A Deconstructive Exploration Of Afrofuturism.Pdf

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Final–Year Dissertation
Department of English, Drama and American and
Canadian Studies, University of Birmingham
Student ID: 1235932
Title: A deconstructive exploration of Afrofuturism
Word Count: 11,752 Words

Abstract
This essay will explore the culturally subversive and incredibly unique enigma that is Afrofuturism.
Afrofuturism will be understood in terms of its inherent delineation from any attempts by a
universal cultural modernity to categorise it within the structures of conventional discourse. Instead,
I will adopt a deconstructive approach to Afrofuturism’s exploration.
In this essay, I will discuss Afrofuturism in relation to theories of Decoloniality, and, in turn,
explain the history and rationale behind its subversion to conceptions of a universal modernity. I
will then explore the methodology and importance of autonomous subjectivity formation in
Afrofuturism. The next chapter will discuss Afrofuturism and music, using Detroit techno as a case
study. The final chapter will cover Afrofuturism in relation to hauntology, with a particular focus on
the parallels between Afrofuturist and Intercultural cinema.
The aim of this essay is to broaden the reader’s understanding of Afrofuturism through the
contextualization and explanation of the issues that Afrofuturism seeks to transcend, and the
examination of the means with which this transcendence is to be achieved.

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Contents
List of Illustrations:
Figure Page
1 Krista Franklin, ‘Money Folder’, 2012 41
Chapter
1.Introduction 4
2.What is Afrofuturism? 7
3.Afrofuturism and Decoloniality 11
4.Afrofuturism and the potential for subjectivity
formation 19
5.Afrofuturism and music 27
6.Afrofuturism and hauntology 36
7.Conclusion 50
8.Bibliography 52

Chapter One: Introduction
My methodological approach for conducting research and writing this essay was inspired
by Kodwo Eshun’s responses in a dialogue with Geert Lovink in 2000.1
The main idea that
resonated with me was that, “the extraction of concepts from any field demands that the
concepts be used as probes in order to get into a possibility space [… to identify] the
permeable membrane between certain concepts.”2
Prior to this I found myself trying to
force ideas into becoming relevant to Afrofuturism. Once I took a step back and undertook
broader independent study, I gradually came to notice the connections that exist across
the spectrum of interdisciplinary research and practice. With relevant theory now starting
to appear everywhere I looked, the task of extrapolating the information to Afrofuturism
became an altogether more fruitful and productive experience. I have to admit that
Afrofuturism is an incredibly eclectic notion in its own right. As I persisted in vain with my
attempts to dissect it into a few easily communicable core elements, I found out just how
eclectic Afrofuturism really is. Afrofuturism, it turns out, can be nothing if not nebulous, this
meaning that delinearity, abstraction, and obfuscation are inevitable in the formative and
consequential processes of its very existence. This is reflected in both the source material
that is used for, and the actual structure of my essay. Intertextuality, collage, and sampling
are devices that are essential to the ethos of Afrofuturism. It would subsequently be
impossible to do Afrofuturism any kind of justice without drawing from a tremendous
variety of texts, ideas, and scholarship, meaning that it would have also been impossible to
limit certain texts and concepts to a specific section of the essay. The result is that this
essay does not have what I would describe as a conventional structure, but paradoxically,
1
Eshun, Kodwo, ‘Interview with Geert Lovink,’ [10th July, 2000]. Accessed at
http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel/6/6902/1.html
2
Ibid.

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the essay is more coherent in its delinearity than it ever would have been had it been
constructed with staunch linearity.
I also feel that it is important to emphasise the influence that the deconstructive
philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had on my derivation of an
understanding of Afrofuturism. Their work acknowledges the endogenous powers of
immeasurable spatio-temporal rhythms3
that can only be navigated when situated in the
context of abstract machinic assemblages, or ‘technics’. Thus, from a Deleuzian and
Guattarian perspective, “time and space are no longer treated simply as universal, a priori
forms of sensible intuition, but rather are understood as components in the production of
variation and difference.”4
This totally abstracted view of time and space is fundamental to
Afrofuturism, and pervades all Afrofuturist productions irrespective of whether they are
literary, sonic, or visual. The prominence of this conception of time and space will become
more evident as the essay progresses, particularly in chapters five and six, and their
discussions of Detroit techno and ‘hauntology’.
Another Deleuzian idea that is significant to this essay is the notion of ‘rhizomatic praxis’.
The ‘Rhizome’ is an approach to knowledge that rejects epistemic binaries and dualisms,
and is instead principled in identifying the countless, heterogeneous connections that
combine to form knowledge. The Rhizome has no point of origins or genesis, as it is
always active in the process of becoming. Inherent to this idea is the notion that history
and culture nomadically exist in flux. This means, therefore, that it becomes requisite to
think of a reality that is necessary to becoming.
3
Pearson, Keith Ansell, ‘Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzche and the Transhuman Condition’ Routledge
(1997) pg. 131
4
Ibid. pg. 129

Deleuze and Guattari posit that, “the planar movement of the Rhizome resists chronology
and organisation,”5
meaning that any conception of ‘being’ cannot therefore arise from, “a
correspondence between relations and identities,”6
nor can a conception adhere to the
‘linearism’ of progression and regression. The conclusion is that ‘being’ is flux, and this is
relevant because flux is at the root of everything that will be covered in this essay. In
particular, subjectivity formation and identity should be understood as a constant process,
and not as fixities.
5
Ibid. pg. 129
6
ibid. pg. 131

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Chapter Two: What is Afrofuturism?
Afrofuturism refers to the Afro-diasporic creation of art and discourse that strives to
transcend the epistemological uniformity of societal modernity through pluriversal
collaboration across cultures, and the production and exploration of individual polyphonic
subjectivities. Individuality is a key tenet of, and therefore constantly recurs in Afrofuturist
texts. The field’s most widely renowned figure (or perhaps entity), Sun Ra, stated that:
“Man has to rise above himself… transcend himself. Because the way he is, he can only
follow reproductions of ideas, because he’s just a reproduction himself. He did not come
from the creative system, he came from the reproductive system… What I’m determined to
do is to cause man to create himself by simply rising up out of the reproductive system into
the creative system. Darwin didn’t have the complete picture. I’ve been talking about
evolution too but I’ve spelt it e-v-e-r.”7
The quote is a suitable precursor to my belief that it is important to view the notion of
Afrofuturism as part of a wider narrative of Decoloniality. Decoloniality is a pluri-versal
entity that rejects any notion of a universal epistemology and views knowledge as
disembodied and independent of any specific geo-historical locations.8
The suffix, ‘ity’ at
the end of the neologism refers to a concept in flux, consistently redefining itself by
embracing multiple subjectivities, again, rejecting any notion of epistemic universality. Sun
Ra’s quote indicates his determination to lift man out of the “reproductive system,” which
represents the endemic nature of epistemic homogeneity, into the creative system, inside
7
Szwed, John F, ‘Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra.’ Canongate Books (October 2000).
Accessed online via https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/szwed-space.html
8
Mignolo, Walter, ‘Modernity and Decoloniality’, 28 October 2011,
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766581/obo-9780199766581-0017.xml

which they are free from the boundaries of a mono-subjective, epistemic universality.
Furthermore, there is an obvious correlation between Sun Ra’s “everlution” and
Decoloniality’s existence in flux. With all of these factors considered, Decoloniality
constructs a suitable space in which Afrofuturism can manifest and flourish.
Afrofuturism provides an untouched space for the critique and analysis of normative
societal structures, whilst encouraging the individual to redefine themselves through
intuitive and holistic introspection. “Its futurity frustrates the accounts of sequential
lineages – that is, of parentage and heritage – that typically inform and frame discussions
of influence.”9
The essence of Afrofuturism transcends race, ethnicity, and anthropocentric
discourse. Mankind is approached on total egalitarian terms, beyond the divisive labelling
mechanisms of race and ethnicity. Instead humans are acknowledged in terms of
complete egalitarianism, as individual constituents of a greater notion of ‘humanity’. Each
individual possesses the right to form his or her own individual perspective irrespective of
societal convention. However, in an admitted betrayal of the core ethos of Afrofuturism,
this essay assumes that only people of ‘conventional’ African descent can produce
material that is Afrofuturist. This is necessary because, as John H. McClendon III explains,
it would be a fallacy to neglect the social reality of race relations.10
The overwhelming theme of Afrofuturism is the autonomous formation of an individual
identity, with ubiquitous features commonly associated with Afrofuturism including;
alienation, cybernetics, and space (both inner and outer), all of which are all conducive to
the development of a unique personal identity. Celebrated philosopher Achille Mbembe
9
Reddell, Trace, ‘Ethnoforgery and Outsider Afrofuturism,’ Dancecult, Vol. 5, Number 2. ‘Special Issue on
Afrofuturism, [2013] pg. 95
10
McClendon III, John H. ‘Materialist Philosophical Inquiry and African American Studies’, Socialism and
Democracy, Vol. 25, Issue 1, ‘What is African American Studies, Its Focus, and Future’ (2011) Pgs. 71-92

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focuses on the importance of cybernetics with his stated belief that that Afrofuturists regard
humanity, “not as something to be attained but, in Nietzchian fashion, as something that
has to be overcome through technologies and the subsumption of flesh into machines.”11
Indeed, when challenging the observations upon which Western thought is based, one
must acknowledge the unprecedented dynamics imposed by rapid technological
advancement and accept that the world can no longer be viewed from an essentialist
perspective.
With that said, I do not completely agree with Mbembe’s assertion that Afrofuturism is
solely concerned with overcoming the colonial criterion of an empirical ‘humanity’ through
synergetic relationships with technology. Of course, cybernetics is an extremely prevalent
theme in Afrofuturism and can be extrapolated from a plethora of cases ranging from
Cybotron’s heteronymous ventures in Detroit techno, to Sun Ra’s intergalactic travels, and
John Akomfrah’s ‘Data Thief’ character in ‘The Last Angel of History’.
I would argue that the nucleus of Afrofuturism is the autonomous formation of
subjectivities. Whether the individual reaches this through technological exploration is of
secondary importance to the key point of subjectivity formation. I would posit that the
collages of Krista Franklin, and Wangechi Mutu are just as ‘Afrofuturist’ as Janelle
Monae’s android alter-ego, ‘Cindi Mayweather,’ because their work questions the historical
construction of social context by rearranging and questioning the traditional codes of
representation via collage. Both Franklin and Mutu maintain their human persona/identity;
yet produce work that is Afrofuturist. Another comparison could be drawn between two
John Akomfrah films, ‘The Last Angel of History’ and ‘Handsworth Songs’. In the former,
11
Mbembe, Achille, ‘Raceless Future.’ YouTube video Duration: 1.05.09, posted December 15
th
, 2014.
Accessed via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkqmAi1yEpo

the protagonist forfeits existing in ‘modernity’ to time travel and piece together the true
meaning of the ‘mothership connection’ through the collection of samples from every era in
which he lands. ‘The Data Thief’s’ time travelling exploits, whilst allegorical, show an
obvious exploration of subjectivity through technological processes. Conversely, in
‘Handsworth Songs’ Akomfrah uses montage in an attempt to construct an objective
narrative that transcends the aesthetic and Manichean dynamics of rioting as portrayed by
the media. The film tries to empower the viewer to craft their own judgment on the events
depicted on screen. ‘Handsworth Songs’’ neutrality challenges the viewer to create their
own individual subjectivities about the Handsworth riots, and simultaneously removes the
protagonists involved from the narrative in which they are simply a ‘rioting minority’, into a
space that is in flux. That is to say, the filmed subjects are portrayed as individuals acting
within their own accord, and reacting to unseen, yet overwhelming contextual factors. The
film’s ability to simultaneously acknowledge and interact with the right of its viewers and
subjects to an autonomous subjectivity undeniably makes ‘Handsworth Songs’ an
Afrofuturist work that aims to further explore what it means be human, rather than to
technologically transcend humanity altogether. Both ‘The Last Angel of History’ and
‘Handsworth Songs’ will be discussed later on in the context of ‘hauntology’.
The first part of this essay will contextualise the importance of identity formation by tracing
the issue’s roots back to the discovery and colonisation of the ‘New World’ in the 15th
century. I will explain how evolutions in Western theology resulted in the secular
anthropocentrism that would construct the parameters of a universal modernity and
identity that Afrofuturism works to transcend. Scholars including; Sylvia Wynter, Walter
Mignolo, and Ramon Grosfuguel, will be used to contextualise a narrative in which the
emergence of alienation, cybernetics, and space as leitmotifs of Afrofuturism can be
understood.

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Chapter Three: Afrofuturism and Decoloniality
“… ‘although out of place’ is logically secondary to ‘in place’, it may come first existentially.
That is to say, we may have to experience geographic transgression before we realize that
a boundary even existed.”12
Tim Creswell
The idea of an omphalos has existed since ancient times. An omphalos refers to an area
or monument that a culture deems to be the center of the world. “To the ancient Japanese,
it was Mount Fuji. To the Sioux, it was the Black Hills... Rome itself was the Roman
omphalos, for all roads led there, and later still Christian maps became centered on
Jerusalem.”13
In 1884, twenty-five nations voted to accept the Royal Observatory in
Greenwich as the prime meridian and global omphalos. This decision to christen “a seat of
science bestowed by royal patronage,”14
as the center of the world is representative of the
changes that had occurred over the last 400 or so years. This is also perfectly symbolic of
the antithesis to Afrofuturism.
The culturally contingent notion of an omphalos was gone. Diverse histories and
subjectivities had been democratically rendered obsolete in favour of anthropocentric
rationality and economic prosperity. The gesture was one of validating the social, political,
and epistemological structures that justified the subjugation and ‘othering’ of colonised
peoples across the globe. The differentiating terms of ‘other’, ‘we’, and ‘they’ became
systems of a social taxonomy that reinforced a subconscious hierarchical structure of
12
Creswell, Tim (1996) quoted in: Garrett, Bradley L, ;Undertaking recreational trespass: urban exploration
and infiltration.’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 39 (1) (2014) pg. 8
13
Higgs, John, ‘Stranger than we can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century’, [ London:
Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 2015] Pg 15
14
Ibid.

discursive authority. bell hooks depicted this interaction, “No need to hear your voice when
I can talk about you better than you speak about yourself… I am still author, authority, I am
still colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now the center of my talk.”15
The problem with the evolution of European anthropology from the fifteenth century
onwards was that it came from a syncretised synthesis of two absolutist ideologies, state
imperialism and theological evangelism. The absolutism generated an anthropology that
would be directed by an unstinting sense of loyalty and duty towards systems that were
ultimately rooted in cognitive structuration rather than objective reality. Theological
evangelism started to manifest when humanist discourse foretold of a divine upgrade of
humanity’s place and purpose on Earth. Man was no longer consigned to repentance for
its Original Sin. Man became the master of his own destiny. This is articulated by Pico
della Mirandola in his 1498 ‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’,
“A limited nature in other creatures is confined within the nature of laws written down by
us. In conformity with thy free judgement, in whose hands I have placed thee, thou art
confined by no bounds; and thou will fix limits of nature for thyself.”16
The premise that God had created the universe for mankind’s sake would form the basis of
man as the rational political subject of the state, and a subsequent cognitive blindness to
conceive a reality separate from human perception. The world would now become
structured self-reflexively, and cognition now sought to interrogate the mind that regards
and structures the world, rather than acknowledging the world as its own separate entity.
15
bell hooks, ‘Marginality as site of Resistance’ Accessed online at
http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~mma/teaching/MS80/readings/hooks.pdf
16
Wynter, Sylvia (quoting Pico della Mirandola) in, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom
Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation - An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3
pp. 257-337 (2003), pg 260

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The world became “no longer a dwelling, but [a mirror of] human structuring activity.”17
The
proliferation of ‘human structuring activity’ was pivotal in the emergence of a unilateral and
inherently Eurocentric anthropocentric subjectivity that would repress any cultural
variations of these structuring mechanisms.
The western coloniser would “invent, label, and institutionalise” the colonised and enslaved
people of America and Africa as “the physical referent of the projected irrational/sub-
rational human other to its civic-humanist rational self conception.”18
The rational
constituents of an identity were universally applicable to ‘humanity’. Therefore, whereas
indigenous people had previously been seen as having a God/s, albeit of the wrong kind,
this new ontological shift made it impossible to conceive another type of ‘human’. The
binary terms of rational/irrational became the new criterion of humanity, replacing the
previous criteria that were contingent on spirituality. The anthropocentric subjectivity
created a colonial empiricism that made objects subservient to a bundle of descriptive
qualities that had been named for their collective similarity. This system is problematic, as
objects need to be viewed from a phenomenological perspective where they are
acknowledged as an individual object before the prescription of qualities, a complete
reversal where the qualities become subservient to the object. Graham Harman clarifies
this with the following example, “the black of an ink pen, and the black of an executioner’s
hood are not the same black, even if the wave length of light is exactly the same. [This is]
because the object in question infects the colour with its own atmosphere.”19
This is a
perfect analogy to emphasise the fallacy of imposing prescriptions that are intended to
17
Bryant, Levi R., ‘Ontology - A Manifesto for Object - Oriented Ontology Part 1’ [Internet Blog], January 12
2010. Accessed on 5th February 2016
18
Wynter, Sylvia, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom Towards the Human, After Man,
Its Overrepresentation - An Argument’, CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 pp. 257-337 (2003), pg 281
19
Harman, Graham, ‘Graham Harman at Moderna Musset: What is an object?” YouTube video, Duration
1:00:12, Date posted: January 29
th
2015. Accessed via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eiv-rQw1lc

generalize onto individuals. This prescriptive ontological shift came to provide the new
forms of order and relational dynamics that would become the foundational basis of
modernity.
“There is no modernity without coloniality, because coloniality is constitutive of modernity,
and modernity is the name for the historical process in which Europe began its progress
toward world hegemony.”20
Afrofuturism operates in future spaces that delineate the notion
of modernity. It creates a discontinuity of experiences related to the past (i.e. contemporary
‘modernity’), allowing the artist or subject to craft their own organic perspectives and
realities. Mignolo opines that the creation of the secular state created a new community of
birth to replace the community of theology.21
The enlightenment notion of citizenship in a
mono-national state colonised pluri-versal senses of belonging, and racial discrimination, a
concept conceived to justify colonisation, mutated into the state’s ideas of citizenship.
Kant’s ‘geopolitical ethno-racial tetragon matrix’ divided the world into ethnicities: yellows
in Asia, reds in America, blacks in Africa, and whites in Europe.22
Whiteness became
synonymous with Christianity and the secular state. The notions of state and citizenship
were then projected beyond Europe as a universalised campaign of what Ramon
Grosfoguel deems “epistemicide,”23
the extermination of knowledge and ways of knowing.
Colonisation allowed Europe to construct a unique image of itself, an identity gauged by
comparisons against an alterity defined as the ‘other’.
20
Mignolo, Walter, ‘The Idea of Latin America’. [Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005] pg xiii
21
Mignolo, Walter. “Citizenship, Knowledge and the Limits of Humanity” YouTube video Duration: 34:37,
posted May 9, 2013. Accessed via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guRtl-tRydA
22
ibid.
23
Grosfoguel, Ramón (2013) "The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic
Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century," Human Architecture:
Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 11: Iss. 1, Article 8. Pg. 6

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The inception of statehood and citizenship crafted a secular discourse that “continued to
program [people’s] hybrid ontogeny/sociogeny behaviours, by means of unmediated
genetic programs.”24
Through the symbolic correlation of the mode of ‘I’ with the eusocial
‘we’,25
societally inscribed discourse reinforced the alienating, hierarchical structures of
coloniality. The threat to statehood, and therefore humankind now came from one’s own
intrinsic passions and desires. “Salvation/redemption could only be found by the subject
able to adhere to the laws of the politically absolute state, and thereby the ‘common
good’.”26
The expansive mercantilism that accompanied the rapid rise of the centralised state would
come to justify the exploitation of ‘capital resources’ in the name of economic common
sense for the greater good. The state legitimised the expropriation of the ‘New World’, and
atrocities such as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade to the ‘rational’ peoples of Europe. The
correlation between economic prosperity and governmental performance evolved the
‘other’ from a racial entity into an economic and political issue of contention. The global
poor had become systemically expendable.27
As mercantilist economics became the
status-quo, a new criterion emerged for the human: mastery of the scarcity of land and
food, also known as ‘social Darwinism’. Only the strong, amidst rapid population growth,
could overcome the challenge of scarcity. The impoverishment of the ‘native’ proletariat
ostensibly represented “the bio-evolutionary determined incapacity of its members”28
to
survive in the world of the competitive market.
24
25
ibid. pg 273
26
ibid. pg 288/289
27
ibid. pg 321
28
ibid. pg 321

The cultural dominance of hegemonic powers has sometimes been described as the
‘prime modernity’. “The ideological basis of the hegemonic power’s rule lies in its ability to
maintain cultural universality…[and] hegemonic cultural power rests upon the assumption
that the prime modernity is desired by all, beneficial to all, and attainable by all.”29
I would
agree that Decoloniality and Afrofuturism are subversive to the maintenance of a
hegemonic universality. However, they both posit that the Eurocentric hegemon which they
oppose asserts its power by imposing of a system of hierarchies, knowledge, and cultural
norms through what Mignolo labels as, “the colonial matrix of power.”30
The colonial matrix
of power refutes the, “[hegemon’s] assumption that the prime modernity is desired by all,
beneficial to all, and attainable by all,” and instead portrays a more malevolent hegemon,
fully aware that the rigid dynamics of its modernity are not beneficial towards or desired by
the majority of its subjects. Those at the apex of the cultural hegemon understand the
epistemic constraints of modernity relative to what Bordieu termed as ‘habitus, “systems of
durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as
structuring structures, that is, as principles of generation and structuring of practices and
representation.”31
Bourdieu’s use of ‘disposition’ emphasises the challenge in not only
altering these structures, but also in their identification. How does one acknowledge
something that is pre-disposed within them?
Afrofuturists, I would argue, adopt a ‘Gramscian’ position in their understanding of the
complex dynamics of modernity. There is a slight shift in the parallax of perspective that
occurs with an understanding of modernity relative to Gramsci’s notion of ‘common sense’
29
Falah, Ghazi-Walid & Flint, Colin, ‘How the United States Justified Its War on Terrorism: Prime Morality
and the Construction of a ‘Just War,’ Third World Quarterly, Vol. 25, No.8 (2004) pg. 1380s
30
Mignolo, Walter D., ‘Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom.’ Theory,
Culture & Society, Vol. 26(7-8): 1-23 (2009) Pg. 2
31
Bourdieu, Pieere, ‘Equisse D’une Théorie de la Pratique,’ Cambridge University Press (1977) Pg. 72

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rather than Bordieu’s ‘habitus’. In no way does this undermine the validity of Bordieu’s
theory. In fact, with Gramsci’s understanding of ‘common sense’ as a disparate bundle of
conventional understandings that constitute the sociological and ontological landscapes of
an individual’s existence, there is still a gargantuan obstacle facing
Decolonialists/Afrofuturists. Gramsci acknowledges that ‘common sense’ assists the
cultural hegemon with the maintenance and reproduction of existing power systems, and
that the horizons of ‘common sense’ are indeed problematic for the subaltern populations
who are subjected to the hegemonic narratives. However, Gramsci also perceived
‘common sense’ to be a heterogeneous agglomeration of narratives that contains within
itself the seeds for transformation.32
Thereby the potential for subversion exists within the
deconstruction of the elements that are constitutive of ‘common sense’.
In order to escape the horizons of ‘common sense’, Gramsci deemed it necessary,“to work
out consciously and critically one’s own conception of the world and thus, in connection
with the labours of one’s own brain, choose one’s sphere of activity, take an active part in
the history of the world, be one’s own guide, refusing to accept passively and supinely
from outside the moulding of one’s personality.”33
Therein lies the value of a Gramscian
conception of modernity to the Decolonialists/Afrofuturists. Not only does Gramsci
emphasise the importance of autonomous subjectivity formation, his rhetoric also lacks the
etymological ‘fixity’ of the ‘disposition’ in Bordieu’s ‘habitus’. The Gramscian model is more
conducive to understanding how things change than the ‘Bordieuan’ idea, which is only
really suitable for explaining why things remain the same.
32
Zene, Cosimo, ‘The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B.R. Ambedkar: Itineraries of Dalits and
Subalterns,’ Taylor and Francis (2013) Pg. 111
33
Gramsci, Antonio, quoted in: Zene, Cosimo, ‘The Political Philosophies of Antonio Gramsci and B.R.
Ambedkar: Itineraries of Dalits and Subalterns,’ Taylor and Francis (2013) Pg. 111

The lineage of colonisation was both justified and consolidated by the evolution of a
universal anthropocentric ontology in Europe, circa. 1492. Exogenous epistemologies,
irrespective of their cultural and historical heritage, were dismissed in favour of a
homogeneous, subjective rationality. Subsequent manifestations like the citizen and the
stately society were modeled on the Manichean conditions that were ascribed to
‘humanity’. Afrofuturism unequivocally rejects any notion of a universal barometer for
humanity in favour of the reclamation of cognitive space to form one’s own identity.

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Chapter Four: Afrofuturism and the Potential for Subjectivity Formation
“Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make
progress, opening the material universe to human expansion.”34
Heinz Pagels
Walter Mignolo has a theory which he calls ‘AestheTics vs AestheSis.” The theory
questions why “western aesthetic categories like ‘beauty’ and representation’ have come
to dominate all discussion of art and its value,”35
and how this organises the binary terms
with which we compare ourselves to others. e.g. black or white? strong or weak? good or
evil? Mignolo advocates a transition away from this formulaic way of evaluating art. Art, he
proposes should be about an elementary awareness of the stimulation evoked by a work,
it’s aesthesis. The aesthesis is realised through a “disobedience to the rules of art and
society.”36
This translates seamlessly into the message of Afrofuturism.
bell hooks identified the marginality of African-American experience as a space of radical
possibility and resistance, “a central location for the production of a counter-hegemonic
discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives. […
An existence that] nourishes one’s capacity to resist [and] offers the possibility of radical
perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives.”37
The margins are
symbolically representative of collective deprivation and hopelessness. However, as
Kodwo Eshun describes, adherence to the limited dualisms of the symbolic can lead to a
34
Pagels, Heinz, ‘Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time” [New York City: Simon &
Schuster. May 2009]
35
Mignolo, Walter, ‘Decolonial Aesthetics (I)’,
https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/, Accessed at
https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/
36
ibid.
37
bell hooks, ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.’ Yearnings: Race, Gender, and
Cultural Politics [1989] pg. 203 Accessed at https://sachafrey.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/choosing-the-
margin-as-a-space-of-radical-openness-ss-3301.pdf

destructive kind of nihilism and, “[a] strange kind of dignity and nobility in pessimism and
failure. ‘At least we have done something’ is the rallying cry of those who privilege self-
esteem over effective action.”38
Within the abstractions of the binary codifiers of; margins
and center, squalor and prosperity, exist the interpretive spaces where the individual can
envisage the practices necessary for the manifestation of an alternative future. Their
Futurist thought, “attempts not only to envision what is to come, but to understand what
about the world could plausibly change. Futurism seeks a systematic and pattern-based
understanding of past and present, and to determine the likelihood of future events and
trends.39
Afrofuturism rejects any notion of binary narratives. The subjectivities of the
creator and observer are acknowledged as complex entities that cannot be restricted to
comparative rhetoric. As discussed by artist Martine Syms, the reclamation of authority is
imperative to Afrofuturist art. Artists should, “root [their] narratives in a critique of
normative, white validation,”40
abandoning ‘fact’ and ‘science’ to “focus on an emotionally
true, vernacular reality.”41
Recovery from colonial ‘epistemicide’ can only occur with the
pluriversal combination of ideas, conducted through sampling techniques like juxtaposition,
intertextuality, polyphony, and parody, all of which are absolutely integral to Afrofuturism.
Kobena Mercer wrote about the interruption of normative expectations by challenging
distinctions that imply a rigid separation between fine art and pornography. His selected
language can be applied to describe Afrofuturism, as Afrofuturism creates a “subversive
recoding of the ideological values supporting the normative aesthetic ideal.”42
The artist
38
39
Phillips, Rasheedah, ‘Constructing a Theory & Practice of Black Quantum Futurism’, Essay featured in:
‘Black Quantum Futurism: Theory and Practice.’ Afrofuturist Affair (2015) pgs. 14 & 15
40
Syms, Martine, ‘The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto’. [17th December, 2013] Accessed at
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/dec/17/mundane-afrofuturist-manifesto/
41
ibid.
42
Mercer, Kobena, ‘Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies/ [New York: Routledge.
1994.] pg 199

21
strives to delink from, rather than assimilate to convention. 43
The power and healing
capabilities of delinking are embedded in the subjectivities of the artist that allow them to
curate their own identity outside of the societal repercussions of coloniality. The artist is
free to “recompose their existential corporeality”44
in any way they please. Afrofuturism
destabilises popular conceptions of what black identity is supposed to be, and what black
popular culture is meant to be. Cultural critic Kodwo Eshun laments, “There was [...] a
compulsory ghetto-centricity of black popular culture. Always this hermeneutics of the
street.”45
These toxic assumptions explain why space is such a prominent theme in
Afrofuturism. The artists’ imaginative tendency to project rather than reflect resulted in the
formation of music forms like techno that dispelled the idea that black music was to be
confined to the street or the stage. A couple of quick detours are necessary before we
venture deeper into the mellifluous wonder that is Afrofuturism’s sonic ecology. We must
first join the ‘Data Thief’ from ‘The Last Angel of History’ and travel through time.
Afrofuturism and the Butterfly Effect
“There is an element of ethno-methodological ‘breaching’, ala Harold Garfinkel, in pursuing
the methodological path of Eurocentric deconstruction where the expectations and meta-
assumptions, long held to be “reality” itself are questioned and exposed as paradigmatic
constructs of a particular worldview.”46
Nikitah Okembe RA-Imani
43
Mignolo, Walter, ‘Decolonial Aesthetics (I)’,
https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/, Accessed at
https://transnationaldecolonialinstitute.wordpress.com/decolonial-aesthetics/
44
45
46
Imani, Nikitah Okembe-RA, ‘The Implications of Africa-Centered Conceptions of Time and Space for
Quantitative Theorizing: Limitations of Paradigmatically-bound Philosophical Meta-Assumptions’. Essay

According to Nikitah Okembe RA-Imani, professor and independent scholar of black
studies at the University of Omaha, the deconstruction of Eurocentric philosophies can go
even deeper than the microcosm that is an individual’s subjectivity. He introduces
ontological and epistemological enquiries to the concepts of metaphysics and proposes
that the age-old questions of ‘what is time?’, and ‘what is space?’ have more to do with the
gaps in Eurocentric epistemology than time or space themselves. Whilst this essay will not
delve into the realm of metaphysics, Imani does use the theoretical paradox of time travel,
and the conventional premise of Ray Bradbury’s ‘butterfly effect’ to establish contemporary
African alterities that exist separately from Eurocentric notions of free-will.
If we were to analyse a hypothetical European time traveler, their ‘free-will’ would refer to
the, “capacity to act unfettered on the basis of one’s own individual choices.”47
In
accordance to the laws of the ‘butterfly effect’, the degradation of the time traveler to the
role of mere observer in their past, would cause them to suffer a perceived lack of free-will.
“Inherent in this theoretical perspective is also the idea that they have an implicit
propensity to breach the past as a consequence of their personhood.”48
The situation’s
dynamics change completely when our Eurocentric hero is swapped with a member of the
Africana Akan community, whose free-will is connected to the, “degree of personal regard
for ethical action,49
and inextricably connected to a collective individuality. The Akan
traveler would therefore be disinclined to act in a manner that may have ominous
consequences for their community. This anecdote illustrates, “In short, the very idea that
featured in: Phillips, Rasheedah, ‘Black Quantum Futurism: Theory and Practice.’ Afrofuturist Affair (2015)
pg. 38
47
Ibid. pg. 35
48
Ibid. pg. 35
49
Ibid. pg. 36

23
time travel is incompatible with ‘free-will’ hinges on a very culturally and paradigmatically
bound definition of that latter concept.”50
The dangers of assuming a universal consensus regarding free-will can manifest in an
array of places, including political science and individual subjectivity. Decolonial scholars
like Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter were inspired by Freudian theories of the
subconscious. To them, the neurophysiological mechanisms activated by certain semantic
assumptions and statements influenced the subject’s conscious mind into accepting, and
therefore experiencing externally prescribed modes of being human51
. The pernicious
paradox of this phenomenon was that it led to the subject being, “governed by the way
‘imagined ends’ or postulates of being, truth, [and] freedom,”52
that they themselves had
come to subconsciously enforce and perpetuate.
Heteronymity
The cleansing of oppressive structures of a colonizing epistemology from one’s
subconscious is a ferocious battle in which the Afrofuturist is constantly engaged. The
speculative tools of Afrofuturism provide a framework for the exploration of narratives that
exist beyond empiricism. Spaces are formed where formal and textual mediations are
conducted to provide partial articulation for the deeper narratives that are occurring in the
subconscious mind.
Physicist Benoit Mandelbrot coined the word ‘fractal’ to describe a shape that revealed
details at all scales. His research showed that upon closer inspection, the geometric
composition of objects consisted of chaos, which, if inspected even closer again, displayed
50
Ibid. pg. 36
51
52
Ibid. pg. 329

rhythms and patterns of order, so on and so forth53
. The Euclidean world of straight lines
and geometric shapes that had hitherto represented order was no longer objectively
validated, and therefore neither was the essentialist rhetoric of fixed empiricism. The
notion of ‘fractalness’ is a helpful starting point to analyse identity, something that Kodwo
Eshun proclaimed to be, “[an] intermittent fluctuation […] the epiphenomenon of
convergent bodily processes.”54
By considering identity to be fractal in its composition, a
subject is no longer limited to a singular mode of being human.
The synthesis of a fractal identity is known as heteronymity. This collection of outsider
identities frustrates the implied values of the figure that exists as the ‘Other’. “[The]
heteronym, a many-name, one in a series of parallel names […] distributes and disperses
you into the public secrecy of open anonymity.”55
Through heteronymity one can break the
subconscious social contract that was described by Sylvia Wynter. The codes of
ethnographic representation are reinvented and rewritten by a multi-layered
consciousness that releases the subject from the shackles of imposed identity, and
empowers them to remake the rules that bind their imagination. In the words of Gilbert
Simondon, “the living being resolves its problems not by adapting itself, which is to say, by
modifying its relationship to its milieu… but by modifying itself through the invention of new
internal structures and its complete self-exertion into the axiomatic of organic problems.”56
Heteronymity, and ‘heteronymously’ inspired artwork confront what Kobena Mercer refers
to as the ‘politics of enunciation’. The ‘politics of enunciation’ is the differentiation in the
53
Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 2015] Pg. 243
54
55
Eshun, Kodwo. Quoted in: Reddell, Trace, ‘Ethnoforgery and Outsider Afrofuturism,’ Dancecult, Vol. 5,
Number 2. ‘Special Issue on Afrofuturism, [2013] pg. 97
56
Simondon, Gilbert. Quoted in: Pearson, Keith Ansell, ‘Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzche and the
Transhuman Condition’ Routledge (1997) pg. 128

25
connotative value of utterances that are denotatively mutual, based on the speaker’s racial
and gendered identity. Mercer asserts that texts have the power to, “overturn the notion
that minority artists speak for the entire community [whilst beginning to address the] shift in
politics of race and representation [that] forces us to question whether the racial identity of
the black artist can serve as a guarantee or fixative for one’s reading of aesthetic and
political value.”57
The individual elements of an abstract subjectivity each have their own
depth, and are constantly changing, preventing any empirical confinement of a given
subjectivity as a trait or characteristic. The act of exploring the fluctuating nuances of
cognition allows the subject to freely interrogate their, “post-modernity.”58
In ‘Chaosmosis an ethico-aesthetic paradigm,’ Felix Guattari wrote of ‘schizoanalysis, a
concept that is synonymous with heteronymity. “Rather than moving in the direction of
reductionist modifications which simplify the complex [schizoanalysis] will work towards its
complexification, its processual enrichment, towards the consistency of its virtual lines of
bifurcation and differentiation, in short towards its ontological heterogeneity.” 59
Through
breaking with the norms of modernity, the subject can use art to germinate a new cognitive
synthesis, producing mutated centers for the creation of subjectivities. That is to say, new
ideas mutate from the realm of cognitive abstraction into new rhizomes, new perspectives,
and new spaces for experimentation and creation. Unsurprisingly, music became the
predominant medium that Afrofuturists use to pursue their heteronymity.
57
Mercer, Kobena, ‘Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies/ [New York: Routledge.
1994.] pg. 215
58
Ibid. pg. 189
59
Guattari, Felix. ‘Chaosmosis an ethico-aesthetic paradigm,’ (translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis).
Indiana University Press (1995) Pg. 61

“Ordinarily one thought that the function of the artist was to express himself and therefore
he had to set up particular relationships. I think that this whole question of art is a question
of changing our minds, and that the function of the artist is not self-expression but self-
alteration, and the thing being altered is […] his mind.”60
John Cage
60
Dickinson, Peter. ‘CageTalk: Dialogues with and about John Cage,” University of Rochester Press (15
th
May 2014) pg. 198

27
Chapter Five: Afrofuturism and Music
“Music is a prophecy: its styles and economic organisation are ahead of the rest of society
because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities
in a given code. It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible.”61
Jacques Attali
The act of heteronymity confirms inner space as an arena for the individual to define
themselves away from generic labeling or stereotyping. The exploitation of outer space too
provides a license for one to create their own future, in a place where society didn’t
perceive black people to be.62
Outer space is the future, an escape from demons of the
past. The Afrofuturist extends the tradition of counter-memory, “reorienting the cultural
vectors of Black Atlantic temporality towards the proleptic as much as the retrospective.”63
The ‘atemporal’ abstraction of linearity is a catalyst for the speculative acceleration into
inner-space and its spaces within spaces, and into outer space, where there is a canvas
for projections of the utopian. The Afrofuturist utilises technology as “a cultural space in
which various forms of interaction and exchange, of mimesis and reversal, become
historically possible.”64
The cybernetic synthesis of cognition and algorithm constructs
networks of spatial architectures in the infinite landscape of the mind.
61
Attali, Jacques. ‘Noise: The Political Economy of Music.’ University of Minnesota Press (1977) pg. 11
62
Akomfrah, John, ‘The Last Angel of History’ [Icarus Films, 1996]
63
Eshun, Kodwo, ‘Further Considerations of Afrofuturism,’ ‘CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 3, Number
2, Summer 2003. Accessed via
https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/new_centennial_review/v003/3.2eshun.html
64
Arnold, David, ‘Europe, Technology and Colonialism in the Twentieth Century,’ ‘History and Technology,
Vol.21[2005], pg. 91

Innovative genres of Afrofuturist music were founded upon this principle of delinearity.
Conformity and standardisation were surpassed by the power of the imagination. The
‘alien’ sounds of artists like George Clinton, Underground Resistance, and Flying Lotus
challenge the supposed limitations of black music, and what society takes black music to
be. Operating through the sonic nuances of intervals, gaps, and breaks, the ‘alien
discontinuum,’ “turns away from its roots [and] opposes common sense with the force of
the fictional and the power of falsity,”65
in a vehement repudiation of a compulsory black
condition.
The website of techno pioneers Underground Resistance calls for a movement of sonic
revolution to combat the “mediocre audio and visual programming [...] [that is] stagnating
the minds of the people; building a wall between races and preventing world peace.”66
“So
called primitive animals and tribal humans,”67
have known that music and dance are the
keys to the universe for thousands of years. The ‘hermeneutics of the street’ are blasted
into the unexplored cosmos. The music has no barriers, no fixed arrangements, and no
rigid structures. It is fitting that techno would emerge out of Detroit at a time when the
automotive industry was collapsing, and convention was being destabilised by the looming
abyss of mass unemployment. This was sparked by Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms that
saw China begin its progression into state controlled capitalism, and an abundance of
cheap Chinese labour within the manufacturing industry. Detroit was on the front lines of
what economist Paul Krugman dubbed as the ‘Great Divergence,’ the great shift in
American inequality. The American Dream abandoned Detroit as, “corporations
increasingly embraces globalization and reimagined themselves as stateless entities in no
65
Eshun, Kodwo, ‘More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction,’ [Quarter Books: London 1998]
pg. 3
66
http://www.undergroundresistance.com/
67
ibid.

29
way beholden to the nations [or cities] that formed them.” 68
The stake of the city’s identity
was thrown into question with the only certainty being a period of flux. The Detroit techno
movement created the sound for the end of an industrial epoch.
Detroit Techno: Sound of the Post-Industrial Epoch
Many scholars like John H. McClendon III undertake a materialist outlook of the world,
positing that humans as social beings have the production of material means (‘productive
forces’) as their foremost concern, thereby ensuring immediate and continued survival
through long-term production. Alongside technological development, materialists believe
that production pertains to, “the social processes wherein a given set of ‘relations of
production’ forms the institutional context for how humans come to find themselves socially
located within definite socio-economic formations.”69
Detroit’s industrial collapse rendered
the social structuring of materialism obsolete, and people’s relationships with the
machinery and spaces that had hitherto defined their existence became completely
transformed. Detroit was the recipient of a rather pernicious phenomenon where individual
and collective identity formation was consumed by the symbolism of the automotive
industry. According to Frederic Jameson, “the discovery of the symbolic […] suggests that
for the individual subject as well as for groups, collectivities, and social classes, abstract
opinion is, but a symptom of some vaster pensée sauvage about history itself, whether
68
Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 2015] Pg 179
69
McClendon III, John H. ‘Materialist Philosophical Inquiry and African American Studies’, Socialism and
Democracy, Vol. 25, Issue 1, ‘What is African American Studies, Its Focus, and Future’ (2011) Pg. 74

personal or collective.”70
The hereditary effects of societal and conventional symbolism on
the unconscious mind are threatening:
“We must resist the reflex which concludes that the narrative fantasies which a collectivity
entertains about its past and its future are “merely” mythical, archetypal, and projective.
[…] This reflex is itself the last symptom of that dissociation of the private and the public,
the subject and the object, the personal and the political, which has characterized the
social life of capitalism.”71
The pioneers of Detroit techno managed to avoid this reflex by harnessing the, “productive
energy revolving around affects of dystopia,”72
to reterritorialize the industrial features that
had previously symbolized a utopian capitalist future. This “productive energy”
transcended any reverence to the skyscrapers, factories, and machines, and transcended
all ubiquitous symbols of capitalist aspiration. The music confronts the “ontological
oblivion”73
of late capitalism. The city of Detroit exists as tangible proof of, “the reversibility
of utopian capitalist fantasy and partial reality into dystopian capitalist reality.”74
Detroit
techno deracinates space from its role as the central organiser of a cultural uniformity;
space instead becomes the arena for negotiating a past that is rooted in subjective
experience rather than a conventionally established narrative. Objects and spaces were no
longer tools for social location as suggested by the dialectical materialists. Instead, they
became symbiotically aligned with humans as entities of equal parity to form a, “’techno’
sensibility, means of craft absented motive and systematic order; tekne without logos […
70
Jameson, Frederic. ‘Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?’ Science Fiction Studies,
Issue 27, Volume 9, Part 2. (1982) Pg. 147
71
Ibid Pgs. 147 & 148
72
Pope, Richard. ‘Hooked on Affect: Detroit Techno and Dystopian Digital Culture’, Dancecult: Journal of
Electronic Dance Music Culture. Vol.2, No.1 pg.25
73
Ibid. pg. 26
74
Ibid. pg. 26

31
a] survivalist modus operandi.”75
This ‘techno sensibility’ was needed to navigate and
survive the dystopia. Through music the artist became one with the machine. Ultimately,
as Richard Pope opines, “[the] productive and critical spirit [of Detroit Techno] evidently
revolves around the effects of dystopia and thus on hopelessness.”76
The music, rather
than projecting a message of optimism, was created to exist beyond the labels of capitalist
rhetoric, allowing the artist to enter hybridized space for individual cognitive exploration.
Lee Perry articulates this phenomenon clearly:
“I put my mind into the machine and the machine performs reality. Invisible thought waves,
you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs, or you
jack it into the jackpanel… I see the studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The
machine must be live and intelligent. The jackpanel is like the brain itself so you got to
patch up the brain and make the brain a living man.”77
Detroit techno coincides with this Afrofuturist emphasis on the relationship and interactions
of an individual with the world around them, avoiding any discourse contingent on
bifurcation. Techno’s utopian sensations result from the liberating realization that comes
with the total embodiment of one’s consciousness, and acceptance of a dystopian
existence78
. The music tells the story of a city where the utopian is no longer an object of
desire existing over the horizon, a story where the ‘American Dream’ is nowhere to be
found, and, therefore, neither is there an experiential separation between utopia and
dystopia. Detroit’s residents and machinery share parity as they are both structurally
75
Ibid. pg. 25
76
Ibid. pg. 27
77
Perry, Lee, quoted in: Eshun, Kodwo, ‘More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction,’ [Quarter
Books: London 1998] pg. 62
78
Electronic Dance Music Culture. Vol.2, No.1. pg. 26

excluded from the discourse and experience of a capitalist modernity. In said modernity,
the rhetoric of capitalism portrays a reality of perpetual growth and opportunity. The city of
Detroit unequivocally contradicts this narrative, and is therefore omitted from ‘modernity’.
Man and machine are both discarded from ‘reality’. Therefore, in the techno rave, “One
only becomes or senses oneself as human, as alive, in the very moment one
acknowledges one’s co-imbrication with technology; one only becomes human in this act
of reflexive apprehension.”79
Afrofuturism concurs with this observation, wherein the individual transcends the
prescriptions of modernity whilst acknowledging their own objective reality, applying their
own daily experiences to the formation of a unique subjectivity. It also shares with Detroit,
and Detroit techno, a denial of all attempts to place it. The individual commands an
understanding that their existence is a multi-layered, and multi-surfaced phenomenon
consisting of multiple competing senses and affects. The sensory experiences of techno
are not about sound as a signifier for reproductions. They are about pure sensation, the
subjective aesthesis evoked by the music. The musical dynamics deal with the real that
manifests beyond linguistically quantifiable representation. It stimulates emotions and
thoughts that, due to the inarticulable dynamics of sound and notational differentiation, are
unique to the observer. The passive identity that emerges in the rave only exists in a
deferential relationship to other terms, until it dissolves through the sieve that is the
cognitive rhizome of structured etymology. Techno, as with all music, allows the individual
to create meaning through its own dynamic, a dynamic which cannot be represented by
language and representation, and exists as a whole within itself – never having to move
into a linguistic space.
79
Ibid. pg. 40

33
Kodwo Eshun describes the formative properties of music, stating that, “When kinetic
sensations organized into art are transmitted through a single sensory channel, through
this single channel they can convey all the other senses at once, rhythmic, dynamic,
tactile, and kinetic sensations that make use of both the auditory and visual channels.”80
Meaning is derived from the relationships of notes and progressions in context with one
another. Each song has its own internal logic and self-reflexive nature. The artist and the
DJ create a world of sound that is completely abstracted from the everyday world of
human inhabitance, every song an individual universe in the multiverse of sound.
Marshall McLuhan’s notions of ‘visual’ and ‘acoustic’ space further explore these sensory
intricacies, and are suitable metrics for the evaluation of the Detroit case. A retrospective
analysis of Detroit shows a tremendous emphasis on the proliferation of visual space and
linearity, a ‘Fordian’ reality whose objectivity was verified by the imposing, visual might of
the automotive industry. In Detroit’s post-industrial epoch sight was no longer the purveyor
of experience, and one had to rely upon the other senses to create cognitive ‘techno
sensibilities’ and navigate the dystopian environment. Space itself was no longer, “a kind
of neutral grid on which cultural difference, historical memory, and societal organisation
are inscribed.”81
Detroit had become a city where conventional, visual sensibilities were
outdated and misguided. The key to enjoying techno comes from the detection and
response to minute rhythmic differences within the tracks,82
and the overall combination of
cognitive awareness and robotic automation. Its infectious rhythms are the creation of the
synergetic mutation and transcoding of milieus haunted by the sensory monotony of mass
80
pg. 72
81
Gupta, Akhil & Ferguson, James, ‘Beyond “Culture” : Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.’
Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 1 [February 1992] pg. 7
82
Electronic Dance Music Culture. Vol.2, No. 1 Pg. 30

production. Immersed in the rhythms, the subject enters a sonic space where, “subjectivity
[emerges and resingularises] as a machinic array – which is automatable and repeatable
through the sequence and loop of electronic production.”83
Techno is truly an apposite
soundtrack for the conventionally abstracted ‘acoustic’ space of Detroit.
Detroit techno’s distinct lack of an aesthetic restricts any infiltration from the linearity of
pronounced visual space, and thereby eludes the toxic annotations of observers who,
through stylistic markers of identity, are keen to associate themselves with a subculture.
Without a distinguishable aesthetic, or markers of identity beyond the autonomous
formation of subjectivity, Detroit techno cannot be historically compartmentalized and,
“simply placed within a progressive history running parallel to official conservative
culture.”84
The movement’s beauty lies within its existence in a state of perpetual flux that
evades the modernist paradigm and structural trappings of subculture. The subculture
phenomenon inherently, “attempts to preserve the idea of distinct ‘culture’ while
acknowledging the relation of different culture to a dominant culture within the same
geographic and territorial space.”85
By re-appropriating the ‘ruins’ of the automotive
hegemon into a communal space at the intersection of the city’s industrial past and post-
industrial present, the Detroit scene, “[created a situation where [people] can feel places,
unregulated by sensory filters and mediating social conditioning.”86
This space’s character
is constructed and reconstructed by this complex interaction between past and present,
83
84
Electronic Dance Music Culture. Vol.2, No.. pg. 35
85
Gupta, Akhil & Ferguson, James, ‘Beyond “Culture” Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.’ Cultural
Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 1 [February 1992] pg. 7 (NOTE: Gupta & Ferguson were speaking about cultural
assimilation and cultural space, but their turn of phrase was useful within the subculture context in which I
placed it.)
86
Garrett, Bradley L., ‘Undertaking recreational trespass: urban exploration and infiltration.’ Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 39 (1) [2014] pg. 6 (NOTE: Garrett used was explaining the
motivations behind urban exploration, but his words were suitable to explain the intentions of the Detroit
techno scene.)

35
and the immersive negotiation with spaces and machinery was, ”not an attempt to build a
‘new’ grand narrative or resistance but to subversively reimagine what already exists,
complicating urban identity and imagination.”87
When we take into consideration the
enormous social consequences and vast quantity of spatial remnants from Detroit’s
industrial collapse, it is undeniable that Detroit techno is haunted by many phantoms from
the city’s past. Historical phantoms are omnipresent in the field of Afrofuturism, and the
next section of this essay will discuss hauntology, which posits that the ghosts of the past
can reemerge and impact the future. Hauntology will be explored in the wider context of
Intercultural cinema, and the cinematography of John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film
Collective. The cinematic case studies will also elaborate upon the importance of collage
to Afrofuturist artists, and a further analysis of Krista Franklin’s ‘Money Folder’, and
sampling in sonic futurism will supplement this argument.
87
ibid. pg. 6

Chapter Six: Afrofuturism and Hauntology
Defamiliarisation is an artistic device that is imposed to obscure the automation of
perceptual formation within the audience. It aims to enlighten the audience about the
limitations of vision in being able to gauge a complete evaluation of an object of event.
Anterior processes in the spatial and temporal realm are to be understood as exerting their
own influence on perception.
There is perhaps no figure in history that advocated Defamiliarisation as strongly as
German playwright, Bertold Brecht. Brecht innovated the ‘Verfremdungseffekt’, roughly
translated in English; this means the ‘alienation’ or ‘distancing’ effect. Through the
‘Verfremdungseffekt’ Brecht sought to turn the audience from passive consumers being
entertained, into critical participants who pondered and objectively observed the
performance that was taking place in front of their very eyes. Brecht wanted to
defamiliarise the audience from their preconceptions of theatre, and incite them to
intensely scrutinize the spectacle before them, seeing it for what it really was, an elaborate
construction with socio-economic contexts that affected its production, narratives, and
existence. He wanted to distance the audience from the actor/character dynamics that are
common to most plays, and empower them to take a stand based on what they saw in the
performance. Brecht wanted to transcend the ‘Western approach’ to theatre, which he saw
as focusing on making the audience as close as possible to the characters and events
based on stage in an illusion of reality that replicates real life identically, and encouraged
spectators to escape the issues in their own eyes by becoming blissfully ignorant in their
engagement with the illusory style on stage.

37
Brecht achieved the ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ in many ways: he stripped the performance of
detailed scenes or sets, displayed the theatrical elements such as lighting instruments and
special effects, and had the actors remove the fourth wall by confronting the audience
directly. By breaking the fourth wall, the audience’s acceptance or rejections of the
character’s words is placed in the conscious realm, not in the spectator’s subconscious, so
they are forced to adopt critical roles that can be applied to their own lives. There was a
didactic function to Brechtian theatre that hoped to maintain a lasting effect on his
spectators who would subsequently go on to question the faults in their own surroundings
and acknowledge the multi-faceted truths of reality. Brecht’s idea of a participatory form of
spectatorship featured a phenomenon known as ‘attentive recognition’, “the way a
perceiver oscillates between seeing the object, recalling virtual images that it brings to
memory, and comparing the virtual object thus created with the one before [them].”88
With
‘attentive recognition’ the viewer delineates from automatically generated perceptions and
applies their own knowledge to extrapolate their own truths from the plethora of
ambiguities that are inherent to any event, text, or representation.
As a dissection of all of the layers that combine to constitute a performance, the
‘Verfremdungseffekt’ is a relevant precursor to hauntology. Essentially, hauntology shares
with Brechtian theatre the same function of deconstruction. The past is deconstructed and
shown as it exists and is perceived from inside the present. Hauntology is about
transcending the forcible reconciliation of representations as reality to focus on the social
dimensions of these representations. Through deconstruction, these social dimensions are
deconstructed and excavated until internal contradictions are discovered, and in turn, a
88
Marks, Laura U., ‘The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses’, Duke
University Press [January 2000] pg. 48

space is carved out for alternatives. Hauntology exists in a temporal dyschronia89
where
traces of lost futures spasmodically emerge from the past and unsettle the present. In an
Afrofuturist context, “hauntology is the proper temporal mode for a history made up of
gaps, erased names, and sudden abductions.”90
By reassessing the validity of historical
texts and discourses that have so often proliferated the subjugation of people of the
African diaspora, hauntology opens a space for the archaeological reevaluation, and the
identification of new truths and narratives that had hitherto the point of observation
remained undetected. Through deconstruction, the phantoms of history that cannot be
‘ontologised’ away91
are reintroduced into relevance and discourse, and the singular
narratives associated with official historical record are shown to be incomplete. The
aesthetic effect of hauntology can be applied to a wide variety of texts and subjects. As we
will see in Krista Franklin’s ‘Money Folder’, the hauntological aesthetic arises from the
contextual factors surrounding the image. Franklin’s collage technique abstracts the
images in the piece and imbues them with new meanings that case a spotlight on the
lurking specters of the past.
Sampling and Collage in Afrofuturism
Sampling and collage are mediums for cutting, ripping, and tearing apart normative culture,
and the oppressive and hegemonic structures of society. They allow an artist to subvert
linear narratives and ascribe a text with their own, personal meaning. The sample also
empowers the viewer/listener to formulate their own perspectives, their own aesthesis
Meanings of a text that have been established on face value are destroyed and hidden
89
Fisher, Mark, ‘The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology’ Dancecult, Vol. 5, Number 2.
‘Special Issue on Afrofuturism’. [2013] Pg. 48
90
Ibid. Pg 52
91
Harper, Adam, ‘Hauntology: The Past Inside the Present’. [27
TH
October 2009] Accessed online via
http://rougesfoam.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/hauntology-past-inside-present.html

39
ones are revealed. Contrary to universal hegemony collage is “a metaphor for universal
continuous change. It is both the result of a blind impulse and directed process. The
transformation is driven by the desire of each entity to be itself, blending into a wider
landscape where other objects interact.”92
Collage is one of the many techniques that Ohio
born artist Krista Franklin uses in her work. In ‘Money Folder’ (Figure 1) she uses collage
to construct an alarming scene where it is insinuated that the power of money and
purported financial equality provides a sufficient premise with which to atone for, and forget
the horrors of historical oppression. The central figure of the piece is a ‘black-faced’
vaudeville era performer whose face is awash with an expression of petrified helplessness.
He is subserviently licking the white glove in his hand, an interaction that is notably
highlighted by Franklin, as the man’s tongue is the only coloured element of an otherwise
monochromatic figure. In black and white we have the circus of top hats, make up, and
stage shows, all relics of the past. In the present, live and in colour, we have the pink
tongue of subservience. Franklin shows that while it may not be as explicit or elaborate as
it used to be, the power structures that reinforce the disparity between black and white are
remain as effectual as ever
The collage appears as a sequential layering of processes. The foundational layer has
‘Devant’, ‘Frente’, and ‘Fron’ (with a missing ‘t’) listed down, all of which mean ‘in front of’
in the three main colonial languages: English, Spanish, and French. This insinuates a
disregard for the past, and a focus on the present. The next layer, a loose coupon for
‘Magic’ shaving powder, confirms the erasure of the past. ‘Magic’s’ logo is of a razor next
to the words ‘no more trouble’. The powder is marketed as being “formulated for black men
92
Gomez, Laura, ‘SeedeR Side - Collage as a subversion of Culture’ Klassik Magazine (November 5, 2015)
Accessed online via http://www.klassikmagazine.com/seederside-collage-subversion-culture/

to help stop razor bumps.”93
The metaphor of a ‘smooth and clean shave’ is fitting for
‘Money Folder’. The folded edge of the coupon shows that it is being removed for use,
presumably in an act to forget the ‘rough and bumpy’ past in favour of an embrace of the
purported ‘smoothness’ of modernity. The packaging is enticing the black man to rid
himself of the vicissitudes of his skin’s past.
Dollar bills appear all over the collage, fragmented over the canvas and the only entity that
interacts with every other piece of the artwork. Opaque hundred dollar bills provide the
foundations upon which the character, the stereo player, and the advertisement lie. A
translucent fifty-dollar bill disappears further as the coupon is extracted. The scene is a
paradox. Without money one has no means to a voice, as portrayed by the stereo,
gramophone, and mask, yet money is being spent to ‘remove’ the ‘razor’ sharp
constituents of history. Meanwhile, the objects at the front of the collage lay benign. The
stereo’s volume gauges indicate silence; the gramophone’s needle is set aside, and the
mask lies dormant on its side with its eyes closed, dead. Culture has been rendered utterly
helpless, and the voices of yesteryear have been shelved and silenced.
Magic, according to parent company L’Oreal, “believe everyone should be able to
celebrate his or her beauty with confidence. And for people of colour that means they
should be able to express how they want to look, and, ultimately, who they uniquely want
to be.”94
Krista Franklin refutes this ‘ultimate’ correlation. ‘Money Folder’ makes a
statement that is akin to Mignolo’s ‘AestheTics vs AestheSis’ thesis, as Franklin
unequivocally rejects the validity of a societal reconstruction that she regards are purely
aesthetic. Aesthetic, surface transformations are in no way capable of exorcising the
specters of the past.
93
http://www.loreal.ca/brand/consumer-products-division/softsheencarson
94
ibid.

41
95
Fig 1
Sampling is the key theme of John Akomfrah’s 1996 film, ‘The Last Angel of History’, in
which the main protagonist is known as the ‘Data Thief’. A metaphor for Afrofuturism, the
‘Data Thief’ travels through time acquiring artifacts of Afro-diasporic expression in an
attempt to discover the ‘mothership connection’. The price that he pays for traveling
through time is that he forfeits the right to be a part of his society’s modernity. The most
effective form of data thievery is sampling, and, by utilising this method, The ‘Data Thief’
uses both the past to create new visions of the future, and the knowledge that he brings
from the future to re-contextualise the past. For a population in which many have no base
95
Franklin, Krista, ‘Money Folder’. Image accessed online via http://africanah.org/unveiling-visions-krista-
franklin/

heritage, sampling is the motion capture and adaptation mechanism that is deployed for
survival. Sampling is a means for navigating an experience of constant flux. Sonically,
sampling allows for a simultaneous cross-referencing of generational creators in which all
eras of black music are digitally immortalised.
“Sonic futurism doesn’t locate you in tradition, instead it dislocates you from origins.”96
The
sonic futurism breaks from genealogies, and rejects all notions of a compulsory black
condition. Afrofuturist musicians travel through time, taking inspiration from their
predecessors and collecting samples to surgically stitch together an innovative new
creation. In the sonic realm, hauntology appears in the form of a sample. The sample
disrupts the listener’s auditory experience, and adds a new dimension to the act of
listening where the listener is cognizant of the intrusion into the present of a fragment of
the past. The consequential fictions created by recursive sampling adopt meaning, and
imbue past sounds with a layer of hauntological significance. Writing in 1957, Norman
Mailer brilliantly articulated the dilemma of the Afrofuturist musician, “we are obliged to
meet the tempo of the present and the future with reflexes and rhythms which come from
the past; the inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of the past strangle our
potentiality for responding to new.”97
Sampling is a means through which the musician can overcome this dilemma, and free
themselves from the obligations and ‘choking’ grip of the past. Sonic hauntology allows for
a diversion from the constraints on innovation that are caused by a linear continuation of
the cultural narratives of the past, into a space of possibility that caters for the creation of
new sounds that are unique to contemporaneity. Mark Fisher captured the synergy
between Afrofuturism and ‘sonic hauntology’ perfectly, “Afrofuturism unravels any linear
96
pg. 2
97
Mailer, Norman, Quoted in: ibid. pg 72

43
model of the future, disrupting the idea that the future will be a simple supersession of the
past. Time in Afrofuturism is plastic, stretchable and prophetic – it is, in other words, a
technologized time, in which past and future are subject to ceaseless de- and
recomposition.”98
Afrofuturism and Cinema
I will now discuss hauntology in Afrofuturist film using John Akomfrah’s 1986 video essay,
‘Handsworth Songs’ as a case example. However, just as it is impossible to write about
Afrofuturism outside the context of Decoloniality, it is impossible to discuss Afrofuturist film
separate from Intercultural cinema. Intercultural cinema originated in the new cultural
formations that resulted from, “global flows of immigration, exile, and diaspora.”99
Etymologically, ‘Intercultural’ indicates a context that cannot be confined to a single
culture, and the cross-cultural mediation of a work across multiple cultures. Intercultural
cinema offers a multitude of ways of knowing and representing the world, and as a
consequence, the films, “suspend the representational conventions [of normative cinema],
especially the ideological presumption that cinema can represent reality.”100
Unsurprisingly, the deconstruction of dominant histories is a typical feature of Intercultural
cinema.
Intercultural cinema travels back and forth through time, “inventing its own histories and
memories to posit an alternative to the overwhelming erasures, silences, and lies of official
98
Fisher, Mark, ‘The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology’ Dancecult, Vol. 5, Number 2.
‘Special Issue on Afrofuturism’. [2013] Pg. 47
99
Marks, Laura U., ‘The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses’, Duke
University Press [January 2000] Pg. 1
100
Ibid. Pg. 1

history.”101
When confronting this lack of communally stored history, the filmmakers
dismantle the officially recognised history and reconstruct their own. These deconstructive
excavations do not yield a simple truth, and in between the dismantling of an official
discourse and the emergence of an alternate discourse, a moment of suspension arises. It
is at this moment where Intercultural works, “begin to call upon the other forms of cultural
knowledge embedded in fetish-like objects, bodily memory, and the memory of the
senses.”102
This ‘hauntological gap’ is a space for the process of discovery. Intercultural
cinema tries to coax the memories out of all kinds of historical artifacts including film and
images. In instances where there are none of these artifacts available to interrogate,
filmmakers turn to recollection images. A recollection image embodies a past event that
has no match in the present image repertoire. They embody the traces of events that have
since been buried, but cannot represent the event itself. In this situation, filmmakers can
use juxtaposition, montage, and the Defamiliarisation of common images, ‘clichés’, from
their context in order to encourage the viewer to make sense of the image in its new form.
Intercultural cinema shares this idea of a participatory audience and ‘attentive recognition’
with the Brechtian ‘Verfremdungseffekt’. The optical image is frequently used to provoke
evocative contemplations from the memory of the viewer, and allow them to bypass the
normative role of passive consumption.
The ‘cultural hybridity’ that is implicit to Intercultural cinema pushes the limits of genre and
conducts an archaeological excavation of fixed cultural identities. In doing so, the cinema
uncovers the knowledge claims upon which these fixities are based, and exposes the
power relations that are hidden in the fragmented nuances of modernity. The implicative
cinema dislocates the viewer and demands their engagement. The result is that the viewer
101
Ibid. Pg. 24
102
Ibid. Pg.5

45
acknowledges that meaning inheres within the image, irrespective of whether or not they
can decipher it.
Cultural memory is located in the gaps between sources of recorded history and memory,
and so, suspicious of the ability of the visual to properly convey cultural memory,
Intercultural cinema is, “the attempt to translate to an audiovisual medium the knowledges
of the body, including the unrecordable memories of the senses.”103
Images are inherently
multi-sensory, and can evoke a variety of somatic sensations. This, then, is the goal of the
Intercultural filmmakers. Films can induce contrasting bodily sensations and cognitive
rhizomes that are so intense that they cause a viewer to question the dynamics of their
mental deductions that culminated in the form of a reaction of interpretation. The imagery
of Intercultural cinema is used as a source for what can yet be thought, rather than a
record of that which has already been thought.104
Intercultural and Afrofuturist cinema operate at the boundaries of the ‘unthought’, “slowly
building a language in which to think it.”105
That which has been said is unsuitable because
it has a tendency for categorization, and because there is so much that it has not been
able to say. The cinema aims to search underneath the huge mound of layers that form
years of discursive representation to reveal the histories that remain unsaid. As Gilles
Deleuze wrote in ‘Cinema II’, ”If we want to grasp an event we must not show it, we must
not pass along the event, but plunge into it, go through all the geological layers that are its
eternal history (and not simply a more or less distant past).” 106
The Black Audio Film Collective (BAF) emerged in the 1980s in the context of a new Black
intellectual class within the United Kingdom. Alongside other groups such as the Sankofa
103
Ibid. Pg. 5
104
Deleuze, Gilles Quoted in: Ibid. Pg. 26
105
Ibid. Pg. 29
106
Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Cinema II’, A&C Black [1 March 2005], Pg. 244

Film and Video Collective, BAF were part of a larger movement of new modes of Black
cinematic discourse. Kobena Mercer argued that these new modes of discourse made the
filmic signifier, “a material reality in its own right,”107
and that the goal of the movement was
to, “reclaim and excavate a creole counter memory of black struggle in Britain, itself
always repressed, erased, and made invisible in the ‘popular memory’ of dominant film
and media discourse.”108
Cinematography provided an alternative archive to the
frameworks of conventional discourse that could store knowledge, memories, and
sensibilities unique to the Afro-diasporic population. Cinema became a medium for the
portrayal of a modernity completely informed by Afro-diasporic experiences and traditions.
The films of the BAF were not interested in showing solidarity towards existing
communities, despite the opportunity for this that cinema afforded. Instead, their films were
interested in political transformation over identity, and in providing a space for becoming
where Afro-diasporic people could come into being. The collective wanted to explore the
histories that would never otherwise obtain validation from the official British historical
record.
According to Jacques Derrida good cinema is, “the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms […]
It’s the art of allowing ghosts to come back.”109
Good cinema illuminates the ghosts of the
past that influenced the actions and mannerisms of those within the picture. It offers
development about the contextual factors surrounding the creation of the scene, and it
sheds light on the unresolved truths that the scene connotes. John Akomfrah and the BAF
achieved all of this with ‘Handsworth Songs’ in 1986. The film attempted to trace to origins
of the 1985 Handsworth riots in inner city Birmingham. These riots were the part of a
107
Mercer, Kobena, Quoted in: Marks, Laura U., ‘The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment,
and the Senses’, Duke University Press [January 2000] Pg. 12
108
Ibid. Pg. 12
109
‘Ghost Dance’, dir. By Ken McMullen (1983: Channel Four Films)

47
nationwide call for self-representation from elements of the Afro-diasporic community, and
‘Handsworth Songs’ was the BAF’s response to the racist response that these
disturbances incurred. Akomfrah elaborated on this in a 2015 interview110
. Akomfrah felt
that the sociological vs. racial arguments of Left and Right were too narrow in their scope
to explain the rioting. The Left’s explanation of social deprivation and lack of employment
opportunities were refuted by the Right’s claims that if indeed this was the case, then why
were there no people rioting in other socially deprived, predominantly white areas of the
country. Akomfrah and the BAF accepted the premise that the riots were criminal, and
racial in their nature, but they did not see this as confronting the underlying structural
issues behind the disturbances. Cognizant that the public debate surrounding the riots
would have a short half-life, the BAF intended ‘Handsworth Songs’ to be an addendum
supplement to these debates111
, and retrospectively bring a new dimension to the
questions of blame and responsibility. Akomfrah elaborated on the importance of a new
dimensional approach, saying, “Who in their right might leaves a small village in the middle
of nowhere… [And] incurs a ten-year debt to ship their family across seas and oceans, to
come and settle in shit-holes across the British Isles just to cause trouble? … How had
they arrived at this moment where causing trouble seemed the only option?”112
Akomfrah
attributes no legitimacy to the voices of the present unless people accept the presence of
voices from the past.
‘Handsworth Songs’ is a visual montage of both handheld and archival footage, and
surreal imagery juxtaposed with a chaotic soundtrack of footage and interviews intertwined
110
‘Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015: John Akomfrah in Conversation’ YouTube video: Duration: 1:26:27, posted
August 5
th
2015. Accessed via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6Mr2heCoeM
111
‘John Akomfrah in Conversation with Alan Marcus’ Vimeo video: Duration: 1:04:34, posted March 27
th
2008. Accessed via https://vimeo.com/830033
112
Ibid.

with free-form jazz. The multi-layered, experimental style expresses the disjunction
between orders of knowledge, official history, and personal memory. Indeed, there is a
correlation between events and representation that influence the memories and extracted
truths of an event. The juxtaposition of clashing sounds and imagery cause a continuous
shift in the parallax with which one views the recordings, and makes the viewer question
their own perceptions of history itself. For Akomfrah, montage was a much more effective
alternative to a traditional interview format because he was reluctant to accept the veracity
of the ethnographic voice and experience, feeling it would reveal nothing about the
oppressive structural features of British culture.113
Akomfrah imposes hauntological
context onto the film using various visual and sonic effects aside from collage. These
include visual fragmentation, fading, grainy imagery, and low-fi, haunting sonic effects.
Furthermore, his use of surreal imagery emphasises the retrospective dynamic of memory.
As with a dream, we craft a deeper sense of events in their aftermath than when we
experience them in the present. Akomfrah’s use of “hauntologising” devices attaches
memories to newsreel footage that would not otherwise exist without them. A notable
example is the footage that shows sharply dressed, excited looking Caribbean immigrants
disembarking from the ships that brought them to Britain. The conventional insinuation of
this footage is optimistic and jovial, hinting at the grand occasion of immigrants finally
landing on the shores of the Great British promise land. In ‘Handsworth Songs’ there is a
collaging of footage and historical affects from across generations and temporalities. This
is effective because it aestheticizes the dissipation of hope, and the escalation into civil
discontent. The stock footage that had come to metonymise a collective memory had its
meaning erased and replaced with a construction that displayed the presence of many
113
Sheffield Doc/Fest 2015: John Akomfrah in Conversation’ YouTube video: Duration: 1:26:27, posted
August 5
th
2015. Accessed via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6Mr2heCoeM

49
historical gaps and phantoms. In ‘Handsworth Songs’, collage provides a visualization of
historical deconstruction.
In adherence to the ‘rhizomatic praxis’ behind Afrofuturism, John Akomfrah is an artist who
is concerned with ‘pluralised hauntologies’, “the many versions and representations of the
past in the present, in numerous images and sources, as opposed to the singularity of
linear narrative and depiction.”114
The abstraction of these hauntologies informs the viewer
of the dynamics that inform their retrospective perceptions. An example from ‘Handsworth
Songs’ is the foreboding montage of dislocated archival footage that interrogates the
viewer’s cognitive perceptions of the disturbances. By dislocating the footage from the
immediacy and urgency of the televised news, Akomfrah challenges the viewer to see
beyond the criminal activity and gain a deeper understanding of the context behind the
acts. The uncovered phantoms that haunt the film invite the viewer to reclaim the counter-
memories that are contained within the text. The parallaxes inflicted by these phantoms
simultaneously temporally dislocate and re-engage the observer in the alternative realities
that are contained within each recorded permutation, with the viewer seeking to locate
cultural memory within the pervading ‘hauntological-ontological gap’. This form of
interaction that is evoked by Intercultural, and Afrofuturist cinema, Krista Franklin’s
artwork, and sonic - (Afro)futurism clarifies the didactic and beneficial potential that
collage, layering, and all forms of deconstruction hold for Afrofuturism.
114
Holdsworth, Claire M., ‘Hauntologies: The Ghost, Voice, and the Gallery’, [2012] Accessed online via
https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/library/documents/hauntologies-the-ghost-voice-and-the-gallery/

Chapter Seven: Conclusion
“Forget red zoning, and food stamps, gentrification, and gang violence. They define
nothing about who you are, who you were, who you shall become. You are nature, you are
the omniverse, you are carbon, assembled of gases from the far reaches. Solar winds,
thousands and millions and millions of thousands, and millions of millions of years ago
coming into being. Combining in the depths far beyond the reaches of civilisations and
empires
…
All of them consist of you, you are all of them. Space is so vast and you occupy that
space. Don’t think about that space you wanna occupy, you don’t need to see it, to believe
it, to feel it, to envision it. You don’t need to see it, you can feel it, you ARE it! Think about
outer space, fuck the ghetto. Think. About. Outer. Space.”115
So perfectly do the above lyrics from Hieroglyphic Being & J.I.T.U. Ahn Sahm Buhl’s, ‘F—
K the Ghetto – Think About Outer Space’, encapsulate the ethos of Afrofuturism, that it
may well stake a claim for being the quintessential anthem of Afrofuturism. In this essay, I
have argued that in order to gain a true understanding of Afrofuturism, one must abandon
all attempts at reducing it to a few, common characteristics, and understand that
Afrofuturism exists in flux so as to avoid the structural trappings of the pervading
Eurocentric modernist paradigm. Indeed, Afrofuturism’s true essence is that it is always in
the process of never becoming, and that it can never be completed.116
115
Hieroglyphic Being & J.I.T.U. Ahn Sahm Buhl, ‚’F—K the Ghetto – Think About Outer Space,’ From the album:
‘We Are Not The First,’ RVNG Intl. [2015]
116
NOTE: Friedrich Karl Wilhelm von Schlegel used similar terminology in his description of German Romanticism,
which I found to be relevant to my conception of Afrofuturism. See http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-
dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=368

51
To reiterate the definition that I gave at the beginning of this essay, Afrofuturism refers to
the Afro-diasporic creation of art and discourse that strives to transcend the
epistemological uniformity of societal modernity through pluriversal collaboration across
cultures, and the production and exploration of individual polyphonic subjectivities.
Throughout the essay, I explored various components of this broad definition.
Afrofuturism’s rejection of any notions of universality are particularly prevalent in chapters
three and four, which discuss Decoloniality and autonomous subjectivity formation.
However, this remains a recursive theme throughout the entire essay. Chapters three and
six, on Decoloniality and Intercultural cinema are most explicit about cross-cultural
collaboration within Afrofuturism, although sampling has shown how this can be achieved
sonically (as seen in chapter five). Individual polyphonic subjectivities are explored in the
most depth in chapter 4, about subjectivity formation, and chapter five, which talks about
the post-symbolic, multi-sensory experience of the techno rave.
Overall, this essay showed how all of the aforementioned components combine with a
deconstructive praxis to ascribe Afrofuturism with its subversive value, and, in doing so,
make Afrofuturism an invaluable tool of expression for people of the African diaspora.

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A Deconstructive Exploration Of Afrofuturism.Pdf

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