instability of gender, and hence to our capacities to produce innumerable variations of gender, partly situated outside of our imagination. This reference to a not-knowing or a not-exactly-knowing, linked to the world-making potential of speculation and fictioning, allows us to think about love and seduction as possible pressure points to Afrofuturism, as articulated, for example, in the writings by Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany.12 Both authors insist on the possibility for another world through queerness, understood as a historically situated, collectively assembled project. Butler’s book Kindred, in which the reader is taken by Dana, the African-American first-person narrator, on a journey in time, from the present of 1970s California to a past on a plantation before the civil war, further shows us the physical, sexual, and emotional implications of actualizing the past in the present and its effects on the future. In “Each Night I Dream” the implications of actualizing the past in the present are visible and audible: during the ritual around the tree we hear an even, heavy breathing, slightly out of sync with the steps and the movement of the chest. It is a heavy breathing that we, as viewers, adjust to in our own breathing. It is a breathing that anticipates the violence that the mob is capable of – which, again, points to the impossibility of separating time into distinct dimensions and rather shows how the future is as implicated in the ritual of the present as the past. In this scene the non-

11 http://www.thisisthenest.com. Last Access 16.01.2016. 12 See, for example, the different forms of intimacy and sexuality in Butler’s Fledgling (2005) or Delany’s Dhalgren (1975). In both books the concepts are represented and enacted beyond heterosexuality and monogamy – which, in the writings of Butler are also formed as inter-species love.

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diegetic sound refers to the character of Liz, and the sound also “de-interiorise[s] the mind of a character: to turn that character’s inner world inside out by creating a […] soundscape which we as viewer/auditors inhabit” (Brophy: 63). When Liz returns home, her body is exhausted and marked by the ritual, by the experience of fictioning her own subject position that enables her, very much like Patrick in the episode “Run”, to impact reality. When Liz confronts the mob that has gathered in front of her door, reality and the fictional collapse into each other; here fiction makes itself real.13 Queer temporalities, as those mobilized in the two episodes are therefore kinematic strategies of resistance to a vision of time as seamless, unified, and forward moving. The temporal strategies, like those in Stories of Our Lives, accentuate alternating narratives and imageries and thereby mediate new forms of being in the world – together. These alternative space-time plots are also visible in Cheryl Dunye’s lesbian classic The Watermelon Woman. In this film Dunye plays the part of Cheryl, the DIY filmmaker, who comes across the 1930s African American actress and Jazz singer, Fae Richards while watching Plantation Memories where the actress is only referred to as “the Watermelon Woman” in the credits. Cheryl decides to use Fae Richards as a point of departure for a documentary film on the history of black cinema, which turns into a documentary about black lesbian history with implications on Cheryl’s own life. The film entangles documentary and fictional strategies of narration from the very beginning, enabling Dunye to tell (her)stories through a network of documentation and fiction. The retro-futuristic approach of the film, the work with archival material and old photographs is here offered as a kinematic form of time travel – a journey through time through the visualization and, in parts, re-enactment of archival material as well as through interviews with contemporary witnesses. This material is interwoven with a love story and discussions on identity politics between Cheryl and her lesbian community that reveal the different relations operating between race, class, and queer gender performance and show an explicit refusal to the integration of normalizing queer structures through the different ways of moving in and out of time. The film therefore provides a response to the racism and mechanisms of exclusion that operate within queer-feminist politics and practices and a working against the marginalization and silencing of black experiences and histories that could inform a more encompassing and intersectional analysis of sexuality, desire, and power, as articulated by Muñoz in his critique of Edelman. As such the film enables new and multiple deviant practices that embody a “sustained and multisited resistance to systems (based on dominant constructions of race and gender)

13 Simon O’Sullivan (2014) calls this affect of fictioning mythopoeisis: the imaginative transformation of the world through fiction.

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that seek to normalize our sexuality, exploit our labor, and constrain our visibility” (Cohen 2005: 24) – the cruising of the utopia queerly that Muñoz envisions in his writing.

Source: Still from The Watermelon Woman (1996); copyright Cheryl Dunye. The archival material included in the film hence refers to the gaps in the archive itself, as well as to the fragmented histories and experiences of queers of color – a fragmentation of memory that has its beginnings in the history of slavery and colonialism and continues to operate until today, also through regimes of visibility and representation in the film industry. Here the gaps are filled through the strategy of fictioning, through an intimate montage of documentation, myth worlds and fictional narratives. As such The Watermelon Woman, similar to Stories of Our Lives, provides us with an alternative understanding of queer potentiality and radically opens itself up to a different world to come by moving backwards towards a revolution. The film breaks with linear and cyclical time, favoring a back and forth motion and constant temporal crossovers instead. Through the temporal strategies The Watermelon Woman draws attention to the fictional moment of history: “Sometimes you have to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is fiction.” The film thus points to an understanding of history as a participatory and ongoing project, “a network of limitless interrelations in which uncertainty is a positive feature” as Elvira Dyangani Ose (2015: 166), for example, argues:

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“If openness and indeterminacy are true possibilities for the production of history, how then does history make its subjects? If the search for historical truth leads to ambiguity, then why don’t we simply make up the past according to our own convenience? And, if one were to do so, who or what would be the collective subject of history? If given the opportunity to be such a history-teller, how does one make relevant the collective memories, personal narratives, inner worlds, stories, and protagonists located within the margins of history? Furthermore, would this reconstruction of the past ever challenge current historiography – its methods of inclusion and omission?” (ibid: 165)

Queer temporalities, as those in Stories of Our Lives and The Watermelon Woman, are kinematic strategies that call attention to, or demand, different narratives and experiences of queerness and as such claim space and visibility – not as individual endeavors, but as collective ones that operate relational to historically situated struggles. Both films provide their own historical narratives by moving back and forth in time towards “the not yet,” towards another world to come. This moving in and out of time differently brings the supposedly distinct dimensions of time together, folds them into each other and gives us insights into alternative times and spaces. As such it provides an outlook into another world possible that is constituted through an understanding of the past and the present and operates in anticipation of a freedom to come.

F ROM

HERE TO

O THER W ORLDS

Despite the references back to a queer history, to a memory of practices that we can, from today’s perspective, potentially read as queer, both films do not produce a nostalgic refuge in the past. The time travel that operates in both films rather points to fragmented and speculative ways of thinking about freedom. While Dunye finishes her film on the note that makes the fictioning aspect of the Watermelon Woman hypervisible, the film Stories of Our Lives ends with an audiovisual take on mutation in alienation and a subsequent camera view into outer space. This ending is initiated by a voice over and images that emphasize once again the populist notion that reads of homosexuality as un-African which in turn marks queers as aliens in their own country, followed by Liz’s own contemplation on this discourse: “The strange thing is when they say we’re ‘un-African’. If we’re not Africans, what are we? Maybe we’re aliens. Maybe we come from a place where gender and sexuality are silly ideas. Primitive ideas. Maybe we came here to find out what it’s like to be human. And maybe it is time for us to go back home.”

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Source: Still from Stories of Our Lives (2014); copyright The Nest Collective. Liz’s thoughts are visualized first by a close up on a set of hands that are examined by the camera, and hence by us as viewers, from the inside out, before we see a group composition of distorted figures forming a graphic line against a bright light source – creating, in a way, an inversion of Harry Shrunk and János Kander’s photographs of Merce Cunningham’s dance performances, entitled Solarized Series, in which the images are deliberately blurred in the printing process. This form of figural mutation is followed by images of Liz’s face with a science fiction interface, which suggests that she is off into other worlds, to which the camera then literally takes us. This moment of individual and collective alienation that works against the constraints of a confined singularity and authenticity is utilized productively. It consciously refuses inclusion into a homophobic environment and hence works against an emphasis on the politics of difference. Instead, similar to the colony for black people envisioned by Sun Ra in Space is the Place, this moment of alienation refers to other worlds, and hence to other spaces of possibilities to think about desire and freedom, to new dimensions of dreaming. This opening up into outer space, which is simultaneously the closing of the film, is by no means an escape from this world that responds to the opening question “will we fight? Or will we run?” with a run. The ending of this film productively employs Benedict Singleton’s (2013) difference between escape and escapology, the latter being the prerequisite to think about freedom.14 It is merely a re-

14 In his text “Maximum Jailbreak”, Singleton distinguishes between escape – a “cosmic” impulse “in which the earth is considered a trap that one needs to get away from (“to conceive a jailbreak at the maximum possible scale, a heist in which we steal ourselves from

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fusal of a politics of singularity and authenticity as a response to oppression: what does it really mean to be African? What is a genuine queer identity? As such the film works against the constraints of overbearing cultural and traditional frameworks and strengthens the possibility of being plural and mutable. The film hence arrives at the question of identity via becoming as self-realization based on the reflective density of existence, in this case via the means of mutation and the empowering politics of alienation.15 Here the politics of alienation – the process of becoming as a form of self-realization through mutation within alienation – is understood as deeply rooted in black radical thought and understood as relational to historically situated struggles that allow us to “dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds,” as Muñoz (2009) puts it, in his articulations of the “not yet” in relation to a queerness that is indebted to Afrofuturism. With this ending, the film Stories of Our Lives approaches queer temporality and queer politics through the question of becoming as a form of conscious selfmutation and as such mobilizes the notion of alienation as providing an “impetus to generate new worlds,” as articulated, for example, also in Laboria Cuboniks’ manifesto Xenofeminism. A Politics of Alienation (2015), published more than thirty years after Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1991): “It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. Freedom is not a given – and it’s certainly not given by anything “natural”. The construction of freedom involves not less but more alienation; alienation is the labour of freedom’s construction. Nothing should be accepted as fixed, permanent, or “given” – neither material conditions nor social forms.” (2015, n.p.)

In Stories of Our Lives this impetus to generate another possible world that allows a rethinking of queer practices and politics in the context of Afrofuturism remains intimately entangled with the specific situation in Kenya. The camera shot into outer space is combined with audio material from the archives. We hear the voice the vault”(05)) – and escapism which Singleton understands less as an actual flight than as a retreat into an inner psychological bunker, as he calls it, which can be understood as individual or collective (as in the case of the film). The latter refers to what Singleton understands as escapology, which is far more than simply a flight into other worlds but combines other worlds with the understanding of what it is that captures and conditions the individual or the collective. Freedom in this sense can be found only in escapology as flight itself is not enough to gradually free oneself or ourselves from the ‘traps’ while unpacking, at the same time, one’s own implicitness in them. 15 See also the conversation between John Akomfrah and Kodwo Eshun in this volume for a further discussion on the workings of identity in the context of alienation and mutation.

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of the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina who returned to the country in a context of increasing homophobia and publicly came out as homosexual. This moment of coming out, which is implied in both of the above-mentioned episodes of the film, refuses a coming into a Benjaminian empty and homogeneous time as it remains connected to the visual and empowering politics of alienation – and by extension refuses the crypto-universal white male gay coming out story, as formulated in Muñoz’ critique of Edelman's notion of queer time. With this ending, the five stories, the five fragments of queerness in the film, are consolidated in the speculative, in the fictioning practice of self-mutation as a form of self-realization that is indebted to the past in its anticipation of a different time to come – a different space-time that is set up as an alternative to the antiblackness to which Stories of Our Lives and The Watermelon Women both respond. While the film Stories of Our Lives refers to the ritual around the Mũgumo tree it otherwise produces an engagement with the past that resists the need to refer to the rich history of same-sex intimacy on the African continent which could be considered as providing ‘proofs’ for the Africanness of homosexuality, thereby producing a different notion of history that enables the possibility to claim space. The reappropriation of the concept of the future functions here foremost by foregrounding the different movements in and out of time – and by extension, in and out of gender and sexuality – that define blackness. Or in the words of Jared Sexton, as he focuses primarily on the question of space: “Black life is not lived in the world that the world lives in, but it is lived underground, in outer space” (2011: 28). As such the film’s complex engagement with queer temporality and Afrofuturism produces a different form of being in the world that refuses a position at the margins of history but occupies an alternative, more radical space-time plot of being in the world altogether. The queer temporal movements that operate in Stories of Our Lives and The Watermelon Women, the moving in and out of time queerly in the context of Afrofuturism, provide a rupture of normative rhythms in society, but also as experienced in queer spaces, and hence operate as an audiovisual transmitter through which lost histories and futures travel. As such both films employ various methods of time manipulation to produce a sexual disorientation and point to the imaginative transformation of the world through time and fiction. The focus on queer temporality in relation to Afrofuturism anticipates a form of intimate re-territorialization in which the future is queerness’s domain.

L ITERATURE Agamben, Giorgio (2004): Kindheit und Geschichte, Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag.

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Benjamin, Walter (1991) [1977]: „Über den Begriff der Geschichte.“ In: Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser Frankfurt am Main, Bd I/2. Blaser, Thomas M (2013): “Africa and the Future: An Interview with Achille Mbembe.” In: Africa Is A Country, November 20. https://africasacountry.com/ 2013/11/africa-and-the-future-an-interview-with-achille-mbembe/. Last Access 24.07.2018. Brophy, Philip (2004): 100 Modern Soundtracks. BFI Screen Guides, London: British Film Institute. Butler, Judith (1990): Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. Butler, Octavia (1979): Kindred, New York: Doubleday. Butler, Octavia (2005): Fledgling, New York: Seven Stories Press. Cohen, Cathy J. (2005): “Punks, Bulldaggers, And Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics.” In: E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (ed.), Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 21-51. Delany, Samuel R (1975): Dhalgren, New York: Bantam Books. Dyangani Ose, Elvira (2015): “A story within a story, within a story, within a story…“. In: A story within a story…, Elvira Dyangani Ose (ed.), Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing, pp. 164-175. Edelman, Lee (2004): No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Durham: Duke University Press. Eshun, Kodwo (2013): “Further Considerations of Afrofuturism.” In: The New Centennial Review 3/2, pp. 287-302. Freeman, Elizabeth (2010): Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham: Duke University Press. Glissant, Édouard (2006): Poetics of Relation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Grosz, Elizabeth (2005): Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Durham: Duke University Press. Karangi, Matthew M (2008): “Revisiting the roots of Gĩkũyũ culture through the sacred Mũgumo tree.” In: Journal of African Cultural Studies 20/1, pp. 117-132. Lorde, Audre (1995) [1978]: The Black Unicorn: Poems, New York: Norton. Muñoz, José Esteban (2009): Cruising Utopia. The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: NYU Press. O’Sullivan, Simon (2014): “Art Practice as Fictioning (or, myth-science).” In: diakron, no. 1. http://bit.ly/200SMgw. Ross, Christine (2012): The Past Is The Present; It’s The Future, Too. The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art, New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

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Sexton, Jared (2011): “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism.” In: Tensions/5, pp. 1-47. Singleton, Benedict (2013): “Maximum Jailbreak.” e-flux journal/46. http://www.eflux.com/journal/maximum-jailbreak. The Nest Collective (2015): Stories of Our Lives. Nairobi: The Nest Collective and The Nest Arts Company Ltd.

F ILMS Stories of Our Lives, Jim Chuchu/The Nest Collective, Kenya, 2014, 60min. The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl Dunye, USA, 1996, 90min. Space is the Place, John Coney, USA, 1974, 85min. The 400 Blows [Les quatre cents coups], François Truffaut, France, 1959, 99min.

FAR SPACE-WISE – Without Edges a Center Cannot Exist in Stasis J AMIKA A JALON

Home Where ever I lay my hat IS where I belong always Gone a rolling stone beat in the bone beat in the bone She’s a space cowboi blue Azonal Where she be, in between spaces She move between places Leaving traces Investigating interzonal cases Unheard unseen In between Breaking out stasis Radio static oasis

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| JAMIKA AJALON watch she tighten up her laces Rocket boots charged She trip thru dimensions Frequency sensation disciple of creation be patient she move in all direction with out detection viral transmission Breaking the cage with all this rage fueling her rocket boots flying high high swallow up the sky singing bye bye she defy Escher staircases while she lie in waiting to see what the winds of change will make she carry no flags just notebooks and rag tags rewiring the matrix she exist in azonal spaces AJALON 2012/2016, SPACE COWBOI BLUE 1

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Space Cowboi Blue is a poem/song written and performed 2012 and released on the new Album “Don’t Feed the Gate Keepers, chapter 1”; http://open.spotify.com/album/ 2zC65lDnytBS9kGHiU30t9. Last Access 17.08.2018.

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Space Cowboi Blue, she is a direct descendent of the totem FAR, or Fugitive Archetype of Resistance – an homage to traditions/movements of resistance as acts of reclaiming agency power, and space – Actors that include real life heroines from before Harriet Tubman to the Combahee River women’s collective named in her honor, to the Queer WOC (women of color) who founded #BlackLivesMatter and beyond. For some time, I have explored the possibilities and narratives of WOC as FAR. Not that she uniquely holds this post, but rather that she holds this post uniquely – her intersectionality makes her the subject most likely to become FAR. What I want to suggest is how her very existence disrupts chrono-political narratives, and how her knowledge of this reality fuels an agency. She creates extraordinary tomes in Othered time zones. During this meta-morphical journey, I will remix the FAR narrative using samples from past writings, anti-lectures, visuals, and other works. I will also integrate visuals, and texts/sound-bytes from other artists who write/play with science fiction, academic literature, film, and/or a combination of these forms. Some of these you will see as images integrated in this text, others through footnoted hyperlinks which connect to my work and others online. This is an attempt to go beyond the strictures of language – melding visual and the poetic to subvert limiting pedagogical discourses, freeing up and giving space to alternative narratives. As is my practice, I will also weave in the narratives of legendary revolutionary figures, along with other influential texts of thinkers/writers/philosophers whose works are kindred to FAR narratives including: Audre Lorde, Rosi Braidotti, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, and Sara Ahmed. These ‘voices’ combined will emanate a kind of FAR choral which reflects an ever-shifting time and space bending narrative(s). A fugitive archetype skews the eye-line of majoriborg surveillance – it’s hidden in plain view, resisting assimilation. To acquiesce is to be destroyed. WOC cross and blur borders, simultaneously visible and non-existent in Othered places. We are multiple linguists; in order to cross borders, we must be like a secret agent. Our true voice is criminal. Our language, experiences, and articulations destabilize the dominant pejorative. A fugitive archetype is one that escapes or slips through the cracks of the fixed ‘law’ or ‘ethic’. It does not claim the permanence of ‘the origin’ but challenges the notion of the symbolic ‘pure’ by mixing, blending, leaving, returning, and mixing and blending again. We must keep moving to avoid detection. Once scanned via majoriborg surveillance we become co-opted inside consumption junction’s snow machine. The snow machine is a man-made manufacturer and disseminator of the white stuff – in this case the main function of white stuff is to keep us “snowed”2 – frozen in time, a

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Slang: to make an overwhelming impression on/to persuade or deceive. See http://www.dictionary.com/browse/snowed?s=t. Last Access 17.08.2018.

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reality whiteout. Time and Space and therefore Reality are mono-chromed. We (WOC) become spectacles within the minds and histories of those who design the majoriborg calendar: fodder for memes and digital post cards. A modern day picnic lynching postcard sold in the days of yore is forever stuck in time as holographic projections of the others’ fetish gaze. Rather than travel through this life in stagnant postures at the margins, FAR has the possibility to inhabit space decoding and recoding language and forever mutating the edges/margins.

Source: Still from White Birch Blues – a sonic poetry video which was an answer piece to Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit”.3 FAR is a narrative with no fixed point, no beginning or end. The Fugitive Archetype of Resistance lives on the divide, a space occupied, transformed, and juiced by the soul energies WOC possess; we are a transient collective symbol of the FAR. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway says: “… ‘women of colour’ might be understood as a cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities and in the complex political-historical layerings of her ‘biomythography’, Zami.” (1991: 175)

Audre Lorde wrote in Zami: “Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being

3

https://vimeo.com/114765782. Last Access 17.08.2018.

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Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different.” (1982: 226)

With this in mind, I cannot alone, as one single person, with a single story, define what it means to be WOC, I can only contribute to a collective impulse. I grew up in America, much of my childhood among chocolate chips in a bowl of vanilla. For a good part of my adult life I have lived in Europe and have had the good fortune to be a part of, as well as be a tourist in, various Afri-diasporic communities in Europe and Africa. I do not wear a WOC flag, nor do I hold a code book. This FAR narrative is a personal journey but it is also open to interpretation and reinterpretation… and in this way, attempts inclusivity.

FAR- UNRAVELING Here I would like to begin to breakdown FAR into its various interconnected elements and its particular connection to WOC. I want to emphasize that FAR is a space that many can inhabit regardless of ‘race’ and/or gender. James Baldwin wrote in “Here be Dragons”: “But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other – male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other. […] none of us can do anything about it.” (1985: 685-6)

It is a fundamental truth that everyone to one degree or another, within the dominant heterogeneous narrative, is forced to dissect parts of themselves in order to adhere to polarized systems of reality. It is true, by virtue of that, if one resists a subjectivity which lays neatly within these dichotomies, you are moving within the realm of the FAR. However, I choose to focus on WOC as FAR because 1) of her intersectionality;4 ‘othered’ by both gender and skin color/‘race’; 2) she remains largely invisible and or an ‘after-thought’ within both the historical cannon of hegemonic white male and afro-centric discourses of resistance and futuristic spaces; and 3) one and two above are even more true if WOC is LGBT. With all these points in mind, this FAR

4

I would like to note here that it was Kimberlé Crenshaw along with her peers at the time (other WOC) who developed and coined the concept of intersectionality while she was still in law school years ago, long before it had become ‘acceptable’ within current queer and feminist discourses.

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narrative is meant to also pay homage to those WOC that are so often buried or erased from our collective memories: those like Fasia Jansen (Afro-German activist, musician, who survived the ww2 holocaust) and Assata Shakur (a Black Power revolutionary, who is still in exile in Cuba), among countless others. And I do this focusing in on women of color as FAR, through an Afro-futurist lens. In this telling, I often return to the story of Harriet Tubman whose legend I believe embodies many aspects of FAR. In General Tubman’s time, she used her intersectional skills as well as her ability to speak in many tongues, in short, her wits, to not only survive, but to also free others. Her niece once said of her: “Aunt Harriet was one of those unusual Souls. Her religion, her dreams or v i s i o n s were so bound together that nobody, and I certainly should not attempt it, could separate them. Aunt Harriet was a member of an oppressed race. She had the ruggedness and common sense of one whose very existence depended upon wits. In her, one found stubborn tenacity of purpose. Her real strength was in the inspiration of the mystic, as well as sagacity.” (Humez 2005: 183, emphasis added)

The General was a wise woman. She knew that she was being recorded and chose her words carefully so that one could read between the lines if need be. She hid in plain view and skewed the eye-line of the surveillance camera. Who knows, maybe she even reinvented her stories in coded language, leaving seeds, to insure their place in history. A fugitive archetype skews the eye-line of majoriborg surveillance, it’s hidden in plain view, resisting assimilation - to acquiesce is to be destroyed.

T HE

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We use archetypes to inform memory. Archetypes were used before the written word to pass down large amounts of information. One symbol could carry with it a whole thought process, philosophy, and/or emotion. In order for a symbol to function as archetype it has to represent ‘a truth’, something that can be understood as a meta-truth; an overall truth which encompasses all truths (i.e. the truth of womanhood, manhood, valor [the hero/ine] etc.). However, where does the archetype or original symbol end and the simulacrum begin? If what we actually have is a series of symbols representing a ‘prototype’ where does this archetype as ‘original’ actually exist? Perhaps there is no original, or beginning, only replication and repetition?

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I like to play with the idea that the WOC, as her subjectivity and expression of lived experience is migratory, nomadic, and outside the law of dominant culture – that her narrative(s), which live outside the Canon, more closely resemble that of a fugitive archetype – always on the move, slipping between the lines and spaces which dictate our proscribed reality and existence within heterogeneous culture. I’m a fugitive that’s how I live As she go along making up the narrative

T HE F UGITIVE For the longest time, I willfully misheard the lyrics of Tricky’s song “Black Steel”. I thought Martina sang, “I’m just a fugitive on the run”, when in fact it’s “I’m not a fugitive on the run”. In retrospect, I guess, identifying with the female vocalist, I felt she articulated my determination to free myself from the trappings of gender, ‘race’, sexuality, and class to live a life that is self-determined and free. ‘Fugitive’ to me was somehow more fitting than ‘exile’, or ‘refugee’. ‘Fugitive’ is to ‘refugee’ as ‘freedom fighter’ is to ‘terrorist’; the tag changes depending on which set of ethics is doing the defines, what side of the ‘law’ you are on, and/or what side of the border you are on. For example, runaways escaping slavery in North America were considered fugitives by their ‘owners’ and hunters, while the abolitionist referred to them as refugees. A fugitive is only fugitive until s/he finds a place of permanence, a place where s/he is not outside the law. So I play with the idea that anything/one that is actively resistant to dominant oppressive force, when in action, must be fugitive in order to survive. Laws are rules put into place to explain, regulate, and give structure to certain ‘spaces’. These laws of course include unspoken rules, guidelines, reinforced sets of ethics that guard dominant chrono-politics. We are fugitive to majoriborg structure, perhaps not always on the run, our refuge being transient. The FAR narrative is fluid, and thereby is able to defy and subvert the gate-keepers of colonized spaces. From myth to legend perhaps WOC exist within a kind of ontological alchemy. WOC as a fugitive archetype is azonic; borders do not exist for the FAR. Reflecting the FAR, our nomadic subjectivities are largely azonal, though at times ‘rest’ in TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zones, Hakim Bey 1991). The azonal is interdimensional, as it exists outside of all zones, including time. Understanding this we can began to assert that the FAR not only changes over time, but transverses and transcends time and space, like an inter-dimensional nomad. WOC cross and blur borders: simultaneously visible in the Othered place and non-existent. We are multiple linguists, in order to cross borders, we must be not

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unlike a secret agent. Our true voice is criminal. Our language, experiences, and articulations destabilize the dominant pejorative. A fugitive archetype is one that escapes or slips through the cracks of the fixed ‘law’ or ‘ethic’. Resistance.

Source: Still from Locations of the M/othership (2009).5 “Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.”6 WOC are shape-shifters, resistant to fixed form, and we use this ability to survive. The necessity of shifting between spaces, and or shifting in order to occupy certain forms, makes us professionals at adaptability. However, it is dangerous to polarize difference. As Sara Ahmed writes in Differences that Matter:

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Here is a link to a clip in which I used the voice of Assata Shakur as she speaks to women in resistance in a poignant manner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h4Xws9HAiQ. Last Access 17.08.2018.

6

From Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1990. The Borg are a dangerous collective – part machine, part human – that sought to assimilate everyone and everything in its path to increase its own knowledge and power.

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“The narrative of becoming woman offered by Deleuze and Guattari works through another coupling – not just molar/molecular, but also majoritarian and minoritarian. One cannot ‘become man’ – man is the absolute majoritarian; the face against which all other identities are defined […]. Hence the other entity which one moves towards in becoming is always minoritarian: it is always less powerful.” (Ahmed 1999: 73)

Lorde’s famous poem “A Litany For Survival” which poignantly speaks to those who “live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision” (Lorde 1978: 31) reflects the often subjugated agency of the ‘other’ and a resistance to being erased or assimilated. In a lecture given at Hunter College, she expands on these themes: “Somewhere on the edge of all our consciousness here is what I call the mythical norm, which each of us knows within our hearts is 'not me'. In this society, that norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is within this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside. Those of us who stand outside that power, for any reason, often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that quality to be the primary reason for all oppression. We forget those other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be acting out within our daily lives. For unacknowledged difference robs all of us of each other's energy and creative insight, and creates a false hierarchy.” (Lorde 1981: 375)

Without edges a center does not exist in stasis. The margins in place within dominant power structures, and infrastructures keep the hierarchal center in place. The illusion is that the center dictates the place of the marginal, when the dynamic is actually reciprocal effectuations. The center is dependent on the marginal for its stability. The FAR subverts majoriborg construction of the only ‘possible’ homogenous reality, if we believe in the replications/simulacras of Otherness it fixes at its margins. Inside ‘Outsider’ spaces the same laws which govern a majoriborg reality do not apply. Here there exists a freedom to recreate language, symbols, forms of communications, which give us agency to imagine and create new ‘impossible’ futures. I want to suggest that resistance and becoming as it relates to WOC as producers of FAR narrative(s), negates these polarities. With ‘voice’ she becomes subject and finds a power and agency in a “space of radical openness” (bell hooks 1989: 149). As Grada Kilomba writes, in her book Plantation Memories: “In this sense, the margin should not only be seen as a peripheral space, a space of loss and deprivation, but rather a space of resistance and possibility. […] a location that nourishes our capacity to resist oppression, to transform, and to imagine alternative new worlds and new discourses.” (Kilomba 2008: 37; my emphasis).

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WOC cross and blur borders, simultaneously visible and nonexistent in Othered places. Our language, experiences, and articulations destabilize the dominant pejorative. Back in the late 1980s, early 1990s, when the seeds of my politicization took root, I was lucky enough to have the texts of bell hooks and Audre Lorde to explain a reality that was closer to my own. Both Lorde and hooks’ essays, prose and poetry validated an agency WOC have as ‘outsiders’, no longer victim, but with the power to define our own realities. Meanwhile, during these same years, in another time-zone, Afro-German women like Maya Ayim, (a good friend of Lorde’s) contributed to the plethora of voices challenging a European monocultural collective memory. In Ayim’s poem ‘Borderless and Brazen: A Poem Against the German “u-not-y””, she openly resists being restricted to hegemonic constructions of race and/or national identity. “i will be african/even if you want me to be german/and i will be german/even if my blackness does not suit you/i will go /yet another step further/to the furthest edge […].” (Ayim 2010: 48)

So how does FAR destabilize this ‘false hierarchy’? Tricky when what is ‘other’ can be reified into the cult of cool. However, not only does the inherent fluidity of FAR elude the snow machine, but also, non-complacent within hegemonic order, FAR is determined to create alternative futures leaving grains of knowledge, and evidence of lived experiences, in the eternal now. Our voices are resistant to a life behind bars. Lorde speaks to an integral function/goal of the FAR narrative: “Looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures like bread in our children's mouths.” (1978: 31)

We are multiple linguists; in order to cross borders, we must be like a secret agent. Our true voice is criminal. Our Language experiences, and articulations destabilize the dominant pejorative

S PEAKING FAR S PEAKING F UTURE ( IN ) S PACES What’s real, as we know, depends on who’s framing the story. Our intersectionality ensures, as previously discussed, subjectivities, which are constantly moving – nomadic. WOC, as artists, academics, etc., have established and will re-establish that we speak in many tongues, that our subjectivities are in

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constant negotiation, a constant state of becoming. As a result, the zones we inhabit are not static. As we move, not unlike migrating vegetation, we leave memory seeds behind. These seeds fall in unsuspecting places, later creating spontaneous ‘settlements’ of resistance. Flux creates the condition of (mental) time travel, better known as re-remembering or re-memory (Toni Morrison 1987). Under dominant power structures, the memories of the Other are subsumed under the overarching Memory which informs how we interpret force-fed realities – memory both reinforces our realities but also informs our possible futures resisting the constrictors of the majoriborg timeline. This ability to speak in different tongues was/is a learned survival skill. The language perception and therefore histories of the dominant narratives, while they claim to include us, include only a hologram of us, an image projected onto our beings and replicated through mass media tropes. It’s a kind of psychic violence which insists on telling us we are something that we are not, that our memories are wrong, that our lived timelines are obsolete at best, impossible and nonexistent at worst. In order to survive it, we must be able to shift between different paroles and timelines, time zones. We go back to the future to retell our stories. Without this skill we could not exist. From myth to legend perhaps WOC exist within a kind of ontological alchemy. I like to imagine Tubman as such a time traveler that during her moments of narcolepsy, when she had visions, that she was lucid about seeing the future. Perhaps when she told the story of her adventures she used the metaphor of God speaking to her because she knew what she was really experiencing would not be believed. In the case of WOC, their realities are unbelievable. Intersectionality disrupts homogenous perception and disturbs majoriborg order. Her existence is an anomaly: unusual, freakish, fantastic. From Sara Baartman (a.k.a. Hottentot Venus) to Caster Semenya, it is easy to see how WOC have symbolized the grotesque, or the bizarre. We understand that our positioning is necessary to stabilize the monoreality of the majoriborg. Much like the position of the Oracle in the film The Matrix who acts as a necessary anomaly in the system, while she simultaneously threatens the very system that created her. The grand opposite of the ‘normal’ subject is the strange or bizarre ‘other’, who exists disturbing the idea of ‘reality’ we are forced to consume. ‘Consumed’ is a very operative word in this epoch where consumption has become a shackle; we are slaves to fabricated economies. But the bizarre is more powerful than any of these chains as we appear, seemingly, out of nowhere, disturbing majoriborg systems of what is real and what is to be. Where the presumptive becomes ‘law’, the bizarre and the grotesque are outlaws. WOC, as outlaws, can utilize the FAR as totem. Under this totem we distort the ‘original’ pathos of the futurist; we are eccentric futurists. The definition of eccentric is twofold: 1.) A departure from the established norm or pattern (synonym-strange); 2.)

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Not located in the center, the axis located elsewhere. In physics the eccentric is described as a disk or wheel having its axis of revolution displaced from its center so that it is capable of imparting reciprocating motion. Reciprocating motion is the ability to move forward and backward alternately; to recur in vicissitude; to act interchangeably; to alternate. => FAR. As eccentric futurists, whose movement is not dictated via a static center, we move through and within space in a way that allows us the freedom to imagine new worlds where the unbelievable can and does happen. The discerning eye can sense complicity between the construction/deconstruction of difference and standardization. The distortion of difference is complicit to a standardization in which past, present, and future are imagined and represented under majoriborg rule – a standardization that is designed to ensure certain ‘inevitable futures’ in which hierarchies stay in tact. The idea of futurism then takes on sinister connotations.

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When we speak of futurism, the dominant definition is one of speed and technological advancement of the machine, a misogynistic, fascist machine again and again ‘conquering’ otherness and difference. The replication of the consumable Other is a necessary part of this process, as simulacra that can be controlled. However, the FAR resists replication as it can not be captured. The materiality of FAR is space. Our /FAR Matter is space. In space we create, and recreate the fantastic and myth in our own image, giving life to possible futures. We do this through our lived lives, through our creations, through our stories. This is what Octavia Butler did in her science fiction, perhaps most notably in her last book, Fledgling: “There were river-borne microorganisms that caused people to develop problems with their memories just as there were microorganisms that could cause people to look hideous and, in the past perhaps, be mistaken for vampires. But that had nothing to do with me either. Whoever and whatever I was, no one seemed to be writing about my kind. Perhaps my kind did not want to be written about.” (2011: 39)

In Fledgling, Shori, a black fifty-year-old vampire in the body of what appears to be an eleven-year-old girl, wakes up in a cave badly injured and with amnesia. During the course of the story we learn, simultaneously with the protagonist, that she is the result of vampire-human experimentation. Vampire genes are mixed with a WOC in an attempt to make it possible for vampires to withstand daylight. We also learn that there are many old-school vampires who are dead-against this miscegenation and work to destroy Shori’s entire family. Ironically, it is her ability to withstand the sun that saves her life. What resonated with me, however, was her process of remembering and re-remembering. Though most of the facts about who Shori is and where she comes from are told to her, there are certain things she just knows intuitively: “His words triggered something in me – a memory. It felt real true. I spoke it aloud… He put his hands on my shoulder. ‘You know that? You remember it?’ ‘I think so. It sounds right. It feels right’.” (Butler 2011:19, my own emphasis)

WOC, whose pasts are often erased within the dominant narratives, often recreate their presents through knowledge that is not necessarily intellectually known but on a cellular level understood. In order for our stories to survive, we have to develop coded narratives that slip past and beyond the scan of the majoriborg eye.

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M UTABLE T OWERS

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“Thirteen feet of black tape was used, to detain, restrain her, to tame, and shame her”

AJALON 20097 Within the majoriborg canon, a fugitive voice must be arrested. WOC narratives are actions of resistance to the grand western discourses dictating a monolithic reality. Though replicas (false memory) of our stories are often consumed by and subsumed into the majoriborg babel, the real subversive elements slip through undetected. Often unrecorded, or mis-recorded within the Euro-western cannon, their truth can only survive through a covert repetition. General Tubman, a master storyteller knew this. In her book Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories (2005) Jean M. Humez attempts to find the voice of Tubman herself. She argues that perhaps a reason her legacy is fairly well-documented, was that the real life (myth) narratives did much to counteract the embarrassment of the cruel history of slavery, so fresh in the minds of many at that time. Many biographers manipulated her story to paint a picture of a woman who, though a grass-roots activist, understood her place within ‘white’ Christian culture, and had forgiven the atrocities committed by the slave owners (sinners). However, juxtaposed with this white-washed portraiture, General Tubman was a woman who regularly challenged segregationist laws, often physically resisting expulsion from railroad cars, and someone who constantly campaigned for her rights as a veteran of the war. She never did receive compensation for her critical work during the civil war, and struggled all of her life under financial difficulty. She also aligned herself with women’s rights campaigns and told her stories in both white and Black ‘feminist’ camps. Her agency in securing some power over her own narrative, Humez argues, is also present in her biographies. Even though she wasn't the writer, the form of her “mini-narratives left little room for manipulation, and inside these ‘core stories’ were codes which only those ‘in the know’ could grasp” (Humez 2005: 193). Her mini narratives were an art form of multi-layered ‘codes’ that slipped past unaware transcribers:

7

This is a reference to Joy Gardener, who died of asphyxiation at the hands of two immigration police in London, England in the 1990s. These lyrics come from a piece called ‘National Quota’ which speaks to the hypocrisy of immigration law and xenophobia. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnam5juR3FU. Last Access 17.08.2018.

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“Somewhat like the hymns she sang during her rescues, the core stories potentially can convey coded meanings to those ‘in the know’. At any rate they are an excellent place to look for possibly ‘subversive’ and relatively authentic expressions of Tubman’s own ideas, values, worldview, and self-concept (if not her exact language).” (Humez 2003: 158)

WOC artists (writers, visual artists/filmmakers, musicians), continue this legacy of embedding coded narratives within their stories. Science fiction author Nalo Hopkinson explains: “There is no solid ground beneath us; we shift constantly to stay in one place […] Another writer once said to me that since the ability to code-switch is practically a given in postcolonial diasporic cultures, it makes sense that writers from those cultures will use it in their writing.” (1999: 589-601)

For us, W.E.B DuBois’ double consciousness splinters into multiple subjectivities. RECODE We need to create a subversive lingo which misses the detection of the rei-ficating machine that which sucks the life out of creative protest movements toward positive change… and turns it into profit and propaganda of cool. a fluid code is needed. a poly speak not unlike that which was used during the times of the underground railroad. it can be hidden in plain view Foster change under the nose of the machine skewing the eye-line of its surveillance camera

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| JAMIKA AJALON facilitating human social revolution through overt covert action But i digress, back to the code. Write a code. Create a code. Decode and recode. Until all systems of language erode into one continuous vibration One sound. (one sonic sensation) Random echoes would act as a splinter in white light revealing the prism. One sound splinters into many scales and chord combinations. Langue is (redefined in the meta molecular) undefined as communication is meta-molecular giving way to a mélange of atomic noise and (a)tonal phrasings. AJALON, 2008, DECODE RECODE, POEMETRICS8

8

A piece from a self-published bilingual (French and English) chap-book of the same title.

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A fluid code is needed. Once we find symbols/language which subvert repressive, dominant discourse(s), it is important that those symbols continually shift – are mutable. Too often ‘radical’ discourse is subsumed into the majoriborg machine – once it is static, it runs the risk of becoming essentialist, reflecting the very prison from which it sought to escape. Or it becomes a victim of the ‘reificating’ machine. Gil Scott-Heron once said, the “revolution will not be televised”, but in the 21st century its simulacrum is certainly commercialized. It is not easy to beat the machine, nor is it possible to “dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools” (Lorde 1984), which is why we must continue to write in code, (re)create codes, decode, and recode. she landed here with the distinct taste for flying on the back of her tongue like a love song you keep trying to remember ZENZILE, 2003, ALIEN TRIOLOGY ALIEN(S)KIN9 ________________________________________________________ Space is possibility’s canvass It’s all around us moves thru us infinite. Vast as our imaginations to grasp this facilitate human revolution. The forms we manifest in space are reflections of our impulses. But only as real as possibility, and space, Is possibility’s canvas. It’s unconquerable because

9

Excerpt from a trilogy of poems written some years before its eventually becoming lyrics for the Zenzile song ‘She Landed Here’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7kO6N9 cwmk. Last Access 17.08.2018.

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| JAMIKA AJALON it IS eternally free. In the words of the late great Sun Ra Space is the place AJALON 200810

“A INT N OBODY C AUGHT M E ” 11 Space is azonal, in a continuous state of flux. Our subjective worlds occupy spaces in between and intersecting zones. Memory is the power driving time inside of flux/space, creating worm holes or portals. This is especially relevant for diasporic WOC, perhaps more poignantly those of us who are Queer. Our histories are buried or lost, memories of our existence in the past lend to our invisibility in the present perpetuating the same cycle in majoriborg-controlled futures. The reality is that we have been resisting colonized space generation after generation, passing down our stories in code, using our ‘alien-ness’ to our advantage, claiming it and living our self-determined stories in spite of the ever present ‘threat’ of the snow machine. From Ma Rainey who sang about herself as a lover of women back in the 1920s through to Octavia Butler who consistently created complex WOC characters of mercurial gender performance, sexualities, ‘super powers’, and vision, we have been reinventing ourselves, based on our own LIVED experiences and what we KNOW intuitively. We are able to do this partially because of how we inhabit and move through ‘space’ which is impossible to conquer. As a historically displaced people, we have written about and incorporated into our folklore – music, literature, history – space travel and finding home somewhere out there in efforts to fulfill the desire for finding or returning home. Often ‘home’ rests in the domain of re-memory: a re-emerging of a past that has not only been repressed by an individual, but subjugated and hidden inside a dominant culture. A kind of mental time travel is necessary to recover a truth which dismantles the ‘centralized’ understanding of our collective presents and possibilities in our collective

10 “Ode to Sun Ra”, first published in the chap-book Recode Decode, later transformed into sonic poetry video. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTdBhs7-ygw. Last Access 17.08.2018. 11 From Ma Rainey’s ‘Prove it On me Blues’ in which she speaks about her love of women all the way back in 1928.

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futures. In her book, Black Women, Writing and Identity, Carol Boyce-Davies states that this is not specific to the African American experience but to “a number of identities disrupted with the coming of the Anglos or others under bourgeois, Western European hegemony” (1994: 17). She is, of course, referring to our histories of colonization, and the idea of ‘space’ as a realm colonized under the dominant Order-imprisoning the possible. The FAR however creates temporary autonomous zones in Space, as a way of creating, recreating, and securing ‘impossible’ futures. “Space, the final frontier (to conquer and colonize) these voyages are of the Starship Enterprise, its… mission, to explore strange new worlds (to conquer and colonize), to seek out new life and new civilisations, (to conquer and colonize), to boldly go where no man has gone befores.” (Star Trek: The Original Series; parenthesis ital. my own interjections)

Nomads move through space. The majoriborgs are conquerors of new frontiers, colonizers of space. They also have their gate keepers. The gatekeeper is implanted in an attempt to own (an interior) space and thereby control it. However, space, in reality, can only be temporarily viscerally ordered – it is in fact a no man’s land of possibility. As intersectional WOC, we often identify with somewhere out there as being home, and negotiate our subjectivities accordingly. It is not simply because of our race, but an intersection of every aspect of our fractured selves. Selves which are asked to assimilate in order to fit in the ‘world’; an ordered self we are expected to learn and perform. The inability to perform them well enough makes us feel alien. If we are not accepted in the majoriborg order, it can seem we have few choices: self-annihilation (physical and or psychic), debilitating solitude, or movement/migration – in search of others with whom we can identify, or a space where the places of connection are strengthened by difference – where sameness doesn’t outweigh difference. A utopia for the Othered … must be space. Sun Ra put it best: Space is the Place – the place where the impossible is possible. This is particularly true when it comes to Queer POC where sometimes, even within our ‘own’ communities of color and/or feminist circles our realities are either sidelined or subsumed – finding the space to perform freely as agents can seem ‘unrealistic’ if not impossible, as we are asked forfeit a part of who we are to be included in those communities/discourses. Even finding narratives of our past existence can be an archeological dig, forcing us to piece together and recreate our own myths and legends using our own lived narratives and biomythographies as fodder. Knowing this, it becomes clear why WOC have used speculative and science fiction as genres of expression, overcoming the oppressive structures that incarcerate our realities. Hopkinson explains:

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“Speculative fiction allows me to experiment with the effects of that cancerous blot, to shrink it by setting my worlds far in the future (science fiction) or to metonymize it so that I can explore the paradigms it's created (fantasy). I could even choose to sidestep it altogether into alternate history. Mosley says that sf makes it possible to create visions, which will ‘shout down the realism imprisoning us behind a wall of alienating culture’. I don't want to write mimetic fiction. I like the way that fantastical fiction allows me to use myth, archetype, speculation, and storytelling. I like the way that it allows me to imagine the impossible.” (1999: 592)

Like Hopkinson, other writers and artists use the realm of the impossible to articulate alternative worlds, but also as a place speak to the possibility of healing and recovering the ghosts of our past in order to clear space for alternative realizable futures. In Tananarive Due’s book, Joplin’s Ghost (2005) the past haunts Phoenix Small's present via Scott Joplin's ghost, which is connected to a piano the protagonist finds when she is a child. For Joplin, Phoenix and the piano are interlinked – both represent all the pain connected to the failures in his life. Part of Joplin’s pain is enmeshed in not being able to realize his full potential in a colonial America. Through Phoenix he is able to finish compositions he never had the chance to do in his life as a mortal. However, the piano is ‘evil’, embodying all the destructiveness, the repressed trauma, a dream deferred can hold. Phoenix, alone, has the power to end the cycle – as a conduit to Joplin's re-memories, she represents an intersection of both past and present. Her character’s metamorphoses add to the FAR choral which moves across space and time to reclaim ourselves and recognize past, toooften buried wounds; thereby freeing up the space for our healing, breaking destructive patterns, and creating alternative lived experiences – collectively alternative worlds. Similarly, in Octavia Butler’s much celebrated novel Kindred (1979), the central character, Dana, embodies a complex multi-layered subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Mysteriously transported from 1970s California into the slavery days of deep south Maryland and the life of plantation owner and ancestor Rufus. Her first trip back in time is when he is a boy. “Was that why I was here? Not only to insure the survival of one accident-prone small boy, but to insure my family's survival, my own birth.” (Butler 1979: 29)

Dana simultaneously represents the past and the future, and has to navigate in both worlds using different paroles, different aspects of herself in order to survive, and, equally important, to retain a sense of self-identity. She transverses space, subverting linear time and polarized chrono-politics, opening a space for redefining and

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reinventing her own subjectivity, as well as her past – securing a future where what her ancestors could only imagine, becomes the realizable. Visual artist kara lynch’s multi-media work in progress, Invisible, draws from science fiction and the speculative. Specifically, the first part of the series, ‘episode 03’ takes us into the future, 2099, when the transatlantic African holocaust is wiped from collective memory. However, a cult keeps the memory alive through ritual bondage and the transport of bodies across imaginary borders. The piece, influenced among others, by John Akomfrah’s experimental documentary film The Last Angel of History, in her own words, is a “time based electronic blkgrrrlretrofuture sci-fi action documentary takes on issues of black radicalism, turn of the century phenomena, passing and cross-over cultures” (lynch 2004). Dana in Kindred, Shori in Fledgling, Phoenix in Joplin, and Z. L. Rhinehart, the shape-shifting cleaner, in Invisible, share a thread, in tangent with legends known and unknown, the likes of General Tubman, which gives life energy to the FAR narrative – creating worlds that highlight the inherent fluidity that WOC possess and the potential and actual power as agents in and of those worlds. Worlds that reflect the Queer/WOC lived realities… to create/recreate visionary spaces, which encourage and support and feed the mercurial performances of our diasporic experiences. All four characters deal with ‘memory/re-memory’ as a vehicle for actual, virtual and or cellular movement through time and space, simultaneously reclaiming and reinventing, thereby transforming both our presents/presence and futures. What is interesting here is not only how science fiction and/or speculative fiction is a habitable genre for WOC, but also how we renegotiate space and the idea of space as subjects. For WOC, the FAR comes to the surface or reintegrates during the process of re-memory. It transverses the boundaries of space and time in the same manner that matter is teleported from one place to another (“beam me up Scottie”). Memory is a way of navigating space and negotiating flux. Re-memory does the same, but disrupts a collective false memory which constrains our sense of self, freeing up space(s) to be… free to recreate our own sense of subjectivity. In the end, space is all that exists… and there exists freedom… this is where ‘becoming’ thrives. For WOC, within the confines of the majoriborg paradigms, our very existence is impossible and therefore represents the impossible. The incomprehensible. The mystic(al). The fantastic. Bending the majoriborg timeline, we WOC as FAR twist the dominant narratives by using the past collected in each present to map our futures. Re-memory seeds are planted in us genetically, but are also deposited throughout history and now take root. We go back to the future to tell our stories.

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L ITERATURE Ahmed, Sara (1999): Differences That Matter, Feminist Theory and Postmodernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ajalon Jamika 2010: Decode Recode Generation X (first self-published in 2009 chapbook “Decode Recode”) Ayim, May (2003): Blues In Black and White. A collection of Essays, Poetry and Conversations, Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press. Baldwin, James (1985): “Here Be Dragons” also known as “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood.” In: The Price of the Ticket, Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985, New York, NY: St Martin’s Press, pp. 677-690. (Original work published Playboy, 1985) Bey, Hakim (1991): The Temporary Autonomous Zone; Ontological Anarchy. Poetic Terrorism, Brooklyn: Autonomedia. Boyce- Davies, Carole (1994): Black Women, Writing and Identity Migrations of the Subject, London and New York: Routledge. Braidotti, Rosi (2007): Difference, Diversity and Nomadic Subjectivity, http://www. translatum.gr/forum/index.php?topic=14317.0. Last Access 27.09.2016. Butler Octavia (1979): Kindred, New York: Doubleday. Butler Octavia (2005): Fledgling, New York: Seven Stories Press. Byrd, Rudolph P. (ed.) (1981): I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Due, Tananarive (2005): Joplins Ghost, New York: Astria Books. Haraway, Donna (1991): Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge. hooks, bell (2000): Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA. South End Press. Humez, J. M (2003): Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Stories, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Kilomba, Grada (2008): Plantation Memories, Munster: UNRAST-Verlag. Lorde, Audre (1978): “Litany For Survival.” In: The Black Unicorn. New York: W.W. Norton, pp 31. Lorde, Audre (1982): Zami: A new spelling of My Name. A Biomythography, Berkley, Toronto, Crossing Press. Lorde, Audre (1997[1981]): “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” In: McClintock, A., Mufti, A. and Shohat, E. (eds.) Dangerous Liasons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives, Cultural Politics, 11, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 374-380. lynch, kara (2004): Invisible. In: Powering UP website. http://teknikaradica. cmagnus.com/teknikaradica.org/conference/participants/lynch.html. Last Access 15.08.2018.

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Rutledge, Gregory E. (1999): “Speaking in Tongues: An Interview with Science Fiction Writer Nalo Hopkins.” In: African American Review, 33/44, pp. 589601.

F ILMS Ajalon Jamika White Birch Blues. 2014. https://vimeo.com/114765782. Last Access 15.08.2018. Ajalon Jamika Ode to Sun Ra. 2009. YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTd Bhs7-ygw. Last Access 15.08.2018. Ajalon Jamika Locations of the M/other Ship. 2009 (clip Assata Speaks) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h4Xws9HAiQ. Last Access 15.08.2018.

M USIC Ajalon Jamika (2003): She Landed Here. Totem album. Zenzile, YouTube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7kO6N9cwmk. Last Access 15.08.2018. Ajalon Jamika National Quota. 2009. Pawnshop album. Zenzile, YouTube. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tnam5juR3FU. Last Access 15.08.2018. Ajalon Jamika Don’t Feed The Gate Keepers chapter 1. 2012. Self-produced. http:// open.spotify.com/album/2zC65lDnytBS9kGHiU30t9. Last Access 15.08.2018.

VI. Final Orbit

Future1 R ASHEEDAH P HILLIPS

The word ‘future’ designates a time period or temporal space that is not now, but that is situated ahead of us and is distinctive from times that precede the one in which we are currently situated. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, future developed from the Old French (futur) during the late fourteenth century, when it denoted “a time after the present… yet to be”. It derives from the Latin futurus via the stem fu- (to grow or become), which is the future participle of the word esse (to be). Notions of the future – that which lies ahead – vary greatly. In traditional indigenous African spatiotemporal consciousness, time is experienced as a matter of pacing (akin to walking). Time begins when you arrive at your destination. African time also has a backwards linearity: when events occur, they immediately move backward to what John Mbiti (1990) calls “Zamani time” or macro time. All future events exist in potential time until experienced or actualized. These events do not depend on some specific clock time or calendar date; instead, time itself depends on the quality of the event and the person experiencing it. Once the future event is experienced, it instantaneously moves backward into the present and past dimensions. Those two dimensions bear the most ontological significance, “a person experiences time partly in his own individual life, and partly through the society which goes back many generations before his own birth” (ibid: 17). In contrast, traditional European spatiotemporal consciousness conceives of time as flow and inevitability. Abstract conceptions of time as a continuous duration first emerged during the 14th century, within the European Judeo-Christian order (Postone 2003: 203). In this context, Biblical apocalyptic visions of the end are

1

This contribution has been previously published in Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late Capitalist Struggle, edited by Kelly Fritsch and Claire O’Connor (AK Press, 2016).

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being inspired by strict regulation of work and prayer times. As Jeremy Rifkin notes in Time Wars, “western culture has institutionalized its images of the future by way of religion and politics, “making sure that “the future can be made predictable and controlled” (1987: 146-147). It is through religion and politics that a linear temporal orientation first came to be discerned, concurrent with the development of Western culture. The structure of time eventually came to be organized discretely and causally into a past, present, and future, with fixed events set against a forward moving timeline – one that would eventually come to a climactic, chaotic end. Prominent religious philosopher St. Augustine was among the first western thinkers to view Christian inspired, linear irreversible time as an important feature of his philosophy. In his book Confessions, written in Latin around AD 400, St. Augustine asks, “How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity” (Pilkington 1876: 302). This progressive unidirectional future was subsequently consolidated through significant events in science and technology. As Gerhard Dohrn-Van Rossum notes, “Only since the scientific revolution in the middle of the seventeenth century can one speak of experimentally qualifying scientific procedures and conceptions of time as a scaled continuum of discrete moments” (1996: 287). The increased use of public clocks (and eventually of personal watches and timepieces) further inscribed a mechanical order of time, impacting all aspects of Western life. Developed around 1854, the second law of thermodynamics reinforced the linear notion that time was speeding into the future toward a chaotic end. Meanwhile, significant temporal-historical events like the invention of the telegram and the construction of the first long distance railroads allowed people to conceive of the future in terms of conquest. Considering the relationship between ‘the future’ and imperialism and colonialism, Stephen Kern notes how the “annexation of the space of others” and the “outward movement of people and goods” amounted to “spatial expressions of the active appropriation of the future” (2003: 92). In 1839, British Foreign Minister Lord Roseberry noted that the motivations for colonizing Africa were not about the present, “not what we want now, but what we shall want in the future” (Kern 2003: 92). Roseberry viewed the future as something to be mined; he and his fellow imperialists were engaged in the business of “pegging out claims for the future” as trustees “to the future of the race” (ibid: 92). In the US context, both during and after slavery, the future offered a potential source of hope in the struggle against racial oppression. On July 5, 1852 in a speech called “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass attacked the hypocrisy of Independence Day, observing that, “America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future” (1852: 16). Consequently, America was liable to commit the same atrocities it had inflicted against those it had enslaved against humanity more

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broadly. Decades later, in 1892, he told a group of black students at Atlanta University, “Be not discouraged. There is a future for you and a future for me” (Hamilton 2002: 117). Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, ensured his followers that “we have a beautiful history, and we shall create another in the future that will astonish the world” (Garvey 2012: 6). At the turn of the century, the avant-garde Italian social movement known as ‘Futurism’ attempted to revolutionize notions of the future in art, architecture, literature, and culture. Believing that the reverential cult of tradition should die, they created manifestos, artwork, music, and critical theory to capture a future that was rapidly speeding toward them. Much like Einstein’s relativistic future, the Futurists’ future had run into now. Or, as Filippo Marinetti wrote in his Manifesto of Futurism, “Time and Space died yesterday” (1909: n.p.). In the “Manifesto of Futurist Painters”, Boccioni et al. declared that, “the triumphant progress of science makes profound changes in humanity inevitable” (1910: 24). In their view, such changes were “hacking an abyss between those docile slaves of past tradition and us free moderns, who are confident in the radiant splendor of our future” (ibid). They embraced a violent, clashing, chaotic, technological future – one that was constantly changing and perpetually at war with its own ideas. Because the future was transient, there could be no permanent buildings, monuments, or empires. Notions of the future have virtually defined the modern day genre of science fiction. Following the Victorian era of wonder, space travel, and high technology, these future visions began to take on a dystopian tone. H. G. Wells spent much of his career time traveling into dystopian futures through fiction, essays, and speeches. Meanwhile, George Orwell’s novel 1984 famously warned, “who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” (1950: 37). The imaginations of science fiction writers have both been stimulated by and contributed to developments in science and technology. Indeed, many sci-fi writers are scientists, or are consulted by scientists when their work predicts the future or thinks up new possibilities and uses for technology. One inevitable consequence of the rapidly changing future envisioned by the Italian Futurists and illustrated by science fiction is what Alvin Toffler called “Future Shock”: the “shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time” (1970: 11). According to Toffler, the greatly accelerated rate of social and technological change in our society produced mostly negative personal and psychological consequences, which arose from “the superimposition of a new culture on an old one” and produced a form of culture shock from which the victim cannot recover (ibid: 11). This was what Marinetti and the Italian Futurists wished for: a ‘future now’, permanently split from the past, and brought about by a violent expansion of the scope of change. For Toffler, we were racing too far into the future, too quickly.

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The term ‘future shock’ itself spread through popular culture, theory, and media after the release of Toffler’s book. In 1973 Curtis Mayfield released his song, “Future Shock”, on his album, Back to the World which Herbie Hancock covered as a title track in 1983: a jazz-funk-electronic fusion that was considered futuristic for its time. For Mayfield, future shock entailed a world of poverty, drug addiction, hunger, desperation: “When won’t we understand This is our last and only chance Everybody, it’s a future shock.”

His words evoke a ‘presentism time orientation’ – the darker side of ‘the future is now’. This represents how oppressed people today, particularly the descendants of enslaved Africans, embody temporal tensions, a disunity between cultural notions of time.2 Today this temporal orientation is connected to class, poverty, oppression, racism, and the legacy of slavery. Maintaining presentism over futurism has been both a defense mechanism against black communal trauma and post-trauma under the conditions of class warfare and racial oppression deriving from slavery, as well as a harkening back to a more natural, ancestral temporal-spatial consciousness. Michelle M. Wright cautions that “if we use the linear progress narrative to connect the African continent to Middle Passage Blacks today, we run into a logical problem, because our timeline moves through geography chronologically, with enslavement taking place at the beginning, or the past, and the march toward freedom moving through the ages toward the far right end of the line or arrow, which also represents the present” (2014: 57). In a similar vein, Jeremy Rifkin explains the consequence of applying the linear progress narrative being to oppressed people keeps them “confined in a narrow temporal band, unable to anticipate and plan for their own future, are powerless to

2

Use of the “presentism time orientation” is class and race-based. It has been recently appropriated by New Age philosophy (being ‘present’ in meditation); however, when presentism is applied to Black people, it is often cited negatively, considered as lacking a sense of the future, and only concerned with present pleasures and immediate concerns. In studies on increased presence of heart disease in African Americans, for example, “presentism time orientation” is often cited as one of the causal factors. African Americans with a present-time orientation “may not see the need to take preventative medication or to finish antibiotics when symptoms disappear,” or “may delay seeing a physician until symptoms are severe, and begin interfering with their work or life” (ELDER Project, Fairfield University School of Nursing 2014).

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affect their political fate” (1987: 165). For those deprived of access to the future, they become stuck planning for the present while the society around them speeds forward in illusory, linear progress. The future thus becomes “untrustworthy [and] unpredictable” (ibid: 192). This narrow temporal band is used to penalize people on a daily basis: being 10 minutes late to court, for example, can mean losing your job, kids, home, or freedom. Hierarchies of time and lack of access to the future informs intergenerational poverty, in the same way that wealth passes down between generations in traditionally privileged families. In a famous speech given at the Founding Rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1964, Malcolm X addressed this imbalance by underscoring how “education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today” (1970, n.p.). In Future Shock, Toffler identified change as “the process by which the future invades our lives.” (1970: 3) Relying on similar conceptions, Barack Obama structured his entire 2008 presidential campaign around ‘change’, using it as a slogan to appropriate a specific vision of America’s future. In 2009, he boldly told a joint session of Congress of his intentions in a speech: “we did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it”.3 In a 2011 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, President Obama was asked, “If hope and change define the 2008 campaign, what [two] words are going to define 2012?” to which he responded, “what'll define 2012 is our vision for the future”.4 His 2012 campaign slogan of ‘Forward’ appropriates the same visionary, future temporality. How do we begin to map our return to our own futures? One way that radicals of today can more affirmatively claim or create the future is by actively engaging temporalities and adopting alternative temporal orientations and frameworks. This in turn shifts the meaning or placement of the future, and shifts the means of access to it. To quote Rifkin, “the new time rebels advocate a radically different approach to temporality” (1987: 12). In this spirit, the concept and community of Afrofuturism has emerged over the last twenty years as a tool, medium, and lens with which marginalized black communities across the diaspora might evaluate and shape our futures. According to Art curator and Afrofuturist, Detroit activist Ingrid LaFleur, Afrofuturism is “a way of imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens” (Womack 2013: 9). For D. Denenge Akpem, it is “an exploration and methodology of liberation, simultaneously both a location and a journey” (2011: n.p.). Along with Afrofuturism, a number of other alternative movements have emerged over the past few years (e.g., Chicano futurism, Queer futurism and Crip futurity) to appro-

3

Available online at https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-ajoint-session-congress-health-care. Last Access 27.08.2018.

4

See

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obamas-three-word-vision-2012-our-vision-

future_594999.html. Last Access 27.08.2018.

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priate or redefine notions of future while actively exploring what the future might look like for marginalized people. For its part, Afrofuturism lends itself well to exploring pathways to liberation, unearthing our true histories, mapping our futures, and understanding our present conditions in the flow of time. Because it provides a perpetual bridge between the past, present, and future, Afrofuturism and the black speculative imagination can be used as liberation technologies to build future worlds.

See Also: History, Hope, Prefiguration, Utopia.

L ITERATURE Akpem, D. Denenge (2011): “‘Are you ready to alter your destiny?”: Chicago and Afro-Futurism, Part 1 of 2”. In: Chicago Art Magazine, http://chicagoartmagazine. com/2011/07/are-you-ready-to-alter-your-destiny-chicago-and-afro-futurism-part1-of-2. Last Access 27.08.2018. Augustine, Dods, M., & Pilkington, J. G. (1886): The Confessions of St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark. Boccioni, Umberto et al. (1910): La Pittura Futurista : Manifesto Tecnico//Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, Milan: Poesia. Butler, Octavia E. (2005): Bloodchild and Other Stories, New York: Seven Stories Press. Buvoli, L., Cotto, R., Davis, L. D., Hernandez, M., & Barrera, M. A. (2009). Manifesto of Futurism by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1909): handwritten by Rafael Cotto, Lamel D. Davis, Michael Hernandez [and others] (2009). [Place of publication not identified], [Luca Buvoli]. Dohrn-Van Rossum, Gerhard (1996): History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Orders. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Douglass, Frederick (1852): “Delivered in Corinthian Hall by Frederick Douglas, July 5th 1852.” To the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, Rochester, NY: Lee, Man & Co, https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/2945. Last Access 27.08.2018. ELDER Project (2014): Cultural Diversity Training materials, Fairfield, CT: Fairfield University Egan School of Nursing. Accessed online: https://www. slideserve.com/dyllis/cultural-diversity. Last Access 27.08.2018. Garvey, Marcus, and Amy Jacques Garvey (1968): Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, New York: Arno Press. Hamilton, Neil A. (2002): American Social Leaders and Activists, New York: Facts on File.

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Kern, Stephen (2003[1983]): The Culture of Time & Space (1880-1918), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mayfield, Curtis, and Richard Tufo (2001): Back to the World. London: Charly. Mbiti, John (1990): African Religions and Philosophy, Heinemann Educational Publishers. Metropolarity Journal of Speculative Vision and Critical Liberation Technologies, March 2013, Season 1, Episode 1 (zine). Orwell, George (1950): 1984, New York: Signet Classic. Postone, Moishe (2003): “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth Century.” In: Moishe Postone/Eric L. Santner (eds.) Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 81-114. Rifkin, Jeremy (1987): Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History, New York: Touchstone. Toffler, Alvin (1970): Future Shock, New York: Bantam Books/Random House. Womack, Ytasha (2013): Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture, Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Wright, Michelle M. (2015): Physics of Blackness: Beyond The Middle Passage Epistemology, Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. X, Malcolm (1970): By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter, New York: Pathfinder Press, pp. 35-67. Available Online: http://www.blackpast. org/1964-malcolm-x-s-speech-founding-rally-organization-afro-american-unity. Last Access 27.08.2018.

Authors

Akomfrah, John, CBE, is a seminal figure in Black British Cinema and forerunner in digital cinematography. He has a body of work that is considered one of the most distinctive and innovative in contemporary Britain. Born in Ghana, to politically active parents he moved to London at an early age. He was a founding figure in the influential cine cultural group Black Audio Film Collective which was dedicated to exploring questions of Black British identity, race and class through film and media. In 1999, he set up Smoking Dogs Films – which simultaneously cohabits the worlds of broadcast, cinema and the arts – with his long term producing partners, David Lawson and Lina Gopaul. John has served on numerous boards as a governor, including the British Film Institute and Film, London and has taught at a number of institutions around the world including M.I.T., Yale and the University of Westminster. John Akomfrah is an artist filmmaker, director, writer and theorist who creates documentaries, feature films and exhibitions that have garnered international critical acclaim. Alisch, Stefanie, (Humboldt University) studied musicology, Portuguese and English in Berlin and Salvador da Bahia while working as a DJ. She is a recent doctoral graduate of the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies where she conducted research into the ‘carga’ concept in Angolan kuduro music and dance. Her work encompasses research, teaching, academic and journalistic publications as well as creative projects on kuduro, broken beat, groove, sound system epistemology, pleasure politics. She recently embarked on a postdoc project on mazurka in the Atlantic realm where she addresses malleable meter through computational methods. Chuchu, Jim, is an artist living and working in Nairobi, Kenya. Chuchu’s photographs debuted in the exhibition, “Precarious Imaging: Visibility and Media surrounding African Queerness” at RAW Material Company, and his photography and video series have since exhibited in spaces such as the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Vit-

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ra Design Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the Johannesburg Art Fair and the 1:54 New York and London art fairs. In the same year, Jim co-founded the Nest Collective – a multidisciplinary collective based in Nairobi. With them, he directed his first feature film – Stories of Our Lives, an anthology film based on the lives of queer Kenyans. Stories of Our Lives was banned in Kenya for ‘promoting homosexuality’, and has since screened at festivals in more than 80 countries around the world to critical acclaim, but is yet to screen in its home country. Coleman, Grisha, is a composer and choreographer in performance and experiential media, her work explores relationships among our physiological, technological and ecological systems. She works as an Associate Professor of Movement, Computation and Digital Media in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering [AME] and the School of Dance at Arizona State University. Her recent art and scholarly work echo::system is a springboard for re-imagining the environment, environmental change, and environmental justice. Coleman is a New York City native with an M.F.A. in Composition and Integrated Media from the California Institute of the Arts, following which she was awarded a fellowship at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has been recognized nationally and internationally including a 2012 National Endowment Arts in Media Grant [NEA], the 2014 Mohr Visiting Artist at Stanford University, and grants from the Rockefeller Fund, and The Creative Capital Foundation. DeFrantz, Thomas F., teaches at Duke University and directs SLIPPAGE: Performance|Culture|Technology, a research group that explores emerging technology in live performance applications. DeFrantz received the 2017 Outstanding Research in Dance award from the Dance Studies Association. DeFrantz believes in our shared capacity to do better, and to engage our creative spirit for a collective good that is anti-racist, anti-homophobic, proto-feminist, and queer affirming. DeFrantz acted as a consultant for the Smithsonian Museum of African American Life and Culture, contributing concept and a voice-over for a permanent installation on Black Social Dance that opened with the museum in 2017. Books include Black Performance Theory, co-edited with Anita Gonzalez (2014), Choreography and Corporeality: Relay in Motion, co-edited with Philipa Rothfield (2016). Creative: Queer Theory! An Academic Travesty commissioned by the Theater Offensive of Boston and the Flynn Center for the Arts; fastDANCEpast, created for the Detroit Institute for the Arts; reVERSE-gesture-reVIEW commissioned by the Nasher Museum in response to the work of Kara Walker, January, 2017. DeVille, Abigail, received her MFA from Yale University 2011 and her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2007. DeVille’s most recent exhibitions in-

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clude Lift Every Voice Sing, ICA Miami, (2017); Empire State Works in Progress, Whitney Museum of American Art (2017); No Space Hidden (Shelter), ICA LA (2017); 20/20, The Studio Museum in Harlem and Carnegie Museum of Art (2017); Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, Kemper Museum (2017); Harlem: Found Ways, Cooper Gallery at Hutchins Center, Harvard University (2017); Urban Planning: Contemporary Art and the City 1967-2017, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2017); LANDMARK, Socrates Sculpture Park (2016); Only When Its Dark Enough Can You See The Stars, The Contemporary, Baltimore, MD (2016); Revolution in the Making, Hauser Wirth, Los Angeles, CA (2016). DeVille has designed sets for theatrical productions—at venues such as the Stratford Festival (2014), directed by Peter Sellers, Harlem Stage (2016), La Mama (2015), JACK (2014-16), and Joe’s Pub (2014) directed by Charlotte Brathwaite. She has received 2014-15 fellowship at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, 2015 Creative Capital grantee and received a 2015 OBIE Award for design. DeVille is the 2017-18 Chuck Close Henry W and Marion T Mitchell Rome Prize fellow. Dukan, M. Asli, is a filmmaker and visual artist who works primarily in the genres of speculative fiction as a subversive artistic and liberatory practice. In 2017, her mixed-media installation, Resistance Time Portal, which centered black radicalism in a futuristic narrative, made its debut in the Distance≠Time exhibition at the Icebox Project Space, co-presented by Philadelphia’s Black Quantum Futurism collective. She has been the recipient of several grants, awards and fellowships, including a 2016 Transformation Award from the Leeway Foundation, a 2016 NBPC 360 fellowship from Black Public Media, and in 2018, a Flaherty Seminar fellowship. In 2018, she also completed Resistance: The Battle of Philadelphia, a six-part, nearfuture web series about a community’s struggle against state violence. She is in post-production on Invisible Universe, a documentary about black creators in speculative fiction and in development on the anthology horror film based on the book, Skin Folk by Nalo Hopkinson. Eshun, Kodwo, is Lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, Visiting Professor, Haut Ecole d’Art et Design, Genève and co-founder of The Otolith Group. He is author of More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (Quartet, 1998) and Dan Graham: Rock My Religion (Afterall, 2012) and co-editor of Post Punk Then and Now (Repeater, 2016), The Militant Image: A Cine-Geography: Third Text Vol 25 Issue1 (2011), Harun Farocki Against What? Against Whom (Walther König, 2010) and The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective 1982-1998 (Liverpool University Press, 2007).

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Everett, Anna, is Professor of Film, Television, and New Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is a two-time recipient of the Fulbright Senior Scholar Award, organizer of the AfroGeeks conferences as well as co-organizer of the Race in Cyberspace conferences. Her many publications include the books Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949; Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media (for the MacArthur Foundation’s series on Digital Media, Youth, and Learning), New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality; AfroGeeks: Beyond the Digital Divide; Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace; and Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s. Anna Everett currently serves a County Commissioner and Chair of the Santa Barbara County Commission for Women. Gbadamosi, Raimi, is an artist, writer and curator. He received his Doctorate (2001) in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He is a member of the Interdisciplinary Research Group ‘Afroeuropeans’, University of Leon, Spain, and the ‘Black Body’ group, Goldsmiths College, London. He is on the Editorial board of Journal of African Studies, Open Arts Journal and SAVVY, and on the boards of Elastic Residence, London and Relational, Bristol. He is currently an Associate at Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WiSER), Johannesburg. Recent national and international shows and events include: Histories of the Invisible, The Centre for the Less Good idea, Johannesburg, Words Festival, NIROX 2017, South Africa; Romulus, Rebus, Priest Gallery, Johannesburg 2017, Cemetery, Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa, 2014/2015; Banquet, South Hill Park Bracknell, United Kingdom. Artist books include: incredulous; ordinary people; extraordinary people; contents; Drink Horizontal; Drink Vertical; The Dreamers' Perambulator; and four word. Recent essays include: Pax Africana Book Chapter 2017; There are Storytellers Everywhere Book Chapter 2017; Testaments of a Current Moment Agenda 2016. Become a citizen at The Republic. http://www.therepublic.net. Gumbs, Alexis Pauline, is a long-term space cadet and a professional cousin. She is the author of M Archive: After the End of the World and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity and co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Her forthcoming book is called Dub: Finding Ceremony. Alexis lives in Durham, North Carolina where she co-stewards The Mobile Homecoming Trust (a queer black experiential archive) with her partner Sangodare. Gunkel, Henriette, is lecturer at the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work focusses on the politics of time from an anticolonial, queer-feminist perspective. She is currently working on a monograph on Alien Time that focusses on Africanist science-fictional interventions. She is the

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author of The Cultural Politics of Female Sexuality in South Africa (Routledge, 2010) and co-editor of What Can a Body Do? (Campus, 2012), Undutiful Daughters. New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice (Palgrave McMillan, 2012), and Futures & Fictions (Repeater, 2017), which was nominated for the 2018 International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award in the Critical Writing and Research category. Haimbe, Milumbe, was born in Lusaka, Zambia. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture attained from the Copperbelt University, and also holds a Master’s Degree in Fine Arts obtained from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in Norway. Milumbe is a multimedia artist interested in exploring diversity in popular media and culture. Her work combines several mediums including drawing, illustration, animation, video, 3D modelling, text and comic book art to navigate these themes. She represents a wide intersection of cultural minorities and believes that this intersectionality places her in a favorable position to lend her voice to the communities that she represents. She lives and works in Toronto, Canada. Hameed, Ayesha, is a Lecturer in Visual Cultures and Programme Leader of the MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. Hameed’s work explores contemporary borders and migration, critical race theory, Walter Benjamin, and visual cultures of the Black Atlantic. She has performed recently at Homeworks Space Program Beirut, Mosaic Rooms, RAW Material Company Dakar, Arts Catalyst, March Meeting Sharjah, Keynote Society for Artistic Research, Camden Arts Centre, La Colonie Paris and Spike Island Bristol. Recent exhibitions include Dakar Biennale 2018, Showroom 2018, Konsthall C Stockholm 2018, “Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics” at MACBA Barcelona and MUAC Mexico City 2017. Her publications include Futures & Fictions (coedited with Simon O’Sullivan and Henriette Gunkel Repeater 2017), Visual Cultures as Time Travel (with Henriette Gunkel Sternberg, forthcoming 2019); and contributions to Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg Press 2014), Unsound/Undead (Urbanonmic Forthcoming 2018). Jean-Louis, Soraya, is a Haitian born, Harlem and Brooklyn raised mixed media queer womynist artist conjurer and healer currently living and loving in New Orleans. Her love of black womxn and families, motherhood, nature, wildcrafting, Black Feminist Futurisms, comics/graphic novels and the African Diaspora are central themes in her work. Soraya’s work as an organizer, mentor, counselor, doula, teaching artist, and medical anthropologist focusing on women’s health and African folklore strengthen her commitment to resisting oppression and facilitating healing through imaginative creative/art activism. Soraya has participated in several group exhibits in various New Orleans cultural institutions including the Mckenna Muse-

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um of African American Art, The JuJu Bag, Antenna Gallery, The Jazz and Heritage Gallery and a solo show at Café Rose NiCaud and Backatown Coffee Parlour. Soraya is the co-founder of ‘Wildseeds: New Orleans Octavia Butler Emergent Strategy Collective’ and was awarded the Alternate Roots Visual Scholars grant in 2014. Most recently, Soraya was the creative facilitator, curator and contributing artist for one of the largest public art exhibitions in New Orleans, Wildseeds “Sacred Space” at ExhibitBE and co-organizer of the inaugural Black Futures Fest: A Celebration of the Black Fantastic in New Orleans in 2015. Keeling, Kara, is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Keeling is author of The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007) and coeditor (with Josh Kun) of a selection of writings about sound and American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), and (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) a selection of writings by the late James A. Snead entitled European Pedigrees/African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). A second monograph, Queer Times, Black Futures, will be published in the spring of 2019 by New York University Press. Kia Henda, Kiluanji, is an autodidact. A profound springboard into this realm comes from growing up in a household of photography enthusiasts. His conceptual edge was sharpened by immersing himself into music, avant-garde theatre and collaborating with a collective of emerging artists in Luanda. Kia Henda has participated in several residencies programs and in the following selected exhibitions: Triennial of Luanda, 2007; Check List Luanda Pop, African Pavilion, Biennale of Venice, 2007; Farewell to Post-Colonialism, Triennial of Guangzhou, 2008; There is always a cup of sea to sail in, 29th São Paulo Biennial, 2010; Tomorrow Was Already Here, Tamayo Museum, Mexico City, 2012; Les Prairies, Les Ateliers de Rennes, 2012; Mondays Begins On Saturday, First Bergen Triennial, 2013; The Shadows Took Shape, The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, 2013; The Divine Comedy, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2014; Surround the Audience, New Museum Triennial, New York, 2015; Museum (Science) Fictions - MUSEUM ON/OFF, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, 2016; Constellations, Tate Gallery, 2017, Imagined Borders, 12th Gwangju Biennale. In 2012 he won the National Award for Culture and the Arts from the Angolan Ministry of Culture and in 2017 the Frieze Artist Award. lynch, kara, is a time-based artist living in the Bronx, NY who earns a living as an Associate Professor of Video and Critical Studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Ambivalent towards hyper-visual culture, she is curious about

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duration, embodiment, and aural experience; and through low-fi, collective practice and social intervention lynch explores aesthetic/political relationships between time + space. Her work is vigilantly raced, classed, and gendered - Black, queer and feminist. Major projects include: Black Russians – a feature documentary video (2001), The Outing – a video travelogue (1999-2004), Mouhawala Oula – a gender-bending trio performance for oriental dance, live video, and saxophone (2009). The current project INVISIBLE, an episodic, speculative, multi-site video/audio installation – excavates the terror and resilient beauty of Black experience. Maier, Carla J., is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen working at the intersection of sound studies and cultural studies with a focus on postcolonial theories and practices and working with an interdisciplinary methodology combining sensory ethnography, music analysis and cultural analysis. In her current postdoc project on “Travelling Sounds: A cultural analysis of sonic artefacts in postcolonial Europe”, she investigates how migrating sonic artefacts – i.e. the mediatised musical sounds and everyday sounds that travel across and beyond nation states, media, genres, identities – constitute and are constituted by the postcolonial and postmigrant conditions of Europe. She is preparing a book titled Sound Practices: South Asian Dance Music as Cultural Transformation to be published with Bloomsbury in 2019. Nagl, Tobias, is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the English Department and associated member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. Previously, he has worked as a DJ, freelance writer (SPEX, Jungle World, epd film, SPON), newspaper editor (die tageszeitung), curator (Oberhausen Film Festival) and translator. He is the author of Die unheimliche Maschine. Rasse und Repräsentation im Weimarer Kino (The Uncanny Machine. Race and Representation in Weimar Cinema, 2009) and co-editor of European Vision. Small Cinemas in Transition (with Janelle Blankenship, 2015). His research interests include Marxism and the Frankfurt School, postcolonial studies, film history and theory, critical theories of race, silent cinema, the historical avant-gardes and political modernism. Nyong’o, Tavia, is Professor of African-American Studies, American Studies, and Theatre Studies at Yale University. His research interests include the cultural study of performance; black diasporic studies; Marxism and post-Marxism; queer and feminist aesthetics; and popular music studies. His books include: The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (U Minnesota, 2009), which won the Errol Hill Award for best book in African American theatre and performance studies, and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (NYU Press, 2018).

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Phillips, Rasheedah, Esq. serves as the Managing Attorney of the Housing Unit at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia, representing low-income tenants in eviction defense and local and national systemic advocacy on preservation of affordable housing and tenants’ rights issues. A recipient of the 2017 National Housing Law Project Housing Justice Award, 2018 Temple University Black Law Student Association Alumni Award, 2018 Community Legal Services Equal Justice Award, and recognized as a 2017 City & State PA 40 under 40 Rising Star, Rasheedah received her J.D. from Temple University Beasley School of Law, and graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.A. in Criminal Justice from Temple University in 2005. In 2011, Rasheedah founded The AfroFuturist Affair, a grassroots organization and small indie publishing platform celebrating and spreading awareness of Afrofuturism in marginalized communities. She is also the co-creator of Black Quantum Futurism interdisciplinary arts collective, the award-winning Community Futures Lab, founding member of Metropolarity Queer Sci-Fi Collective, and is the author of several books and essays on black futurism, black temporalities, and speculative fiction stories. As part of her socially engaged art practice, she has been a recipient of the 2017 Pew Fellowship, 2017 Center for Emerging Visual Arts Fellowship, 2016 West Philadelphia Time Exchange Residency, and is a 2018 Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity. Rashid, Umar (Frohawk Two Feathers), was born in 1976 in Chicago, Illinois, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He earned his BA at Southern Illinois University in 2000. Rashid has created a narrative focusing on the colonial history of the Frenglish Empire – a fictionalized empire of his creation that combines France and England. His portraits, drawings, flags, maps, battle scenes, and other artifacts continue the long history of Frengland – an ongoing project Rashid began working on in 2006. In Rashid’s history, the dates of the Frenglish Empire (1658-1888) roughly correspond to the actual English Civil War and the abolition of slavery in Brazil respectively. Ten years in the making and spanning almost 140 years of Frenglish time, Rashid’s global empire has developed a complex, global history, much like the trajectory of actual colonial enterprises. Similarly, his work references a panoply of cultures that collapses geography and time. Stylistically, Rashid alludes to Egyptian hieroglyphs, Native American hide paintings and ledger art, Persian miniature painting, and illustrated Spanish colonial manuscripts to name but a few. Schrade, Daniel Kojo, visual artist and professor of art at Hampshire College, Amherst Massachusetts USA, studied in Germany and Spain. His work includes repeated motifs such as the ‘Afronaut’ figure and the cycle entitled “Brother Beethoven”. Schrade combines performance, installation and abstract expressive painting strategies with textual elements and personal iconographies in his pieces. His

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paintings and installations have been presented internationally including the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Oaxaca (Mexico), Artist Alliance Accra (Ghana), Haus der Kunst Munich, Iwalewa Haus University Bayreuth (Germany), the Indonesian National Gallery (Jakarta), and the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (Poland). Amongst others, he was invited to lecture about his work at Goldsmiths University London, Kwame Nkrumah University Ghana, Georgetown University Washington DC, and the University of California Los Angeles. Daniel Kojo Schrade holds an M.F.A (Diploma) from the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, Germany. Most recently he was awarded Dartmouth College Artist in Residence for Spring 2019. sorryyoufeeluncomfortable, formed in 2014 out of the Baldwin’s Nigger Reloaded project initiated by Barby Asante and Teresa Cisneros, currently led by Rabz Lansiquot and Imani Robinson, syfu are a multi disciplinary group of young thinkers and makers working towards creative, nuanced study of how the intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class affect communities. All this as our personal and professional mode of challenging the oppressive foundations of the contemporary world:https://www.instagram.com/sorryyoufeeluncomfortable;https://mobile.twitter .com/syfucollective?lang=en; https://m.facebook.com/syfucollective. Siegert, Nadine, is a researcher, curator and publisher with a focus on modern and contemporary arts of the Global South. Currently she is the Deputy Director of Iwalewahaus, University of Bayreuth and member of the research project Revolution 3.0 at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies. She was a Brooks International Fellow at Tate Modern/Delfina Foundation and Curator in Residence at Vila Sul, Goethe-Institute in Salvador de Bahia. She curated a number of exhibitions such as FAVT: Future Africa Visions in Time (since 2016), Mashup (since 2015) and GhostBusters (2012). In 2016, she published her PhD (Re)mapping Luanda on nostalgic and utopian aesthetic strategies in contemporary art in Angola (LIT). Since 2015, Siegert leads the project African Art History and the Formation of a Modernist Aesthetics. In this context, her current research project is on socialist aesthetic modernity in Africa. Smith, Robyn, is a Jamaican cartoonist with an MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies. She has worked on comics for NECIR (New England Center for Investigative Reporting), the Seven Days newspaper, College Humor, The Nib, and has most recently illustrated the comic Wash Day created by Jamila Rowser. She’s been featured on The Comics Journal list The Best Short Form Comics of 2016 by Rob Clough and also Pen America by Whit Taylor, for her mini comic The Saddest Angriest Black Girl in Town. Right now, she’s supposedly working on more weird, sad autobio stuff and holding on to dreams of returning home, to the ocean.

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Tate, Greg, is a writer, musician and cultural provocateur who lives on Harlem’s legendary Sugar Hill. His most recent book is Flyboy2: The Greg Tate Reader (Duke University Press, 2016). Tate also leads the Conducted Improv funk band, Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber who will celebrating their twentieth anniversary in 2019.

Cultural Studies Gundolf S. Freyermuth

Games | Game Design | Game Studies An Introduction (With Contributions by André Czauderna, Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman) 2015, 296 p., pb. 19,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-2983-5 E-Book: 17,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-2983-9

Andréa Belliger, David J. Krieger

Network Publicy Governance On Privacy and the Informational Self February 2018, 170 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-4213-1 E-Book: 26,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-4213-5

Nicolaj van der Meulen, Jörg Wiesel (eds.)

Culinary Turn Aesthetic Practice of Cookery (In collaboration with Anneli Käsmayr and in editorial cooperation with Raphaela Reinmann) 2017, 328 p., pb., col. ill. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3031-2 E-Book available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-3031-6

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!

Cultural Studies Martina Leeker, Imanuel Schipper, Timon Beyes (eds.)

Performing the Digital Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures 2016, 304 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3355-9 E-Book available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-3355-3

Suzi Mirgani

Target Markets – International Terrorism Meets Global Capitalism in the Mall 2016, 198 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3352-8 E-Book available as free open access publication ISBN 978-3-8394-3352-2

Ramón Reichert, Annika Richterich, Pablo Abend, Mathias Fuchs, Karin Wenz (eds.)

Digital Culture & Society (DCS) Vol. 3, Issue 2/2017 – Mobile Digital Practices January 2018, 272 p., pb. 29,99 € (DE), 978-3-8376-3821-9 E-Book: 29,99 € (DE), ISBN 978-3-8394-3821-3

All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!