Reframing the post-apocalypse in Black British film: the dystopian Afrofuturism of Welcome II the Terrordome and Shank

ABSTRACT

The Afrodiasporic experience after the Armageddon of slavery, Afrofuturism has long theorized, is essentially post-apocalyptic. However, while the end of the world is conceptually at the heart of the Afrofuturist imagination, it is still relatively rare as a diegetic event. This article seeks to highlight how two British films, Ngozi Onwurah’s dystopian Welcome II the Terrordome (1994) and Mo Ali’s Shank (2010) explore the ambivalence of Black British futurity as imagined under the conditions of such new apocalypses. With recourse to the Public Enemy-inspired Armageddon effect and the resulting modernist alienation/Alien Nation, Terrordome’s and Shank’s engagements with the apocalypse address Afrofuturism’s inherent complication of resulting from a critique of Armageddon, without, however, reproducing its (epistemological) violence. In so doing, this article outlines how both films seek to make visible the potency of Afrofuturist filmmaking to reclaim the genres, traits, tropes, and narrative mechanisms of futurity even under the most averse, antiblack future conditions. Central to such considerations are both films’ Afrofuturistic chronopolitics of circularity and simultaneity, as well as their self-reflexive engagement with Afrofuturist tropes, such as the Igbo Landing Myth (Terrordome) or spatial transgressions and the erasure of cartographic sureties, such as clearly delineated borders (Shank).

KEYWORDS:

• Afrofuturism
• post-apocalypse
• Black British cinema
• Welcome II the Terrordome (1996)
• Shank (2010)

Notes

1 van Veen (2016, p. 69) points out that awareness of the effect is not a necessary condition to actually experience it: “The rest of us—those unschooled in the Afrodiasporic apocalyptic experience of the armageddon-effect—are all late to the effects of armageddon, though we live its effects (blindly).”

2 I use the terms future and futurity here in Hugh Charles O’Connell’s (2016, p. 292) sense:

Futurity relates to a qualitative notion of the future-as-difference, as opposed to a merely quantitative notion of the future, especially wherein the conditions of capitalist realism reduce any notions of the future to a mere extension or intensification of the conditions of the present.

3 Gilroy’s critique, in fact, is all-encompassing: “Terrordome is unimaginably bad, artistically and conceptually inept, the script an embarrassment, the narrative incoherent, much of the acting risible” (1995,, p. 18). His main objections focus on what he calls the film’s “banal” and “pastiche” misappropriation of Black revolutionary signification for an alleged race war (p. 18). His secondary critique of antifeminism has since come under scrutiny by the readings of Anne Ciecko (1999) and Émilie Herbert (2018b).

4 Academic writings on Terrordome, of which there are precious few, have up to now focussed on the film’s deconstruction of essentialised, Black British identities (Ciecko, 1999), the film’s defiance of its burden of representation and its simultaneous legitimacy of “Black rage” (Foster, 1997), its film’s body politics (Herbert, 2018a), or its appropriation of the ghetto trope (Herbert, 2018b).

5 I use the italicized spelling Terrordome as an abbreviation of the film’s title for the film itself, and the non-italicised Terrordome for the diegetic city.

6 Such retellings refer both to the Igbo Landing myth as well as the genealogically related legend of the Flying Africans, in which enslaved persons grow wings and escape as birds, and have also been understood as transcending an Afrofuturist framework (E. E. Thomas, 2019). This myth, furthermore, is intimately linked to Black Atlantic musical traditions as most of its incarnations and retellings have the Igbo sing their way into the creek. Retroactive imaginations have weaved civil rights chants such as “And before I’d be a slave” or the early American hymn “Oh freedom” into the myth, and the musical connection has since been reworked, e.g. in Beyoncé’s recent music video “Love drought” (2017) (see also V. D. Thomas 2018, pp. 53–54 for comparable uses of water imagery in Beyoncé’s Lemonade).

7 The televised revolution is of course contested terrain, and, as van Veen argues, a “pernicious re-cycling of slavery: the commodification of black revolutionary cultures through the media apparatus of representation,” and further “that it is only through spectacular dramatization—a Sicilian embrace of televisualization and consumerized means of communication—that the Armageddon effect can be rendered visible” (2016, p. 72).