THE BLACK ANGEL OF HISTORY

Abstract

Against the usual interpretation, which states that Afrofuturism is unreservedly technophilic, I argue that Afrofuturism is a radical critique of white technology. White technology (be it imperial, colonial or capitalist) is an acosmic technology that rejects its belonging to the cosmos. The Space Age and what is now called New Space (both of which have neo-colonial aims) are perfect illustrations of white technology and its anthropocentric enthusiasm. Rejecting this colonial and exploitative technology, Afrofuturism – from the music and poems of Sun Ra to the paintings of Wangechi Mutu to the poems and activism of Alexis Pauline Gumbs – is first and foremost an attempt to use outer space not as a space open to conquest, but as a mediation, a stellar detour thanks to which our terrestrial condition could be politically and anthropologically rethought. At odds with any geoengineering project, Afrofuturism conjures up an “epoch of being” (Heidegger) in which technology would be constantly inhabited by a form of uncanny that would definitively prevent human beings from considering technology as a way of mastering the Earth.

Keywords:

• Afrofuturism
• technology
• cosmology
• Anthropocene
• alienocene

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I thus maintain that what Koyré described as the passage from the “closed world” to the “infinite universe” did not simply lead to the end of all cosmos, but to the necessity of redefining this term, neither as order nor as pure chaos, but as the historical formation of the alien-totality.

2 Even neurology can be leukocentric: see Fern.

3 On the concept of “counter-futures,” see Eshun (“Further Consideration” 301).

4 A turn that, according to Kodwo Eshun, enables “an identification” with “the potentiality of space and distance within the high-pressure zone of perpetual racial hospitality” (“Further Consideration” 298–99).

5 It is this part of Dery’s definition that, for instance, Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones quote in their co-edited volume Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (viii).

6 See what Saidiya Hartman says about “the impossibility of fully recovering the experience of the enslaved and the emancipated” (10).

7 Sun Ra, “Gravity and Levity” (Corbett 311–13).

8 Here I am relying on David.

9 We can read this myth in the sleeve notes for their CD, The Quest (1997).

10 See also the painting, Expedition into the Sun (Pepperstein 26).

11 On Russian cosmism, see Groys.

12 See also: “Are you a slave to planet Earth? You said you’re free, Prove it to me” (Ra 21).

13 Toni Morrison interviewed by Paul Gilroy (Gilroy 178).

14 On this point, see Sinker.

15 I rely here on Trevor Schoonmaker (21–50).

16 After all, didn’t Husserl maintain that “the Earth does not move”?

17 See Yuk Hui, “For a Cosmotechnical Event” and my response to Hui’s essay in the same issue: “Cosmos and Technology (Dasein’s Planetary Condition).”

18 I will thus not try here to show – borrowing the terms of Achille Mbembe – how the “Negro” is “produced” (68) and how the “becoming-black of the world” (17) is put in place, not by rejecting this analysis, but because my objective in this article is to measure the effects of a reversal: the Black as a cause and not as a product; as returning [revenir] and not as becoming [devenir]. Mbembe certainly conceives a reversal of the negative meaning of the word “negro” into a positive meaning: no longer the rejected, fungible, invisible being, but the possibility of a larger humanity, going beyond races and differences, a world-community (230, 257–63). But this reversal of “nothing” into “everything,” which is not so far from what Sieyès said about the Third Estate or Marx about the proletariat, does not seem conceivable to me without first acknowledging to what extent the world is not one: it is divided between the world of capital and the world of those who refuse it (on this point, see Kisukidi 98–99). It is on the basis of this division that the Afro-pessimist thesis seems relevant to me: its reversal of the meaning of the word Black leads to a political division and not to a cosmopolitan unification.

19 I lean here on Jared Sexton’s article (6).

20 Sun Ra, quoted in Youngquist 220–21.

21 I lean here on the interpretation given by Clinton Fluker, via the analyses of Houston Baker devoted, in his book Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, to the meaning of this crossroads in the blues (see Fluker).