Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  The cosmogenetic moment

  In 1995, the London-based group Black Audio Film Collective released The Last Angel of History, also known as The Mothership Connection, their essay film which remains the most elaborate exposition on the convergence of ideas that is Afrofuturism. Through the persona of a time-traveling nomadic figure known as the Data Thief, The Last Angel of History created a network of links between music, space, futurology, and diaspora. African sonic processes are here reconceived as telecommunication, as the distributed components of a code to a black secret technology that is the key to diasporic future. The notion of a black secret technology allows Afrofuturism to reach a point of speculative acceleration.

  Imagine the archaeologists squinting at the cracked screen of the microvideo installation that shows the Data Thief trapped in the history vaults of West Africa . . .

  Black Audio director John Akomfrah and scriptwriter Edward George integrated a thesis from critic John Corbett’s “Brothers from Another Planet,” a 1993 essay whose title references John Sayles’s 1983 science-fiction movie of an alien that takes on African American identity to escape his interstellar captors. Akomfrah and George take up in particular the oeuvres of Sun Ra and his group, the Arkestra; Lee Perry, reggae producer, composer, songwriter, and architech of dub reggae; and Parliament-Funkadelic funk producer George Clinton, three figures analyzed in terms of their use of the recording studio, the vinyl record, and the support of art work and record label as the vehicle for concept albums that sustain mythological, programmatic, and cosmological world pictures.

  Corbett pointed to Ra’s group, the Arkestra; Perry’s 1970s recording studio, the Black Ark; and the Mothership Connection, Parliament’s 1974-1981 album cycle to argue that “largely independent of one other, each is working with a shared set of mythological images and icons such as space iconography, the idea of extraterrestriality and the idea of space exploration.”

  Identification code unidentified

  By the 1980s, the emergent digital technology of sequencers, samplers, synthesizers, and software applications began to scramble the ability to assign identity and thereby racialize music. Familiar processes of racial recognition were becoming unreliable. Listeners could no longer assume musicians were racially identical to their samples.

  If racial identification became intermittent and obscure to the listener, for the musician, a dimension of heteronomy became available. The human-machine interface became both the condition and the subject of Afrofuturism. The cyborg fantasies of the Detroit techno producers, such as Juan Atkins and Derrick May, were used both to alienate themselves from sonic identity and to feel at home in alienation. Thelma Golden’s notes towards the formulation of a twenty-first-century “post-black” aesthetic describe this cultural moment of studio-based sonic process more satisfactorily than it does gallery-based visual practice.

  The implications of revisionism

  Gilroy argues that the articulations sketched above tend to overlap with historical flashpoints. To analyse black popular futures in this way is to situate them as fallout from social movements and liberation movements, if not as direct parts of those movements. These moments may be historicized by politico-spiritual movements such as Black Christian Eschatology and Black Power, and postwar politico-esoteric traditions such as the Nation of Islam (NOI), Egyptology, Dogon cosmology, and the Stolen Legacy thesis.

  The Nation of Islam’s eschatology combined a racialized account of human origin with a catastrophic theory of time. Ogotomelli, the Dogon mystic, provided an astronomical knowledge of the “Sirius B” Dog Star, elaborated by French ethnographers Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, that demonstrated a compensatory and superior African scientific knowledge.

  Egyptology’s desire to recover the lost glories of a preindustrial African past was animated by a utopian authoritarianism. Before Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1988), George G. M. James’s Stolen Legacy (1989) simultaneously emphasised the white conspiracies that covered up the stolen legacy of African science, reversing Hegelian thought by insisting upon the original African civilization.

  Afrofuturism is by no means naively celebratory. The reactionary Manichaenism of the Nation of Islam, the regressive compensation mechanisms of Egyptology, Dogonesque cosmology, and the totalizing reversals of Stolen Legacy–style Afrocentricity are immediately evident. By excavating the political moments of such vernacular futurologies, a lineage of competing worldviews that seek to reorient history comes into focus. In identifying the emergence and dissemination of belief systems, it becomes critical to analyze how, in Gilroy’s words, “even as the movement that produced them fades, there remains a degree of temporal disturbance.”

  By creating temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that disturb the linear time of progress, these futurisms adjust the temporal logics that condemned black subjects to prehistory. Chronopolitically speaking, these revisionist historicities may be understood as a series of powerful competing futures that infiltrate the present at different rates.

  Revisionist logic is shared by autodidact historians like Sun Ra and George G. M. James of Stolen Legacy, and contemporary intellectuals such as Toni Morrison, Greg Tate, and Paul D. Miller. Her argument that the African slaves that experienced capture, theft, abduction, and mutilation were the first moderns is important for positioning slavery at the heart of modernity. The cognitive and attitudinal shift demanded by her statement also yokes philosophy together with brutality, and binds cruelty to temporality. The effect is to force together separated systems of knowledge, so as to disabuse apparatuses of knowledge of their innocence.

  Afrofuturism can be understood as an elaboration upon the implications of Morrison’s revisionary thesis. In a 1991 interview with the writer Mark Sinker, cultural critic Greg Tate suggested that the bar between the signifier and the signified could be understood as standing for the Middle Passage that separated signification (meaning) from sign (letter). This analogy of racial terror with semiotic process spliced the world of historical trauma with the apparatus of structuralism. The two genealogies crossbred with a disquieting force that contaminated the latter and abstracted the former.

  The uses of alienation

  Afrofuturism does not stop at correcting the history of the future. Nor is it a simple matter of inserting more black actors into science-fiction narratives. These methods are only baby steps towards the more totalizing realization that, in Greg Tate’s formulation, Afrodiasporic subjects live the estrangement that science-fiction writers envision. Black existence and science fiction are one and the same.

  In The Last Angel of History, Tate argued that “The form itself, the conventions of the narrative in terms of the way it deals with subjectivity, focuses on someone who is at odds with the apparatus of power in society and whose profound experience is one of cultural dislocation, alienation and estrangement. Most science fiction tales dramatically deal with how the individual is going to contend with these alienating, dislocating societies and circumstances and that pretty much sums up the mass experiences of black people in the postslavery twentieth century.”

  At the century’s start, Dubois termed the condition of structural and psychological alienation as double consciousness. The condition of alienation, understood in its most general sense, is a psychosocial inevitability that all Afrodiasporic art uses to its own advantage by creating contexts that encourage a process of disalienation. Afrofuturism’s specificity lies in assembling conceptual approaches and countermemorial mediated practices in order to access triple consciousness, quadruple consciousness, previously inaccessible alienations.

  Imagine that later, on that night, after the site is sealed off, ready for the next day, after the AAAP have all been disinfected, one of the archaeologists dreams of six turntables; the realization of the Invisible Man’s dream of hearing Louis Armstrong’s “What Did I Have to Do to Be So Black and Blue” multiplied to the power of 6.

  The extraterrestrial turn

  Afrofu
turism uses extraterrestriality as a hyperbolic trope to explore the historical terms, the everyday implications of forcibly imposed dislocation, and the constitution of Black Atlantic subjectivities: from slave to negro to colored to evolué to black to African to African American.

  Extraterrestriality thereby becomes a point of transvaluation through which this variation over time, understood as forcible mutation, can become a resource for speculation. It should be understood not so much as escapism, but rather as an identification with the potentiality of space and distance within the high-pressure zone of perpetual racial hostility.

  It is not that black subjectivities are waiting for science-fiction authors to articulate their lifeworlds. Rather, it is the reverse. The conventions of science fiction, marginalized within literature yet central to modern thought, can function as allegories for the systemic experience of post-slavery black subjects in the twentieth century. Science fiction, as such, is recast in the light of Afrodiasporic history.

  Afrofuturism therefore stages a series of enigmatic returns to the constitutive trauma of slavery in the light of science fiction. Isolating the enigmatic phrase “Apocalypse bin in effect” from the 1992 Public Enemy track “Welcome to the Terradome,” Mark Sinker’s 1992 essay “Loving the Alien” argued that this lyric could be interpreted to read that slavery functioned as an apocalypse experienced as equivalent to alien abduction: “The ships landed long ago: they already laid waste whole societies, abducted and genetically altered swathes of citizenry. . . . Africa and America—and so by extension Europe and Asia—are already in their various ways Alien Nation.”

  Temporal switchback

  Afrofuturism approaches contemporary digital music as an intertext of recurring literary quotations that may be cited and used as statements capable of imaginatively reordering chronology and fantasizing history. The lyrical statement is treated as a platform for historical speculation. Social reality and science fiction create feedback between each other within the same phrase. The alien encounters and interplanetary abductions people experienced as delusions in the Cold War present had already occurred in the past, for real.

  All the symptoms specific to a close encounter had already occurred on a giant scale. The collective delusion of the close encounter is transplanted to the Middle Passage. The effect is not to question the reality of slavery, but to defamiliarize it through a temporal switchback that reroutes its implications through postwar social fiction, cultural fantasy, and modern science fiction, all of which begin to seem like elaborate ways of concealing and admitting trauma.

  Black-Atlantean mythos

  In 1997, this aesthetic of estrangement was pursued to its limit-point by Drexciya, the group of enigmatic producers, synthesists, and designers operating from Detroit. In the liner notes to their CD The Quest, Drexciya (1997) proposed a science-fictional retelling of the Middle Passage. The “Drexciyans” are water-breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of “pregnant America-bound African slaves thrown overboard by the thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo.”

  Could it be possible for humans to breathe underwater? A foetus in its mother’s womb is certainly alive in an aquatic environment. Is it possible that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air? Recent experiments have shown mice able to breathe liquid oxygen, a premature human infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid oxygen through its underdeveloped lungs. These facts combined with reported sightings of Gillmen and Swamp Monsters in the coastal swamps of the South Eastern United States make the slave trade theory startlingly feasible.

  In treating Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) as a science fiction which is then developed through four-stage analysis of migration and mutation from Africa to America, Drexciya have constructed a Black-Atlantean mythology that successfully speculates on the evolutionary code of black subjectivity. In turn, their project has inspired a series of paintings by the contemporary African American abstract artist Ellen Gallagher, and responses in the form of essays by the critics Ruth Mayer and Ben Williams.

  Drexciya’s project has recently extended itself into space. For their Grava 4 CD, released in 2002, the group contacted the International Star Registry in Switzerland to purchase the rights to name a star. Having named and registered their star “Grava 4,” a new installment within their ongoing sonic fiction is produced. In wrapping their speculative fiction around electronic compositions that then locate themselves around an existing extraterrestrial space, Drexciya grant themselves the imperial right to nominate and colonize interstellar space. The absurdity of buying and owning a distant star in no way diminishes the contractual obligation of ownership that the group entered into. The process of ratification therefore becomes the platform for an unexpected intervention: a sono-fictional statement that fuses the metaphorical with the juridical, and the synthetic with the cartographic. Contractual fact meets sonic fiction meets astronomical mapping in a colonization of the contemporary audiovisual imagination in advance of military landing.

  To conclude: Afrofuturism may be characterized as a program for recovering the histories of counter-futures created in a century hostile to Afrodiasporic projection and as a space within which the critical work of manufacturing tools capable of intervention within the current political dispensation may be undertaken. The manufacture, migration, and mutation of concepts and approaches within the fields of the theoretical and the fictional, the digital and the sonic, the visual and the architectural exemplifies the expanded field of Afrofuturism considered as a multimedia project distributed across the nodes, hubs, rings, and stars of the Black Atlantic. As a tool kit developed for and by Afrodiasporic intellectuals, the imperative to code, adopt, adapt, translate, misread, rework, and revision these concepts, under the conditions specified in this essay, is likely to persist in the decades to come.

  References

  Bhabha, Homi. 1992. “Postcolonial Authority and Postmodern Guilt.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge.

  Bernal, Martin. 1988. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985. Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

  Corbett, John. 1993. “Brothers from Another Planet.” In Extended Play: Sounding off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

  Drexciya. 1997. Liner Notes. The Quest. Submerge SVE-8. Compact disk.

  Ellington, Duke. 1993. “The Race for Space.” In The Duke Ellington Reader, edited by Mark Tucker. New York: Oxford University Press.

  Eshun, Kodwo. 1998. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books.

  Fisher, Mark. 2000. “SF Capital.” Themepark magazine.

  Gaba, Meshac. 2002. Short Guide to Documenta XI. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz.

  Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

  —. 1994. “Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni Morrison.” In Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures. London: Serpent’s Tail.

  —. 2001. Between Camps. Allen Lane.

  James, George G. M. [1954] 1989. Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy. Khalifahs Book Sellers. Reprint.

  The Last Angel of History. 1995. Directed by John Akomfrah. London: Black Audio Film Collective, C4/ZDF.

  Sinker, Mark. 1991. Interview with Mark Tate. Unpublished transcript, Arena magazine.

  —. 1992. “Loving the Alien.” The Wire 96 (June 1992).

  32

  Indigenous scientific literacies in Nalo Hopkinson’s ceremonial worlds

  Grace L. Dillon

  In archeologies of the future, Frederic Jameson bridges the schism between science fiction and fantasy by recalling Claude Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of “thinking Indians,” specifically the Algonquin/Ojibwa, whose metaphorical totemic narratives display the allegori
cal mind necessary to navigate the imagined divide (61). Similarly, in the definitive book on Canadian sf and fantasy, David Ketterer points to native myth-making and Indian and Inuit peoples’ folktales and legends as a major source of Canadian speculative literature, whose allegorical “consequential other worlds” emphasize spatial and temporal “otherness” reinforced by “the human other” and concentrate not only on alienation but also on the “recognition of constraints and respect for the powers of Evolution, History, and Nature” (166–167). Brian Attebery reconstructs aboriginality in sf as the indigenous Other becoming a part of the textual unconscious “always present but silenced and often transmuted into symbolic form” (387). He sees sf as a contact zone that “links [Aboriginal] traditional oral literatures with a high-tech or post-tech future” (402).

  Whether or not we will remain satisfied with these categories, fantasy, sf, and speculative fiction often rely on so-called “cautionary tales” to depict dystopic worlds where the slavish embracing of advancing western technologies leads to environmental decay. And, increasingly, tellers of cautionary tales are juxtaposing the technologically compromised natural order with native and indigenous worldviews, as Attebery, Ketterer, and Jameson observe. Further refining distinctions, we sometimes include this emerging movement within the larger category of “postcolonial sf” because it reintroduces “indigenous” elements that fifteenth- through twenty-first-century colonization has marginalized.

  Drawing on First Nation Ojibwa/Anishinaabe tradition invoked by Jameson, we might go further and characterize postcolonial sf’s cautionary tales as “ceremonial worlds.” Environmental philosopher Jim Cheney defines ceremonial worlds as “worlds or stories within which we live, the worlds—myths if you like—that have the power to orient us in life” (“Truth, Knowledge” 110). Cheney implicitly points to the primacy of storytelling in the transfer of indigenous knowledge, where story functions as ceremony to preserve tradition—specifically, proper custom and practice. Examples are manifold throughout Native American experience, but in maintaining focus on the Ojibwa/Anishinaabe, one might consider the compilations archived by Basil Johnston (Ojibway Ceremonies; Ojibway Heritage). Ojibwa stories tend to exercise an allegorical spirit while explaining the origins and usage of natural resources, such as the tale of “Mandamin” (corn). Many stories detail the habits of animals, who are considered to have spirits and equal “personhood” status with humans. The tale of the little girl and grandmother picking blueberries illustrates the use of story to pass down knowledge of medicine while also emphasizing the relationship among generations, as the older serves to instruct the younger. A little girl watches as a snake pursues a frog until the frog takes refuge in a grove of poison ivy; fittingly, though, she had not noticed the drama unfolding on her own but was directed to take notice of it by her grandmother: